Free Republic

The announcement that came from the White House is spooky in its brevity. It was just one sentence announcing the end of the COVID emergency. The 15 Days announced on March 16, 2020, which implemented the national emergency declared a few days earlier, ended up lasting 1,135 days. What resulted? National ruin. We see it in every aspect of our lives: cultural, economic, educational, public health, familial, community, and trust in institutions. Life expectancy is in free fall, not from COVID but from the fallout of the response. Cities are wrecked. Millions have been professionally and demographically displaced. It’s not...

Today, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced an agreement on a shared vision for reopening their economies and controlling COVID-19 into the future. Joint statement from the governors: COVID-19 has preyed upon our interconnectedness. In the coming weeks, the West Coast will flip the script on COVID-19 – with our states acting in close coordination and collaboration to ensure the virus can never spread wildly in our communities. We are announcing that California, Oregon and Washington have agreed to work together on a shared approach for reopening our economies – one that...

The possibility of U.S. lockdowns—never attempted on this scale in the history of pandemics—was already in the air in early March 2020. The theory of lockdown had been floating around for 15 years but now China was first to try it, and claim enormous success, however fraudulently. Incredibly, the United States was set to try it out too but getting Trump on board was going to take some doing. The federal government had the quarantine power since 1944. That much we knew. But just how expansive could its exercise be? Would they dare quarantine the well with the sick? How...

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Photos released by Miami Beach police show what a luxury hotel room looked like when officers found former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum drunk and with two other men. The photos released Wednesday show vomit-stained and rumpled bed sheets, a box for a party light disco ball, spilled white pills on the carpet and a vial of a drug often used for erectile dysfunction. But the newly released photos and officer body-cam video shed no further light on what Gillum was doing or why he was there last month. Fire rescue crews and officers were called...

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), and in furtherance of Proclamation 9994 of March 13, 2020 (Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak), which declared a national emergency by reason of the threat that the novel (new) coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2 poses to our Nation’s healthcare systems, I hereby order as follows: