Free Republic

More and more, from Virginia's beaches to the mountains up north to right here right now, people are coming to a consensus: Their governors' shutdowns are over.The story below is the first in a series on America’s small businesses, their struggles under the shutdowns, and what they’re doing to survive. Names and locations below have been obscured to protect the people who spoke with us from government retaliation. Over two weeks, The Federalist is traveling the country to tell more stories like this one.THE NEVADA DESERT — Sonny moved to this little mining town to work the oil rigs in...

The pandemic has stripped millions of work, community, and hope. As local governments extend quarantine orders, urbanites like me are starting to wonder: what is the point of city life? This week marks just over two months since most states instituted shelter-in-place orders to contain COVID-19, and with this milestone came an apparent turn in the tide of public opinion—or at least, public behavior—on social distancing.Even as Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and one of President Trump’s most prominent pandemic advisors, warned against rolling back lockdown orders in his testimony to Congress...

Everybody’s painfully aware that the economy has been taking a huge hit the last couple of months because of lockdowns related to the coronavirus outbreak. But now the layoff wave is starting to crash across the bow of the media, and it’s causing some alarms to go off: Over just three days, Condé Nast, Quartz and VICE gutted their newsrooms with layoffs. This is a historically bad year for digital and local journalism.

https://thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-14-at-4.58.53-PM-998x725.pngMADISON, Wis. — Declaring that the state’s top health official wrongly bypassed legislative oversight, the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down the Evers’ administration’s extended lockdown of the state.The 4-3 decision by the conservative-led court declares Wisconsin Department of Health Services Secretary-designee Andrea Palm’s Emergency Order 28 “unlawful, invalid, and unenforceable.”“Because Palm did not follow the law in creating Order 28, there can be no criminal penalties for violations of her order,” the ruling notes. “The procedural requirements of Wis. Stat. ch. 227 must be followed because they safeguard all people.”Palm’s extended order, issued before Evers’ first stay-at-home edict...

“The economic devastation wrought by the pandemic could ultimately kill more people than the virus itself,” The Los Angeles Times (“The Times”) admitted in a shockingly anti-liberal media narrative story published May 11. The story noted that the United Nations predicted that “a global recession will reverse a three-decade trend in rising living standards and plunge as many as 420 million people into extreme poverty, defined as earning less than $2 a day.”

With COVID-19, it is like that clichéd scene in the movies where the scientist looks up from the microscope and says, ‘This doesn't seem to behave like anything I've ever seen before.’ My father-in-law recently asked me if it is hard to see hospitals and death in film because their depictions are so inaccurate. Yes, it can ruin the realism for me and make me cringe. Then I realized that just watching the news or press conferences these days are giving me the same feeling.Everyone seems to be talking about intensive care units (ICUs) and COVID-19 patients. As someone who...

Right now all of us have decisions to make about how much freedom is too much freedom. On the national lockdown loosening in some states and stubbornly persisting in others, Americans are very much of two minds. For some, including most of the media, it is an inconvenience, but a righteous one that saves lives. For others, often with smaller megaphones, it is a powerfully destructive force economically and socially. But we should be able to agree that, whether justified or not, the lockdown has been a massive infringement on Americans’ basic rights. At least since women received the right...

Until a few weeks ago, Melissa St. Hilaire worked the night shift taking care of a 95-year-old woman for a family in Miami."I help her to go to the bathroom, use the bathroom, and I watch TV with her, and I comb her hair sometimes in the night," she said.But one day in March, the woman's daughter told her not to come back, saying she wanted to protect her mother during the coronavirus pandemic.St. Hilaire is black and a Haitian immigrant. And her situation is an example of what early data from this crisis shows: People of color have lost...

Blessing In Disguise. It’s Evil Social distancing is not something to celebrate. It is, according to the experts, what we must do right now. But it’s a necessary evil, not a societal good. As the U.S. government’s “30 days to slow the spread” order expires, with no indication that President Trump plans to extend it, it’s time to start asking whether it was worth it. Have the extreme social distancing and economic measures to which we have subjected ourselves accomplished the desired result? Was any of it even necessary to begin with? It’s a question we’ll be debating for years....

When half the working class is facing economic devastation and the other half still has to show up to work, are we really all in this together? I’m a lawyer in New York City, currently working from home due to the coronavirus shutdown. For me it’s working quite well. Almost all of my work was done on computer, internet, and phone even when I was doing it in an office, so doing it from a home equipped with a computer, internet, and phone is not really much of an inconvenience. In fact, comparing the distance from my home to my...

'Even a phenomenon as menacing as COVID-19 is one of the inevitable risks of life,' writes Purdue President and former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. While other education leaders are waiting for politicians to release their students from the lockdowns suspending their futures, former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, now head of Purdue University, is making plans to reopen his campus for fall.“We have every intention of being on campus this fall,” he told the faculty senate on April 20, according to USA Today. “We are sober about the challenges that will bring. We believe in the value of the on-campus experience,...

Wake County, North Carolina continues to ban Christians from their central rite of communion while allowing hand-delivered food so long as it's served by restaurants instead of pastors. Like many other locales across the nation, in the name of reducing coronavirus transmission Wake County, North Carolina continues to ban Christians from their central rite of communion while allowing hand-delivered food so long as it’s served by restaurants instead of pastors. After I reported last week on threats against a local church for holding services within government social-distancing and hygiene guidelines while grocery, hardware, and other retail stores are allowed to...

The decisions that are being made during this crisis are far too important and complex to be based on such imprecise data and with such unreliable results. There’s been a lot of armchair analysis about various models being used to predict outcomes of COVID-19. For those of us who have built spatial and statistical models, all of this discussion brings to mind George Box’s dictum, “All models are wrong, but some are useful”—or useless, as the case may be.The problem with data-driven models, especially when data is lacking, can be easily explained. First of all, in terms of helping decision...

The New York Times' Bret Stephens took a lot of heat for arguing New York lockdown rules don't fit the rest of the country. I know the feeling. Bret Stephens has a tough job. I don’t mean like 19th-century coal miner tough, but as one of the “conservative” opinion contributors at The New York Times, he winds up pleasing none of the people a lot of the time. This is because much of the Grey Lady’s leftist readership doesn’t think the Times should run conservative views at all and much of the American right finds the anti-Trump “can’t we go...

Virus management is about power and control, the two things the elite always want and therefore don’t want to relinquish even when the virus recedes. The big-picture story of American politics of the last four years has been a battle royale between elite power structures and millions of ordinary Americans. Donald Trump’s 2016 election win, the Russia collusion hoax, and the impeachment drama were all essentially tussles between elite control and democratic norms, between the will of the powerful and the will of the 2016 voters, a.k.a. Trump supporters. A loose assortment of unelected bureaucrats, D.C. power players, Democratic leaders,...

‘It’s great that dog grooming, gin, guns, and garden supplies are essential,’ says Pastor Kevin Martin, chuckling at the irony, ‘but the body and blood of Christ are not.’ It was a parishioner who called local news and possibly the police on Rev. Kevin Martin for continuing to hold services during coronavirus shutdowns, even though he had explicit state permission to do so while taking extra health precautions.Members of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Raleigh, N.C. were filmed by local television as they walked with their spouses and children into the church to worship and receive critical spiritual care at...

Our leaders are making decisions based on training, experience, intelligence, and wisdom, and they have our best interests in mind. But this does not mean they are always correct. I had a patient once with a liver lesion. At the community hospital where I worked, I reviewed her MRI with the radiologist carefully and we concluded it was a possible liver cancer. Unfortunately, I shared her care with a university hospital. In their opinion, the lesion was definitely cancer and they so informed her. She promptly drank herself to death. Of course, it could be argued that the university care...

With virtually everything and every business in New Jersey shut down, why are liquor stores deemed essential business and allowed to remain open and operational? For as long as this pandemic has gone on, the left has shouted incessantly that we must “believe in the science and the scientists” and the experts and anyone else who cements the idea of shutting down an entire economy. Okay. Let’s trust the science and the experts and follow their advice to shut it all down. Would that satisfy the left? Of course not. Because it’s never enough. Once you give in to one...

It is untenable to lock down much of the country until a proven-safe vaccine is available in a year or more. Thus, we need to adapt and prepare for life in the time of coronavirus. By the time we get back to normal, normal will be different. The Chinese coronavirus is a once in a generation plague, perhaps once in a century. Humanity is better equipped to respond to it than at any time in history, but there is still no easy way through this pestilence. A time of death and economic hardship was inevitable once the Chinese communists tried...

Our nation's leaders are demanding that American children pay for this crisis through debt-financed spending, while depriving them of the education they need to make that even remotely possible. One of the many significant but underappreciated effects of U.S. politicians’ response to coronavirus is their pre-emptive mass school shutdowns. It is likely these shutdowns will harm the next generation far beyond the trillions in government spending these children will someday be forced to pay off for previous generations.For one thing, the school shutdowns will cripple children’s economic future by depriving them of up to an entire year of learning. That’s...