If it’s truly the planet-killer Plague they claim, then why is nearly everything they’ve said about it a damned lie?

On Wednesday, Florida reported a record high 216 deaths and “the grim news comes a day after the state set the record with 186 virus-related deaths,” as NBC Miami put it.

In fact, the record high for the daily number of deaths in the state appears to have been on July 16, when 123 people in the state were known to have died with the disease.

As of Wednesday night, Florida’s COVID-19 surveillance dashboard showed only 13 deaths on July 28.

As we have reported in this space before, the press is using daily reports from states to paint a picture of a runaway virus.

What the mainstream press keeps forgetting to tell people is that it can take the government days, if not weeks, to record a COVID-19 death. The daily reports aren’t telling us what’s happening now, but what happened earlier in the month. The chart below shows the impact of this. The gray bars represent when deaths are reported by Florida, and the red bars are when the deaths actually occurred. 

If anything, what the numbers show is that the virus peaked in that state around mid-July.

And when you throw in how wildly the death count has been inflated using all sorts of diabolical stratagems and jiggery-pokery, even that peak isn’t nearly as scary as they need it to be. Meanwhile, in Georgia, they appear to have themselves a governor and not a wannabe dictator.

I am old enough to remember when the media was trashing Georgia Gov. Kemp for being a first to reopen the economy. Massive death and suffering were sure to follow. That didn’t happen and Kemp never got an apology or an opportunity to tout the success of the reopening.

Then the riots happened over Memorial Day weekend and continued apace following the death of Rayshard Brooks. About two weeks later, Georgia’s case-rate began to climb. The cases were concentrated in Fulton County, where the protests occurred in Atlanta and two adjacent counties, Gwinnett and DeKalb.

By that time Georgia had been open for six weeks. Georgians were not going back on lockdown. We were back to eating out, back to the gym, and getting our hair done. It was starting to feel like we could get back to normal. Most Georgians also don’t take hypocrisy lightly. If thousands of people could be in the streets in downtown Atlanta, there was no way you were going to stop those of us outside the city from meeting friends for a plate of nachos and a beverage on Friday evenings.

Governor Kemp resisted calls to lock down again. He insisted that the freedoms that had been restored be available to Georgians across the state. Nor did the governor let mayors in Savannah and Atlanta place additional restrictions inside their cities. He also ensured no Georgian or business would be fined for not wearing masks or enforcing mask-wearing.

He invalidated local ordinances that mandated masks or levied fines. Following that announcement, there was much screeching and gnashing of teeth from Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. Kemp went on a statewide tour to educate the public on mask-wearing with the surgeon general. He has also consistently modeled the behavior in public and on social media.

However, to those on the left, letting adults assess their own risk and make a personal decision is not allowable

Well, I mean, duh. That IS pretty much their whole raison d’etre, you know. And then there’s this:

Any conservatives afraid to look at the data and form their own judgment ought to instead, look at the people who they’re standing with when they dutifully put on a mask or continue to believe that the economic and social catastrophes inflicted on us had any justification whatsoever.

It’s hard for a normal well-adjusted person to believe that anyone could be so depraved that they’d create a fake medical crisis to inflict the equivalent of a massive bombing campaign on the American people in order to create enough misery to unseat the President.

Or that they’d insist everyone needlessly wear surgical masks in public to keep the crisis going till November.

But, when you find yourself on the same side as Jerry Nadler, Eric Swalwell, the rest of the Democrats, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and Hollywood; all of them insisting that there’s some horrible threat to America we need to take extreme actions against as they ignore the obvious terrible costs, suppress all evidence to the contrary, and flood us with propaganda that would’ve made the Soviet’s envious, you might want to consider whether you’ve maybe gone astray somewhere.

That’s the bonus Reason Number 6 in an article touting 5 reasons why “…wearing masks is anything but harmless.” But speaking strictly for myself, I find the moral case against donning the Mask Of Submission the most compelling of all.

People who resist COVID-19 restrictions are often accused of being selfish and caring only about their own freedom. While that might explain the actions of some, moral arguments can be made against many of the restrictions.

Although simple appeals to “freedom” are indeed less popular today than in the past, we should not disregard them. Nearly all our responses to COVID-19 require balancing one concern against another, and individuals and institutions will come to different conclusions as they try to strike that balance.

Freedom implies the right to conclude something different than the state and order your life accordingly. That is no small thing.

We should also resist the ratcheting effect of a growing culture of safetyism, most excellently discussed in an UnHerd article by Matthew Crawford. He writes, “At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears. At the level of bureaucratic grasping, we can note that emergency powers are seldom relinquished once the emergency has passed.”

Accepting invasive rules that affect personal behavior in a low-risk environment conditions people to accept that kind of intrusion into their lives. This is one reason people are particularly against masking their children, who are especially prone to manipulation. If we do this, what kind of human are we helping to produce? People who care only about coronavirus statistics gloss over these negative consequences.

It is also morally problematic to indefinitely treat the healthy as the maybe-sick. Inasmuch as we are required to do this at all, we should do it with the lightest hand and for the shortest duration possible. “Eliminate all risk” is not a reasonable standard. Politicians, however, almost always eager central planners — with a few exceptions — seem willing to just drop the hammer.

Which should tell all Real Americans everything they’ll ever need to know about them.