April 29, 2026

COVID SIX YEARS AGO TODAY: Actual headline (still up) at The Atlantic — Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.

Three weeks later, The Week reported that the Mull’s dark dreams fortunately did not come true: We should be grateful for good news in Georgia.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Atlanta is not burning. Bodies are not piled up in the streets. Hospitals in Georgia are not being overwhelmed; in fact, they are virtually empty. There is no mad rush for ventilators (remember those?). Instead, men, women, and children in the Peach State are returning to some semblance of normal life: working outside their homes, going to restaurants and bars, getting haircuts, exercising, and most important, spending time with their friends and families and worshipping God. The opening that began more than three weeks ago is continuing apace.

Oh, my apologies, you were waiting for bad news? Sorry, I forgot, we were actually not supposed to be rooting for the virus. Despite the apparent relish behind headlines like “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” one assumes that most Americans, even the ones most committed to omnidirectional prophecies of doom, were actually hoping this would happen. While it really is a shame that we do not get to gloat about the cravenness and stupidity of yet another GOP politician, I think on balance most of us will be glad to hear that Gov. Brian Kemp was not badly wrong here.

What is happening instead of the widely predicted bloodbath? Confirmed cases of the virus are obviously increasing (though the actual rolling weekly average of new ones have been headed down for nearly a month) while deaths remain more or less flat. This is in fact what happens when you test more people for a disease that is not fatal or even particularly serious for the vast majority of those who contract it, for which the median age of death is higher than the American life expectancy.

How was this possible? One answer is that the lockdown did not in fact do what it was supposed to do, which is to say, meaningfully impede transmission of the virus. In fact, data both from states like Georgia and from abroad suggests that the lifting of lockdowns is positively correlated with a decrease in rates of infection. This could be because lockdowns are inherently ineffective at slowing down a disease whose spread appears to be largely intrafamilial and nosocomial.

Georgia’s Republican governor earned bipartisan attacks when he wisely reopened his state in late April: Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Affable Culture Warrior.

In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. Mr. Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.”

The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20.

That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows:

“Look, the national media’s all over me about letting you do this,” Mr. Trump said. “And they’re saying you don’t meet whatever.”

Mr. Kemp replied: “Well, Mr. President, we sent your team everything, and they knew what we were doing. You’ve been saying the whole pandemic you trust the governors because we’re closest to the people. Just tell them you may not like what I’m doing, but you’re trusting me because I’m the governor of Georgia and leave it at that. I’ll take the heat.”

“Well, see what you can do,” the president said. “Hair salons aren’t essential and bowling alleys, tattoo parlors aren’t essential.”

“With all due respect, those are our people,” Mr. Kemp said. “They’re the people that elected us. They’re the people that are wondering who’s fighting for them. We’re fixin’ to lose them over this, because they’re about to lose everything. They are not going to sit in their basement and lose everything they got over a virus.”

Mr. Trump publicly attacked Mr. Kemp: “He went on the news at 5 o’clock and just absolutely trashed me. . . . Then the local media’s all over me—it was brutal.” The president was still holding daily press briefings on Covid. “After running over me with the bus on Monday, he backed over me on Tuesday,” Mr. Kemp says. “I could either back down and look weak and lose all respect with the legislators and get hammered in the media, or I could just say, ‘You know what? Screw it, we’re holding the line. We’re going to do what’s right.’ ” He chose the latter course. “Then on Wednesday, him and [Anthony] Fauci did it again, but at that point it didn’t really matter. The damage had already been done there, for me anyway.”

The damage healed quickly once businesses began reopening on Friday, April 24. Mr. Kemp quotes a state lawmaker who said in a phone call: “I went and got my hair cut, and the lady that cuts my hair wanted me to tell you—and she started crying when she told me this story—she said, ‘You tell the governor I appreciate him reopening, to allow me to make a choice, because . . . if I’d have stayed closed, I had a 95% chance of losing everything I’ve ever worked for. But if I open, I only had a 5% chance of getting Covid. And so I decided to open, and the governor gave me that choice.’”

At that point, Florida was still shut down. Mr. DeSantis issued his first reopening order on April 29, nine days after Mr. Kemp’s. On April 28, the Florida governor had visited the White House, where, as CNN reported, “he made sure to compliment the President and his handling of the crisis, praise Trump returned in spades.”

Three years later, here’s the thanks Mr. DeSantis gets: This Wednesday Mr. Trump issued a statement excoriating “Ron DeSanctimonious” as “a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.” As Mr. Trump now tells the tale, “other Republican Governors did MUCH BETTER than Ron and, because I allowed them this ‘freedom,’ never closed their States. Remember, I left that decision up to the Governors!”

Of course, by 2023, Trump was far from the only former official distancing himself from the debacle of 2020: Anthony Fauci Says Don’t Blame Him for COVID Lockdowns and School Closures.

Amanda Mull of the Atlantic’s about-face was much faster, taking only a month: Atlantic writer who warned of Georgia’s human sacrifice by reopening says New York’s 8 p.m. curfew is ‘absolutely insane.’

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

EVERYONE’S A BILLIONAIRE:

Iran is doing so well that it won’t be long before everyone’s a trillionaire.

Posted at 1:32 pm by Stephen Green

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: The Dems’ newest phrase in raging at the GOP is to go ‘Kill yourself.’

In almost any other era, the hostile exchange between EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) would have been an instant embarrassment on Capitol Hill.

But at a time when political violence is becoming frighteningly common and widely accepted, DeLauro’s nasty suggestion that Zeldin drink a glass of weed killer marked just another day in the trenches.

Dripping with bitterness, the 83-year-old, purple-haired DeLauro is often an embarrassment to Connecticut and more sober-minded Democrats with her nutty bluster.

She outdid herself Monday, and certainly wasn’t interested in Zeldin’s factual and workmanlike testimony, saying it sounded “like a climate change denier’s manifesto.”

When he countered by citing court rulings in the EPA’s favor, she was ignorant of the cases, but in no mood to learn.

“I don’t have to listen to this BS!” she raged.

Writing later on X, Zeldin said she “apparently believes that when you don’t have anything good to say, you should instruct the person you are debating to kill themself.”

In 1987’s The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom wrote, “We have here the peculiarly American way digesting Continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending,” adding that “the new American life-style has become a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family.” That Weimar-style nihilism has taken a far darker turn over the past decade:

The establishment left accepting such a dark worldview is what leads to headlines such as this:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

HE’S RIGHT, OF COURSE:

Posted at 12:55 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CHANGE: Supreme Court Strikes Down Louisiana’s Congressional Map in Major Voting Rights Ruling.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down Louisiana’s congressional map in Louisiana v. Callais, finding that the state’s second majority-Black district violated the Equal Protection Clause.

In the 6-3 decision, Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The court held that the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to draw a second majority-minority district. Without that requirement, the state had no compelling reason to use race in drawing its lines.

SB8, enacted in 2024, created a District 6 stretching roughly 250 miles from Shreveport through Alexandria and Lafayette to Baton Rouge. Louisiana drew the district after a federal judge in Robinson v. Ardoin found the previous map likely violated Section 2.

Related: Virginia Supreme Court Denies Dem AG’s Attempt To Ram Through Gerrymander Vote Certification.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

A BLOW AGAINST RACISM AND DIVISION:

Posted at 12:29 pm by Glenn Reynolds

MEMORY HOLED:

Posted at 12:28 pm by Stephen Green

DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH:

Posted at 12:01 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WHAT A JOKE: Iran selected for a vice presidency post at UN’s nuclear non-proliferation confab.

The United States and Iran clashed at the United Nations on Monday over Tehran’s nuclear program and the latter’s selection to be one of dozens of vice presidents at a month-long conference to review the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The 11th conference to review implementation of the NPT, which came into force in 1970, began on Monday at the United Nations in New York. Different groups nominated 34 conference vice presidents, and the conference chair, Vietnam’s UN ambassador Do Hung Viet, said Iran was picked by “the group of non-aligned and other states.”

Christopher Yeaw, assistant secretary for the US Bureau of Arms Control and Nonproliferation, told the conference that Iran’s selection was an “affront” to the NPT.

The only non-proliferation the Islamic Republic understands is bunker-busters delivered by B-2.

Posted at 10:40 am by Stephen Green

TRUTH:

Exit quote: “Let’s be honest, Jimmy: when you hate Donald Trump as much as you do, that doesn’t sound like a joke. It sounds like how you really feel. They always say there is truth in comedy.”

Posted at 10:24 am by Stephen Green