One of the most disgusting abuses of 21st-century governance in America was how our supposed leaders utterly failed both the Constitution and the people following the arrival of the COVID-19 virus after its release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in central China.

We’ll include Donald Trump in that, perhaps only tangentially. Trump’s COVID sins mostly consisted of taking terrible advice from people who sought to weaponize COVID to end his presidency. When he did that, Trump found himself rolled by Deep State actors like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, whose answers for COVID were to force Americans to wear face diapers, shut down the economy, take away freedom of association and in so doing deny the public an opportunity to meet and organize for the purpose of resistance to medical tyranny being imposed by the states, and demand compliance with a vaccination program consisting of something which could only loosely be called a vaccine.

The inception of these things happened on Trump’s watch, and it’s unfortunate that it did. Trump clearly had the right instincts about the virus. He knew that it was of Chinese origin and he knew that it came from that lab in Wuhan. He also knew that the incidence of death among healthy people infected by it was exceptionally rare and he believed it was treatable.

If you watched Trump, his responses to the COVID outbreak were what one would suppose were prudent given the information he was given. He was told that the medical industry needed time to ramp up production of supplies and equipment, so he agreed to a “two weeks to flatten the curve” lockdown which it was thought would keep hospitals from being overwhelmed by COVID patients. That lockdown ended up lasting for two years or more in Democrat-run states, something Trump couldn’t control.

He was told an mRNA treatment would serve as a vaccine, so he surged resources into perfecting and producing it. That ended up being, if not a disaster, a less-than-efficacious way past the virus. COVID vaccines have nasty side effects among some who take them, but perhaps worse than that they don’t actually stop people from getting or spreading COVID.

That isn’t Trump’s fault, of course, as it’s Big Pharma who made the vaccines. Spearheading production of something which was supposed to help is generally a good idea, and Trump did that. But he never suggested mandating the vaccine and he was gone from the White House when the vaccine mandates came. He can’t be blamed for the abuse of the vaccines.

Trump’s great instinct was to treat COVID, of course, and in this he was failed by the team around him. When Trump suggested that hydroxychloroquine could be a solution for some people, he was accused of killing an Arizona man whose wife gave him fishtank cleaner (she was actually murdering her husband, not trying to treat him for COVID; the media didn’t report that). When Trump heard about a treatment doctors at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles were experimenting with which used UV light as a means of disinfecting the lungs of COVID patients on ventilators, and discussed that as a possibility for some, he was accused of suggesting that Americans inject themselves with bleach.

Before long, there was barely any mention of treating COVID by anybody in the public health sector, and every suggestion for treating the virus would be suppressed by both the legacy media and social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube.

So if there’s a reckoning due for the malicious failure of our government, it probably shouldn’t fall on Trump so much as on the administrative state, the White House regime which took Trump’s place in January of 2021 and perhaps most of all on the governors who implemented all of the worst examples of medical tyranny.

And while Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer might have been the most prominent COVID tyrants among the governors in office during that time, there really wasn’t anyone worse than either Tim Walz or John Bel Edwards when it came to stupid, wasteful, corrupt and despotic COVID lockdowns.

Our readers know about Edwards, who instituted an emergency declaration for COVID and proceeded to demand that Louisianans wear a mask virtually everywhere, shut down the schools and would have kept them shut down but for an open revolt by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, Education Superintendent Cade Brumley and a number of local school boards who led the charge to reopen the schools. Edwards also threw billions of dollars around in drunken-sailor fashion, much of the swag landing with cronies, attempted to institute a vaccine mandate which generated a great deal of resistance among the public, and most egregiously he attempted to close the churches.

Which resulted in the colossal embarrassment of the Tony Spell case, and the giant black eye that gave Edwards.

The people of Louisiana fought Edwards almost to a standstill. The people’s representatives in the Louisiana legislature had the opportunity to beat him, but they didn’t show the requisite courage to finish the job.

After months of Edwards lockdowns and a growing realization that nothing the governor and his team of petty tyrants were doing was getting Louisiana past the pandemic, the Louisiana House of Representatives exercised its legal right to dissolve Edwards’ COVID emergency declaration. All that was required to do that was a petition carrying 53 members’ signatures sent to the governor, and by October of 2020 they’d done that.

But Edwards, in a fit of psychotic majesty, rejected the petition. He said it was unconstitutional without a majority of the Senate as well, though that was an utterly bizarre argument unsupported by jurisprudence or statute. An emergency declaration is just that; an emergency, and as such it requires a full governmental consensus to maintain. When a majority of one house of the state legislature declares an end to that consensus that is dispositive along any rational analysis, but Edwards found himself the beneficiary of a terrible ruling by a sycophantic district judge in Baton Rouge which sustained the emergency.

It was a low point in state history. Prior to Edwards’ COVID rampage it was thought that Huey Long had set the standard for dictatorship on the bayou.

We’re largely recovered from those COVID abuses, and the backlash from them made Louisiana considerably redder as a state. Something like the COVID lockdowns is very unlikely to happen again as a project of Louisiana’s governor, and it’s hoped that the word is out among the state’s politicians that it’s career suicide to try any such antics again.

In Minnesota, no such lessons were learned, and that’s a reflection of a much more pliant and docile citizenry. Tim Walz took full advantage of the opportunities Minnesotans gave him under COVID and made himself a despot from March 13, 2020, when he declared a state of emergency, to May 28, 2021, when he finally lifted it.

Jordan Schachtel at The Dossier runs through one of Walz’ lowlights…

During the early days of the Covid hysteria era, Walz set up a snitch hotline that encouraged Minnesotans to report their neighbors for violations of his lockdown order. Those caught violating his lockdown order were subject to penalties of up to $1,000 or 90 days in jail. He also imposed mask mandates for multiple years.

Here’s one such empowered snitch reporting on kids playing basketball and tennis outdoors:

Martin Armstrong goes into further detail…

Tim Walz aimed to force at least 70% of the state to undergo vaccination. The unvaccinated were not permitted to participate in society. Tim Walz created a COVID-19 hotline for citizens to report neighbors who they suspected were violating his COVID laws. Walz threatened the public with a $1,000 fine or up to 90 days in jail if they spent time with someone who did not reside in their household during the “shelter in place” period. He threatened people with a $25,000 fine if they dared to meet as a group in public, such as a church, but riots for Black Lives Matter were encouraged.

Around 10,000 incidents were reported to the COVID hotline as neighbors began to turn on each other. “It is being used, and we simply want to let people be able to call and let folks know,” he said. “It’s for their own good. If we see people that may not be as informed on this, it’s an educational piece,” Walz claimed. He later told Politico: “I got to the point where I was saying, ‘Please, just wear the mask so you live long enough to vote against me.” When government says they’re squeezing our freedoms for our own good, there is always a self-serving motive.

The Upper Midwest Law Center attempted to sue the governor for his blatant overreach, but the Minnesota Supreme Court sided with Walz. Former President Trump stated that Minnesota needed to be liberated from Walz’s rule, but Walz managed to grasp onto power for as long as possible to keep the people of Minnesota under his thumb.

And perhaps most disgusting of all was the quarter-billion-dollar fraud Walz oversaw thanks to the river of federal dollars flowing into Minnesota…

According to federal charges filed over the past couple of years, at least 70 people were part of a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy that exploited two federally-funded nutrition programs to fraudulently obtain more than $250 million in one of the largest COVID-era fraud schemes anywhere in the nation.

The defendants allegedly used a Minnesota-based nonprofit organization called Feeding Our Future to avoid tough scrutiny from the Minnesota Department of Education, which was supposed to be conducting oversight of the programs.

…

So far, more than 20 people have pleaded guilty or been convicted for their roles in the fraud scheme. None have been sentenced yet. Two of those charged were found not guilty, and most are still awaiting trial.

“Defendants falsified documents, they lied, and they fraudulently claimed to be feeding millions of meals to children in Minnesota during COVID,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said at a press conference in June, after the first trial in the case concluded. “This conduct was not just criminal. It was depraved, and brazen.”

That was reminiscent of the $100 million boondoggle Edwards oversaw in turning the Ernest Morial Convention Center into a popup COVID hospital with virtually zero patients, which as it turned out was really just an excuse to issue crony contracts to his friends.

Tyranny is good business for the corrupt. We learned that during COVID. Walz and Edwards were both pretty good teachers.