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NYTimes Scratching Heads Over Texans NOT Freaking Out Over The Wuhan Wheezer

New Yorkers finally have that story they’ve been dying to tell. And yet, they still aren’t happy about it.

New York was slammed really badly by COVID for a few reasons, including severe incompetence at the City and State level. (Looking at YOU Cuomo and De Blasio.)

Their ‘Paper of Record’ has been dying to start reporting about bad news in ‘flyover country’. If they can do it with one of those pesky big states like Texas or Florida, so much the better.

Imagine their glee when they heard that COVID cases in Texas were ticking up. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. You can hear it in their words.

For a while, it seemed that the coronavirus had spared West Texas. Cases were low. Few had died. Concern through the spring was focused on getting businesses running again.

By mid-June, the Texas Tech football team returned to campus. Local baseball tournaments resumed. Hotels filled up.

Then people started getting sick.

In Lubbock, a burnt-tan city of 250,000 with a rollicking college bar scene, more people tested positive for the virus in the last three weeks than in the previous three months combined. On the day Gov. Greg Abbott began to swiftly reopen the state, two months ago, the city recorded eight positive tests for the virus. On Wednesday, there were 184. —NYT

‘Then people started getting sick.’ The ‘finally’ is only implied.

So did this reign those Texans in, cow them into prostrating themselves before our technocratic betters, and doing exactly what some guy in a labcoat on television tells us to do?

Not. Even. Close.

The sudden jump, concentrated among those in their 20s, reflected a sharp and uncontrolled rise in the virus that has hit Texas harder than many other places in the country. Unlike the early weeks of the pandemic, when infections were concentrated in the state’s mainly liberal cities, the virus has now reached into the deep-red regions of the state that have resisted aggressive public health regulation.

Yet for many conservatives, even those with the virus now at their door, the resurgence has not changed opinions so much as hardened them.

For those Texans, trust in government is gone, if it was there to begin with, and that includes some of the state’s top leaders. On Tuesday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas declared himself tired of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor. “I don’t need his advice anymore,” Mr. Patrick said. —NYT

What do the Times have to say about this headstrong group of people?

That sentiment was echoed outside a popular, newly opened hamburger restaurant in Wolfforth, Texas, just outside Lubbock, where even Mr. Abbott, a Republican, came under harsh criticism. “It seems like he’s been influenced by Fauci and the left,” said Mark Stewart, who sat with his wife and children and several other families at a gathering for locals who home school.

None in the 18-person group, which squeezed around several outside tables, wore masks or made an attempt to stay distant. “This is the first time we’ve met each other and we don’t care,” said Mr. Stewart’s wife, Tamera, adding that other people might take precautions when they are together and stay far apart. “Texas has all kinds. But we’re done with all that.”

Such attitudes present a daunting challenge for local leaders trying to contain a resurgent outbreak, especially in solidly Republican areas, where mandatory public health measures can generate swift opposition. —NYT

They just can’t get it into their heads that there is a species of American that refuses to have some government pencil-pusher make sweeping decisions about their lives.

Wes Walker

Wes Walker is the author of "Blueprint For a Government that Doesn't Suck". He has been lighting up Clashdaily.com since its inception in July of 2012. Follow on twitter: @Republicanuck

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