It has been half a decade since everyone went crazy. I lived in the Florida panhandle during the pandemic, where the lockdowns were a blip, and the craziest thing Black Lives Matter did was block a bridge, an incident that was only interesting because it ended in one of the protesters taking a ride on the hood of a Ford Flex all the way into the next town over. Covid culture, so much as it existed, was enforced in large part by northern busybody corporations like Target, where I saw my last masking fight in the spring of 2021.
“Put on your mask,” I heard a portly middle-aged woman murmur as she walked past a sunburnt dad in Nikes.
“Shut up, bitch,” the dad replied.
Even under the Panhandle’s rather tepid Covid regime people were still at each other’s throats. Of course, it was worse elsewhere.
From my phone, I saw people’s brains break in real time. In blue America, people called my governor “DeathSantis” because he dared to open the beaches. I saw upper-middle-class-whites call to empty the jails and defund the police, ostensibly for the sake of working-class blacks they’d never spoken to outside of customer-service interactions. I saw suburban uncles stockpiling guns and calling to fill the same jails with Democrat celebrity pedophiles. Cities were burned and shortly thereafter—capitols stormed.
