by Alex Berenson, Unreported Truths:
At least he came by his insanity honestly (unlike his descriptions of his military service); ex-Minnesotan and censor-in-chief Andy Slavitt was one of his top advisors
Everything is connected. Especially Covid authoritarians.
Before he conspired to violate my civil rights and make Twitter ban my journalism in 2021, Democratic healthcare operative Andrew M. Slavitt was a top Covid advisor to Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
With Slavitt’s encouragement, Walz pushed a tight lockdown on his state. He encouraged residents to snitch on each other on a state-run hotline. And he sharply tightened Minnesota’s rules on gatherings in November 2020, long after it was clear Covid was a threat mainly to the very elderly and could not cause hospital overrun.
How badly did Walz panic in fall 2020? He essentially destroyed Thanksgiving. On Nov. 19, 2020, one week before the holiday, Walz barred “indoor or outdoor [emphasis added] gatherings, except with immediate household members” and added “no person from outside your immediate household should enter your home.” He also closed bars, restaurants, gyms, movie theaters, organized sports, and pools.
Of course, months earlier, when protests and riots over the death of George Floyd had rocked Minneapolis in May and June 2020, Walz had taken a different view. “We certainly believe that there’s a right that people have to gather,” he told reporters.
Walz’s crackdowns received less attention than those by Democratic governors in states like California and New York.
But his power grab was arguably more problematic because Minnesota is more closely politically divided than the coastal blue states and Walz’s lockdown faced more open opposition. In spring 2020, the protests were fairly narrow.
But after Walz’s November orders, business owners openly revolted, and police largely refused to enforce the rules.
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But Walz’s orders were not entirely ignored.
Lisa Hanson, a bar owner in a rural Minnesota town about 100 miles south of Minneapolis, was arrested in early 2021 for keeping her bar open. In December 2021, a jury convicted Hanson of defying the lockdown; she served 60 days in jail and was fined $1,000.
A newspaper account of the trial reveals the state judge who oversaw it effectively gave jurors no choice but to find Hanson guilty. He kept Hanson from challenging the constitutionality of Walz’s orders at the tiral. And in his jury instructions, he
told the jurors they must follow the rules of law, even if they don’t agree with them. He said they were obligated to find her guilty if they concluded she operated the bar and restaurant, served food and beverages on-site during the dates cited in the charges, knew of the law’s existence and intentionally violated it.
Huh. A politically motivated trial overseen by an aggressive judge, ending in a preordained conviction. Where have we seen that recently?
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As Walz cracked down, Andy Slavitt – who at the time was living in a wealthy Minneapolis suburb called Edina – was among his top advisers. An October 2020 profile of Slavitt called him a “a friend and trusted adviser” to the governor.
At the time, Slavitt had made himself among the loudest and most aggressive pro-lockdown voices on Twitter and nationally. In July 2020, he had tweeted that the United States “can virtually eliminate the [corona]virus any time we decide to” if it engaged in what he called “a 90% lockdown.”
Specifically, Slavitt suggested closing all “bars & restaurants & churches & transit” and “prohibit[ing] interstate travel.”
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