Nashville Government Lied About the Coronavirus—Does Everybody?

Nashville, Tenn., Mayor John Cooper speaks at the Glen Campbell Museum and Rhinestone Stage in Nashville, on Feb. 13, 2020. (Jason Kempin/Getty Images)

Commentary

For good and bad reasons, my adopted hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, can’t stay out of the news.

The good: Ben Shapiro, Jeremy Boreing, and the gang from The Daily Wire are moving their successful conservative media company here for reasons similar to mine. They no longer “love LA.”

They considered Texas but opted for Music City because of the number of “creatives” here. (If you watched the Nashville-based Academy of Country Music Awards on Sept. 16, you could see that in action.) Welcome, guys!

The bad: Like many cities across this nation, Nashville’s government has been extremely peremptory—and it now seems worse than that—in its dealings with the pandemic.

Its mayor, John Cooper, issued what amounted to diktats restricting most social activity in a town that relies heavily on tourist income. They were particularly punitive toward the popular honky-tonks on Lower Broadway. The owners screamed bloody murder but got little or no response.

Now we know why: Nashville Metro lied. The coronavirus figures for those same honky tonks (country music bars) were nowhere near what the city had said or implied they were in order to keep them shut or semi-shut, Fox 17 Nashville revealed in a series of private government emails uncovered by the station.

Mayor Cooper is shaping up as a national villain, similar to New York City’s infamous Bill De Blasio. (More in a moment)

This shouldn’t just be local news, or even national; it should be international for what it tells us about the virus.

Not So Dangerous

Restaurants and bars may not be nearly as dangerous locales for the transmission of the novel coronavirus (known here as the CCP virus) as we have been told. In fact, they could possibly not be very dangerous at all, since the instances of the virus associated with them appear to be minuscule.

That has implications for every city in the world and every country. The hospitality industry has been decimated, in many places, almost beyond repair. Tourism has been wounded globally, possibly terminally. Ditto the airline industry. Tons of employees in virtually every nation have lost their jobs.

The reasons for these—let’s be kind—“mistakes” are political and scientific.

The political couldn’t be more obvious. Various sides proclaim what they insist is the scientific truth about the pandemic according to their ideological wishes or what they hope to achieve politically.

The suppression by both Twitter and Facebook of Chinese virologist Dr. Yan Limeng, who had the temerity to propose that the virus was manmade and originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, is just one current and particularly flagrant and despotic example.

The doctor, formerly a Hong Kong resident, lives in hiding somewhere in the United States, while Twitter and Facebook continue to exercise massive control over our lives and what we learn and know in a manner that veers to the totalitarian.

Further, on the scientific side, for the past eight months or so we have watched the supposed “experts” contradict each other and themselves ad infinitum on what we should do about the virus, wear the mask or not, what drugs work or don’t and so forth. (How many times has Dr. Anthony Fauci said the exact opposite of what he said only a month or so before?)

All of a sudden, Sweden—that was heavily criticized for practicing “herd immunity,” kept its restaurants and bars open and (more or less) was apolitical in its decision-making—is doing pretty well, especially compared to most of Europe. Who would have guessed it?

Behind all this is the myth of “settled science,” that famous oxymoron only the Democratic candidate for the presidency has the cluelessness to believe—or say he believes. In any case, he will choose his experts to make his decrees.

Moral Narcissism

But back to humble Nashville and what it portends nationally. The email exchange unmasked by the local television station tells us about much of the decline of American cities we are experiencing or witnessing.

Like so many mayors across the country, Nashville’s Cooper—awash in moral narcissism—allowed supposedly righteous demonstrators from Black Lives Matter and, to some extent anyway, Antifa protest with near-impunity while restricting the pleasurable activities of law-abiding citizens. (He was lucky things didn’t get more out of hand here than they did.)

Somehow, again like the other mayors, he acted as if the protest crowds wouldn’t transmit the virus whereas the crowds of tourists and locals boogieing on Lower Broadway would.

Boy, was he ever wrong—about the crowds of tourists and locals, at least. (And they are big, even during the pandemic.) From Fox 17:

“On June 30th, contact tracing was given a small view of coronavirus clusters. Construction and nursing homes were found to be causing problems with more than a thousand cases traced to each category, but bars and restaurants reported just 22 cases.”

That’s 22 out of 27,563 documented COVID cases in Nashville/Davidson County, as of this writing. That’s 0.0008 percent from bars and restaurants. Ten times more people probably sprained their ankles getting out of Ubers.

Moreover, there’s no indication this minute number even knew they were sick, let alone were hospitalized or died.

You would think local government would rejoice, open the bars and restaurants, let the good times roll.

But no!

Top Secret

What transpired was a TOP SECRET/EYES ONLY email to a circle of government officials who colluded digitally with each other about why this happened and how to handle this awkward information.

One of the emails that—for reasons unknown, but you can guess—had the sender’s name ripped off from the address line at the top said: “My two cents. We have refused to give counts per bar because those numbers are low per se.”

Indeed, they are.

You can go to the link for more details. One can only guess how many similar hidden email exchanges have gone on throughout American cities, how many lies we have been told.

The upshot in Nashville, which has had a drastic economic decline, is the mayor pushed through a sudden 34 percent increase in property taxes. It’s now subject to a recall petition, led by a brave fellow named Steve Glover.

No Beds Available

But, as the late-night TV cliché goes, there’s more. And this, too, has national, possibly global, implications for the pandemic we have been living through.

Thanks to the same television station, Fox 17, we just now learn there’s been a fraud in the hospitalization metrics that we have been warned about incessantly. Their Stacy Case writes:

“If you click on this link and look at the dark blue line at the peak of the light blue section, you’ll notice that’s COVID hospitalizations. The light blue is all other hospitalizations. The yellow is available beds. To fully reopen, Metro government is requiring both blues to dip below the red dotted line. As you see, that probably wouldn’t happen with or without COVID. Malkus explains, ‘You know, you take all of the COVID patients away, you’re still not going to meet that metric. So, to us, it’s like that’s a bad metric.’

“Metro’s metric requires us to have 20 percent of beds open before we can reopen.

“In other words, normal hospitalization rates [not COVID] are keeping huge sectors shut down and thousands out of work”

Well, I’ll be…

No, I won’t, actually. Nothing surprises me at this point.

Does this mean that the game is rigged, that Nashville (and other cities undoubtedly) stays locked down in perpetuity ... or until, if and when, Joe Biden gets elected?

The folks at Fox 17 asked Cooper for a response to this seemingly outrageous situation. He answered with some prevaricating politician-speak that ended like this: “Now, I think they [hospitalizations] do recede a little bit and that’s why it can’t be just on one metric. You’re navigating the course of the disease that, let’s be more realistic, it will be much more like a year we'll be influenced by it.”

That would make us about six months into his hoped-for Biden administration. As for Cooper, I can’t wait to vote in his recall election.

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJ Media, and now, a columnist for The Epoch Times. His most recent books — “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (non-fiction)— are available in all formats on Amazon. He is @rogerlsimon on Parler and Twitter.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.