Ron DeSantis took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal today, penning a scathing op-ed that takes apart the government and media’s response to the COVID pandemic while defending his state’s successes. The Florida governor addressed how politics got so infused into actions taken prior and present regarding the virus.

He also noted how the pandemic was a boon to the mainstream media, meaning they have had every incentive to keep the fear porn rolling.

Here are some of the best passages with a hat tip to Logan Hall from The Daily Caller for putting this together.

desantis bringing the flames in this WSJ op-ed. pic.twitter.com/AL2NVtg25p

— Logan Hall (@loganclarkhall) March 18, 2021

The way the press has treated COVID has been a complete disgrace. While lockdowns destroyed the mental health of people, killed businesses, and in some cases, cost lives, the media set about making everything about Donald Trump. The obsession reverberated in all their coverage, including their irresponsible, deadly treatment of hydroxychloroquine, a drug that has been used around the world to treat COVID at certain stages of the illness. In that instance, telling people a common malaria drug was going to kill them if a doctor gave it to them was preferable to giving the orange man a small victory.

Further, COVID drove ratings, which meant that every piece of bad news along with every new attack on Trump made CNN, MSNBC, and their cohorts more money. Now, with Trump gone and their ratings collapsing, networks like CNN a desperately scraping for the next crisis. Just today, Sanjay Gupta was on air rattling about how you must wear masks after vaccination because the virus will mutate if you don’t. They want you subjugated forever so the fear peddling never stops because if it stops, they lose more viewers. Of course, that all feeds into their partisan, left-wing narratives as well.

DeSantis also hit our “elites” for their consistently wrong predictions, noting that Florida well outperformed the doomsday scenarios by ignoring politicized “experts” and actually following science and common sense. As the governor notes, “15 days to stop the spread” turned into a tool of control, one that the current administration has no intention of letting go of. But Florida did things differently and reaped the rewards.

The victory lap is on, and DeSantis deserves every second of it. It took real courage to do what he did. Other GOP governors like Mike DeWine, Larry Hogan, and yes, Greg Abbott, simply didn’t have the fortitude to stand up and do what was right early on. In the end, they garnered worse outcomes and worse economies with more hardship on their residents. It didn’t have to be that way, and DeSantis showed that.