Lots of people with deeply held opinions and reliable Internet connections are working very hard to get your attention with insightful commentary, witty observations, and hot takes on breaking news. Some are better than others, but no one is better – or more prolific – than Jeff Childers.
I first stumbled across Jeff’s blog, Coffee and Covid, early in the lockdowns, and took enormous pleasure in his daily musings. Jeff is a lawyer by trade, but don’t hold that against him. He used his legal expertise to push back against the local officials in Alachua County, Florida who tried to force the citizenry to mask up while INSIDE their own homes – or face arrest. For Jeff, that was a bridge too far, and his determination to fight that particular variant of authoritarianism eventually led to a day in court and a winning verdict – a verdict that caused dozens of neighboring counties to return to their senses and overturn their mandatory masking mandates. He was right, in other words, at a time when being right was very risky, very unpopular, and very expensive.
It was during this time that Jeff began to chronicle his legal adventures in a blog called Coffee and Covid, where he shared the details of his case, along with a lot of other information relevant to the pandemic – much of which ran counter to the fear and dread that seemed to define every headline. Jeff offered his readers a steady diet of context, perspective, honesty, and most of all, hope – all of which were in short supply six years ago. Today, Coffee and Covid has grown into something truly extraordinary – a daily vituperation of all the mendacity fit to print on a rich variety of headlines, that clocks in between 2,000 and 6,000 words. Again, that’s every day, seven days a week.
The sheer volume is both impressive, and unprecedented. In just five years Jeff has published the equivalent of ten Bibles. But it’s not the volume of content that’s led to Coffee and Covid’s success – it’s the weird mix of intelligence, sarcasm, exasperation, determination, humor, and relentless optimism that’s turned this small-town southern lawyer into a trusted citizen journalist with far more readers than CNN has viewers.
Here’s a link to today’s post, which is a fine example of what he churns out every day. https://bit.ly/4s1TSIk And here’s a link to our conversation. https://bit.ly/TWIHI474JeffChilders
What a pleasure to meet a lawyer who can speak in plain English, and his lovely wife, Michele. Thank you both for flying across the country and spending a few days in Gomorrah.
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