A conservative radio host from New Jersey was so appalled by Louisville’s COVID-19 safety precautions on a recent trip that he fled for Nashville and wrote a sanctimonious blog post about it.
Bill Spadea, an anti-vaxx personality with 27,000 followers on Twitter, detailed the horrors of his stop on his station’s website in an article titled, “Unvaccinated Spadea gets kicked out of Louisville, Kentucky.” Spadea, who is also a failed political candidate, claims he and his wife were denied entry at “place after place” on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. Which is odd, because we could only find one downtown Louisville distillery on the tour that has a vaccination requirement on their website — Michter’s Fort Nelson Distillery.
If you were to follow the suggested Bourbon Trail Louisville tour on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail website, Michter’s would be the first place you would land. But, just a few storefronts down, you would find the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience, which “kindly” requests masks but not vaccinations. Same with the Old Forester Distilling Co.. If he had made it to Angel’s Envy, he would have found that masks are only required in production areas.
LEO sent an email to Spadea asking him which distilleries he tried. He has yet to respond.
Of course, a quick search at Spadea’s Twitter shows he is also anti-mask, frequently spouting phrases like, “Take off the mask” and “no mask.”
Spadea blamed his experience on “the decisions of big Pharma and complicit local politicians.” Although, in Louisville, individual businesses have the say in whether to require vaccines or masks, unless they’re state-owned. And, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Moderna are not in charge of any local COVID-19 safety decision making.
Spadea used his blog to try and contrast parts of the country without mandates, which he believes are thriving, with places that have more safety precautions, which he characterized as waiting on the edge of their seats “to be told what to do by the CDC and the FDA.”
In his quest to make his point, Spadea wrote that our city had “empty streets,” “closed restaurants” and palpable tension. In Kentucky, he also said he was subjected to the tyranny of “billboards trying to push the vaccine” and “radio hosts reporting endless COVID ‘metrics.’”
Instead of staying, he traveled to downtown Nashville, where he said he experienced “no masks” and “no vaccine questions.” “Just great food, packed streets and friendly people happy we were there,” he wrote.
Spadea does not say exactly what time he was in Louisville versus when he was in downtown Nashville. We don’t know what areas of our city he went to or exactly how long he was here. He also didn’t acknowledge any non-COVID related differences between the cities. Like, the fact that Nashville is a national bachelorette destination or that it is the hub of country music in the country. All things that make Nashville different than Louisville that started long before COVID and any (now lapsed) mandates.
But, based on his sample size of two, everyone who lives here is scared and our city is an entertainment wasteland.
Based on the sample size of this writer, Bill Spadeas aren’t welcome in Louisville, anyway.
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