There's public health risks to doing large political gatherings, but in this country - and we do still live in America - we protect the right to free speech and we protect the right to political discourse and political events.

We don't need union bosses to tell us how to take care of our people. We never have, and we never will in Mississippi.

No business is non-essential to those who rely on its paycheck for food, for supplies and for shelter.

We can't have career criminals walking around with no records. The law enforcement community that I spoke with agreed.

No one likes high school and college sports more than I do.

We have to be willing to make sacrifices.

When you are making mandates on individuals to do things like wear masks and you're making mandates on individual business owners to put guidelines in place... they need a little bit of lead time to build up and get that done.

Do we have hospital capacity issues? We do. But the reality is in our state and virtually ever other rural state across America, we have ICU bed issues and hospital capacity issues even when there's not COVID-19.

If you live in Tishomingo County and there's a statewide mask mandate you can't help but say, 'Well, that's probably for those folks in Hancock County.' If you put a statewide mandate, the folks in Hancock County are going to say, 'That's for the folks up in Tishomingo County, they can't possibly be talking about me.'

The state does not run the water system in the city of Jackson. Perhaps we should.