CLAY: Great piece this morning in the latest issue of the Wall Street Journal by a guest who’s been a guest with us a couple of times I think, fled New York City for the free state of Florida. She is Karol Markowicz, and the headline of your opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal is — and we talked about this some yesterday — “New York City Keeps Masking Toddlers: The School System’s Policy Is an Exercise in Senseless Cruelty,” and, Karol, this is crazy. I know you’ve got kids.
MARKOWICZ: Yeah.
CLAY: I’ve got kids. We finally get kids K through 12 not required to wear a mask in New York City.
MARKOWICZ: Mmm-hmm.
CLAY: But insanely they are still requiring 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds to wear masks who are probably the people who are least able to wear them —
MARKOWICZ: (laughs)
CLAY: — and as you point out, least necessary to wear them as well.
MARKOWICZ: Yeah. And who should have never been wearing them even when we believed that masking perhaps did something, which I don’t know who can still believe that. I don’t think that anybody thought that kids under 5 should be masked ever. I mean, nobody else was doing this. Every time you saw a toddler being pulled off a flight, you could be sure that that video was taken in America because only we were masking toddlers.
And it’s just crazy to me that it’s March 2022, and I’m still writing about masks on small children as if there isn’t a mountain of evidence that they don’t need it. It’s really soul crushing. I don’t have small children. I mean, my youngest is 6. So if you still lived in New York, this wouldn’t affect me, but I cannot imagine that people are okay with unmasking everybody except 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds.
BUCK: Karol, do you come across anybody…? It’s Buck, and thanks for being with us of course, again. Do you come across people that will actively defend this? I find this fascinating. It feels like everything is always just, “Someone else says, I have to do this.”
MARKOWICZ: Yeah.
BUCK: Right? Like, I’m just a cog in the machine. It’s always tyranny by committee with these covid idiots.
MARKOWICZ: Right.
BUCK: And I was wondering, honestly, like, do you come across blue checks that are saying, “Masking of children is necessary to save lives”?
MARKOWICZ: No. No, I don’t, because it makes no sense. So even if you believe that this segment of the population should mask because there is no vaccine, it doesn’t make sense because only like 40% of New York City children are vaccinated 5 and up. So what you’re saying is that just because a vaccine exists for the 5 and up, that they get to take off their masks. That makes no sense, and I don’t see anybody defending it. I don’t know who put this bug in Eric Adams’ ear. It’s really shocking to me. I feel like it has to be teacher union related. I don’t know, though, because obviously we don’t have a media that asks this kind of thing.
BUCK: Can I just ask you also like the teachers union thing Karol for a lot — ’cause you’ve been on the forefront of this, and Clay and I both just really appreciate you writing on this and you wrote in your recent New York Post op-ed that you were wrong at the beginning when you thought that schools shutdown should happen.
BUCK: You actually believe in accountability, but you changed your mind when you saw the evidence.
MARKOWICZ: Mmm-hmm.
BUCK: I thought we would all do that as a country.
MARKOWICZ: Right.
BUCK: I gravely overestimated Democrats’ honesty and basically decency on this stuff. But that only lasted a couple months and I realized they’re completely out of their minds.
MARKOWICZ: (laughs)
BUCK: But, I mean, going forward on this, I just… What is it with the teachers unions? It just feels like they’re doing this ’cause they can. I mean, it’s one thing when they can stay home for Zoom learning. But it seems like the teachers unions say, “We’re all scared, our adults, even though they’re vaccinated and, whatever.” Like, what is that all about?
MARKOWICZ: Right. I feel like it is a flex of power to say, “We still have control.” You’re absolutely right. Like, I got it wrong in March of 2020. And, you know, Buck, I give you a lot of credit for getting it right early on. So I get that people got it right when I was wrong, and I’m sorry that I pushed for schools to close in March 2020. I never believed that the two weeks to stop spread would lead to two years of masking children and this insanity.
And I just think that if we don’t get apologies and contrition and acknowledgment from these people who got it wrong and continue to get it wrong, they’re going to do this to us again. The “pause” right now with the mask mandates in New York City is just a pause. It’s not an ending. They’re just saying, “The numbers are down right now, we can take off our masks. We might put them back on,” and “might” to me means that they definitely will.
CLAY: Karol, I think you’re a hundred percent right, and this is why I keep beating the drum that the 2022 midterms have to be a referendum on the politicians who allowed these awful decisions to be made.
MARKOWICZ: Yep.
CLAY: I think — and Buck said it, and I think he’s right — it’s a single-issue election. Our democracy — I really believe this — demands that we hold people accountable when they make atrocious errors of judgment on our behalf, and the Democratic Party did that for basically two years.
MARKOWICZ: Yep.
CLAY: And you’re seeing, Karol… I know you left New York City, but the New York Times had a piece, I think it was yesterday I was reading —
MARKOWICZ: Yes.
CLAY: — where they said, “Hey, oh, by the way, the people who suffered the most from school shutdowns were poor and minority kids.”
MARKOWICZ: (laughs) Right. Right.
CLAY: We’ve been beating that drum for two years. It was self-evident.
CLAY: And this morning I wake up and their morning digest or whatever they send out, it effectively acknowledged that none of the mask mandates and none of it worked. I mean, their tiptoeing up to it, right?
MARKOWICZ: Yeah.
CLAY: They’re not definitively saying, “We got this a hundred percent wrong.” Will they ever? You’re arguing they need to.
MARKOWICZ: They must, yeah.
CLAY: Do you think we will get that acknowledgment?
MARKOWICZ: I don’t think we’re gonna get it for a very long time. So the piece this morning about whether or not any of the mitigation factors worked, which we know they did not, was by David Leonhardt there, and he’s sort of the… You know, he’s the sanity whisperer at the New York Times.
CLAY: Yeah.
MARKOWICZ: He brings news from two years ago to them. (laughs)
CLAY: (laughing)
MARKOWICZ: And so he… But even in that piece, he still has to hedge it and say, “Oh, you know, but if numbers go up then we may have to go back to masking.” So he admits that masking did not work, only to say that should numbers go up, we should go back to the thing that did not work. And this is what passes for journalism. And it really kills me that he’s the best that we have to even offer. Like, he’s the best at the Times. He’s our only hope at the Times, really is what it is, and that’s scary.
BUCK: Speaking to Karol Markowicz, got a great piece in the Wall Street Journal just yesterday, “New York City Keeps Masking Toddlers: The School System’s Policy Is an Exercise in Senseless Cruelty.” She’s a hundred percent right. She also had a piece in New York Post saying what we’ve been saying here on the show, and I want everyone on the team on this one: We’ve gotta demand apologies and “I was wrong” from the people who were wrong.
We cannot allow this I to be a suspension of all this. And to that end, Karol, it was about power early on, and it was about the election. And then I think they created this mass hysteria that they had to just keep feeding.
MARKOWICZ: Mmm-hmm.
MARKOWICZ: (laughing)
BUCK: Is he locked in a thimble somewhere? Like, what’s going on? And with all this, it feels to me like ego is a huge part of this, that a lot of people who think they are very smart and very data driven were very, very wrong. And they actually can’t — like, psychologically cannot — compute this even though it’s so clear now so they’d rather continue with the delusion.
MARKOWICZ: Yeah. Right. I play poker, so it’s like in the poker they can’t get off the hand, like they thought they had the aces in the beginning but now they’re clearly beat but they do not stop betting into the pot. That’s where we are right now, these people absolutely cannot admit defeat. And it’s really just, again, scary for the future. I don’t even… I wouldn’t care so much about them admitting that they ruined, you know, the lives of children and the lives of so many people for two years.
I wouldn’t care about that as much if they didn’t continue to have so much control over the rest of us going forward, and the fact that they can just bring all these policies back at any time. I mentioned to you I met a couple in Florida who are big fans of this show; I know they’re listening right now. But their business suffered. They described how they didn’t sleep for two years and how painful it all was and how nobody cared, and it was supposed to be these people were at home baking bread and on their Pelotons thinking that nobody else was affected. And it’s just… It’s tragic to me that they retain this level of control to ruin our lives going forward.
CLAY: Karol, I’ve made the analogy of Vietnam, not in the context of obviously this being a war, necessarily. But there was a contentious battle between people who said, “Hey, we need to fight the war in Vietnam; we need not to.” Now if you talk about the history of Vietnam, almost no one will admit to believing that Vietnam made sense to ever fight.
MARKOWICZ: Mmm-hmm. Yeah.
CLAY: Will we end up with covid where people like you, me, and Buck and many of our listeners out there who have been fighting these anti-restriction, anti-lockdown arguments, where almost everybody just ends up arguing that they were on our side all along and no one will admit, 20 years from now that they ever believed kids needed to wear masks —
MARKOWICZ: (laughing) Yeah.
CLAY: — that 2-year-olds needed to be masked up or that kids should have ever been out of school?
MARKOWICZ: So what’s wild is that’s our best-case scenario, right?
CLAY: Yeah.
MARKOWICZ: (laughing) Because if they don’t admit it then it’s very easily… We can have covid 2028 and have to start all over again.
CLAY: Yeah.
MARKOWICZ: This is not something that just ends. Absolutely have a different pandemic. This happens. And these people, unless they go back and say, “I was wrong,” unless they even internally say that, maybe not even to us, very likely to turn back to the same mitigation factors. I mean, if you look at, like, what the health agencies have been saying, I mean, Walensky said, you know, I think in January that masking… No. It might have been December. Sorry. But that masking provides 80% protection against viruses.
CLAY: Yes.
CLAY: No doubt.
BUCK: Yeah. It’s not over until they admit they were wrong and they say they’re sorry and they are nowhere near that right now.
MARKOWICZ: That’s right. Yep.
BUCK: Karol Markowicz, everybody. Karol, thanks so much. Appreciate it.
MARKOWICZ: Thanks so much, guys. Thank you.
CLAY: Thank you as well.
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