Even Potato Head Finally Gets It? Welcome to the Party, Pal!

CLAY: I started off the show, for those of you who are just now getting in your cars or just catching up with the fact that the New York Times has an editorial and the main editorial in their newspaper today says, do not close the schools again. It says that kids have virtually no risk from covid. And also buried in there is that masking in schools should no longer be mandatory. In fact, it says, “To think that two years of masking has no negative impact is shortsighted. Kids are resilient but not endlessly resilient. Masking in schools should be voluntary rather than mandatory.” And I thought that was interesting because the storyline is a-shifting in a hurry.

That’s the New York Times. Even CNN’s own resident Potato Head, Brian Stelter, also was asking, shouldn’t we be doing more to protect children by letting them live normal lives? It’s amazing how the narrative shift is occurring at CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post. You know who they’re starting to sound a lot more like? Voices for reason and sanity like Buck and I. Listen to this from CNN.

STELTER: With this inevitability about more and more and more cases, what is the better metric to be using? How should we be evaluating the fight against covid? Does the NFL point the way forward? The NFL this weekend saying we’re not gonna be testing every player all the time for covid because a lot of them are positive and they don’t even know because they’re asymptomatic. The NFL’s only gonna test if people show symptoms, if players show symptoms.

Is that the new way forward? And here’s another question since we’re hearing about schools closing again. We collectively took action to protect the elderly in 2020. Now shouldn’t we be doing more to protect children by letting them live normal lives? Are we really gonna let the kids suffer even more?

CLAY: Welcome to the party, pal. For those of you who are Die Hard fans, John McClane famously said, “Welcome to the party, pal.” This is what reasonable, rational people have been saying for 18 months now. We’re coming up on two-year anniversary of “15 days to stop the spread.” Remember back in March of 2020? We’re almost two years to the date since that happened. And only now are people in New York Times and people at CNN actually looking at the data and saying, wait a minute. Kids aren’t really at risk. Why are we making ’em wear masks in school? Kids aren’t really at risk. Why are we making them remotely go to classes?

And in the New York Times opinion here, I couldn’t help about notice, you know how equity is such a big thing for the Democratic Party, not equality, equity. You know what ended up happening when schools shut down that people like Buck and I have been saying for 18 months now? The school districts that shut down overwhelmingly served minority kids who were the least likely to have the ability to have Wi-Fi at home or have parents able to work with them. In fact, as schools reopen, this is in the New York Times editorial, 2% of majority white districts stayed closed. Eighteen percent of majority black schools stayed remote, and nearly a quarter of majority Hispanic schools stayed closed. The most inequitable results of any of our lives was directly driven by Democratic Party union with teachers and their teachers unions. They insisted that the poorest kids among us were not able to be in school in person, and that had an overwhelming impact on not just education, but also on children’s health.

Because do you know that in poor schools a huge amount of the nutrition and even the calories that kids get come from free breakfasts and free lunches? A huge part of kids having safe upbringings at home comes from teachers who are able to see kids who might be being abused and help to get them credit and support for all of the things that are occurring in those households. Because if you’re not in school, you don’t have the ability to get help. All of those things, I believe the biggest public policy failure in America since Vietnam is directly at the feet of Democratic politicians. Mayors, congressmen, senators, and, yes, Joe Biden himself all supported lockdowns when there was zero scientific evidence that schools should be shut down at all.

And now make no mistake what’s happening. They are trying to argue that things have changed, and that’s why they can support schools being open. CNN’s gonna do it. The New York Times is gonna do it, the Washington Post, the MSNBCs of the world, and they’re gonna try now to convince you that there was no possibility of schools being open last year, that Randi Weingarten is a hero. Watch it. They’re gonna try to change the story, and they’re gonna have you, some of you out there like kind of shaking your heads, saying, wait a minute. What’s changed that all of a sudden schools are gonna be open and kids are able to be back in person?

The data has been clear and transparent and without question since back in June of 2020 when all of the pediatricians, do you remember what that happened, the pediatricians came out and said, hey, we need to make sure that schools are open, the American Academy of Pediatrics? They said that in June of 2020. They said every school needed to be open all over the country by August and September of 2020. Trump argued that. And immediately the teachers unions and all the left wingers said. Oh, my God. Are you trying to kill us all?

There’s no way that we can have schools back open. And the results are clear now. If you were poor, if you were in a minority school district, you lost over a year of instruction and, as a result, that is the most deleterious, I really believe this, American social policy decision since all the way back, I really do believe this and it deserves more attention than it’s getting, all the way back to Vietnam. And in the years ahead what Buck and I have been saying is going to become commonly accepted truth. But what you guys need to remember is the number of people out there that allowed for this insanity to exist in the first place.