The Child Abuse Scandal of the Covid Era

BUCK: Clay, what we’ve done to kids — and not you and me and the people listening to this, but America. What the Democrat Party, the Biden regime and Democrats at the state and local the level have done to kids across the country with covid is perhaps one of the most appalling things about this entire chapter in our nation’s history.

Our friend Karol Markowicz over at the New York Post who’s been a staunch defender of children during this — she’s got kids in the New York City public school system — wrote a piece: “Mask mandates are harming our kids’ development.” And, Clay, one of the most unsurprising conclusions possible now, finally you’re seeing this “it can finally be told” piece she’s pointing out where opening schools was like never a problem.

Schools never should have been closed. They are not the feasts for covid, and all the people are gonna be hospitalized, gonna be terrible, kids are gonna die. That was all hysterical nonsense pushed by the lazy teachers unions to allow people to do remote teaching, which is no teaching. But kids are suffering now developmentally. They’re behind in reading. They’re behind where they would have been, right, in one year.

They’ve fallen back dramatically. They’re having cognitive issues. They’re having speech issues. They’re having emotional, psychological trauma from being masked up, from sitting on the ground outside in freezing weather to eat their lunch — which they make kids do in New York City. People are abusing their kids. It’s like the photo we mentioned the first hour where a woman is gleeful at her child getting the shot. The kid is crying and writhing in pain, and we just had an MD on in the last hour saying kids don’t need the shot! What’s going on?

CLAY: (sigh) You heard me sigh there — probably a lot of people did — because this is one of those things that I believe is gonna be impossible to fix. Let me explain what I mean by that. Buck, you and I, you talk about this a lot, but this is one of the things that we were a hundred percent right about. When they shut down schools back in March, I was willing to make the argument then, “Okay, let’s do it for two weeks. Gotta bring the kids back.”

Even to not finish that school year I think was a poor decision. But the analogy that they were trying to make — remember they said, “Hey, if you go look at what happened with the flu a hundred years ago. The schools that shut down had better results, the communities that shut down schools than the ones that did not,” and when I know you were saying what I was saying was, “You can’t fight the battle of this war based on the technology of the last war.”

One of the biggest failures, if you like military history — I know you do like I do, Buck — is every new war is fought based on the technology that would have won the last war. And what was so frustrating to me about the whole idea to shut down schools in the first place was it was based on an entirely different virus which impacted people of different ages completely differently. We knew that China lied about a lot of data early on.

But by March and April and May of 2020, it was quite clear that kids were spared from severe consequences from covid. So the idea of not allowing them to go to school — and in fact sending them home and telling them to stay in their houses with their family members — was actually more dangerous because we know covid spreads inside of households much more so. But what was so frustrating…

This is the one area where I think Trump could have won the election and he didn’t quite make this case. And I think you’re seeing now in 2021 and I think you’re gonna see it made in 2022. Moms and dads out there who suddenly had to be responsible for keeping their kids home from school weren’t able to do their own jobs. The amount of economic impact from shutting down schools — not only for those kids but for the larger society — was seismic and remains seismic.

Buck, the kids who could least afford to be out of school — kids without reliable internet at home, kids without parents who had the luxury to be able to work from home and could help supervise what they were doing on an hour by hour, day-by-day basis, those kids — are the biggest losers. And we lost — before all is said and done, we will have lost — millions of kids from the educational system who will never complete their full education.

Primarily poor, primarily minorities, primarily disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds that don’t have a lot of opportunity, those are the kids that bore the brunt of the cost. ‘Cause if you were rich, you got a teacher to come in, your parents could do it, you built your own pod system, all those things. The poor kids bore all the brunt… The Democrats claim to care about equity and they failed them.

BUCK: You know what happened? The teachers union ended up telling us when all the test scores… It is already happening, folks. They’re already seeing that kids — and as Clay says (he’s spot-on), the people that suffered the most, the children that suffered the most are low-income kids and the disproportionately minority kids, Democrats of course pretend to care so much about those demographics.

They’re already doing all of these studies to show they’re behind — and in a sense, it will take — even with additional help — years to get them back to where they would have been, not like years to get them to a grade level. Years to get them to the expected level within our failing public school system, by the way. And what’s gonna happen? The teachers unions, it’s a win-win. You know what they’re gonna say?

“We need more money. That’s the problem! Give us more money and more paid leave and time off and maybe we’ll get your kids that we subjected to this madness back on track,” which wasn’t even a great track in the public school system in a lot of cases anyway. But, Clay, more to the point today, New York is a perfect example of this. Kids are masked in schools.

CLAY: I know.

BUCK: I was at restaurants last week before I got sick. Adults who are at risk — including 75-year-olds who are substantially heavier and comorbidities and everything, they’re sitting around in closed, confined quarters eating, drinking, doing whatever they want to do. Everyone’s doing it! All adults are doing it. Not to pick on any age-group but people at the most risk obviously come to mind but we’re all doing this.

People have what we’ve all turned into the folks who are being told to turn off your iPad ’cause it might crash the plane, right? No one actually believes that, but the airlines enforce this lunacy for years and years. They finally the relented a little bit ’cause everyone knows it’s so stupid. In my building, there’s double maskers again. I’m finally seeing it now.

So I gotta stop making double masking jokes ’cause people are now doing it. I’m seeing double maskers come back. They do it in the elevator, but then they go sit in a restaurant for hours unmasked. I’m like, “What do you think you’re doing? What are you accomplishing by this?” With children — the lowest risk demographic for covid, the lowest risk of death and the lowest risk for spreading it too.

At least half, you said — Marty Makary told us this. I’ve forgotten this, that at least half — have already had covid, their little immune systems are rock solid now against this virus, if they’ve had it and cleared it, and we’re making them mask up. Governor Hochul of New York — and not to so much focus today on New York, folks.

But we’re at the tip of the spear of the lunacy. Governor Hochul’s going around. She’s older, she’s unmasked. But your 5-year-old has to be masked for eight hours a day in school and mask up between bites? They enforce that, mask up between bites in the school system? This is mass child abuse. It is child abuse.

CLAY: This is what everything and talked about in August in our school district. And I’m thankful that my kids I have two in public school and one in a private school. None of them have to wear masks here in Nashville. They’ve done away with the private school masking requirement. My son goes to a school in Nashville, private school where I, live, obviously.

And my kids, we live in Williamson County, which is just south of Nashville, Franklin-Brentwood area. They’ve done away basically with the masking requirement. They’re even allowing, Buck… You know, I used to like to go eat lunch. Our show now airs during lunchtime. But my wife went in and ate with our first grader.

Every now and then you can go in if you have a kid in school and you can sit at the table with them and visit, and maybe even back up now in our public schools allowing parents and grandparents to come back in and be able to visit with the kids. And my son’s private school just had a grandparents’ day, no masks required.

All the grandparents could come — for the first time in two years — and be able to walk around and see everything at that school to be able to see their grandsons and granddaughters and be able to experience that event. What we have taken away, what we have taken away is going to be calculated for generations to come. There’s a real serious consequence of these decisions.

And one of the things that I’m most fearful of, Buck, is this idea that we have ingrained in very young children anxiety, nervousness, and fear that they are going to die if they aren’t wearing masks, that they are going to die if they don’t put their mask back up between bites, if they don’t get vaccinated for something that they’re not in danger from.

BUCK: I regularly see in New York — you know, I live and work in Midtown so I’m right in the thick of it, folks, all the time — I regularly see parents outside unmasked with their children masked outside.

CLAY: Yeah, crazy.

BUCK: I’m just looking at them like, “What?” (laughing) You know, it’s one of those things if I say anything of course I’m a bad guy, but I want to say, “Why are you crazy? What is wrong with you? What has happened to you?” But you know what? We know the answer. CNN, the New York Times, Fauci, constantly saying stuff that just drives up anxiety and doesn’t actually provide public health benefits that they say it will and then when we say, “Oh, look they’re wrong” or, “Oh, look, they’re doing the thing we said we would do,” but they said they wouldn’t and now they’re doing it. They just say, “Shut up, peasant; get your shot.” I don’t want to hear it.

CLAY: This is also a consequence of polarization in media. And I’m glad that we’re growing our audience to such an extent, because there’s lots of people who hear, “Oh, they say this on Fox News and, oh, Clay and Buck say it,” and initially their thought is, “I just want to do the opposite of whatever those guys are saying.” We don’t have a real battle of ideas anymore, ’cause I think there’s lots of patients who are afraid of being judged for listening to anybody else!

BUCK: I also want to point something else. All the libs you’ll see — ’cause this gets me very fired up and I meant to say this for a while. All the libs you’ll see are in lockstep with Fauci have been the whole time and that’s the way that they approach things. And they always say, “Oh, well, you’re just changing your tune because of the politics.” I was opposed to Fauci when Trump was listening to him.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: I was opposed to Fauci and masking and lockdowns when a Republican president was doing it. Granted in a crisis, granted it was a different time. But when Trump was going along with Fauciism, I was like, “This is madness. We shouldn’t do this. Why are we doing this?” I’ve been consistent, and so have you, Clay, to your credit.

The libs are the ones who, when they’re running Biden against Trump, it’s, “Oh, I don’t know if you can trust that vaccine,” and then it’s, “Oh, my God. The vaccine needs to be mandated every six months for everybody forever,” right? They’re the ones that switch based on the politics. I’ve hated all this crap all along.