reSee.it - Tweets Saved By @Rstorechildhood
@Rstorechildhood - Restore Childhood
🚨 IT’S HERE! 15 Days: The Real Story of America's Pandemic School Closures is LIVE NOW, streaming FREE exclusively on X! 500+ days of closed schools, isolated kids, and broken trust. The TRUTH is exposed. WATCH NOW! https://t.co/yxhJHtsG1L
Video Transcript AI Summary
The transcript presents a sprawling panorama of the COVID-19 era focused on school closures, remote learning, politics, unions, and the fight over reopening, framed by activists, parents, teachers, and researchers.
Key themes and events emerge:
- The crisis is described as an existential crossroads and a chance to envision a different normal. Greenpeace’s Annie Leonard frames the moment as one where “the normal we want” should be imagined to align with environmental, educational, and social justice goals.
- Education and justice: Several speakers emphasize that environmental justice, educational justice, and worker justice are interlinked, and that the pandemic spotlighted inequities in who could access learning, technology, and safe schooling.
- The shock of school closures: The pandemic prompted rapid, widespread school closures. Speakers recall beliefs in a five- to fifteen-day pause, then a shift to online learning, with seven states closing schools temporarily and more than half of the country’s students sent home. The immediate consequences included interrupted learning, loss of routines, and a sense that the crisis was transforming childhood and education.
- Online learning and its toll: Remote schooling brought significant challenges: uneven access to devices and the internet; large disparities by race, ethnicity, and income; low student engagement; difficulties for families with multiple children, parents working from home, and limited bandwidth. Students reported missing social interactions, sports, and in-person coaching; teachers were sometimes perceived as disengaged or inaccessible, and screen time created new burdens on young eyes and attention.
- Personal stories of impact: A broad range of testimonies depict how closures disrupted academics, athletics, and social development. Students described losing seasons, recruiting opportunities, and access to facilities; families faced cramped living spaces, competing childcare needs, and the anxiety of uncertain futures. A recurring thread is the sense of long-term developmental harm and the fear of a generation affected by persistent disruption.
- Public health messaging and fear: The narrative includes public health guidance (“out of an abundance of caution”) and the role of fear, media messaging, and political rhetoric in shaping behavior and policy. Some participants criticize the portrayal of the virus as deadly to children, while others defend policies as necessary to prevent hospital overwhelm.
- The Great Barrington Declaration and questions about consensus: A cluster of speakers outlines the Great Barrington Declaration (Kuldorf, Gupta, Bhattacharya) which argued for focused protection of the vulnerable and less intrusive measures for others. They describe censorship and media backlash against these dissenting scientists, arguing that the declaration revealed a contested scientific consensus and was censored online.
- The role of the unions and politics: A significant portion of the narrative asserts that teachers’ unions and Democratic political leadership (notably Nancy Pelosi and Randy Weingarten) influenced school reopening strategies, advocating cautious reopenings and additional funding for PPE, staff, cleaning, and transportation. The claim is that the unions used the crisis to push a broader climate and social-justice agenda, and to secure resources through federal relief (CARES Act, American Rescue Plan) that supporters label as a “smash and grab.” There is also critique of the perceived closeness between the administration, the CDC, and union leadership, with accusations of favoritism and top-down decision-making.
- Case studies across regions: The film contrasts approaches in the U.S. with those in Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland) and notes that Scandinavian countries reopened schools with varied strategies, including outdoor schooling experiments, and cites evidence suggesting no clear pandemic benefit to closing schools long-term. It also points to the CDC’s original March 2020 school-closure guidance, which some participants say was later discarded.
- The aftermath and one-sided narrative about safety and reopening: By 2021, parents began organizing into a “parental rights” movement to demand in-person schooling, arguing that schools could reopen safely with proper safeguards. Some districts faced lawsuits or protracted battles between unions and local administrations. The film asserts that millions of children suffered educational and mental-health harms; millions more disappeared from the education system, and the long-term consequences include learning loss, decreased engagement, and social dislocation.
- Reflection on accountability and the future: The closing emphasis is on accountability, transparency, and safeguarding kids’ futures. The concluding message from a storyteller—who shares a personal history as a refugee child and survivor of long closures—urges parents to step up, organize, and demand a future where children’s education and well-being are prioritized.
Notable points and voices:
- Annie Leonard (Greenpeace) frames the crisis as an opportunity to reshape society toward justice and sustainability.
- Randy Weingarten (AFT) and Nancy Pelosi are depicted as influential figures aligning with union priorities on reopening.
- Testimonies highlight stark disparities in technology access and the unequal burden on low-income and minority students.
- The Great Barrington Declaration is presented as a counterpoint to the prevailing lockdown narrative, with claims of censorship and media hostility toward dissenting scientists.
- A comparative lens shows mixed international experiences, with some countries reopening earlier and learning safely, while U.S. policy is portrayed as heavily influenced by unions and political calculations.
- The final call is for recognizing the failures, demanding accountability, and mobilizing parents to secure a future where schools can function safely and equitably for all children.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: This is a crossroads. It's an existential crossroads.
Speaker 1: I'm Annie Leonard. I'm the executive director of Greenpeace. What is the normal we want at the end of this?
Speaker 2: Try to envision how to use this for what the society that we want to see.
Speaker 3: What a great
Speaker 0: gift. What a tremendous opportunity. We're just so lucky. We have to use it.
Speaker 2: Environmental justice helps create educational justice, helps create worker justice.
Speaker 4: COVID is God's gift to the left.
Speaker 5: I'll never forget I was walking down the street crying. I had just come from our children's elementary school having picked up two packets of homework that were supposed to last just fifteen days.
Speaker 6: Fifteen days. Fifteen days.
Speaker 7: Fifteen days.
Speaker 8: Fifteen days.
Speaker 9: Fifteen days.
Speaker 5: It felt like a one way street, not just in New York, but for schools all across America.
Speaker 10: Bam. The pandemic suddenly came out.
Speaker 6: If we are complacent and don't do really aggressive containment and mitigation, the number could go way up and be involved in many, many millions.
Speaker 10: And then school ended.
Speaker 2: The epidemiologists have told us we need to close schools. Schools in seven states have temporarily closed.
Speaker 5: More than half of the
Speaker 2: country's students have been sent home.
Speaker 5: For the next two weeks, weeks, they'll be learning online.
Speaker 10: And then I started forgetting a bunch of things that I learned in school.
Speaker 11: I was excited for nationals. And when stuff shut down, at that point, I didn't know what to do.
Speaker 8: This afternoon, we're announcing new guidelines for every American to follow.
Speaker 11: So my outdoor season for sophomore year was done. That means I didn't have access to to my weight room in my school building. My mind is like, how could this really happen?
Speaker 6: There's an answer to
Speaker 12: this. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1: Go ahead, Tony.
Speaker 7: He was my mentor, so I'm gonna have to let him speak.
Speaker 6: The small print here, it's really small print, in states with evidence of community transmission.
Speaker 13: My my older son, all his opportune all the you know, he's like he was a shy kid. He was starting to open up in ninth grade. He did all these, like, geeky clubs, and he made friends for the really for the first time in his life, and they just closed it.
Speaker 14: At the end of the day, we're one body. There's a mutuality, and there's a recognition of our interdependence that requires of this moment that we direct a statewide order for people to stay at home.
Speaker 15: They weren't allowed to use the play equipment. And I remember driving my son home, and he was like, I don't think there's anything left for, you know, for me to live for. And he was eight.
Speaker 3: What I love about the students is absolute brilliance and resilience.
Speaker 16: We didn't have anything for a while. And then when they did, probably had two months of virtual school to finish that year.
Speaker 10: And sad because I had a really nice teacher, and I wanted to see her.
Speaker 16: Yeah. She had a fantastic teacher that year.
Speaker 9: Obviously, you Yes. You're a union Yes. Leader, and you have workers.
Speaker 2: Everybody is scared. The the fear has now overtaken the fact.
Speaker 17: The teachers didn't really seem to care if you were failing, they were
Speaker 18: they didn't care.
Speaker 8: You get moments in history where people say, okay. I'm ready. I'm ready for change. I get it. I think this is one of those moments.
Speaker 19: I got on the varsity team, and then COVID happened.
Speaker 20: I felt like I got punched in the stomach when they said they were gonna close schools, and I just knew that it was a really, really bad thing
Speaker 18: to dropped, like, dramatically where I was getting, like, a ton of time.
Speaker 21: Saw all of the, you know, harmful consequences of school closures and how many kids
Speaker 22: This is unprecedented in in the history of infectious disease to have prolonged school closures for a pandemic, especially one in this case that affected children so much less. It's unprecedented.
Speaker 23: Some of those folks said, okay. This is our chance now to really monetize Zoom schooling and remote learning. And what we saw was horrific outcomes. We saw it as massaging person.
Speaker 24: And I was told by one of the Facebook groups that if I criticized the teachers union, that I would
Speaker 25: be kicked out.
Speaker 5: I knew these closures wouldn't be brief, wouldn't serve the best interests of families, and would lead to an unprecedented disruption in the development of our nation's school children. My name is Natalia Marukhfer, and I'm a New York City public school parent. When schools closed in 2020 due to the COVID nineteen pandemic, I joined thousands of parents in the fight to reopen them. This is the story of the families who fought to uncover the truth.
Speaker 10: When the pandemic hit, it was two or three years ago, and I would have, like, be five or six. Learning online was, like, a little bit hard because when the computer started breaking up, I was like, wait. You have to say that again?
Speaker 26: We were so excited to have Hudson in this dual language program. We were planning on Sybil following in and being part of that community. We were developing relationships with the other parents there. You know, our kids were developing relationships with their kids.
Speaker 12: Think I it was easy to have Grace at that time because no one knew we were transitioning to virtual learning. It's not the teacher's fault. But I I do think as we kept doing it and seeing, like, a five year old spending this time on the computer is not a good use of our time. We lived in a 600 square foot apartment at that time, and every all of his three younger siblings had to be quiet so he could be on the computer to learn something like letters or something very simple that I was like, I could just close the computer and do this myself altogether, and that would be a lot more effective than the way this is going right now.
Speaker 5: The original fifteen days to slow the spread quickly turned into weeks, then months. Working parents and families were stuck in a perpetual state of uncertainty, unable to plan for the future.
Speaker 27: You know, it's four boys in a house by themselves trying to pay attention to their computers, trying to self discipline to sit in their rooms in front of a computer and get the work done that they're supposed to.
Speaker 28: You know, the first day was was all novel and fun. You know, having a sleepover at your friend's house is the best way I could describe their attitude. Within a week, you know, the shine was off the penny.
Speaker 17: My grades were absolutely awful. I had mostly Ds and Es. I was lucky to get a B or a C because I'm not the kind of person who would do well on online school. I have pretty bad ADHD.
Speaker 2: I had my camera off most of the time and microphone, so I kinda just sat there.
Speaker 18: Sometimes the teachers would ask people to to turn on their their cameras if they didn't, like, trust people, but most of the time, they would just keep them off. The teachers really didn't care.
Speaker 10: Yeah. That was really distracting for me because I could just get up, go go downstairs, grab a bowl of cereal, come back up, and I miss and I miss half of class.
Speaker 29: According to an Ed Week research survey conducted in May, forty two percent of teachers said student engagement was much lower than before the pandemic.
Speaker 30: Virtual learning was, like, difficult for me. I really didn't do nothing for, like, seventh grade.
Speaker 31: It was too much screen time, too much phones. No one wanted to Zoom. I didn't wanna Zoom. It was just rough.
Speaker 5: Despite reassurances from the government, media, and teachers' unions that America's kids were resilient and remote learning was comparable to in person school, children across the country of all ages and backgrounds struggled to adapt to life behind screens, cut off from classrooms, teachers, and friends.
Speaker 16: Excuse our mess.
Speaker 32: But your mom's. You get it? Okay. Dinosaurs? Sore?
Yeah. A lot of dinosaurs.
Speaker 10: I didn't like when we had to do Zoom school in the same room, me and my sister. We had two desks, one right there and one right there. Like, I could hear her answering questions, and I was trying to focus, and it was really hard because you're only this far apart from each other.
Speaker 33: I had no contact with my friends, nothing. We only got to talk in a virtual classroom on Zoom, and oftentimes the talking was, like, I know, delayed because, like, I lagged a lot.
Speaker 10: We had a limited amount of bandwidth, and sometimes, like, a couple of classes I didn't attend because, and I had to do, you know, make up some of it, a lot of it.
Speaker 15: Our bandwidth wasn't sufficient to have both of our kids in school simultaneously. You know, we had to choose which child was going to learn. And if we were doing that, what are the decisions for people where both parents are also working from home? Their children aren't going to school at all.
Speaker 9: We've investigated the experience of families during COVID along a number of different dimensions. And early in the pandemic, in the in those first few months and then into the 2020, we were asking lots of questions about kids' access. Right? So do they have technology? Do they have access to teachers?
Are they getting assignments? We found basically large disparities in terms of both race, ethnicity, and income in terms of kids' access to various kinds of educational opportunities. So, like, low income kids were way less likely to have technology in those early days.
Speaker 34: The head of New York's public schools says some 300,000 kids don't have electronic devices or Internet access at home.
Speaker 35: We handed out laptops to as many kids as we could, but we couldn't connect with every single kid. There were some kids that when school shut down, we more or less lost contact with them, or they weren't able to get a laptop for whatever reason and they're doing school on their phone, or they're helping their younger brothers and sisters. There's just so many factors that made it a very unsustainable way to teach.
Speaker 23: The old narrative had been education's broken. We throw so much money at it. We're getting so many poor outcomes, so let's disrupt it. There was entrepreneurs who saw financial opportunity. And then when COVID came around, some of those folks said, okay.
This is our chance now to really monetize Zoom schooling and remote learning. And what we saw was horrific outcomes.
Speaker 5: The impact of school closures went far beyond academic and technological setbacks. Public school sports programs too were entirely shut down, devastating the momentum of countless high school athletes.
Speaker 36: So when the pandemic hit, Michael just finished New York State championships. So the momentum was building because he PR'd. He had a personal record. He actually played made the medal stand as a sophomore. The next week was the national high school championship.
So within that two week window, everything went from normal and open to completely shut down.
Speaker 11: So my outdoor season for sophomore year was was done, and I couldn't train on my track team, I that means I didn't have access to to my weight room in my school building. At that point, there was kids on my team, and there was kids on all all teams, no matter what. No matter what sport you play, kids were looking for recruiting and shutting down sports inside the city really just said no. There's none of that is gonna happen.
Speaker 37: It was terrible because the kids couldn't get recruited. They couldn't be seen because you weren't allowed to go into a public high school. I was in the park trying to keep the kids to some sort of a routine. You know, word got out, you know, and I was kinda told that please do not meet with your kids, and it was like, I know they needed the assurance that one day and one day soon, we were gonna go back to normal, and I needed them. I can't just sit in my house, do nothing.
I'm a creature of habit, and my habit is to worry about the students on my team and now all of a sudden I can't see them. You know, we would try to do stuff on a Zoom, but I couldn't believe that I couldn't go to a park.
Speaker 19: This is where I was working out during pandemic times, you know, when football wasn't around and, you know, my free and my friends would would get together and we would play and we would have, you know, just try and continue the sport that we love with what we were under, you know, with everything that was going on. We didn't wanna lose sight of our hopes and dreams. Still, you know, tough times to have to lose a sport that you love for a year and then expected to come back and put up the skill that you had to put up before the pandemic, which was it's just impossible.
Speaker 5: Children across the country of all ages and backgrounds struggled to adapt to life behind screens, cut off from classrooms, teachers, and friends. There was a deep and unfamiliar fear which became the tool that led to compliance.
Speaker 31: It takes me back to 09/11 where everything was red, like
Speaker 38: High alert. Department of Homeland Security recently placed New York and Washington DC on a heightened state of alert due to new terror information.
Speaker 31: And it's like the same thing with COVID where it was like, high alert. Fear. Fear.
Speaker 39: There are a lot of places at this moment anyway are trending in the wrong direction.
Speaker 8: We are going to close down the New York City playground.
Speaker 31: They closed the parks for the kids to play, and then they took the rims off the the hoops, which was crazy because people was kids was coming here, like, to play. And then next thing you know, my my son was like, mom, they took the rims down, and it was like, wow. And then they took the whole thing off. So it's like they really want people to be stuck in their homes. Like, it's good to get in.
Bad enough you have to contain it with a mask. You can't breathe. But then when these kids wanna come out and play, they can't even play.
Speaker 24: Every single day you would turn on the television and it was like the Cuomo show. He would have graphs and charts tell us how many people were sick, how many ventilators we didn't have.
Speaker 8: Friend line of ICU admissions is still up.
Speaker 32: We're just watching the news and there wasn't a lot of good information. There was a lot of panic and anxiety and fear propaganda. It was all about be afraid, but I was a little bit nervous.
Speaker 40: Out of an abundance of caution.
Speaker 11: Out of an abundance of caution. Out
Speaker 31: of an abundance of caution.
Speaker 41: Out of an abundance of caution.
Speaker 23: Out of an abundance of caution.
Speaker 19: It's a
Speaker 42: very powerful didactic argument because the moment you begin to challenge them, you're the one who looks like a fool.
Speaker 32: The idea that social distancing could help us in the absence of a vaccine and in the absence of much information in a city where we're packed in, we live close together, we take the subways, the ventilation, it all seemed reasonable to say, let's take two weeks and make sure our hospitals don't reach capacity.
Speaker 5: So you believed that it was that that there was a chance that after two weeks things would resume normalcy?
Speaker 32: It didn't even occur to me that it wouldn't.
Speaker 24: I believe that mantra of stay home, stay safe, stay home, save lives. I felt that empowerment that by sitting on my couch and watching Netflix with my kids was making a difference.
Speaker 5: As the pandemic dragged on, I began questioning the necessity of these closures. Were they truly keeping us safe, or were they causing more harm than good?
Speaker 43: City of Santa Monica decides to close the park overlooking the beautiful ocean to cause misery For children and families, we will exercise civil disobedience in the form of unlawful enjoyment.
Speaker 42: I never bought into it because I am a scientist. And so my way of working is I always ask questions, not because I think people are lying, but because I always am skeptical because I'm taught to be skeptical. That's how I learn medicine. It's how I learn science. And so when I hear about mandates, when I hear about lockdowns, the first thing out of my mind is do we have any justification for this, any proof?
And if not, why are we doing it? We now know people who weren't just thinking it like I was, but were saying it loudly in public, even as early as March 2020, like doctor Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford.
Speaker 13: So in March 2020, I wrote an op ed. We just did some calculations on what the death rate likely could be given this fact that it's it's really likely to me that the disease had spread outside of our control.
Speaker 41: I began writing in detail and doing interviews about the pandemic in March 2020. I wrote that the infection fatality rate was much lower in reality than what the media was saying.
Speaker 13: You can't expect people who don't have the resources to stay home and stay safe to to stay home and stay safe. It's inhumane. This is what I wrote in the on the Wall Street Journal op ed. It's like we don't know the mortality rate. It's very important that we rapidly conduct the studies to measure the mortality rate so that we can better plan policy.
Speaker 41: When I wrote papers proving that the number of life years lost from the lockdowns grossly exceeded the number of life years lost from the virus, my advice was not taken. The advice of Birks and Fauci were taken almost throughout the entire country.
Speaker 13: I thought when I was writing about that that it would induce the CDC to run the study. But there was this guy, Dan Eichner, ordered a whole bunch of antibody test kits and offered the test kits to us to run the study ourselves.
Speaker 38: The Stanford study involved 3,300 volunteers
Speaker 31: Did you turn down?
Speaker 7: From all over Santa Clara County tested recently and recruited from social media.
Speaker 13: We found that about three percent of Santa Clara County, three out of a hundred people, had evidence of antibodies. Doesn't sound like a lot, but it was 50 times more infections than the cases that had been identified to date. And it meant the lockdowns had that we'd already adopted were which had already been tremendously damaging to the lives of children and the poor. They were useless.
Speaker 5: Despite clear evidence that school closures would likely not be effective and even harm children, pro lockdown voices dominated public opinion. Scientists and political leaders who challenged these views were quickly pushed aside.
Speaker 13: It felt like the community was coming together to answer this really important question. At the same time, I started getting death threats. I started getting, friends of mine, at least former friends of mine, writing to me saying, how dare you question, any of this?
Speaker 41: We saw some very vicious, despicable behavior in our society, partly incited by what I would call propaganda in the media.
Speaker 5: The pressure to accept COVID nineteen mitigations isolated parents, coercing them into accepting prolonged school closures that would profoundly impact an entire generation of children.
Speaker 8: The modeling put together by doctor Birx and doctor Fauci
Speaker 7: Use that evidence base to really bring that data and that evidence.
Speaker 6: We feel that the mitigation that we're doing right now is having an effect. It's very difficult to quantitate it. Therefore, we
Speaker 8: will be extending our guidelines to April 30 to slow the spread.
Speaker 5: Meanwhile, in Scandinavian countries, schools were already reopening with no observable ill effects.
Speaker 44: Swedish children bustle into school just as they have right throughout the COVID pandemic. Classes here have been running and compulsory for all pupils up to the age of 16 with no face masks.
Speaker 22: Sweden declined to close schools, and Norway and Finland closed schools for, you know, six weeks, and Denmark, I think, eight weeks.
Speaker 15: When Denmark and Norway opened up their schools and they got really creative about it, they opened up the Tivoli theme park in Denmark so the kids could go to school outdoors. It was so exciting. And you could just see, like, the teachers were so excited, and the the whole country was very excited to see the kids going back to school.
Speaker 45: Prime minister Matte Frederiksen welcomed some of the youngsters as they went back to school in the capital, Copenhagen.
Speaker 5: The children are very happy to see their friends again and to go to school again.
Speaker 16: I did a story on the schools that we opened in April. So it's a private school in Denmark. The principal of the school took their their phone around and sort of let me see and hear how they were doing it, and they were like, we're gonna build the confidence in this community that this is okay to do.
Speaker 15: That just kinda seemed normal to me. Like, that's, like, the right response. And then they did a comparison between Sweden and Finland, and they didn't find any difference. So it was pretty good evidence already that opening or closing schools, it didn't really have much of a difference on either the pandemic trajectory or how severely teachers were impacted whether or not they were at home or in school.
Speaker 46: Swedes were put under this global elite condemnation of you are doing a bad thing.
Speaker 47: You didn't wait to force social isolation on people.
Speaker 2: We've been taking lots of different decisions. One of them is not to close down all the restaurants, cafes, and shops.
Speaker 46: And they just kind of didn't blink, which showed a whole lot of conviction.
Speaker 15: We watched Danish TV and Swedish TV. I saw how The United States' response to COVID nineteen, like, diverged from what was happening in Scandinavia.
Speaker 41: Data shows more than 90% of stories in American media were negative about COVID, whereas in Western Europe, only about fifty two, 54% were negative. It's the same pandemic. There's a big difference.
Speaker 16: I was an education reporter. I had to work in tandem and in collaboration with our health desk or science desk because we weren't the ones who were necessarily authorized to say this is a scientific consensus. Sometimes the things that people were saying on the science desk or the health desk wouldn't always be they wouldn't necessarily check with us the way that we checked with them. And so they might say things like, oh, kids get sicker from COVID, and we'll be like, no. They are not getting sicker from COVID.
Speaker 5: While many other countries reopened their schools, American families heard only promises.
Speaker 2: We put out, as you know, a plan to reopen schools safely in April. This is about safety and equity for both our kids and for our members and for our teachers.
Speaker 22: This is unprecedented in in the history of infectious disease to have prolonged school closures for a pandemic, especially one in this case that affected children so much less. It's unprecedented.
Speaker 38: One thing that almost nobody I've talked to knows is that in March 2020, the CDC actually had very specific school closure guidance specific to COVID. And at the time, actually, it was very reasonable. I don't know why we just threw away that guidance. I think it it just sort of went down in the books of what I call COVID exceptionalism. We sort of had this idea that COVID was unlike any other pandemic.
I guess every other pandemic is not quite like another, but, you know, certainly, we have had past experiences with other respiratory viral pandemics.
Speaker 22: So 1918 was really interesting because what happened is the progressive cities, were specifically New Haven, New York City, and Chicago, they were told by the federal government, I think we have to close schools. We're having this terrible pandemic. And they said, we are not going to close schools because of their progressive politics. New York City specifically said 750,000 of our 1,000,000 children are in tenement housing. They're low income.
Where else are they gonna be checked for signs of violence? Where else are they going to get food?
Speaker 16: When school shut down, I immediately knew it was going to be a really big deal for kids, even if it had only been for three weeks or six weeks. And the reason that I knew that is because I had been in my hometown of New Orleans right after Katrina. Volunteered in schools. I'd reported. There was a really big school closure.
There was a big upheaval. Kids were kind of tossed like dice all over the country. They didn't spend that much time out of school, but the disruption caused a learning loss and a sense of dislocation and trauma. It took two years for those kids to recover in terms of where they've been academically. And when you look at high school graduation rates and college going rates, those never recovered.
Speaker 23: All the research showed is that screen connection doesn't supplant or replace face to face connection. For whatever reason, evolutionarily we're designed for human to human interaction.
Speaker 19: It was just so hard to learn. We would go in different rooms. We called it our quarters and we would just start learning, but it was just still like like a disconnect. You could feel the disconnect.
Speaker 10: When I was taking my Spanish classes on the computer, everything was people could just kept talking in English. Like, my teacher kept talking in English, so there was, like, only 10 words in Spanish in my classes.
Speaker 33: It was hard on my eyes. I, like my eyes were burning. Like, they gave us fifteen minute breaks during during the school day. So, like, I know, I guess for me, was to rest my eyes, but then we just got right back on Zoom.
Speaker 19: I could turn off my camera and go into a different room. Meanwhile, the teacher's talking and not hear a single word of what she's saying and then come back when attending and saying bye.
Speaker 18: I would just feel bad. Like, I I would honestly I would just feel isolated. Like, I didn't feel right because I knew I had stuff to do, but I just didn't feel like getting it done.
Speaker 30: I didn't know what to do, and I just, like, stayed in my room. I used to be, like, the goofy, joyful person and it's just like I never see myself like that.
Speaker 10: I missed out on friendships. I missed out on out out of school activities. Look back there. Pull pick it up and turn it around. It says we miss our friends.
Speaker 19: It was just so abnormal. Kids haven't been allowed to be kids.
Speaker 5: As a long time progressive democrat, I thought I was on the side that advocated for the vulnerable and for the children. But what if I was wrong? The cracks between reality and the narrative began to show.
Speaker 38: Large crowds of demonstrators in multiple cities getting more violent following the death of George Floyd.
Speaker 6: For the twelfth night in a row, a coast to coast call to action.
Speaker 48: George Floyd protests turned destructive in parts of Manhattan.
Speaker 32: Here in Soho, all these retail buildings, the glass front were smashed. You could see it from our windows. You could see the amount of looting going on. You could see people running around.
Speaker 24: The biggest turning point for me when I started to question if public health was telling the truth was during the George Floyd riots.
Speaker 46: We had a a cop who fairly brutally put a knee on George Floyd. That was police abuse, in my opinion.
Speaker 24: I understood why people were upset, and I understood why people wanted to protest. I guess the piece that I didn't understand was how public health says you can protest, but you can't go to church or you can't play soccer outside.
Speaker 32: Whatever you think, pro or con rioting for social justice, it had been made really clear to us for months and months and months of groups of people being close together was a was a life or death health risk.
Speaker 24: And yet it was okay and encouraged by public health commissioners to protest and chant in March.
Speaker 7: From New York to Minneapolis, Atlanta to Seattle, health care workers take a knee for racial injustice.
Speaker 32: It's hard not to see it like, oh, if I go out and carry the right sign and say the right words, I can hang out with a thousand people, but 28 kids can't go sit in a classroom together.
Speaker 24: And then when two weeks went by after those riots and there were no significant spikes in cases in the areas and cities that they happened, it just started to kinda tumble.
Speaker 5: The double standard was glaring. COVID nineteen appeared to be on the decline, yet schools remained closed.
Speaker 32: But it's really hard to have a little kid not see their friends, not go to the playground, not do anything. And by then, I was getting frustrated. They were opening up these things called rec centers in New York so that that policemen and firemen could go back. So it's like, wait a second. Kids can go into the actual school building that they used to go to, if you call it a rec center, and employ low income workers who are not unionized to staff those rec centers, and that's not deadly.
But if you take those same kids in those same buildings, and call it school, and tell the unionized workers of the the teachers union to come back to school, then that's deadly, then that's scary, then that's bad. It the hypocrisy of it.
Speaker 35: The union started having these union wide calls. That's when there was a real split. There were the teachers who wanted to continue working from home, still feel like it wasn't safe, and there were teachers who were ready to get back. What I
Speaker 49: experienced was basically universally in my at least in the beginning, teachers did not wanna go back. I definitely blame the union leadership in a lot of ways because I don't think that they gave teachers accurate information.
Speaker 35: I think the union was sending the message to teachers that it's not safe.
Speaker 2: What's happened is so many people are asymptomatic. You don't know where the disease lurks. Whatever the virus has transmuted to, it's now infecting more kids.
Speaker 5: The end of the 2020 school year was a bitter disappointment. Then a glimmer of hope emerged. On 06/25/2020, the American Academy of Pediatrics stepped forward with a clear message. All policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a
Speaker 2: goal of having students physically present.
Speaker 5: It finally felt like we might see schools reopen in the fall.
Speaker 50: In a letter to state officials this week, the California Teachers Association wrote simply said California cannot reopen schools unless they are safe.
Speaker 2: Those of us who have spent our life teaching kids are not gonna take a risk with kids or with our members' lives.
Speaker 51: And so until Arizona, all Arizonans adopt the behaviors that will, slow the spread of this virus and make our society safe, we can't go back into our classrooms with our students.
Speaker 5: It was becoming clear that teachers' unions were keeping schools closed. On 07/10/2020, this influence was on display when the American Academy of Pediatrics in a joint press conference with the teachers' unions reversed their earlier guidance on school reopening. Tonight, the American Association of Pediatricians is clarifying its stance on reopening schools in the fall. They say their guidance has been misunderstood and misrepresented. The AAP's new stance emphasized the need for substantial new investments in schools in order for them to reopen safely.
Parents watching kids suffer without structure and learning began organizing on social media to demand in person education and push back against these constraints.
Speaker 52: Started to meet other parents through Facebook.
Speaker 47: Form the Facebook group and Twitter account.
Speaker 32: I found some other parents through social media.
Speaker 15: Started to get involved in posting the results of what they were finding in Europe on Facebook. I remember joining my first first board call.
Speaker 20: People would be texting back and forth like, did you get
Speaker 16: a spot? Who gets to speak tonight?
Speaker 21: I became much more heavily involved with hundreds of other parents, probably thousands.
Speaker 48: We went out and did this protest and put people on notice that we were paying attention.
Speaker 20: Because I'll do anything for my kids. Right? You're gonna do anything as a mom, to make sure that your kids have what they need.
Speaker 5: This was the beginning of the new parent movement.
Speaker 47: My name is Jonathan Zackerson. I'm from Roseville, California. I have three kids. 2020, I started reopen California schools to just try to connect with other parents.
Speaker 24: I'm from Buffalo, New York. It's a large school district. I was so worried that schools would not reopen. I put my name in to be on our district reopening committee.
Speaker 48: Back in August 2020 is when I got involved in this entire, what I call parental rights movement. Our school district, Central Bucks, is the largest suburban school district here in Pennsylvania, and they did an extensive survey about getting the kids back into school in the 2020.
Speaker 24: Nobody wanted virtual, and very few people wanted part time.
Speaker 48: Over 80% of all the parents asked for some version of in person education.
Speaker 52: We had enough data by the summer to feel like we could open the schools and we could balance the risks.
Speaker 24: They could be three feet apart, and that would enable us to get all of the kids back in school. Because everybody knew that kids really weren't at risk. We go to submit the plan, the superintendent comes back and said that it's not three feet, it's six feet.
Speaker 47: Which for most classrooms, that shut them down.
Speaker 48: The superintendent said, oops, I'm gonna disregard what every one of you asked for. We're all going virtual starting in two weeks. Oh, by the way, childcare, go figure that out. Oh, by the way, what you do with your job, go figure that out. That's not my problem.
Speaker 47: My initial reaction was, okay. We're gonna fire the school board.
Speaker 48: I called up a friend of mine who's a political consultant. I said, we can't let that stand. We need to hold this superintendent accountable for basically not doing his job. And we did. We started a protest movement at that point.
Speaker 47: We started a parental rights movement at that point. The teachers union for LAUSD, UTLA was adamant that schools needed to be shut down.
Speaker 3: We have to take a stand, a strong stance against this dangerous anti science agenda that puts the lives of our members, our students, and our families at risk.
Speaker 47: They got to governor Newsom because they didn't want this battle happening at the local level.
Speaker 24: There were issues with the teachers union. Every single local union was delivering the exact same letter with the exact same verbiage that came from a higher up level.
Speaker 47: We had our first rally at the state capital in the 2020. We had probably about a thousand people there, and I thought that's all it was gonna take, but that didn't happen.
Speaker 24: We had to fight like hell just to get our school to open, And then the first day of school, they announced that our kids were going home.
Speaker 5: In Florida, governor Ron DeSantis followed the science, defying the teachers' unions by reopening schools.
Speaker 20: I'm from Florida, and I was serving on a school board in Florida, Indian River County, and we were lucky enough to have governor DeSantis. July 6, governor DeSantis and his then secretary of education, Richard Corcoran, came forward and said, schools will be open for in person learning. We will have open schools.
Speaker 53: In the school year, I think it's gonna be really, really important for the well-being of our kids, but I also think it's important for a lot of parents who've had to juggle an awful lot over these last couple months.
Speaker 20: We were supposed to start in in the beginning few, like, week and a half of of August, but we actually had to delay two weeks.
Speaker 54: Three days before schools are set to reopen in Orange County, more local teachers are joining a lawsuit to keep them closed. This lawsuit would not just impact Orange County, but schools across the state.
Speaker 20: And so we took another two weeks, but schools opened before September. And that began a journey with teachers' unions fighting to keep schools closed in a way that I never thought possible.
Speaker 5: As parents rallied locally for school reopening, they were taken aback by the formidable opposition from
Speaker 38: They're seizing the opportunity to add more pressure to mayor Lori Lightfoot and the board of education.
Speaker 10: This will be a funeral procession style march.
Speaker 55: Yesterday, Union County teachers and staff held a drive to stay alive rally, wanting school officials to put the brakes on in person learning.
Speaker 39: This is a public health crisis, and the only way, the best way to mitigate the spread of this disease is to keep everything shut down, especially the schools.
Speaker 20: People are asking us, like, if we're essential workers. And my answer is no because we can work remotely.
Speaker 41: America's teachers were outliers in how fearful they were compared to other professions. Well, half the teachers are 41 years of age. Teaching is a young profession. 82 are 55. The only thing different about a school from the society outside a school is that schools are lower risk.
Speaker 35: There was definitely a genuine group of teachers who didn't feel it was safe, but I would say it was much, much smaller than the teachers who were willing to fill out the form to have an excuse to stay home. Because I knew some of those same teachers had been out and about that summer, going on vacations, going out for workouts, going out with their friends.
Speaker 48: Erin Chambers is on the Chicago Teachers Union Executive Board and an area vice president for the union. In recent months, she's used her union pulpit to push teachers to refuse to return to the classroom, saying it's simply not safe. But her Instagram told a different story. She was poolside in Puerto Rico on vacation.
Speaker 49: As someone that before this always was very pro union, I think it was taken advantage of as a political advocacy thing. They were more concerned about keeping up appearances of being good liberals than about the welfare of kids.
Speaker 5: I knew schools were safe. Thousands of other parents across the country knew schools were safe. Schools around the world and in Republican led American cities had reopened safely for both students and teachers. Was it the virus keeping the schools closed, or were there special interests using this emergency to achieve other goals?
Speaker 1: I'm Annie Leonard. I'm the executive director of Greenpeace. What is the normal we want at the end of this? And it's not the normal we had before.
Speaker 54: We have to stop the bleeding now, but we have to decide what kind of society we wanna have post COVID nineteen.
Speaker 11: We really have to create the future that we wanna see.
Speaker 5: On 03/26/2020, during the original fifteen days, a meeting took place between environmental activists and labor union leaders. Also included in the meeting was Academy Award winning actress, Jane Vonda.
Speaker 0: You know, like all of you, I'm sure I I wanna shut down the capital right now with our bodies on the line, but we can't do that. What's the equivalent?
Speaker 5: There to represent the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teachers union in the country was Randy Weingarten.
Speaker 2: I agree with everybody else who said, let's also try to envision how to use this for what what the society that we want to see.
Speaker 5: Speakers began by expressing concerns about safety, but quickly shifted the discussion to how the COVID nineteen crisis could be an opportunity to advance their climate and social justice agendas.
Speaker 0: We don't have the time. We don't have the resources to fight one crisis and then another crisis. We have to do them together.
Speaker 2: All of us know that's gonna take elections. It's gonna take our activism, but it's gonna take elections because of let we have this president and this senate instead of what we need in the senate and what we need in terms of the presidency, we're not gonna fundamentally be able to take this terrible pandemic that's going to, you know, change our lives fundamentally in America and and do something different.
Speaker 5: In the early days, when we were still navigating the uncertainties of the COVID nineteen virus, how did Randy Weingarten know that the pandemic would fundamentally change our lives? Instead of using a rational science based approach to decide when essential services like public schools could reopen, schools became a pawn for teachers unions to get more money.
Speaker 2: We need the money for PPE. We need the money for extra teachers. We need the money for extra cleaning and extra buses.
Speaker 56: We want to be with our students. But to make in person instruction a reality for all, we need the resources to keep everyone safe.
Speaker 2: We need the trillion dollars from the HEROES Act, and on top of that, about another, 100,000,000,000 because of the cost of reopening schools.
Speaker 5: Starting in March 2020, Congress unleashed a torrent of funds into America's k to 12 schools. On March 27, the CARES Act provided 13,200,000,000. On December 27, they received another $54,300,000,000. Then on 03/11/2021, president Biden's American Rescue Plan offered a windfall, another $122,000,000,000 for America's schools. In total, $189,500,000,000, more than triple the federal Department of Education's annual budget.
Speaker 25: I call it the smash and grab. This was the biggest smash and grab in Ed money history, I believe, ever. This is the biggest scandal of funds that were taken and not used for students.
Speaker 5: As the picture became clearer, it emerged that these unions were orchestrating at the highest levels.
Speaker 2: We have no better friend and no more effective advocate in terms of how we move policy than the speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi.
Speaker 5: Nancy Pelosi and Randy Weingarten were in lockstep, pushing a cautious plan slowing school reopenings for millions of kids. The teachers' unions demanded the strictest reopening rules, and Pelosi echoed their talking points.
Speaker 57: We all want our children to go back to school. Teachers do, parents do, and children do, but they must go back safely. Going back to school is presents the biggest risk for the spread of the coronavirus.
Speaker 5: But going back to school did not present an increased risk of the coronavirus. Europe and even parts of Asia showed us that open schools were already safe.
Speaker 20: COVID showed the very cozy relationship between, the Biden administration and, the CDC and the influence that Randy Weingarten had, in the decision making process for our children across the country.
Speaker 5: Freedom of Information Act documents and congressional testimony have since revealed that Randy Weingarten was in close contact with the Biden campaign and CDC director Rochelle Walensky throughout the crisis.
Speaker 21: Why didn't she when she was in the conversations with the CDC and Tony Fauci push more strongly for schools to open quickly?
Speaker 14: I didn't see anything in that that that talked about opening. It was only metrics for closure.
Speaker 21: It was because of a powerful Well, it's still
Speaker 38: little bit of
Speaker 21: a keeping them closed
Speaker 38: I mean,
Speaker 21: that she is in charge of.
Speaker 5: The unions were not just influencing, but actively shaping the national CDC guidelines for school reopening.
Speaker 58: I'm a member of congress that sits on two committees that deal with this, the CDC. I don't have a direct number to director Walensky. Do you?
Speaker 2: I do not talk to representatives of the government.
Speaker 33: Do you
Speaker 58: have a direct number to to director Wilinski?
Speaker 2: Do I have director Wilinski's direct number?
Speaker 58: Yes.
Speaker 2: Yes. I have director Wilinski's direct number.
Speaker 5: From the national level to the local level, parents could see this union agenda at play.
Speaker 42: Los Angeles County where I am. Right? The public health department, Barbara Ferrer, who is not an MD, and she's not doesn't have a science PhD. She has a social welfare PhD.
Speaker 59: Well, know, I I really started my career as a community organizer. I mean, I'm passionate about justice issues.
Speaker 42: She's never cited scientific publications. What has she cited? She cited her labor partners. What do labor partners refer to? They refer to labor unions.
Speaker 59: With the uncertainty that we face right now in our county, everyone needs to have sort of a a a plan b, around the reopening.
Speaker 20: It was really interesting to watch the bureaucratic state grow. Right? Up until this point, the health director in my community, the biggest thing she had done was focus on rabies. And then all of a sudden, you have this health department director who is calling the shots for the school district, and it was crazy. I'm trying to think of how to describe how when you're elected and I took my position so seriously, and I felt accountable to the community, but then the other board members were willing to abdicate their authority to other people.
Nobody wanted to make hard decisions or difficult decisions or decisions that someone might not like. And so it was so much easier to just defer to the medical experts.
Speaker 32: Some of it legitimately maybe was fear and anxiety in the beginning days. I felt that fear and anxiety, but I really do think that the teachers union, as I saw it, decided it was in their union members' interest to stay closed.
Speaker 42: And so now you have a great conflict between what the labor unions want and what is good for little children and families, ordinary citizens.
Speaker 5: Parents were just beginning to understand the game. They were blindsided by the extent of union influence over the Democratic party.
Speaker 24: The problem with public sector unions as it is today, particularly the teachers' unions, is that our tax dollars pay our state, which pay our teachers, which the teachers' union skims their dues right off the top, and then this teachers' union end up funneling so many campaign dollars into only Democratic candidates.
Speaker 47: The teachers unions here donate 99% of their political donations to Democrats. Newsom was beholden by the unions, a lot of the politicians were, so they really weren't gonna disagree with what the teachers unions wanted.
Speaker 35: The ways that the unions acted really pulled the veil down to reveal what they are really about. And it's not so much representing the interests of teachers, but about a lot of these very far left political agendas.
Speaker 2: Justice is our middle name. It is the lens by which we do all of our work. Climate justice is racial justice. It is worker justice. It is gender justice.
Speaker 41: We value teachers and rightfully so. Teachers are so important to our our children, to our country. But when you have teachers led by people who are in those teachers' unions, making up all kinds of reasons why they cannot come in and teach our children. That's a sick society. Those people should be removed.
We cannot trust them.
Speaker 60: This is part of the NEA's guidance on reopening school buildings. Ensure that school building reopening plans are inclusive and equitable for all educators and students by humanizing learning environments and designing spaces that are situated in the experiences of communities of color, not just through white cis hetero and able-bodied lenses. What does that mean? And what does that have to do with making sure that the kids and teachers don't give each other COVID nineteen?
Speaker 56: We have said from the beginning that we need to focus our resources and plans on opening our schools safely and equity equitably.
Speaker 25: Basically, in the name of equity, we're just not gonna do anything. Because if one child has this type of access and then the other child doesn't, well then there's gonna be no for anyone.
Speaker 5: I took at face value that the teachers' unions were there to protect teachers and students, not champion social justice issues.
Speaker 46: You always have to look at what is it that the people that are driving these policies are after. When Trump won the election in 2016
Speaker 51: We wanna do everything we can to help you succeed because if you succeed, then the company succeeds.
Speaker 46: The elites went crazy. They thought we have to regain control over the information sphere so this never happens again. When the pandemic hit, it was like, oh, wait. We can regain control over the information sphere.
Speaker 2: Environmental justice helps create educational justice, helps create worker justice. We build trust. We build agency. We change narrative. We change lives.
Speaker 4: COVID is God's gift to the left.
Speaker 46: This is universal. The elites universally are on the same side. This is the moment when all the social media companies said, we want to do good. We want to do only put forward those explanations that are supported by science. Science became the source of authority for the government and and the institutional leads in general.
That doesn't really matter where it's a news report.
Speaker 40: Wanna turn to the latest on the coronavirus emergency. Florida and Georgia reporting their highest daily death toll so far. And in Georgia, the back to school crisis is taking center stage.
Speaker 46: We're a president talking.
Speaker 8: We're gonna need more testing in order to be able to open our schools.
Speaker 46: Or a school curriculum.
Speaker 2: The pandemic is soaring, and so we need to follow the science.
Speaker 56: And I've been saying all year, follow the science. Follow the science.
Speaker 46: It's all the same thing.
Speaker 61: The public accepted school closures to an extent they wouldn't have, I don't think, if they had heard the views of scientists who critique these things and who were actually able to give accurate information like Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kuhldorf.
Speaker 13: In October 2020, I got invited by Martin Kuhldorf, who's a professor at Harvard University, to to come to a little conference that he'd arranged in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The conference was just three people.
Speaker 45: And they are doctor Martin Kuldorf from Harvard, doctor Sunetra Gupta from the University of Oxford, and doctor Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford. They have come together to produce a declaration, which sets out an alternative approach to how this virus should be tackled.
Speaker 13: Goal was to tell people that there was a debate in the scientific community about the propriety of lockdowns, that in fact there were legitimate scientists who disagreed with the lockdowns and that there was an alternate strategy available.
Speaker 61: The Great Barrington Declaration was a sort of short treatise saying that lockdowns were a bad idea because they did more harm than good while they failed to protect the actually vulnerable people.
Speaker 13: Which, by the way, the ideas were just the old pandemic plan. There were nothing nothing really novel in terms of the ideas. But we wrote it in such a style that it was accessible to every single thinking person. It was one page long. We put it on the Internet, so that people could sign on on petition, and it went viral.
Tens of thousands of people, prominent people signed it. Within days, it was really clear that we had struck a chord.
Speaker 61: And then the scientists realized that the Great Barrington Declaration itself was being censored on social media. So it wasn't really coming up in searches. The Facebook page was removed.
Speaker 13: I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I want to let the virus rip. Essentially, why did I wanna kill people?
Speaker 61: Instead of engaging with it or being interested in the ideas, it was sort of just denounced, really vociferously by the media and especially by people like Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins. They called the scientists fringe epidemiologists even though they weren't fringe, they were world renowned epidemiologists.
Speaker 13: I think the press in The United States and in The UK attacked us in part at the instigation of the government. And we know this for because there are FOIA documents that that that have emerged.
Speaker 61: We asked for correspondence between them and the tech companies, and those documents were really shocking. I mean, they showed a really high level of coordination.
Speaker 13: The question is why did the governments of The United States and The UK, and actually about other governments around the world, view the Great Declaration such a threat? And the answer is because the Great Barrington Declaration shattered the illusion that there was a consensus.
Speaker 5: The illusion of consensus around the science, what the unions were really after, and what it would take to reopen schools was beginning to crumble. Still, many families would have to wait until 2021 to fully get their kids back into classrooms. Parents like me believed president Biden when he promised to prioritize reopening schools.
Speaker 8: It should be a national priority to get our kids back into school and keep them in school.
Speaker 5: Even after the unions got so much of what they wanted
Speaker 8: Some of the executive actions I'm even trying today, I mean, help change the course of the COVID crisis, combat climate change in a way that we haven't done so far, and advance racial equity and support other underserved communities.
Speaker 5: It still wasn't enough. Studies now reveal a harsh reality. While many children face setbacks of years due to school closures, this was, in many respects, the best case scenario. For hundreds of thousands, the situation was far graver. They vanished from the education system altogether.
Speaker 25: A lot of kids just disappeared. They weren't doing well checks.
Speaker 19: You'll see it in many cases where, you know, teachers were at homes and everything like that, but kids were out working.
Speaker 11: The kids that I competed with before COVID, they were they didn't I didn't compete with them after COVID. They they were gone.
Speaker 5: What was taken away from our children when the schools were closed, they would make us fight for inch by inch to restore. Bureaucrats and leaders claiming to follow the science continually shifted the goalposts, reenvisioning education in a way that left our children with an unrecognizable version of school.
Speaker 62: In seventh grade, we had the mass, and it was just so hard to, like, talk to one another. It was like these shields on us that were, like, blocking us from human communication.
Speaker 31: I saw my son, like, happy mom. I got on the team. And then when they was like, you have to get vaccinated to be on the team.
Speaker 30: That, like, just broke me, and I was just like, bro, I really, like, put my whole life into this.
Speaker 36: I think of Mikey, and he's a kid who became exposed to track and field his freshman year. Well, what if he was two years younger and his freshman year never came? He would never have that opportunity or that exposure, and I doubt he would be where he was.
Speaker 8: When you took away normalcy from so many, and abnormal became normal, abnormal is hanging out, abnormal is robbing, abnormal is stealing, abnormal is not being in school, not being around your team, your club. You wanna know what's gonna get a gun out of a kid's hand? It's gonna be a football. It's gonna be a basketball. It's gonna be a baseball.
It's gonna be a sport. That gets them off the street.
Speaker 5: Tens of millions of children across the nation were left adrift when the schools were closed. Their fundamental rights to play, to learn, to grow were stripped away by those entrusted with teaching them.
Speaker 49: People who should have been in roles of helping them and protecting them were in roles of encouraging what I consider at that point to be institutionalized abuse. And to force parents to
Speaker 20: be complicit in the abuse of their children is such a betrayal of trust. I I I don't blame parents if they feel like they can't trust the public education system anymore.
Speaker 6: I I certainly anything that I left in the system
Speaker 63: was gone by then. When when you saw going to these rallies,
Speaker 6: going to these protests and seeing what was going on with social media and the way these teacher the the executives at at Baltimore County were behaving, you know, it's just kinda like this ugly underbelly of of of of the education system.
Speaker 32: Time and time again, when I said or when other moms said our kids should be back in school full time and the evidence supports that it it can happen safely, we were attacked, were maligned, we were accused ridiculously of being white supremacists, of being spoiled and lazy and just wanting our kid not to take care of our kids. When in fact, there's no way to be more deeply invested in your kid than to take on the anger and the fury that open school moms took on because we were standing up for our kids.
Speaker 16: There were people that saw themselves as being progressives, and yet they were all of a sudden feeling they were crazy because everybody else was saying, like, you're a racist if you want schools to reopen.
Speaker 5: All institutions felt the pressure to comply.
Speaker 13: Stanford's been, my home for thirty six years. The motto of the university, which I've loved from the first moment, is let the winds of freedom blow. In 2020, that fundamentally changed. If you got that wrong answer, then you were gonna get attacked.
Speaker 61: Because children have been the most negatively impacted by COVID restrictions, I would say they've also been the most negatively impacted by the censorship. The fact that, you know, the government is involved with this censorship on a on a massive scale to an unprecedented degree that's having a real impact on the public's ability to understand what what the debate is, what the facts are, and hear the voices of dissenting scientists.
Speaker 23: We should have said enough. We're harming them more psychologically because the depression rates, the anxiety rates, the suicide rates skyrocketed. When you look on whole, there was more damage that was done by the mental health harms than by any viral harms that were done.
Speaker 22: The eating disorders, the the increase in obesity, the increase in mental illness, the
Speaker 18: increase in
Speaker 5: just everything that we did, you know, like it's it's
Speaker 22: terrible. It's terrible. Children shouldn't have been out of school this long.
Speaker 5: Parents initially caught off guard eventually recognized the deception.
Speaker 2: And I really want your viewers to hear me. We know kids have lost out by being home. We know remote learning hasn't worked.
Speaker 64: Is there a point in which kids have been out of physical in person school for so long that the education that they've lost isn't really recoverable?
Speaker 2: No. I don't believe that. I believe that kids are resilient, and kids will recover.
Speaker 5: I don't know what kind of society would use their children as human shields for adults. That's just simply not acceptable. The battle was not against a virus. It was against those manipulating this crisis for their own ends.
Speaker 48: Parents actually started to pay attention to the way that the the school was actually run. And we realized that there was little oversight on the contract negotiations. There was little oversight on the curriculum. There was little oversight on what this closure policy was. So they literally woke up the proverbial silent majority because of COVID.
Speaker 35: Before the pandemic, I was fully focused on teaching, and the pandemic changed everything. My path as a teacher, as a parent, in ways that I never would have imagined.
Speaker 24: Nationally, there was this belief that it was red versus blue. It's democrats versus republican, and I stood shoulder to shoulder with women that were from San Francisco lifelong Democrats. I stood next to gentlemen who have been lifelong Republicans. Everybody just wanted what was best for their kids.
Speaker 47: The California Teachers Association was doing opposition research on parents in these groups to try to understand who was funding them, who are they, what are they doing, and why are they successful. They couldn't accept the fact that it was just parents who cared about their kids.
Speaker 48: I don't know that any of us are sitting together if COVID hadn't happened, talking about what now is gonna be the next chapter of what becomes this parental oversight movement.
Speaker 42: I think if we don't dig into this deeper, hold people accountable, expose the truth, This is gonna happen again, but it's gonna happen way worse.
Speaker 5: I was six when my family fled the Soviet Union for America. School became my world, a place where I learned English, made friends, and found structure. Without it, I'd have been lost, stuck in our cramped apartment watching my parents scramble to work and build our lives. School was my shot at the American dream. So when they announced schools would close for just fifteen days, I felt uneasy.
I knew reopening them wouldn't be simple, and I was right. The chaos revealed unions, bureaucrats, and politicians fighting for their own agendas, not for our kids. Every day schools stayed closed, I thought of kids like me losing their lifelines. I saw families left hanging. Through the closures and the struggles of my own children, I learned a hard truth.
No one's coming to save our kids but us. So parents, step up. You hold the keys to your children's future. If you don't fight for them, who will?
reSee.it AI Summary
In 2017, I became known as the 'poster child' for trans kids after my feature in National Geographic. Reflecting on my journey, I shared moments from my childhood, including my early self-awareness at age 7 when I identified as a girl inside. Over the years, my family's affirmations and societal pressures shaped my identity. However, at 17, after undergoing medical transitions, I realized I identify as non-binary, expressing regret over my past choices. My mother, who faced backlash for her decisions, believed she was saving my life, yet I wonder if I could have explored my identity without such drastic measures.
@Rstorechildhood - RESTORE CHILDHOOD
🧵 In 2017, 9 year old Avery Jackson became the ‘poster child’ for “trans kids” 🏳️⚧️ after being featured on the cover of National Geographic. Now aged 17 & let’s check in on Avery & his affirming family. Let’s see if kids ‘know who they are’ ⬇️ Written by @thepeacepoet99 1 https://t.co/PduTKf73YZ
@Rstorechildhood - RESTORE CHILDHOOD
Before his viral appearance on National Geographic at age 9, here’s a video of little Avery at age 7. Avery was a normal kid. He discussed enjoying climbing, playing with his brother & wanting to be a ninja. Then, the child’s shocking revelation: “Oh, and I’m transgender” 2 https://t.co/Em69ZX2des
Video Transcript AI Summary
Avery, age 7, enjoys climbing trees, pretending to be a ninja or animals, and playing games with her brother. She also likes pretending to be characters from games. Avery is transgender.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Hi. I'm Avery, and I'm 7 years old. I like to, like, climb trees, be a ninja, be pretend I'm animals, and all sorts of things. I like pretending I'm people from games. I like playing with my brother.
And, yeah. That's what I like too. And, oh, yeah. I'm transgender.
@Rstorechildhood - RESTORE CHILDHOOD
7 year old Avery discusses being born a boy & having boy body parts, but knowing that he was a ‘girl inside’. When young kids claim that they are *really* members of the opposite sex, it begs the question: What level of understanding do young kids have about their ‘gender’? 3 https://t.co/Y5IZCigEHI
Video Transcript AI Summary
The speaker states that despite a doctor saying they were a boy, they knew they were a girl. They acknowledge having male body parts but assert that this is acceptable.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: That's warm. Doctor said I was a boy, but I knew in my heart I was a girl. So I may have some boy body parts, but that's not wrong. That is okay.
@Rstorechildhood - RESTORE CHILDHOOD
The 7 year old “transgender child” shows great self-awareness when he says: “Sometimes I like to play as an animal, a ninja or a princess. But it doesn’t mean my parents should treat me that way because it’s just make-believe.” Instead of listening, his parents affirmed. 4 https://t.co/6otFBicNRn
Video Transcript AI Summary
The speaker enjoys playing as different characters like animals, ninjas, or princesses. However, they don't want their parents to treat them as if they actually are those characters. The speaker was afraid to tell their parents something, despite being a girl. They feared their parents would stop loving them, throw them out, and stop providing food.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Sometimes I like playing as like an animal or a ninja or a princess, but that doesn't mean my mom and dad should treat me like it. Like, it's just to make me bleed. Even though I was a girl, I was afraid to tell my mom and dad because I thought they would not love me anymore and they would throw me out and stop giving me any food or anything.
@Rstorechildhood - RESTORE CHILDHOOD
Following Avery’s cover story on National Geographic in 2016- he appears alongside his family & three other “transgender children” in HBO’s “Transhood”documentary. Avery & the other featured ‘trans kids’ were tracked for 5 years. The footage left viewers SHOCKED 5 https://t.co/Mi7yvAJuP4
@Rstorechildhood - RESTORE CHILDHOOD
In this shocking clip from “Transhood,” Avery expresses no longer wanting to continue his public life of trans activism & his book tour, saying that it “ruined” his life. To this, his transactivist mom Debi responds with shock that her CHILD *changed his mind* 6 https://t.co/uVAyMTFXJH
Video Transcript AI Summary
Speaker 0 states they are going to Washington D.C. to meet with senators and representatives, after which they plan to sell Avery's books.
Avery (Speaker 1) expresses a strong aversion to having a book, stating it has ruined their life and public knowledge will only worsen it. They acknowledge previously wanting the book, but now regret that desire, calling it a "stupid, silly mistake."
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: We're going to Washington DC. We actually go and meet with our senators and representatives. After we do that, we go and sit and sell some of Avery's books for a little while.
Speaker 1: I just don't want to even have a book. I've done too much in this world. It's ruined my life enough and now everyone in this world is going to know. And it's just gonna make my life worse?
Speaker 0: A couple years ago, you wanted people to know.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I I did. But now, that was really stupid, silly mistake. And now, I don't.
@Rstorechildhood - RESTORE CHILDHOOD
This shocking clip from “Transhood” shows how Avery’s mom Debi dismisses her child’s change of heart regarding his life trajectory as a mini trans activist. Though the trans activists say that parents must listen to & affirm their kids, this trans activist mom did NEITHER. 7 https://t.co/Hh7MYOu1PV
Video Transcript AI Summary
Speaker 0 states they are going to Washington D.C. to meet with senators and representatives, after which they will sell Avery's books.
Avery (Speaker 1) expresses reluctance about the book, stating it has ruined their life and its publication will worsen it.
Speaker 0 reminds Avery that they previously wanted people to know about the book.
Avery acknowledges this, but now considers it a "stupid, silly mistake" and no longer wants the book published.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: We're going to Washington DC. We actually go and meet with our senators and representatives. After we do that, we go and sit and sell some of Avery's books for a little while.
Speaker 1: I just don't want to even have a book. I've done too much in this world. It's ruined my life enough and now everyone in this world is going to know. And it's just gonna make my life worse?
Speaker 0: A couple years ago, you wanted people to know.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I I did. But now, that was really stupid, silly mistake. And now, I don't.
@Rstorechildhood - RESTORE CHILDHOOD
Avery was affirmed as a girl by everyone, including President Biden. Yet his love of all things ‘girly’ began to disappear as he got older. At age 14-15 Avery had already been on a regimen of puberty blockers & cross-sex hormones- rendering him sterile for life. 8 https://t.co/e4ji7Dd0GP
@Rstorechildhood - RESTORE CHILDHOOD
The 7 year old boy who said he was a ‘girl inside’, who loved pink, butterflies & dresses- made a shocking revelation ten years later: At 17 years old, following his permanent chemical castration, Avery declared that he wasn’t really a girl- but that he was ‘non-binary’ 9 https://t.co/BFUTUicDxr
@Rstorechildhood - RESTORE CHILDHOOD
Avery was a toddler who liked pink & dresses. He had discomfort with his male genitals. His mom went onto the internet, where she was told that her child ‘might be’ transgender. Then, the pediatrician affirmed it & the Debi fully committed herself to transitioning her son 10 https://t.co/ldW28TSuDr
@Rstorechildhood - RESTORE CHILDHOOD
Societal opposition to letting a boy grow his hair & wear sparkles caused Avery distress. The other toddlers didn’t care about Avery’s non-conformity, it was their parents who did. Avery’s family went into hiding so Avery could grow his hair & live as an ‘acceptable girl’ 11 https://t.co/cRwCtOWsp9
Video Transcript AI Summary
The speaker's four-year-old child declared, "Mom, you know I'm really a girl. I'm a girl on the inside." This prompted appointments with a psychologist and endocrinologist to rule out medical issues.
The child increasingly expressed herself as a girl, wanting to wear dresses and sparkly shoes. Restricting this expression led to depression, and the speaker allowed her to attend school in girl's clothes, which improved her happiness.
While the children and teachers were initially accepting, some parents reacted negatively, influenced by "adult bigotry." The family lost friends and family and went into hiding for a year while the daughter grew her hair out. They re-emerged with a happy and confident daughter.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Transgender before and really didn't know what to think. We made an appointment with our pediatrician. She recommended a child psychologist. But before we could even get an appointment, my daughter, then my 4 year old son, said these words to me. Mom, you know I'm really a girl.
Right? I'm a girl on the inside. That moment changed my life. In the following months, she became more insistent. We saw the psychologist and an endocrinologist to make sure there wasn't a hidden medical issue.
She became more determined to express herself by wearing those pink sparkly shoes to day care. She wanted to go out for ice cream and a fairy dress and wings. Eventually, we couldn't hold her back. She was showing signs of depression and refused to leave the house dressed as a boy. The day I let her go to school in girl clothes, she was happier than I had seen in a very long time.
The kids were great, and the teachers were awesome. But then the kids went home and told their parents, and they weren't so great after that. Adult bigotry had influenced them. We lost most of our friends and some of our family. We basically went into hiding for about a year while my daughter grew out her hair to look like the girl that she is.
When we emerged again, it was with a very happy and confident daughter.
@Rstorechildhood - RESTORE CHILDHOOD
Debi Jackson faced her son’s insurmountable distress by seeking the opinion of an “expert” who recommended raising the boy as a girl. Debi’s decision to follow the experts’ advice made her a social pariah. Persecution further drove Debi into the clutches of transactivists. 12 https://t.co/pD5a8AirBI
Video Transcript AI Summary
The speaker's four-year-old child declared, "Mom, you know I'm really a girl. I'm a girl on the inside." Following this, the child became more insistent about expressing herself as a girl. Medical professionals were consulted to rule out underlying medical issues.
The child's insistence on expressing her true gender led to depression when forced to present as a boy. Allowing her to dress as a girl improved her happiness. While the children at school were accepting, some parents were not, leading to the loss of friends and family. The family went into hiding for a year while the child grew her hair out. They re-emerged with a happy and confident daughter.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Transgender before and really didn't know what to think. We made an appointment with our pediatrician. She recommended a child psychologist. But before we could even get an appointment, my daughter, then my 4 year old son, said these words to me. Mom, you know I'm really a girl.
Right? I'm a girl on the inside. That moment changed my life. In the following months, she became more insistent. We saw the psychologist and an endocrinologist to make sure there wasn't a hidden medical issue.
She became more determined to express herself by wearing those pink sparkly shoes to day care. She wanted to go out for ice cream and a fairy dress and wings. Eventually, we couldn't hold her back. She was showing signs of depression and refused to leave the house dressed as a boy. The day I let her go to school in girl clothes, she was happier than I had seen in a very long time.
The kids were great, and the teachers were awesome. But then the kids went home and told their parents, and they weren't so great after that. Adult bigotry had influenced them. We lost most of our friends and some of our family. We basically went into hiding for about a year while my daughter grew out her hair to look like the girl that she is.
When we emerged again, it was with a very happy and confident daughter.
@Rstorechildhood - RESTORE CHILDHOOD
When this little boy’s mom was told by the experts that she must trans her son & she faced social backlash for it- she dug her heels in further. She didn’t have a child 17 years ago, expecting to be a trans activist. She genuinely believes castrating her son saved his life. 13 https://t.co/cDEM3jTgdH
@Rstorechildhood - RESTORE CHILDHOOD
Debi Jackson felt persecuted for following the expert opinion to transition her son. She went from a skeptic to a true believer. As her son began to change & grow out of his ‘girly’ behaviors, his mom had already committed fully to his transition. 14 https://t.co/isLu2Dpczz
@Rstorechildhood - RESTORE CHILDHOOD
Even as this little boy turned-“trans kid” pioneer began to grow out of his ‘girl identity’ phase, his mom had already re-routed her life’s mission in pursuit of a techno-medical fantasy. If only her little boy had been allowed to have his princess phase in peace. 15 https://t.co/nB6j981hKt
