Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 1181 ｜ Silent Lunches & Stolen Childhoods： The Truth About School Shutdowns ｜ Guest： David Zweig

00:00:00.000 investigative journalist david zweig published an article in new york magazine in 2021

00:00:07.840 debunking the myth that widespread masking at schools is preventing the spread of covid and

00:00:15.640 he is here today talking about his incredible new book called an abundance of caution and

00:00:23.740 he gives us a behind the scenes look at how our public health apparatus how our media how our

00:00:32.380 politicians worked together to hide the truth about covid and covid policies oh my goodness

00:00:41.600 this is an incredible conversation i learned so much i know that you are going to appreciate his

00:00:48.260 clarity and his courage and this is a very timely conversation with everything that is going on so

00:00:55.800 buckle up you are going to learn so much this episode is brought to you by our friends at

00:01:00.760 go to ranchers go to go to ranchers.com use code ally at checkout that's go to ranchers.com code ally

00:01:06.680 david thanks so much for taking the time to join us uh for those who may not know can you tell us

00:01:20.880 who you are and what you do sure my name is david zweig i'm an investigative journalist and author

00:01:26.820 and i'm here to speak with you about my new book an abundance of caution american schools the virus

00:01:33.780 and a story of bad decisions yes when you reached out to me i recognized your name immediately because

00:01:40.120 i remember using your articles when i was talking about masks in was it 2021 or 2022 probably 2021 i

00:01:49.320 think yes and the reason why they were so instrumental is because suddenly we had a voice in the mainstream

00:01:56.660 in new york magazine the atlantic and elsewhere saying uh our masking policy our school shutdown policy

00:02:03.760 it doesn't seem to be working so can we back up to then how did all of that come about for you

00:02:09.560 yeah um i live in the new york area so like most people in my area when kind of things first shut down

00:02:17.040 i was fully on board and compliant with everything um i'm a little embarrassed to admit maybe there was

00:02:23.740 even some wiping down of groceries in the in the first few days me too okay right because i was listening

00:02:29.860 to the experts yeah and we were going along um and as your audience probably knows and remembers

00:02:36.420 we were given uh 15 days to slow the spread remember that slogan and it was also flatten the curve

00:02:43.100 and you might remember they showed basically a graph where if there's if everyone listened to their

00:02:49.820 instructions and followed orders then it would be this gentle slope of cases but if you didn't listen

00:02:54.880 there'd be this big spike and it would overwhelm the hospitals well by the end of april um i was

00:03:03.700 walking with a friend of mine and we were just recounting how miserable and absurd remote learning

00:03:10.360 was it was just it was an abject failure basically from day one it was obvious this wasn't going to

00:03:15.660 work long term but it was explained to us this was a trade-off to keep people safe to prevent the

00:03:21.020 hospitals from being overwhelmed so even though it was bad you know we went along so something

00:03:27.840 interesting happened though by the end of april cases in new york had fallen by something like 50

00:03:33.940 since like a peak in early april and i said to my friend we did it man we flattened the curve um i

00:03:42.140 guess what do you think they're gonna like open schools like next week or something what's going on

00:03:46.060 yeah and he was like dave they're not going back and that's when i realized something was really

00:03:53.140 wrong um because we were told to do something we all followed the instructions and we achieved the

00:03:59.620 goal and then they just you know move the proverbial goalpost at that point and that's when for me as as

00:04:07.000 someone who's an investigator and i've spent a lot of time before the pandemic um i'm very familiar

00:04:13.080 with talking with academics and scientists reading um journals um about scientific articles i was

00:04:20.520 had this sense i'm like i better start looking into this because something strange here because

00:04:25.200 they basically lied and i'm not seeing anyone really much noise about this this is kind of strange

00:04:32.400 yeah so that set me on the path to trying to investigate things myself because i wasn't seeing

00:04:38.820 any real questioning of what was going on within the media and eventually i was like well i'm in

00:04:45.120 the media i guess i'll have to do this and did you consider yourself progressive or like democrat is

00:04:53.220 that how you've politically identified in the past i would say most of my adult life i've been left

00:04:58.440 leaning yeah um i've always identified as an independent yeah um although in new york you can't vote in a

00:05:04.580 primary unless you're with a party so i from time to time i would you know just have an affiliation

00:05:09.700 but um i've always leaned left politically and we can get into this if you want but um and but still

00:05:17.420 been an independent thinker i'm not like just kind of like a no matter what democratic yeah clearly

00:05:22.220 yeah so i always had a little bit of this independent or more than a little streak but

00:05:26.300 nevertheless that's where i leaned um after my experience during the pandemic with the research i did

00:05:32.020 it's i have to say it's my political leaning is completely shattered at this point i don't lean

00:05:38.700 toward the right either um but the my faith and when people read this book i mean perhaps your audience

00:05:45.720 already is has cynical uh viewpoint on some of public health and larger institutions it will be impossible

00:05:52.220 for someone to read this and not and and not have their faith completely shaken in in our expert

00:05:59.260 class the book really is about the failure of the expert class i'm so interested in that time for

00:06:06.120 you when you looked around and you said okay something doesn't seem right this doesn't seem to

00:06:11.600 change it doesn't seem to be corresponding with the data we see a lot of people in the media

00:06:17.500 at that moment said well you know what i think i'm gonna shut up about it because i don't want

00:06:23.280 to be accused of killing grandma or killing kids and they must know what they're talking about but

00:06:29.560 there was something in you maybe it was that independent streak maybe it's just because you

00:06:33.360 love digging for truth that said you know i'm not going to be quiet about this and this really

00:06:39.460 bothers me and i'm going to do something about that where do you think that came from yeah it's a

00:06:45.160 really good question because initially i just wanted to find out what was going on i was in the

00:06:50.420 middle of writing a book i was under contract totally different topic obviously and i just

00:06:55.140 needed to know what was happening um because the information we were being given didn't match again

00:07:01.040 that moment where it was like we flattened the curve cases have dropped 50 what's going on why

00:07:07.480 aren't the kids going back to school um so for me i just needed to satisfy my own curiosity

00:07:13.020 but then that shifted toward a sort of a professional goal when it was clear that no one else was covering

00:07:21.080 this and um i guess i think there's just you know if you're curious about like my psychology or

00:07:27.180 something yeah i guess maybe part of me has always felt a little alienated and and that degree of

00:07:33.040 alienation um i think has some downside but it also has enabled me to be really tolerant of being in

00:07:41.440 an out group um whereas most people naturally don't want to be cast out they want their peers

00:07:47.300 to like them i'd prefer if people liked me i prefer to be in a group but i'm willing to to not be in

00:07:52.960 the group i don't care i think also part of it may be and we can get into this like most of the people

00:07:58.580 in the media are from a particular background they went to fancy schools i went to a state school i

00:08:04.320 wasn't you know a straight a student i didn't kind of like follow this particular trajectory that so many

00:08:09.980 of those people um followed so i think that also sort of set me apart and it's one of the things

00:08:15.580 that um i think is so important about if we want to talk about how to restore trust in some of our

00:08:23.440 institutions in particular health institutions but others as well that to me what you really need is

00:08:29.700 you know there's so much talk about dei but there needs to be diversity of ideology of political

00:08:36.380 views and other types of diversity um that's what really matters in my in in my view is how people

00:08:42.340 think differently and unfortunately and what i talk a lot about in the book and i explain through lots of

00:08:48.380 i think really interesting examples throughout time is how group think when people are within like a

00:08:56.580 certain tribe is extraordinarily powerful and unfortunately people within the public health

00:09:02.780 establishment almost everyone there leans left almost everyone within the legacy media leans to

00:09:10.000 the left so when you have these two really influential institutions that were working basically

00:09:15.360 together um during the pandemic most of those people again going back to what i was saying how did

00:09:22.120 they get there how do you get to the new york times well you probably got straight a's in school

00:09:26.440 then you went to yale or brown then maybe you went to columbia journalism school

00:09:30.720 then you you know wind up there all these people not all most of them followed a similar path

00:09:37.460 um to get to where they are and that path involved not being a rabble rouser not being an iconoclast 0.90

00:09:43.940 and that's within medicine as well you know medicine self-selects for people who are really smart usually

00:09:49.660 who work really hard those are good traits that's really important for a doctor but it also selects for

00:09:55.500 rule followers you know when you are in when you're a resident you can't just ignore the attending you

00:10:01.560 know you have to follow you're not just going to go against all of your peers um if they're saying

00:10:05.900 something so you have these institutions composed of a certain type of person with a certain type of

00:10:11.660 political leaning and a way that they're they all kind of got to where they are the success they had by

00:10:17.020 kind of staying within the group um and that's ultimately i think what i show in the book is that's

00:10:22.860 really dangerous when you have this one type of personality type again i'm i'm generalizing here

00:10:28.940 but that's more or less what happened and ultimately it took a small number of people who are outside

00:10:35.900 um or who or who could tolerate being outside that that group to push back against um some of the things

00:10:43.140 that they were doing and saying because unfortunately our public health institutions um really misled the

00:10:50.120 american public on a variety of things within the pandemic but what i was particularly focused on

00:10:55.040 is on children in schools and the and the misleading information from those authorities was not questioned

00:11:02.360 by the the most prestigious uh media institutions in our country um so those that's much of my book

00:11:09.180 talks about the sort of dynamic like how do the gears of our society turn when your audience is

00:11:17.040 thinking about oh there's some narrative going on now you know in the media or just in the country

00:11:21.860 how does that happen how does that create that's what my book shows it's it takes place during the

00:11:27.200 pandemic but that's really just the backdrop to understand decision making and narrative formation

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00:12:47.620 code ally b what was the first disturbing finding if you can remember when you started to dig into this

00:12:59.980 in 2020 at that point you kind of just had a suspicion that something was wrong but obviously

00:13:05.300 as you dug into it that suspicion was confirmed so what was the first thing that you found that set

00:13:11.100 you off on oh i gotta keep going i would say um very early it was obvious that children were not at

00:13:19.280 at any great risk from the virus um it was well established um in the beginning and so i just kept

00:13:25.640 collecting more and more um data to support that idea i started talking with scientists mostly in

00:13:32.680 europe because they weren't doing this in america um but speaking with experts in europe and then the

00:13:39.920 next question was well kids can be quote unquote super spreaders so the the beginning um sort of

00:13:46.300 narrative was kids are in grave danger you know or they might be we can't open schools um then that

00:13:52.280 shifted toward well maybe kids are okay but they're going to kill their grandmother they're

00:13:57.000 going to kill teachers right so one of the main pivot points for me was toward the end of april in

00:14:03.560 the beginning of may millions of children started going back to school in europe 22 countries ali

00:14:10.880 reopened in europe started reopening their schools 22 countries okay and in may there was a meeting at

00:14:18.240 the eu of education ministers and in that meeting they said we have not observed any negative

00:14:24.520 consequences of schools reopening we're not seeing anything with case rates or stuff like that they met

00:14:30.040 a second time in june they had the same determination we haven't observed anything now just like pause for

00:14:36.940 a moment on this this is not like a weird like a tiny schoolhouse in the middle of mongolia you know

00:14:43.400 with 10 kids we're talking about millions of kids in school in developed countries not dissimilar from

00:14:50.240 america and this was virtually non-existent um in the media this this meeting and i couldn't believe

00:14:59.620 it i watched this video over and over because i'm like how is it possible that this isn't a headline

00:15:05.160 in every newspaper in the country why isn't this on every single tv station there's this is it the main

00:15:11.860 argument was kids are going to be putting other people in danger well here it is we have this

00:15:17.260 real world experiment you don't even need to do a contrived experiment we have millions of kids

00:15:21.760 and this was ignored ali it was ignored by the media by and large and it was ignored by our experts the

00:15:28.380 health officials how could that be so i ultimately wrote about um the meetings myself but i was just one

00:15:34.920 voice within this but that was one of the main points where i was where i was like something is

00:15:41.720 extraordinarily wrong that what we would call empirical evidence which means evidence that you

00:15:49.240 can see and experience yourself that empirical evidence was being ignored and instead the officials

00:15:57.320 were following theory they made up all sorts of contrived reasons oh it's because that's europe that

00:16:02.760 doesn't count they're doing that we need to wear masks we need to have a hepa filter we need to

00:16:07.700 have six feet of distancing none of these things by the way ali were were um done across the board in

00:16:14.500 europe they did not follow six feet of distancing there across the board many of the schools there

00:16:19.000 were doing three feet or one meter or nothing at all kids there the ecdc that's europe's version of

00:16:25.500 the cdc they recommended against kids in primary school wearing masks so forget about us saying two-year-olds

00:16:32.340 had to wear masks they didn't even want them doing it there they weren't following there was a whole

00:16:36.620 thing i have a long section in my book about hepa filters because it drove me crazy that schools in

00:16:41.420 america some of them literally were not opened because teachers unions or others were demanding

00:16:47.140 that they have a hepa filter that's like a special filter on like air conditioning i remember the

00:16:50.980 teachers unions make it a huge deal of that they don't use those in europe by and large that would be

00:16:56.520 very very rare schools didn't have hepa filters so again none of these things that we were told

00:17:02.900 were critical to make school safe to open none of them were were being used across the board in europe

00:17:09.540 and cases there this is what happened to cases after they opened schools they went down like this now i'm

00:17:16.200 not suggesting that opening schools causes cases to go down but what that does suggest of course is that

00:17:21.520 children were not super spreaders schools were not driving the pandemic and we can get into why that

00:17:26.480 is but the point is the evidence was there that this wasn't dangerous this wasn't increasing cases

00:17:32.680 and it was ignored and it was dismissed with these contrived reasons and for me as a dad and as

00:17:40.940 an investigator and a journalist it was unacceptable

00:17:44.080 i remember there was a study maybe it was around 2021 maybe 2022 that it was a cdc study and everyone

00:17:54.100 was pointing to it saying see these schools over here that wear masks they're having fewer deaths in

00:17:59.680 their community in these schools over here and i remember you debunked that you pointed out that

00:18:04.280 journalists were kind of just looking at the abstract decontextualizing it and reporting on that

00:18:10.000 and not digging into the study right yeah there's actually more than one study unfortunately by the

00:18:16.400 cdc that purported that mask mandates were reducing community transmission or school transmission and the

00:18:23.880 evidence i can't emphasize this enough like i approach this topic apolitically like i don't have an agenda

00:18:30.220 and you know i'm not coming at it from one side or another the reality is the cdc's science that they

00:18:38.520 conducted or that they used to support their positions was incredibly poor and was incredibly

00:18:45.160 misleading it's it's i know that's hard for some people to believe maybe not your audience i don't

00:18:50.920 know right but there are a lot of people who you know including me my faith was you know these were

00:18:56.740 the good guys these are public health experts why would they lie to us why would they you know

00:19:00.820 manipulate something one way or another so just very briefly this masking study that i had written about

00:19:07.720 there was a study done in in arizona and i won't get into all the details but at one point i got um

00:19:15.880 official data from the state of arizona and from the counties that they were looking at these were

00:19:21.620 official numbers from you know the source from from the government there in arizona and the numbers

00:19:27.800 differed from what was in the study um that the cdc published and i and and these difference

00:19:34.640 mattered a lot um regarding you know how how they um came up with their findings there were many many

00:19:40.060 things wrong with the study but this was one thing where it wasn't my opinion it wasn't my

00:19:44.080 interpretation because someone could argue about that well who are you to say that the you know

00:19:48.100 analysis is wrong this was just these are the data and they're different so i reached out to the cdc

00:19:54.160 and i said hey you know i have this data from from this is from the state of arizona this is the

00:19:58.880 official numbers and it's different from what's in your study you know how can that be what do you

00:20:03.020 have to say about this and they wrote back to me we've looked at the study and there are no errors

00:20:09.100 and like that's something that you don't recover from or at least for me and so when you're asking

00:20:17.860 about these like moments it's the european schools opening this was yet another moment where after that

00:20:24.440 i mean you you can't go back i mean it was an extraordinary moment i mean they were lying through

00:20:30.260 their teeth when they said that to me or if they weren't then they are so incompetent that they

00:20:35.240 should not be in that field at all yeah to have that response it's it was quite stunning and and

00:20:41.500 yet you know as you point as we're sort of touching on much of my book is about the media a lot of it's

00:20:47.760 about evidence and about understanding how things work but media even for people who don't like the

00:20:53.580 new york times or who don't want to watch cbs or whatever it may be that still is influencing the

00:20:58.520 culture that still has an enormous impact and then maybe even even if you don't like it then part of

00:21:03.700 your effort then has to become how do we counter these messages so yeah again one of the things that

00:21:09.080 i think is so important about the book is i hope it will arm readers with information and an

00:21:15.240 understanding about what i would call like the anatomy of how this thing looks and how it works and

00:21:22.380 as a writer i was occupying this really strange rare lane where i was still writing within some of

00:21:31.100 these sort of legacy media publications but i was the lone voice in pushing back against what was an

00:21:37.740 accepted view yeah it was rare and that's exactly what i was about to ask you about new york magazine i

00:21:44.800 think that was the first article i saw but you had written you know you wrote for wired and i was

00:21:51.000 surprised that new york magazine was publishing something like this i don't know what else they

00:21:55.720 had published on covid but other mainstream outlets like the new york times and the washington post

00:22:00.160 had been purveyors of a lot of the information that you're talking about kind of uncritically just

00:22:05.040 saying this is what the cdc says and so it must be true that informs policy as you said were you

00:22:11.100 surprised when you started getting published by these mainstream outlets as the lone critical voice

00:22:15.840 well i was more surprised in the beginning when i had pitched a bunch of places and look as a

00:22:21.480 freelance writer um no one owes me a response no one owes me you know a guarantee it's not easy

00:22:27.960 but i had written for them i had contacts um shortly before i started i wrote my first piece and wired

00:22:34.840 um i had what i believe was the most read piece in the entire new york times for at least a day if not

00:22:41.000 a couple days it was about a newlywed who got stranded newlywed couple who got stranded in

00:22:45.380 the maldives once like the world shut down it was very so these people knew who i was and the way

00:22:52.180 that i was able to sort of break that that kind of wall if you will in a few publications was that

00:23:01.040 i tend to not write things that are based on anecdote a lot of the way journalism works you have

00:23:06.980 one person or maybe a few there's a profile it's personal it's a it's very effective and then you

00:23:11.980 use that to build your broader argument you may bring in some statistics or studies i don't do

00:23:16.840 that generally i just try to pound you with here's the information and i just have a bullet list you

00:23:22.620 know when i'm pitching an editor here's what i've got and thank god there were at least a few editors

00:23:28.240 at these places who had the courage and the ability internally to to push back against kind of an

00:23:34.660 accepted viewpoint and and because they read my pitch and they're like this is kind of irrefutable

00:23:41.660 what this guy is showing us so that i think that's the way that i was able to break through because

00:23:46.780 other writers who i'm friendly with who are writing for more sort of right-leaning publications or for

00:23:51.960 sub-stacks they're like how are you pulling this off and um and that that's even now with with my book

00:23:57.820 which is published by mit press you know this is very very much within that's about as you know

00:24:03.280 within academia and the left as you can get but i think they respect that my journalism is grounded

00:24:11.620 in research it doesn't mean i don't make mistakes but but by and large i support everything i say i

00:24:18.920 have hundreds of end notes in my book because i don't ever want to make a claim where someone's

00:24:23.500 going to read and be like where did he get that from because that's my main criticism of what the

00:24:28.180 media did instead of there's this thing in philosophy they call it an argument from authority

00:24:32.940 which i see you nodding right which is it's a logical fallacy it means you shouldn't believe

00:24:38.920 someone just because of their credentials just because someone you know and unfortunately that's

00:24:44.620 what the media did by and large throughout the pandemic that they simply quoted oh anthony fauci

00:24:50.440 says this or they sometimes wouldn't even um quote someone who would just say experts say

00:24:55.140 and then they had a list of things but there was no evidence to support this the journalists weren't

00:25:00.300 doing their most basic job which is to be skeptical of claims by people in power and to either force

00:25:06.400 them to provide evidence or to investigate it yourself but they didn't so we had essentially a

00:25:12.680 country where the people in charge were like this kind of infantilizing the public where this

00:25:19.020 finger wagging sort of mom you need to listen to us and do what we say it's almost like a mom

00:25:24.200 because i said so that's essentially what we were told it was the because i said so do this because

00:25:30.640 they weren't providing any evidence and when they did provide evidence it was very very poorly uh

00:25:36.260 supported oh man there's so much that i could analyze in that i i think that progressives suffer

00:25:42.140 from misplaced mothering in a lot of ways they actually take up social justice causes as a way to 0.84

00:25:48.200 channel the instinct of mothering and it leads to a lot of i think misleading or actually dangerous

00:25:55.740 policies but one of the formulas i think that's a fair hypothesis and my book would be strong support

00:26:02.640 for that hypothesis yes and even though we don't i'm sure that there are plenty of things that we don't

00:26:08.600 agree with culturally politically the formula that you articulated about journalists kind of taking an

00:26:15.120 anecdote that supports the conclusion that they already have that pulls at the heartstrings the

00:26:20.700 story pulls at the heartstrings so when it comes to covid maybe it's a grandma who died because her

00:26:27.020 child came home from school and had covid and then they go within and they sprinkle in the supporting

00:26:33.160 facts and i talk about that not to promote my book but in toxic empathy when it comes to abortion when

00:26:39.480 it comes to so many other subjects that is how a lot of these outlets will write their stories it's not

00:26:45.860 just peppering you with facts it's starting with a story that is triggering your empathy and then

00:26:51.920 they've already got you really and then all of the like the supporting facts are just it's kind of icing

00:26:56.960 on the cake that makes you feel justified and righteous in your empathy and then that leads you to vote a

00:27:03.920 certain way and to support certain policies that may not actually be rooted in truth and i saw that a

00:27:09.740 lot with covid it was emotional extortion do you want my grandma to die what about this one six-year-old

00:27:17.360 who also has asthma and is on a ventilator you not wearing a mask is causing them to die and most people

00:27:23.960 cannot withstand that to the point of digging into the facts because it's too uncomfortable and it's

00:27:30.640 like the payoff for digging into the facts and creating that relational tension with the people

00:27:36.620 who are blaming them for like the potential death of thousands of people it's not enough it's not

00:27:41.840 enough so most people just buckle under the pressure and say well i want to keep the peace as much as i

00:27:47.140 can but if everyone does that we're in a really dangerous place right which is exactly what happened

00:27:51.540 that's such a wonderful phrase by the way toxic empathy it's great i mean it's so not not not everyone

00:27:57.000 thinks so well progressives definitely don't i think it it very accurately describes a sort of

00:28:03.100 emotional manipulation um and then people feel virtual i'm good you're bad i'm so good you're bad

00:28:12.320 and when so to have an anecdote that triggers someone emotionally then they and the problem is

00:28:19.240 this began with at the early part of the pandemic where we were told certain things about certain risks

00:28:25.880 and there's a thing called the primacy effect where when you're told something initially that tends to

00:28:30.820 calcify for people and it's very very hard even when people are presented with new information

00:28:37.000 to unwind um what you've already kind of that feeling you've already established in your mind or in your

00:28:43.540 heart so even though there was tons of information and i was trying my darndest to get it out there and

00:28:49.340 other people were as well it didn't matter um that's one part of it is the toxic empathy as you're

00:28:55.060 describing the other part simply is that um that opening schools and then you know more broadly

00:29:01.420 opening things up but in particular when i'm you know was was so damaging with schools um was that

00:29:08.700 this became very quickly coded as right wing and once something got again with this calcification once

00:29:15.860 it was coded as right wing again these themes that i'm talking about with tribalism and group think

00:29:21.200 people it was radioactive trump tweeted in july of 2020 something to the effect of open the schools

00:29:30.000 in the fall it was all caps with a bunch of exclamation points once he did that he ensured

00:29:35.620 that schools in half the country would remain closed because this was what i call like newtonian

00:29:41.840 physics it's every action has the equal and opposite reaction they had to react against it

00:29:47.200 especially in an election year exactly so he and the american academy of pediatrics put out guidance

00:29:53.260 that was very aggressive is not the right word but very very strenuously said kids need to be in school

00:29:59.840 don't even worry about six feet of distancing if you do three feet that's fine it's not worth it

00:30:04.640 um to keep them out of school just for three versus six they said get them in there after trump's tweet

00:30:10.620 almost immediately after the aap reversed its guidance gone was this idea of don't worry about

00:30:16.940 the six feet of distancing gone was the idea of no matter what get them in instead they said listen to the

00:30:22.640 experts and they said schools need a lot of money we're going to need an enormous amount of resources

00:30:29.780 to open the schools and then the third piece of that is who authored this new statement with them

00:30:34.680 it was co-authored by the two largest teachers unions in the country so it was and i have many

00:30:41.300 examples predominantly our democrat and wanted joe biden to win oh yeah i mean uh jill jill biden's

00:30:48.420 like first meeting in the white house was with the the heads of the two largest teachers unions there's

00:30:53.340 no wine garden and randy wine garden and at the time becky pringle um there's no ambiguity about the

00:30:59.180 political leanings and i have lots of stats in my book about you know donations and money there's no

00:31:04.500 there's no ambiguity of where of where their political allegiance lies and they say that

00:31:09.780 themselves um so this was the response in america was completely politicized and to me one of one of

00:31:18.720 the ironies is that the left generally views itself as a champion of the underprivileged um this is how

00:31:26.720 they position themselves but yet the policies that the left advocated for harmed the very

00:31:34.380 people that they ostensibly cared about the most poor people black kids brown kids those are the

00:31:41.520 kids who got harmed the most because of lengthy school closures in america and to a lesser degree

00:31:47.960 some a lot of these other policies the mask mandates the hybrid schedules and all this other nonsense

00:31:53.760 that harmed those kids the most and it's one of the most tragic ironies of of the pandemic and i think

00:32:01.660 something that people on the left have not reckoned with

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00:33:21.420 tell us more about what you found out about the mechanics of public health you said it kind of

00:33:32.680 shattered your faith in our public health apparatus what do you mean by that well something like that

00:33:38.540 experience with emailing with the cdc and they're just you know the term gaslighting gets used a lot

00:33:43.700 but i mean they were full of it and and they knew it i don't know if i try not to curse on your

00:33:48.800 program you've done good you've done good making an effort um something like that you don't recover

00:33:55.260 from and it was very clear that these people within these institutions were afraid it most of them

00:34:03.660 people just go along most physicians don't read studies they might look at an abstract and that's it

00:34:10.680 and instead but if you had gotten to a debate with someone or an argument they would say well i'm gonna

00:34:16.820 listen to my doctor i'm not listening to you well it's like sorry your suburban pediatrician actually

00:34:21.680 doesn't know anything about mask mandates they also don't know anything about studies on viral

00:34:27.540 mitigation they just don't and that doesn't mean they're not a good pediatrician taking care of the

00:34:32.360 you know various things that you do in that practice but the idea that like regular doctors had a

00:34:38.780 clue about any of this stuff was farcical but this was the sort of like a mic drop that you couldn't argue

00:34:44.700 with them that there was this sort of um almost like this insular idea about who were the experts

00:34:51.160 we were supposed to listen to and no one else could be listened to and you know two points on that one

00:34:58.480 of them is that touching on this idea that when i mentioned about how the american academy of

00:35:03.300 pediatrics reversed its guidance after the trump thing i also talk about in my book that once i started

00:35:08.760 writing a bunch of these articles that were in these kind of legacy media outlets but that very much were

00:35:14.000 against the the established view i started having people emailing me and contacting me from around

00:35:19.500 the country and included in that list of people were a lot of doctors and even former cdc officials

00:35:25.640 and many of them the emails would start out with thank you so much for writing this i agree with what

00:35:32.640 you're saying this is i don't think this is right the school should be open this is harming kids i don't

00:35:38.100 think there's any benefit the mask mandates are crazy whatever it may be and they said but all of this

00:35:43.500 is off the record can't talk about it um and the reason was obvious is because they didn't want to

00:35:50.240 be cast out of their group and i'm sympathetic to it to some degree look if you spend all these years

00:35:55.980 as a physician you know going to medical school this is how you pay your mortgage not everyone has

00:36:01.200 the type of either professionally or socially the type of personality to tolerate yeah being cast out but

00:36:07.320 i'll tell you something else a number of them also were explicitly told by administrators and these

00:36:13.500 are people by the way at top university hospitals in the country at some of our most prestigious

00:36:17.920 institutions and their boss or the administrator said do not speak publicly against the cdc or anthony

00:36:26.040 fauci or deborah burks you are not allowed to do it full stop so what our country was experiencing

00:36:32.740 was essentially a manufactured consensus because we were repeatedly told well this is what the experts

00:36:39.760 say but we weren't being shown the public by and large what experts in europe were saying and doing

00:36:45.380 because they came to a very different conclusion about how to respond with schools and kids and we

00:36:50.980 also weren't hearing from these voices within the u.s who either were silencing themselves or were told

00:36:56.900 by their administrators you are not allowed to talk about this so when you talk when we think about

00:37:03.280 the mechanics of how things work that's one of the important things for people to understand

00:37:07.720 is the degree of of sort of tribalism and self-censorship that goes on within these institutions

00:37:15.120 and i show how through kind of what are basically a series of case studies of how there was this

00:37:22.920 essentially a divorce from what's called evidence-based medicine which is which is a specific

00:37:29.600 scientific process to follow and instead we were following intuition um and if that i would say that's

00:37:37.220 a charitable reading yes i try to be chat well here's the thing i try to sort of steel man the other

00:37:43.900 side as much as i can which is good so i try to imagine once if someone i loved worked at the cdc or was

00:37:50.580 saying some of the stuff how it what's the most charitable way i can think about it because here's

00:37:56.400 the thing like i understand that some people might say intuitively it makes sense if you close schools

00:38:01.220 that's probably going to reduce transmission or if i have something in front of my face maybe that'll

00:38:05.440 reduce it a little bit maybe it's not perfect i recognize some people that made intuitive sense

00:38:10.340 it did to a lot of people actually but what i talk about in the book is that our intuitions are

00:38:15.960 often wrong um and that's especially so in medicine and i give lots of like fascinating

00:38:21.140 examples through history about things that seem totally obvious actually weren't true once they

00:38:28.320 were tested and again another irony is there were all these people with lawn signs around where i live

00:38:33.620 in this house we believe in science yeah i still see some of those signs people didn't know jack

00:38:40.720 about the science they had no clue and it's just an exquisitely frustrating thing to see that and

00:38:48.500 those are the people who by the way i mean i was called a murderer you know and a trumper and a lunatic 0.71

00:38:54.900 and all this stuff for following science for following evidence right so how much of this do you think

00:39:02.560 was just an anti-trump reflex i know we already talked about that a little bit but i'm trying to

00:39:09.820 understand the motivations not just of the everyday person who maybe sincerely believed that they were

00:39:14.200 saving grandma but the people who knew better because if you as a freelance journalist were able

00:39:19.320 to dig into the studies and understand it there were certainly people in public health who were able to

00:39:23.860 dig into the studies and understand it and once they knew they still didn't say anything to me it seems

00:39:29.860 like just naked political motivations to have continue to have cuomo as the foil for trump

00:39:36.980 yeah and cuomo really was the sort of like hero for for them in many ways um i think a lot of it

00:39:45.140 also has to do with you know i can't get into the mind of these people and knowing what they actually

00:39:50.600 believed but it seems quite obvious and i think i give a lot of evidence for this that people did

00:39:56.900 what's known as the noble lie they knew they were full of bs but they did it anyway because they felt

00:40:03.260 like what they were doing needed to be done whether they felt like that children and people actually

00:40:09.700 were in great danger and i believe that many of them thought that you're saying oh people at the cdc

00:40:13.680 surely they read what you were talking about i'm not so sure ali i gotta tell you motivated reasoning

00:40:19.340 is really powerful and when people are motivated to think in a certain way to support their view

00:40:25.380 you're the mind does all sorts of acrobatics to kind of wall things out i mean i got into an

00:40:31.100 argument with this person who is a big covid pundit she's an emergency medicine physician

00:40:36.160 but she somehow fashioned herself an expert on disease uh mitigation and she kept saying there's

00:40:42.860 no harm from masks and even the american academy of pediatrics was tweeting stuff out saying like

00:40:48.140 masks aren't harmful and i said what is harm who are you to decide that she said well they're an

00:40:53.520 inconvenience maybe they're annoying but i said really are you three years old forced to wear a mask

00:40:59.080 for eight hours a day i think it's fair that some people might interpret that as harm who are you

00:41:04.020 to decide that and that's kind of one of the big things is like so much of what happened was based on

00:41:11.720 values not based on science yet we were again gaslit we were told and speaking of cuomo he repeatedly

00:41:19.480 said you follow the science you follow the data it's that simple and it was it was very smug and very

00:41:27.960 confident and that was appealing to a lot of people on left this is our hero trump is an unserious

00:41:34.440 person he's dangerous this guy he's serious he follows the science but science doesn't tell you

00:41:40.400 what to do science is a process science brings you information and the values of the people who made the

00:41:48.780 decisions and this is really important the values of the people who got to decide what happened

00:41:55.360 and what i think could be argued was basically a tyranny um on much of the public that these people

00:42:03.860 come from a certain class a certain political leaning with certain values and certain preferences in their

00:42:09.920 own lives and also a certain economic class generally that these people might call the laptop class

00:42:16.200 where they are generally upper middle class people making six-figure salaries or better um working at places

00:42:23.280 like the nih the cdc working as physicians working in you know at prestigious media outlets so their

00:42:31.740 viewpoint about staying home they could be virtuous i'm just going to stay home and order netflix

00:42:37.700 well yes but a huge portion of our country was out there bringing them their food out there working in the

00:42:44.320 warehouses the slaughterhouses keeping the electricity on and so on all of those people this was one of the

00:42:51.760 most class based policies like imaginable in in a generation the way that there was one class who was

00:43:02.220 meant to just wait on the the upper class and not only wait on them but the upper class fashion themselves

00:43:09.120 as virtuous we're staying home and we're good we're good people for doing that you dirty person i don't

00:43:15.760 want to get too religious about it but they're the metaphorical value of the lower classes who are 1.00

00:43:20.940 out there dirty working on you know the infrastructure of our country taking care of the

00:43:26.220 clean people at home was quite extraordinary so it's one of the things that it matters and there's lots of

00:43:33.980 stuff in my book about modeling which is like these projections about which were incredibly poorly done

00:43:40.960 but the the same thing the people who create the models that that show well if everyone stays home

00:43:46.660 and does this this and this um those are the people who fared very well because they get to choose

00:43:52.680 what goes in the model right so and you know you and i chatted about this before we started recording

00:44:00.020 i wrote an article on a church in california um that fought back against limits that gavin newsom and then

00:44:09.180 more centrally within their county santa clara county what church was it do you remember um calvary

00:44:14.640 church okay yeah and they they were they along with all the other churches in the area were barred from

00:44:20.240 having gatherings above some arbitrary number of people and they said we're doing it anyway this is

00:44:26.780 what we believe and the county sued them um they sent out spies which i get into all this stuff who

00:44:33.420 spied on them behind like a fence and they used geo tracking with like digital stuff to monitor

00:44:38.760 people's cell phone data it's insane it's wild what happened and again when you think about the

00:44:46.080 sort of like tyranny of what of this type of thing going on but all this comes back to values right

00:44:51.060 because while that was going on the malls were open you could go to a casino you could go to a liquor

00:44:57.780 store strip club and this is the same thing by the way in new york city there were little kids when

00:45:03.640 they opened the schools and by the way open is like kids were there one or two days a week if they

00:45:08.140 were lucky but they called it open when biden came into office we have you know x percent of the

00:45:13.060 schools are open well yeah if the kids going in one day a week if you actually call that open

00:45:17.420 but setting that aside when the kids were there in the new york city winter there were children

00:45:23.240 sitting on the concrete eating lunch outside because they thought it was too dangerous and many

00:45:28.700 of them weren't allowed to speak i have my sub stack is called silent lunch which i've named as an

00:45:34.660 homage to all these school children who were barred from talking that is heartbreaking it's it's

00:45:40.900 extraordinarily heartbreaking imagine little kids told you're not allowed to talk during lunch you

00:45:46.820 have to sit outside on the concrete and eat your lunch while at the same time right down the block

00:45:51.920 two adults are having a glass of wine in a restaurant that's fine so when we think about

00:45:57.140 the values of how much that impacts policy that we were told over and over policy was based on science

00:46:05.520 that was a lie the policies were based on values of a particular socioeconomic group and a particular

00:46:13.020 political group quite honestly who had their values and they inflicted them on the rest of society

00:46:19.200 i don't attend church but i understand and respect where if someone that's meaningful to them

00:46:24.800 going every sunday that's someone's group that they needed maybe they needed that more than the mall

00:46:30.680 maybe a grandmother who's 78 years old maybe she wanted to see her family and she said you know what

00:46:37.000 i've got a one out of a hundred chance of something going wrong but 99 out of 100 i'm going to be okay

00:46:41.720 i'm going to take those odds i don't know how many years i have left i want to see my family but we were

00:46:47.160 told we weren't allowed to do that again so that's like such an important theme in my book is showing how

00:46:52.920 the values of those in charge were inflicted on the public and yet we were told that it was almost

00:47:00.020 orwellian yet they were telling us that it wasn't values oh this is all science

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00:48:38.440 you know you might not be religious and you might not realize it is a religious instinct i think that you

00:48:50.720 realize that there is something disordered in asking kids to sacrifice on behalf of adults that there is

00:48:57.340 something inherently unjust about that and so i want to talk a little bit more about the social harms because

00:49:04.640 some people are listening to this and a ton of people started listening to this show in 2020 because

00:49:09.800 people were just like oh my gosh what is true i feel insane is someone on my same page and a lot of

00:49:16.800 people would say that when they were in the midst of 2020 they were maybe some of the people that you're

00:49:23.240 talking about that they were the ones who were zealously telling other people to mask to shut down the

00:49:29.680 schools and they might be thinking well i did it in the best interest of the people around me and

00:49:36.260 what did it really harm and i'm not trying to shame those people now who maybe realize their mistakes

00:49:41.920 but for those who don't realize like what was the harm in people acting in that way and in you know

00:49:50.180 putting those regulations on the schools was it really i mean objectively harmful for those kids

00:49:56.640 so one of the things that you know we keep is the lens through which we all see and experience the

00:50:02.920 world and for many people their families maybe it was just kind of an inconvenience this was horrible

00:50:09.680 for plenty of kids from well-off backgrounds make no mistake however by and large they fared far better

00:50:17.340 than kids from underprivileged backgrounds so or if there are some people in your audience who for them

00:50:22.580 they're saying yeah i think most people admit now they would say yeah the pandemic that kind of sucked

00:50:27.700 that was really hard but it wasn't that bad or is that what they aren't understanding perhaps is the

00:50:34.480 incredible harm on so many children millions of kids and you have to think about what kind of society

00:50:41.700 as you said you know what kind of society does this to children and an argument at least theoretically

00:50:49.520 could be made you might disagree with it but that well we need to have these trade-offs or sacrifice

00:50:55.600 some of these things for children in order to save people but the shame of it is because of these lies

00:51:01.800 that i'm talking about from the public health establishment there were no trade-offs it was only harm

00:51:07.860 no one was saved by long-term school closures no one was saved from masking two-year-olds

00:51:13.360 no one was saved by barriers on desks and all this other nonsense this was only harm no trade-off no

00:51:21.820 benefit and you know early on this was known this is going to be hard for people to hear but early on

00:51:30.620 the reporting of child abuse went down and that sounds oh this is wonderful wow that that's interesting

00:51:37.840 this is great but it's not the case what happened is teachers and educators are the most important

00:51:44.520 people in a child's life for a child who is in harm's way they're there that is the child's first

00:51:51.480 place to go where they either a child can speak to them or teachers see that something's wrong

00:51:57.220 they're mandatory reporters they have that's right and when they closed schools so everyone talks about

00:52:02.840 the long-term school closures let's pause for a moment closing schools for the entirety of the

00:52:08.800 spring of 2020 that alone caused enormous damage and people don't talk about that enough that even that

00:52:15.820 was unnecessary and incredibly harmful so these kids were left alone these kids who were suffering from

00:52:23.380 from abuse didn't have a resource and they were left at home with a monster many of them and what they

00:52:29.400 found was that the incidence of actual abuse had skyrocketed and i want to be clear about something

00:52:34.980 this was observed as early as april of 2020 public health establishment knew about this and didn't 0.97

00:52:42.580 care they kept the schools closed anyway they knew a certain number of kids were going to get the crap

00:52:49.140 beat out of them or something else horrible and they kept the schools closed anyway so it's really

00:52:55.320 important that's why i wrote this book ali is one of the reasons and beyond those kids and we can talk

00:53:00.520 about the other examples is that there needs to be a historical record a document that says this

00:53:06.840 happened that we can't allow a sort of revisionist history something that's convenient and exculpatory

00:53:13.400 to the people who made the rules and i understand i'm glad you pointed it out this may be hard you

00:53:18.200 don't want to shame people maybe you know even the people who didn't make rules but maybe they thought

00:53:22.100 this was a good idea they were persuaded i don't want people to feel shame i don't want anyone to

00:53:26.940 go to prison but i want a document to exist it's really important that people read the book talk

00:53:33.440 about it and know about this so we can make sure that something like this doesn't happen again

00:53:38.180 because even beyond um the horrors of child abuse i mean we could just run down the list ali from

00:53:45.240 um eating disorders where the bmi in children went up but then on the flip side there were plenty of

00:53:51.180 kids who became anorexic and bulimic there were children um screen time skyrocketed during the

00:53:57.040 pandemic and never kind of went back down um anxiety depression i talked with a lot of mental health

00:54:04.540 professionals for children their practices were exploding during the pandemic and it wasn't because

00:54:11.660 of people dying let me be very clear about that it was directly correlated with kids being kept out of

00:54:18.220 school we know about learning loss which rightfully so has gotten a lot of attention that's directly

00:54:24.180 correlated with the time that's out of school with worse test scores and worse learning loss that we

00:54:29.740 still haven't recovered but i want to touch on one other thing which is as much as these sort of

00:54:35.820 statistics are important and we can get into it by the way kids weren't taken to the hospital when

00:54:40.820 they had appendicitis until the last minute it was too late parents were scared that's exactly right

00:54:45.640 and and adults also didn't get cancer treatments on right on down the line the amount of harm that

00:54:51.480 was done this was not just oh we're just trying to help people cuomo had said if i can save just one

00:54:57.600 life well sure but you're taking one or more lives to ostensibly try to save that one life it was

00:55:05.440 extraordinarily foolish but one of the things that's the toxic empathy it blinds you to reality and

00:55:13.620 morality and you ignore the victim on the other side of the moral equation so just one life one 0.97

00:55:19.740 story you know one person that you're saving and then you've got a thousand people on the other side

00:55:25.000 that they're bidding you ignore so to explain what in economics they would call that second order effects

00:55:30.700 what you're describing there's the first order thing that you're aiming for but then you can just

00:55:35.120 picture a cascade or dominoes there's all these second order effects happen that's the toxic empathy

00:55:41.320 that you're describing the harm that comes from going for that first thing without thinking about

00:55:46.100 these other things that's what people in public health are supposed to do but instead they had this

00:55:50.860 just extraordinarily myopic vision about one thing they wanted to achieve and disregarded everything

00:55:57.660 else but one of the things that's not covered in the statistics is when you think about a kid who

00:56:05.340 was in the bronx who was playing football and maybe he's the first kid in his family to potentially go

00:56:12.660 to college what do you think happened to that kid when the football season was terminated and and i've

00:56:17.720 mentioned this example a lot because i interviewed um a gentleman who runs a program for kids who are at

00:56:23.500 at risk um in the bronx and areas nearby with football because this is a place it's a thing for kids to do to

00:56:30.700 help keep them on track help keep them out of trouble and for a few of them it was even a ticket

00:56:35.380 out of there to get into college those kids lives their life is permanently altered and that doesn't show

00:56:42.900 up in the statistics so when people are thinking about the harms some of these harms do leave lasting

00:56:48.880 scars but many of them it's something that's ineffable you can't even articulate it or know what it is

00:56:54.940 but it's there we harmed a generation of kids for nothing

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00:58:15.420 i was thinking about all of those you know

00:58:23.360 inquantifiable things that were affected i i think about for example my oldest was

00:58:31.960 gosh she was about six months when covid started and you know obviously the regulations and the

00:58:38.940 restrictions surrounding it lasted for a long time and so after it was required for

00:58:45.100 her to wear a mask on a plane we just stopped traveling with her and you know my husband's

00:58:52.000 family lives in another state and so for however long that was i don't even remember how long it was

00:58:57.980 from the time she turned to to the time that it ended that regulation ended we just didn't travel to see

00:59:05.540 my husband's family and we've seen them a lot since then and it's all good now but just think about

00:59:11.020 the memories that were lost the quality time that was not spent because i wouldn't put my two-year-old

00:59:16.320 in a mask i saw those viral videos that you know the flight attendant would force the child with autism

00:59:23.720 to wear the mask and then the mom is breaking down and i'm like i do not want to force that onto my

00:59:30.360 toddler that is cruel and so think about how many people didn't go do those things didn't spend time

00:59:36.380 with family you will never know we'll never know the full impact of that i love that you're touching

00:59:42.280 on this so this is at the very end of my book one of the things i talk about is you know there are so

00:59:48.080 many lasting harms you know unfortunately physical and also economic when you think about education loss

00:59:55.040 but so many of these harms are what i described just as you're talking about this idea of things that

01:00:01.340 you only get to do third grade once right you only have one senior prom right you only have one you

01:00:08.260 know senior year football season these kids are and some of them they're fine you know they will be

01:00:13.660 fine many of them but when childhood is achingly brief and when you think we are each now as adults

01:00:20.340 we have like that highlight reel in our head you know a montage of different scenes these kids have

01:00:26.040 a large blank space where there should be memories and instead they were just alone in a bedroom in

01:00:32.620 front of a chromebook some of them and they missed that experience we took something from them it was

01:00:39.540 essentially stolen in many regards so it's it's so um it's just so meaningful to hear you talk about

01:00:46.920 that with with your with your child and missing seeing grandparents it's the same thing what this is

01:00:53.260 not benign the idea of just like oh well they did okay they learned at home that was fine again maybe

01:00:59.280 that was okay for some kids we must not only see things through a certain lens and understand the

01:01:05.820 vast harm that was inflicted unnecessarily um and again to me i touch on all of these harms and i know

01:01:13.240 we talked about them that's not what my book is focused on it's just i don't seek to manipulate

01:01:18.120 people emotionally over and over it's in there it's woven through it to me what's far more

01:01:22.840 important is for people to gain an understanding of how things actually work i'm someone who i've

01:01:28.880 written for the new york times i give an insider's look for what actually was going on behind the

01:01:34.860 scenes i talk about what was going on in public health i had people from the cdc i had others at

01:01:41.060 top institutions talking with me where i want to pull the curtain back so your audience can read this

01:01:47.860 and and have information to understand because it doesn't have to be a pandemic it's any crisis

01:01:53.760 it's anything the same playbook comes out on how these large powerful institutions um interact with

01:02:01.760 each other and people need to be armed with with critical thinking and understanding of oh i saw this

01:02:08.580 i understand now i read about this yeah now i know how to respond whether it's politically they want to

01:02:14.380 get involved or whether the response is just simply in their own mind and understanding the reality

01:02:19.140 of what's going on because sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is refuse to say that

01:02:24.140 two plus two is five that's right even if that is in your own mind and we do learn that from 1984

01:02:28.760 you mentioned the orwellian nature of all of this sometimes the most powerful thing that you can

01:02:33.520 do is tell the truth and that's what you do in this book and so for people who are thinking okay

01:02:37.900 i'm going to be prepared next time a crisis hits this book is perfect for them not only because

01:02:43.420 it's revelatory of all the things that we're talking about the mechanisms that go on but it

01:02:48.080 arms them with the facts and also the courage to say okay maybe in my small way or maybe in some huge

01:02:53.940 way i'm not going to let this happen again and so i'm just so grateful to you i really am whether

01:02:59.820 it's just your innate personality or whether it is god-inspired courage whatever it is i'm grateful for

01:03:06.560 you for telling the truth and for coming on the show today this was a very interesting conversation

01:03:11.520 everyone go out and get this book you got to get it it is called an abundance of caution

01:03:16.540 american schools the virus and a story of bad decisions david thank you so much

01:03:21.040 thanks allie appreciate it

01:03:23.100 all right guys hope you loved that conversation with david after after i was done talking to him i was

01:03:33.920 like this guy is amazing he is so courageous he is so clear and articulate i learned a lot in that

01:03:41.760 conversation even as someone who was following covid closely and all the masking regulations and

01:03:48.060 his book it's just incredible it reveals so much so make sure you go out and get it um i want to remind

01:03:54.960 you guys speaking of just telling the truth and ensuring that people are informed and holding our public

01:04:01.700 officials accountable you have to subscribe to nicole shanahan's new show you can go to youtube.com

01:04:08.720 slash nicole dash shanahan make sure that you go to my channel and you watch the interview i did with

01:04:16.340 nicole it will if you don't know who she is it will introduce you fully to her and show you just how

01:04:22.120 much she cares about the truth and empowering people especially moms and families so excited that she has

01:04:29.600 joined blaze tv as a blaze tv host it is awesome also subscribe to blaze tv go to blaze tv.com

01:04:36.620 slash ali subscribe you'll get all of our exclusive behind the paywall content it also ensures that you

01:04:43.920 will never be separated from us by the censors because we never know what's going to happen on

01:04:48.720 youtube and spotify but blaze tv that's where we build our community and that's where we give you

01:04:54.480 content that you can't find anywhere else so go to blaze tv.com slash ali to subscribe all right that's

01:05:00.840 all we've got time for today we will be back here tomorrow

01:05:03.300 you

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - April 30, 2025

Ep 1181 ｜ Silent Lunches & Stolen Childhoods： The Truth About School Shutdowns ｜ Guest： David Zweig

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