From Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor to the head of the CDC, our so-called elites continue to mislead us on the realities of COVID. Why? Because they are agenda-driven, not fact-driven. And once they decide that a policy is right, fact manipulation is entirely permitted, so long as it s in service of that policy, like the obsession with vaccines.
00:03:02.340And offering the story of how last summer she told her teenage son, who she said had been looking forward to summer camp all year long,
00:03:10.080that he couldn't go, even though millions of children would go to summer camp in 2021.
00:03:15.700And by the way, the summer prior, without any problem whatsoever.
00:03:21.220Remember when COVID was beginning to wane for a while and she tried to switch the messaging to masks forever,
00:03:27.140tweeting about how masks prevent all sorts of viruses having nothing to do with COVID-19.
00:03:32.640Well, that's none of your business, whether I want to wear a mask or not to prevent the common cold on an airplane, Rochelle.
00:03:38.860I figured this woman was just another hardcore left wing COVID hysteric who had managed to scare herself into oblivion.
00:03:44.800But this weekend, a different reality emerged.
00:03:49.620Rochelle is apparently a partisan hack.
00:03:53.200Why else would she jump through such hoops to avoid calling out Justice Sotomayor's BS at the U.S. Supreme Court?
00:04:00.500The hard time she gave Fox News Channel's Brett Baier on his most basic attempts at a fact check reveal a partisan determined to change the subject.
00:04:12.120Not someone concerned about the credibility of public health messaging.
00:04:16.560Watch this first up on Justice Sotomayor's claim about 100,000 children being hospitalized, many, she claimed, on ventilators.
00:04:23.980What we can find from Friday suggests there are fewer than 3,500 current pediatric hospitalizations from COVID-19.
00:04:35.600Yeah, but, you know, here's what I can tell you about our pediatric hospitalizations now.
00:04:39.860First of all, the vast majority of children who are in the hospital are unvaccinated.
00:04:44.140And for those children who are not eligible for vaccination, we do know that they are most likely to get sick with COVID if their family members aren't vaccinated.
00:05:01.420And in fact, what I will say is, while pediatric hospitalizations are rising, they're still about 15-fold less than hospitalizations of our older age demographics.
00:05:11.860Why did he have to press to get her to answer that?
00:05:28.700Shouldn't the CDC director care that a major figure in the United States is putting out shocking misinformation on children and COVID in a highly watched Supreme Court hearing?
00:05:37.140Isn't it her professional obligation to correct that?
00:05:40.560She did finally admit that there are at most 3,500 kids in hospitals with COVID right now, not 100,000, but only after she tried to dodge.
00:05:50.840And even then, it was immediately on to how the kids who are hospitalized are unvaccinated and no context on how the vast majority of kids in the hospital right now are there with COVID, not because of COVID.
00:06:27.760I'll tell you that right now, 17, if you're unvaccinated, you're 17 times more likely to be in the hospital and 20 times more likely to die than if you're on, than if you're boosted.
00:07:51.600By the way, there was also a study recently out of Houston Methodist showing Omicron is much more contagious than Delta, which we know, but does not, quote, appear to have the very virulence.
00:08:42.700Joining me now to discuss all of it, as I mentioned, is Phil Kirpin.
00:08:48.240Phil truly understands this better than most people.
00:08:50.720He actually filed an amicus brief, meaning friend of the court brief, that was cited repeatedly in the arguments on Friday.
00:08:57.000And he knows the thing or two that Sonia Sotomayor apparently does not.
00:09:00.700Phil, first, let me just ask you for your reaction to the disinformation that we heard from Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Breyer, the liberal wing of the court, on Friday.
00:09:10.680Well, it was really, really remarkable, Megan.
00:09:15.000It felt like a time warp at times, like we were still in March 2020, and we were scared and bewildered, and we didn't know what was happening.
00:09:22.780And hospitals in New York were overwhelmed.
00:09:25.580And it was completely out of time and out of place for what is actually happening.
00:09:31.260And anyone who's following the data and following recent developments would know that.
00:09:36.320And so they live in not just Washington, D.C. is a bubble on this stuff, but there's sort of a bubble within a bubble.
00:09:43.200I suspect they get I actually assumed they were getting their information from CNN and The New York Times.
00:09:48.140But it turns out, I think, that she was reading The Guardian, the left-wing U.K. newspaper The Guardian, which apparently had an article that was written sort of in an unclear way that suggested over 100,000 children were hospitalized.
00:10:03.100So I guess that's where she got that insane, obviously, false number.
00:10:06.900But just complete disconnect from reality is what the liberal justices showed.
00:10:10.900It was. It was a complete disconnect in the business about Omicron being just as deadly as Delta.
00:10:18.280I mean, the most charitable thing you could possibly say about something like this, even if you're the most hawky of the COVID hawks, is, we'll see.
00:10:28.240You know, is that the best you could possibly do?
00:10:31.140You know, those are going to cause a lot more cases.
00:10:32.500We've now had South Africa go through their entire Omicron wave up and down.
00:10:36.960So we've got one country's totally complete experience with this.
00:10:40.480And it looks like their deaths are going to come in at about 20 times lower than their Delta wave in the Gauteng province, which is Johannesburg, 18 million population, the sort of the epicenter of the epicenter.
00:10:51.160The inherent reduction in severity of the virus is a little bit in question because they also have a lot more immunity from prior waves.
00:11:02.760And so, you know, this is something we're looking at now as we have the London wave coming down very fast.
00:11:07.160And by the way, the D.C. wave of Omicron is coming down very fast as well.
00:11:11.380The justices don't even seem to be aware of what's happening in their own town because the percent positive in D.C. peaked right around January 1st and it's been dropping very steadily here in D.C.
00:11:20.020So there is this question of, you know, how much of the 10 or 20 fold reduction in mortality is the virus being weaker versus there being more immunity in the population?
00:11:31.900It's we're going to find out that it's a mix of both.
00:11:34.240But one thing that's absolutely clear is that this is much less severe and is a much lower threat.
00:11:41.020And I would argue does not present in any way a grave danger for the purposes of the OSHA determination.
00:11:47.460You know, even if you thought that Delta did.
00:11:50.660That's the standard they have to meet in order.
00:11:52.900Well, that's one of the things they have to prove in order for Biden's vaccine mandates to withstand scrutiny, that there is a grave danger posed by COVID as we know it today.
00:12:02.180This today's COVID, not yesterday's, not March of 2020's COVID.
00:12:05.460By the way, I know I see your point on The Guardian, if that if that exact number appears there.
00:12:11.840My first inclination is yours was The New York Times, because that was the paper that said we had nine hundred thousand children hospitalized with COVID since the beginning of the pandemic.
00:12:22.900And at that time, it had been sixty three article were as long as the article said that she won all these awards.
00:13:05.420I mean, he basically said, look, we had seven hundred fifty thousand cases yesterday.
00:13:08.640And if we delay this by one day, if we should stay by one day, that means another seven hundred fifty thousand people will be infected as if, you know, it's a switch and you turn the mandate on and cases go to zero.
00:13:21.220And of course, what we've seen with Omicron is we've actually seen the highest case counts in the most vaccinated places.
00:13:27.660So the most vaccinated county in America, Marin County, California, has sky high record case counts.
00:13:34.540You know, New York City has sky high case counts.
00:13:37.720And right here and just outside D.C., we have Montgomery County, Maryland, which is, I think, number three most vaccinated county in America, massive record case counts.
00:13:46.740And so this idea that if we were just forcing mandating people to be vaccinated, we wouldn't have case counts is completely false if you're paying even the slightest attention to what's happening in the world right now.
00:13:59.240How much your brief focused very much on, I think, the relevant question of the day, which is what we're dealing with right now is mostly Omicron.
00:14:47.040What we argue in our brief, and I think the evidence now overwhelming on this point, is that there is a benefit to vaccination, but it's a personal benefit.
00:14:54.960It is not a public or societal benefit because it only reduces disease severity.
00:15:00.360It does not reduce your chances of catching the virus or transmitting it to others.
00:15:05.080And that really undercuts the entire rationale for these mandates.
00:15:08.920And it's also really important to respect people who choose not to get the vaccine because that's a very personal decision.
00:15:18.300You know, there is a risk of adverse events, especially if someone's already been infected.
00:15:26.120That's something that people should decide with their doctors, not by politicians and bureaucrats dictating what's best for everyone.
00:15:32.040And I think that if you stop thinking about this idea that there's going to be this grand societal benefit, which I think the evidence now shows there won't be, it should be very clear that the right way to think about this is as a personal decision, a personal private health decision that individuals should be able to make with the advice of their doctors.
00:15:49.300And, you know, I think the evidence on this point right now with Omicron, and we walked through all of this in our brief, it's really overwhelming.
00:15:54.780There does seem to be a time limited reduction in transmission and the risk of becoming infected, but it seems to wear off after only 60 or 90 days after the second shot and maybe you're talking about Delta after a third shot.
00:16:09.760So after that, in fact, we see in a lot of these countries, the protection goes negative.
00:16:13.960You're more likely to get it than someone who's unvaccinated after 60 or 90 days in the Danish and the Canadian data.
00:16:33.380OK, so they concluded that you that after 60 to 90 days, you're more likely to contract COVID if you've had the vaccines than if you haven't.
00:16:45.540But is does that is there an asterisk to that latter point saying if you haven't and you have natural immunity?
00:16:54.540Yeah, they didn't break the data up in either of those studies.
00:16:57.000And I suspect that you put your finger on exactly what's happening here, which is the unvaccinated group probably has a lot more natural immunity than the vaccinated group, which is why they're getting infected less.
00:17:08.600When the vaccine immunity sort of wears off and gets closer to zero, you get more of a comparison of the group with more previously infected versus not previously infected.
00:17:18.560So to me, most likely it's waning to zero and then you're getting a composition effect from more natural immunity.
00:17:24.700But we really don't know why the data is showing what it is.
00:17:27.340And there are some plausible there are some plausible mechanisms that can actually cause reduced immunity.
00:17:33.900If you have things like antibody dependent enhancement and there there there are physical mechanisms that could cause negative vaccine effectiveness.
00:17:41.540But I'm not sure that we actually see any evidence of those.
00:17:44.160It is very possible that it's just what you suggested, that it kind of wanes to zero.
00:17:48.840And then you have a different composition in terms of natural immunity.
00:17:51.560But neither of those studies broke that out.
00:17:53.820So we don't let me ask you about wanes to zero to the last I looked at this was when I had Scott Gottlieb on, former FDA commissioner who now is on the board of Pfizer.
00:18:01.200And he's touting the vaccines and he's touting the mandates.
00:18:03.360And I'm telling him a study just came out that day that was published in The Lancet about the Pfizer vaccine, showing that after six months post your second dose, it had only a 47 percent effectiveness at preventing covid, which is not good.
00:18:16.940And he claimed he hadn't seen it, blah, blah, blah.
00:18:18.900But that's I mean, that's that's not so good.
00:18:20.560And it certainly seemed like based on the Israel study and other data, you'd be better off six months post a covid infection at at fighting off a second infection than six months post your second Pfizer vax.
00:18:37.360Well, the studies we were just talking about for Omicron, we see that the observed vaccine effectiveness goes negative, which means you're probably not getting any protection at all from the vaccine, even if you were able to correct for those confounders.
00:18:53.800I think that one of the issues we've got right now, Megan, is they haven't updated this vaccine.
00:18:58.980And so you're using a vaccine that essentially expresses the spike protein of a two year old now extinct virus while something very different is what's circulating right now.
00:19:08.700It's as if they were mandating you as, you know, the flu vaccine from five years ago instead of using this year's.
00:19:13.660You might get some effect, but it's going to be pretty small and short lived.
00:19:17.020And so I think one of the real failures of the Biden administration and all they do is talk about vaccines all day long.
00:19:22.580But when we had the sequence for this, they didn't make any expedited effort to actually get a vaccine that was specific to it available.
00:19:31.220And we're still using this one that was designed for a very different virus.
00:19:35.520What about the fact that, well, Delta is still out there and the vaccines are a bit more effective at preventing transmission of Delta?
00:19:42.120I mean, it's nothing to write home about, but it's certainly doing a better job at preventing transmission of Delta than it is Omicron.
00:19:48.340Well, I mean, I think that it's hard to get a really good handle on how much Delta is still out there.
00:19:55.260If you believe the CDC, it's pretty close to none.
00:19:57.980If you look at a state like Illinois that does their own sequencing, they still have about half of the cases being Delta in Illinois and their own genetic sequencing.
00:20:04.440So we've got a big disconnect here between the CDC saying Delta is gone and some of the state data saying there's still quite a bit of it.
00:20:11.820To me, where this really becomes important is not so much with the vaccines, because I feel like everyone who wants the vaccines is probably already getting them at this point.
00:20:19.660To me, where it really becomes important is the availability of the therapeutics, which the Biden administration has really mishandled,
00:20:25.600because the Regeneron therapeutic, the one that President Trump had, is about 75 or 85 percent effective against the Delta variant in terms of reducing hospitalization and death risk.
00:20:36.140It's extremely effective. It appears it's less effective against Omicron, probably more like only 40 or 50 percent effective.
00:20:43.500But, you know, if we were using the PCR test to screen the likely Delta cases, we could be giving everyone in any kind of risk category with a likely Delta case that therapeutic.
00:20:54.360And I don't know of any state that's really doing it that way.
00:20:56.600Instead, they're rationing based on race and they're rationing based on seemingly political considerations.
00:21:02.200And so we're really misusing the tools we have right now to deal with those remaining Delta cases.
00:21:06.420And all of our efforts, our public health messaging continues to go into the vaccine, get a vaccination.
00:21:13.560You must be vaccinated. It's like, stop it. Snap out of it. Stepford, child, come back to me.
00:21:19.320The reality has changed in so much your mess, so much your messaging.
00:21:22.920It's so annoying and it's befuddling to watch somebody like Rochelle Walensky until you realize there is zero chance in hell she would have done that to cover for a Justice Alito who had misstated the facts, which leads me to my last second to last question, Phil.
00:21:37.000And that is Justice Gorsuch took a beating in the press and the left wing press for allegedly misstating how much flu we deal with each year.
00:21:47.080They're saying that he they're claiming that he said hundreds of thousands of people die from the flu every year.
00:21:56.740And you were the one because I've been following your Twitter, which is amazing.
00:22:00.240And everyone should follow Phil Kirpan at Twitter on Twitter.
00:22:33.800Flu kills, I believe, hundreds, thousands of people every year.
00:22:38.280Flu kills, I believe, hundreds, thousands of people every year.
00:22:42.740Flu kills, I believe, hundreds, thousands of people every year.
00:22:46.600So there's no of there's no of in there, Phil.
00:22:51.740Yeah, it's one of it's like an emperor's new clothes thing.
00:22:54.280People who are really, really liberal, true believers insist that they hear a silent of in that sentence, including a guy named Jason Lemon, who writes for Newsweek, who refuses to correct his article on this.
00:23:06.020Even after the audio was pointed out to him.
00:23:08.060And by the way, the transcription error has now been corrected on the Supreme Court website.
00:23:12.880And so they point to that as the basis for their claim anymore.
00:23:15.840Now, the transcription error is corrected.
00:23:22.940They wanted an alibi for not covering the insane things that the liberal justice falsely asserted.
00:23:29.260And so they seized on what was obviously a transcription error to smear a conservative justice.
00:23:34.660And by the way, Megan, that was actually a really good line of questioning from Gorsuch.
00:23:38.400The point that he was making was kind of, you know, what's the limiting principle here to this idea that OSHA should mandate vaccines because viruses constitute workplace hazards.
00:23:49.080And he said, you know, flu kills thousands of people every year.
00:24:00.200So I thought it was a very interesting line of questioning.
00:24:05.520And, you know, sort of instead of covering that line of questioning, they used it as a trans.
00:24:09.580They used this transcription error to call him stupid and give themselves an alibi for not covering the things the liberal justices really did say.
00:24:17.540And by the way, you know, in just in terms of misstatements, at one point, Justice Breyer said 750 million people got Omicron the day before, got COVID the day before.
00:24:39.260And how do you think it's likely to come down?
00:24:42.740Well, I think we'll get something today.
00:24:44.420We'll get something today, even if it's just a brief administrative stay while they figure out what the actual decision is going to be, because as you pointed out, the effective data will go shorter is today.
00:24:54.520I don't know if it'll just be, you know, give us a few more days administrative stay or we'll get an actual decision.
00:24:58.940But I'm cautiously optimistic on the OSHA mandate.
00:25:02.700I think that other than the three in the tank liberal justices, the other six were very skeptical of the idea that Congress had authorized OSHA to do this and OSHA Act, you know, 50 years ago.
00:25:13.940And I think that on the basis of what they call their major questions doctrine, it's pretty likely that the six Republican appointed justices will all agree.
00:25:24.000On the CMS health worker case, I'm less optimistic.
00:25:27.720That statute is much broader in its language.
00:25:31.320And we've got a lot of justices that I think want to decide on the basis of the statutory language.
00:25:36.200You've got Roberts, who always likes to play both sides and triangulate things.
00:25:39.940And so that one, I feel, is going to be a 5-4.
00:25:42.760It could be a 5-4 in either direction.
00:25:44.440I have less of a good feeling on that one.
00:25:45.960And that just speaks to the health care workers as opposed to any worker at any business that has more than 100 employees who are swept up.
00:25:53.900That's two out of three employers in America.
00:25:56.320That's what they're swept up in sort of the first challenge that the Supreme Court is trying to decide.
00:26:00.760Phil Kirpin, I would like to thank you for being a source of actual good information from the beginning of this thing.
00:26:07.280As I say, if you would like it directly, follow Phil on Twitter.
00:26:14.580Up next, we're going to talk about schools with Corey DeAngelis of the American Federation for Children.
00:26:20.060The teachers in Chicago continue to refuse to teach.
00:26:24.540And just as we'd like to exempt the actual teachers, you know, sort of say it's the unions, which nine times out of ten, it really is union-led nonsense.
00:26:32.400It's 73% of the teachers there who support this.
00:26:35.280I mean, you can't really say that here.
00:26:53.260But what if you or a partner needs to step away?
00:26:56.140When the unexpected happens, count on Canada Life's flexible life and health insurance to help your business keep working, even when you can't.
00:27:03.980Don't let life's challenges stand in the way of your success.
00:27:17.280Join me now as a strong advocate for school choice, especially in the wake of these COVID school closures.
00:27:28.720Corey DeAngelis, National Director of Research at American Federation for Children, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and senior fellow at the Reason Foundation.
00:27:38.040Corey, thank you so much for being here.
00:27:39.440So let's kick it off with what the latest is in Chicago, where it appears the teachers just refuse to teach.
00:27:48.080Yeah, look, they decided to close school for another day today.
00:27:52.500And since the fourth day of school closures, they're holding children's education hostage nearly two years into this since this all started.
00:28:03.420Every other business essentially has been able to figure it out.
00:28:06.600Private schools and daycares were somehow magically able to be open essentially the entire time.
00:28:12.420Grocery stores were able to be open essentially the entire time.
00:28:15.840And I think the problem here is that the main difference is one of incentives that in the private sector, the the schools and every business understands that their customers can take their money elsewhere.
00:28:27.020When it comes to the public school teachers unions, they get your money regardless of whether they open their doors for business.
00:28:31.480So they fight as hard as possible to keep their doors closed in order to secure additional ransom payments from the taxpayer in perpetuity.
00:28:39.580It's a never ending cycle. And we're seeing that play out in Chicago, where look, in Chicago, they've already received two point eight billion dollars over over eight thousand dollars per student in Chicago since March of 2020.
00:28:51.960And federal, quote unquote, covid relief that was really had nothing to do with safety from the beginning of all this.
00:28:58.500It's really had to do more with politics and power than anything else.
00:29:01.800And they're still closed because they figured out that they can use the closures as leverage to get even more money.
00:29:08.820And look, they're going to continue doing this.
00:29:11.400And I think the only way to get out of this problem is to fund the student directly.
00:29:15.420Chicago spends over twenty seven thousand dollars per student per year.
00:29:19.720Now, according to their twenty twenty two budget, average private school tuition is only about eleven thousand dollars in Chicago.
00:29:26.860Why not give most, if not all of that funding to the parent and let them figure it out?
00:29:32.360That's the only way I think you get out of this so that the school actually has an incentive from the bottom up to cater to the needs of families as opposed to the other way around.
00:29:40.320That is amazing. Two point eight billion dollars in federal covid funding from the elementary and secondary school emergency relief fund just to Chicago public schools alone.
00:29:52.100So what did they do with the money? Right. That you read the Wall Street Journal.
00:29:56.260Fox News was reporting. OK, so they spent it on laptops because, of course, they want to make sure everybody can do the remote learning.
00:30:03.320That was number one priority for these teachers.
00:30:06.160They spent twenty six million on safety equipment, medical equipment, masks, air purifiers, other items intended to make schools safer.
00:30:13.060All the Chicago teachers went to the front of the line when it came to the vaccines, when they were still sparse.
00:30:17.880None of it is enough. None of it will ever be enough.
00:30:22.640That's exactly right, Megan. It'll never be enough because they can always argue as to why they need more money.
00:30:27.300The way that I put it before is that underperforming private schools shut down, underperforming government schools get more money.
00:30:33.380Why? Because they can say, well, we're underperforming and failing because we don't have enough money, even though since 1960 in the U.S.,
00:30:39.980we've increased per pupil education expenditures by two hundred and eighty seven percent after adjusting for inflation.
00:30:46.280That's before all the covid bailouts. We'll see when the data come out on that.
00:30:50.320But we're seeing individual districts increasing per pupil education expenditures over the past couple of years in places like Los Angeles,
00:30:57.420where the data has already surfaced by about 60, 70 percent over a couple of years.
00:31:02.860It's just absolutely horrendous. And if you look at how they're spending the money in places like Los Angeles, the district officials laid out a plan a few months ago and they said they pointed out that six percent of their student population has left.
00:31:15.160There's this mass exodus occurring from the government school system right now because a lot of parents are fed up with it.
00:31:21.060And the remote learning, we really shouldn't even call it remote learning because the kids aren't learning all that much.
00:31:25.480If you look at the data on that from McKinsey and Company and so many other studies on the topic, we should call it remote instruction, if anything,
00:31:34.860or maybe remotely learning or maybe remotely learning because you're not learning all that much.
00:31:38.500The school closures have hurt kids academically and in other ways, too, mentally, physically.
00:31:43.900We've seen obesity in children increase substantially over the past couple of a year and a half.
00:31:49.720And we've seen teenage suicide attempts increase by about 31 percent over the past year and a half.
00:31:57.220It's just absolutely horrendous that they're still playing this school closure card to to use that as leverage for even more money from the taxpayer.
00:32:07.200And there's no there's no real way out of it except for bottom up accountability.
00:32:11.800If your grocery store closes, you can take your money elsewhere.
00:32:15.280If a Walmart closes for whatever reason or if the employees go on strike as a customer, I can take my money to Trader Joe's or or Safeway or Harris Teeter.
00:32:24.680But when your public school closes, families are stuck in between this tug of war between the district and the union.
00:32:32.020And the customer feels all the pain in the current government school system.
00:32:37.660And thankfully, it's finally being exposed for the nonsense that it is.
00:32:43.160There's this messed up set of incentives that are baked into the government school system where they get your money regardless.
00:32:48.800And in fact, the worst they do, they can actually profit from that.
00:32:52.400And we're seeing that play out with the school closures.
00:32:54.860And the way that I put it before is that covid didn't break the government school system.
00:32:58.980It was already broken in the past year and a half, almost two years now, simply shined a spotlight on the main problem with K to 12 education all across the country,
00:33:08.000which happens to be a massive, long existing power imbalance between the public school monopoly and individual families.
00:33:18.100Teachers unions have overplayed their hand.
00:33:19.900Twenty twenty one was already the year of school choice.
00:33:22.100Or if you're hip with the lingo, it's the year that we fund students, not systems.
00:33:26.060And 19 states in twenty twenty one alone expanded or enacted programs to fund people as opposed to buildings to allow families to take their children's education dollars to a private or homeschool setting.
00:33:38.800If they don't like whatever's going on in their public school and support for school choice in the minds of voters, according to nationwide polling, has been surging as well.
00:33:48.900I want to get to that. I want to get to that because if it's it's all red states, it's not as necessary like what we need is bills like that that become law in blue states where the teachers unions are the strongest.
00:33:59.700And they're they remain extremely strong because they're the ones who get Democrats elected.
00:34:03.460I mean, Barack Obama was entirely beholden to the teachers union and so are the state governors in the blue states.
00:34:08.880It's disgusting if you spend any time thinking about these folks, thinking that these folks care about your kids, you're wrong.
00:34:15.220They care about the money they get from the unions.
00:34:17.920That's exactly the problem here. And look, we saw this play out in twenty twenty twenty one as well, where you had a red state Kentucky with a blue governor, Andy Beshear.
00:34:28.760He was a school choice hypocrite. He vetoed a bill that came to his desk that would have funded students directly.
00:34:35.800Thankfully, they had enough votes to override his veto, but he attended private school at one point and he sent his kids to private school, which is great.
00:34:43.600I'm happy for him. I think every family should seek out the best education for their children, but they shouldn't fight against school choice for other families.
00:34:50.980Thankfully, they had enough votes to override that veto in Kentucky.
00:34:53.640Joe Biden exclusive almost exclusively attended private schools, sent his kids to private schools, his children attended private, his grandchildren attended private schools.
00:35:03.200That's great again, but they should not fight against other families from having that having that same opportunity.
00:35:09.760And I will say it's not a Republican versus Democrat thing in theory or even among the majority of constituents.
00:35:17.240If you look at nationwide polling on this, in fact, over the past year and a half, the biggest jumps in support for the concept of the money following the child has been among Democrats and parents who had kids in the public school system that happened to fail them so much starting in March of twenty twenty.
00:35:34.440But you're talking about people to wake up. You're talking about constituencies, constituencies.
00:35:39.340Yeah, that's right. But the leaders are the unions are too important to them.
00:35:43.800I mean, I see your point. Once the once the populace starts to get it, ideally, you have a change at the top in the leadership.
00:35:49.960But so far, not so much. I mean, you can't think of a group that's that these Democratic politicians are more beholden to than the unions.
00:35:59.280Yes, there's a disconnect between the people on the ground, the actual families, Democrat, Republican, independent, the Democrats in particular, and their people in office at the state houses.
00:36:10.060Democrats are substantially in state houses, much less likely to vote for school choice bills.
00:36:15.060And you're right. It's because the teachers union donations, if you think about Randy Weingarten's union, the American Federation of Teachers, for example, every single campaign cycle.
00:36:25.020If you look at the Open Secrets website since 1990, the past three decades, over ninety seven percent of their campaign contributions went to Democrat political candidates as opposed to Republicans.
00:36:36.860And so when you when you're in office as a Democrat, they're listening to the needs of the teachers unions and they have been for far too long.
00:36:45.920But I feel like in since covid has exposed all the problems with the government school system, even Democrats in office are having to start to think a little bit harder because there's been this new special interest group that has emerged over the past year and a half,
00:36:59.600which happens to be parents who want more of a say in their kids education, parents have woken up and they're holding politicians accountable more than they ever have before.
00:37:10.660So instead of just having the teachers unions to answer to politicians from all backgrounds are having to listen to the needs of parents, hopefully going forward.
00:37:19.940And I will say, just think about the logic, right?
00:37:21.700Like there's an inconsistency in the logic when it comes to Democrats who oppose school choice, because we already fund students directly when it comes to higher education with Pell grants, for example, for low income kids.
00:37:33.020The money doesn't go straight to the community college and then the student doesn't have to go to a residentially assigned higher education provider.
00:37:40.540Instead, the money rightfully goes to the student and they can choose the community college if they want.
00:37:45.460But they can also choose a public university, a private university or even a religious university.
00:37:50.240The money follows the decision of the student.
00:37:52.580We do the same thing with the federal Head Start program and other pre-K programs.
00:38:42.800The unions, the heads of the unions, they don't want it.
00:38:44.700But in a small sign of light, as you point out, some of these Democratic politicians are starting to get it that this is a problem and that you can't have, you know, zero school choice from these Democrat politicians as a policy matter while they all send their kids to private schools.
00:39:02.120And I saw that you were remarking on this guy from New Hampshire, a Democratic state senator there, I think it was, Justin Wayne.
00:39:09.620Again, this is a Democrat who's putting exactly that challenge to other lawmakers in his state.
00:39:16.540The only people who are opposing school choice today are the same people who have choice.
00:39:24.220This has been a very growing pain for me as I was against this bill my freshman year and the last three, four years struggled where I was going to be on it.
00:39:55.860So as we spend six, seven years in elementary school changing a school, your kid be a part of that change.
00:40:03.140And when they fall behind, when they don't have the resources, allegedly, when they're dealing with suspensions and things like that, then we can all go through it together.
00:40:39.380And he's referring to LB364 over there in Nebraska.
00:40:43.520They're actually debating it this week, I believe.
00:40:46.100And yeah, I mean, the logic is sound when it comes to the supporting school choice.
00:40:50.540We already fund people directly with essentially every other industry and level of education, which raises the question, why would you support it for everything else?
00:40:57.760But only when it comes to the in-between years of K-12 education, you have a problem with it.
00:41:02.500The obvious answer to me is that there's a difference of power dynamics.
00:41:05.860That there's choice choice is the norm when it comes to higher education, pre-K and everything else in the United States for now, thankfully.
00:41:14.040But choice threatens an entrenched special interest only when it comes to those in-between years of K-12 education, the teachers unions, most of all.
00:41:23.880And so they fight as hard as possible, of course, to against any change to the status quo.
00:41:28.860And their main argument will be, oh, school choice sounds fine and all, but, you know, school choice steals money from the public schools, to which I'll respond, the money doesn't belong to the government schools in the first place.
00:41:39.340No one would say that allowing families to choose their grocery store stole money from Walmart.
00:41:44.440That wouldn't make any sense because we all understand that your money, even if it's food stamp dollars that's funded by the taxpayer, it doesn't belong to any of the institutions, Walmart or Safeway or Trader Joe's.
00:41:54.500The money is meant for the family. And similarly, K-12 education dollars are meant for educating children, not for propping up and protecting a particular institution, which funds students, not systems.
00:42:07.700It's basically asking for a meritocracy. If the schools are so confident, you know, in their product, in their ability, in the teacher's ability to connect with students that actually teach them, you shouldn't worry about school choice.
00:42:18.120No problem with the money file follows the student because, you know, your students are going to stay with you.
00:42:22.240I mean, I know one of the best one of the best teachers in the country. She happens to be a friend of mine.
00:42:27.300She teaches in New Jersey and she's in a lower socioeconomic area and lower socioeconomic school where there are a lot of kids of Hispanic background who struggle when they come into the classroom.
00:42:38.360And she works tirelessly night and day to make sure that they learn and they get through and they thrive and her students do.
00:42:44.940So she's she's winning the meritocracy. Sadly, not all teachers are like that.
00:42:50.580Many, many teachers are like the ones in Chicago who want to refuse to work.
00:42:55.200Seventy three percent, they're saying of them, some seventy three percent of these teachers refuse to work.
00:43:00.420They should all be fired, as far as I'm concerned, if they don't show up.
00:43:03.060And while they collect their paychecks and this I'm going to squeeze in a quick break, Corey, but I have to play it whenever we talk about Chicago because it's so disgusting.
00:43:12.540Let me just we're going to go to break watching, watching the teachers who are now saying they cannot work because they're so terrified of covid.
00:43:19.500This was them doing their interpretive dance protest last year.
00:43:23.600Young, able bodied teachers who want to show you how scared they are of covid by leaping around their living rooms so you can understand just how fragile they are.
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00:45:01.160In Chicago, there's an interesting move by parents to sue the school district, saying that this is effectively a union strike.
00:45:16.840And while 73 percent of the teachers is a lot, it's not quite enough to justify a strike, saying you don't have the legal right as teachers to dictate whether the schools are open or closed.
00:45:29.200I like this as a means of fighting back.
00:45:32.580But the reality is it's not just happening in Chicago.
00:45:35.500I know you've written about Detroit, where you say that they're suffering there from the little known Friday variant of covid, where they've just given up school on Fridays, allegedly because of covid.
00:45:48.940I mean, there's all this weird stuff that's happened over the past couple of years that really just shows how ridiculous it is.
00:45:54.360I mean, in one place in Sacramento County in California, there's a story about they had a closure rule that arbitrarily applied to schools, but not to daycares, because obviously covid knows if you're learning something, then they're going to it's going to get you.
00:46:11.240And similarly, all across the country, there were at least 10 states that I counted where the public schools where they were saying it wasn't safe enough for them to open.
00:46:20.400So they were doing the remote learning stuff that we shouldn't call learning because they're not learning all that much anyway.
00:46:24.880It's remote instruction or even more accurately, it's just a school closure.
00:46:28.480But they were opening the same schools for daycare services, the same buildings and charging parents out of pocket for something that they're already paying for through the property tax system.
00:46:40.860It's just absolutely absolutely ridiculous. And it really just showed people, you know, how stupid this is.
00:46:46.500Same thing with Detroit. They're planning on closing on Fridays before the winter break.
00:46:51.240And, yeah, it's like it's like the what does the virus know that it's Friday and that's the only day it's going to get you.
00:46:57.500And so you can't go to school on Fridays. I mean, we all understood what it was.
00:47:00.980It was a way to to lengthen the weekend. And we're seeing this post winter break.
00:47:05.760They want to extend the winter break. And I don't think it's because the people in the system are are bad or incompetent.
00:47:11.800I think the problem is one of incentives. It's the system itself where you get the same amount of money,
00:47:18.460regardless of of the satisfaction of the customers in no other industry.
00:47:23.680Does this does this happen? And I think that's why we saw the grocery stores open.
00:47:27.520We saw the private schools open. We saw pretty much everything else running normally as fast as possible,
00:47:33.380except for the schools that which happened to be the public schools, which happened to be one of the safest places,
00:47:38.960especially for kids who are at very little risk of mortality from the virus.
00:47:44.080Mm hmm. And and yet, you know, even when they go to the schools and believe me, I much prefer open schools to close schools,
00:47:51.100but they get there. And what kind of schooling are they actually getting when they have to wear the masks all day
00:47:55.120and they're in between the plexiglass barriers and they have to stay six feet apart from everybody
00:47:59.180and they have to run around playing basketball with masks on, which is highly questionable.
00:48:03.800And they're scared by their teachers day in and day out about a virus that really has absolutely no effect on children.
00:48:09.480For the most part, it's just that's a subject for our next time.
00:48:12.780But, Corey, I really appreciate all the good work you've been doing on this.
00:48:15.700Thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you so much, Megan.
00:48:19.600Next up, one of our favorite independent journalists, Matt Taibbi, is here with some great, great thoughts on January 6th.
00:48:28.620And you hear AOC has COVID. Don't go away.
00:48:32.380Joining me now, Matt Taibbi, editor for the TK News Substack and co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast
00:48:46.200and one of the most fair journalists working today.
00:48:49.680Great to have you back on the show, Matt. How's it going?
00:48:52.480It's going great, Megan. Thank you for having me.
00:48:54.720All right. Let's start with Rochelle Walensky, who doesn't seem to understand the concept of just being a truth teller
00:48:59.980and not a cover the ass of Sonia Sotomayor player.
00:49:04.260She was asked by Brett Baer repeatedly over the weekend when he's hosting Fox News Sunday temporarily now.
00:49:10.780And they're rotating cast. But in any event, he asked her repeatedly what she said was wrong.
00:49:17.780There aren't 100,000 children in hospitals and on ventilators.
00:49:22.300There haven't even been that many since the beginning of the pandemic.
00:49:26.060Right. Dodge. But she goes to vaccines.
00:49:28.920What we really need is vaccines, vaccines, vaccines, vaccines for children.
00:49:32.240Whoever is in the hospital hasn't had a vaccine.
00:49:34.420And then only when he pushes her again, does she finally say, yeah, OK, it's not true.
01:17:48.300And what Trump did is exactly the opposite of of what politicians always do, which is the groveling, you know, sort of aid drafted apology.
01:18:57.660And there's nothing who nothing and no one who's inviolate to me, not the Republican establishment and John McCain, not the Fox News personalities, no one.
01:19:40.900No, I mean, look, I don't I don't credit him with actually thinking this through, but he is amazing at that.
01:19:47.300But the flip side of this, I mean, I remember an example.
01:19:50.620I covered Howard Dean when he first started traveling around the country and reporters hated Dean for whatever reason.
01:19:56.400I can't remember what it was, but they would every day they would they would pester him and say, aren't you too much of a pacifist or aren't you too, too much of a leftist to be the president?
01:20:06.760And whatever you think about that question, he got it like a thousand times a day.
01:20:11.940And rather than just tell everyone to go screw and move on to another question, he tried every single day to answer the question.
01:20:20.900Like he would he would sit down patiently and with with some reporter who was, you know, trying to nail him and and and basically beg for them not to not to say that he was just unqualified for office.
01:20:56.540I my husband and I were having this discussion.
01:20:58.360If it's not Trump on the GOP side next time around, and this is an eminently winnable race, eminently winnable race for the GOP next time around against Biden or whoever.
01:21:14.320And my husband's position was it can't be anybody who was prominent during the Trump era like those are the Republicans who were in any way part of the Civil War back then within the GOP.
01:21:29.760Let me tell you what I really think about Donald Trump and then all a bunch of bad things about Donald Trump and the convention where he didn't really endorse Donald Trump.
01:21:36.300And then and then he kind of like back Donald Trump's election claims.
01:21:40.040But then he said stuff like, you know what I mean?
01:22:58.400And I think I think, you know, Youngkin is kind of maybe it's not him, but but somebody like him is kind of the formula for for what could succeed for Republicans.
01:23:09.020Not that I'm necessarily rooting for the outcome, but but but I think I think that's I think you saw in that race.
01:23:39.560They don't really know what Vladimir Putin is doing necessarily or not doing.
01:23:43.060They just like how strong he is. Right.
01:23:44.900I think in today's day and age, especially like with toxic masculinity taking away, you know, a lot of things that we thought were attractive in men, the the Republican Party needs somebody who's got some sharp elbows and telegraphs as strong and quote a real man.
01:24:06.040And by the way, Matt, this is bringing me to before we get to Youngkin and where the where the GOP goes.
01:24:15.500It was some Canadian politician who tweeted out a picture of his wife who had just come home from a 12 hour overnight shift at the hospital, I guess.
01:24:24.840And I've got to I will read to you what he tweeted because it's so amazing.
01:24:28.800You guys can check out my Twitter if you want to see it for yourself, which you should, because you've got to see the responses.
01:24:33.360He writes his name is John Reyes, J-O-N.
01:24:36.220Even after a 12 hour night shift at the hospital last night, my wife still has the energy to shovel the driveway.
01:24:46.120God bless her and all our front liners.
01:25:50.320And the whole thing is not a bad summation of what I think will win on the Republican side and perhaps nationwide next time around.
01:25:59.560Well, I mean, again, going back to Trump, remember the moment when Jeb Bush was going on and on about how strong his mother was?
01:26:07.880And Trump said she should be running in the debate.
01:26:12.780And I think I think Jeb Bush's campaign ended in that moment.
01:26:16.520I mean, I think you're you're really on to something.
01:26:20.120Youngkin also, in addition to being a sweater vest guy and not having a ton of presence, he's also a private equity type and is going to be, you know, lugging around a lot of baggage on that front as well.
01:26:34.720So that's that's why I'm sort of saying it's not necessarily going to be him.
01:26:39.580But but yeah, I think I think you're right.
01:26:41.500I think I think, you know, somebody who's a fresh face, you know, and and is not going to bend to the will of the media, especially.
01:26:51.940I think that's that's the most important quality to have, maybe slightly irascible, slightly a little bit, a little a little edgy.
01:26:59.280Yeah, a little edgy. OK, so can we talk for a minute about the series that you did covering Virginia and the parents and what mattered in Loudoun County, which is a liberal place?
01:27:09.180It's unlike a lot of places in Virginia. It's not some, you know, deep red place where, as we know, Virginia is more purple blue now.
01:27:15.860But you took a hard look at what at what's going on there, what went on there.
01:27:20.720And you said the Democrats education lunacies will bring back Trump.
01:27:26.880You talked about Nicole Hannah-Jones in the piece, but but you also had just taken a hard look at Loudoun County in Virginia.
01:27:31.640And so what what are your conclusions about where the Dems went wrong and whether they've figured it out post Virginia?
01:27:40.600Well, first of all, that that whole story was was so badly miscovered by the traditional media.
01:27:47.880They you know, the conventional explanation for what happened in Loudoun County was that this was a dog whistle Republican race baiting campaign using critical race theory as a rallying cry.
01:28:06.720And actually, it took me about, you know, maybe a half an hour worth of phone calls or maybe maybe a couple hours to find out that this thing actually started with something that had absolutely nothing to do with critical race theory.
01:28:22.520This this this was a controversy that started by you could probably go back to 2018.
01:28:28.100It had to do with gifted admissions, which is a big deal.
01:28:32.340And this this place, this is the wealthiest county in America.
01:28:36.120The these are places where the parents expect to get their kids into Harvard and Princeton and Yale and places like that.
01:28:42.900And so getting into an advanced program like Thomas Jefferson High, which is actually in Fairfax County, but they have a program to bus kids there.
01:28:51.140It's very, very important. And so there was a there there was a dispute there basically about how are we going to weigh the admissions to get into these gifted programs?
01:29:05.020And the problem was that the Asian kids were killing everybody in these admissions.
01:29:09.820There were there were there were 70 percent of the of the admittance and there were only 20 percent of the population.
01:29:15.980All the other demographics were unhappy about that.
01:29:18.260And so they there was a move to change the rules.
01:29:20.580The NBA and the LACP filed a complaint.
01:29:24.480And that led to a series of incidents that ended up getting into the news.
01:29:31.860But the root of this had nothing to do with with critical race theory.
01:29:35.020This was about whether or not we're going to use standardized tests and grades to decide who gets into gifted programs.
01:29:42.180And, you know, it's it's it's a it's pretty weighty stuff.
01:29:45.780There was that. And then there was the school closures thing.
01:29:48.480That was a much bigger deal in Loudoun County than the curriculum.
01:29:53.860So that was that was an important thing.
01:29:55.740And then when you finally got to what they were what they were recommending that the schools do,
01:30:01.200you know, because they had hired these outside equity consultants to do a review.
01:30:06.740And of course, they found systemic racism everywhere.
01:30:09.140But the the one of the recommendations, just to give an example, was they wanted to create what they call an equity ambassador program,
01:30:16.480which would have been an anonymous group of non-white only students who would have regularly informed on the rest of the student body to the school.
01:31:00.680So what do you think the lessons are for other?
01:31:03.900Well, for really for Democrats, right, coming out of that, it's like I it got expanded to cover everything.
01:31:11.120Right. What I notice is in the wake of the Virginia loss by the Dems, whatever your agenda was, you said that's what Virginia was about.
01:31:18.420Right. Like that's my thing. That's what my thing was.
01:31:22.000But I do think it was absolutely about parental rights, for sure.
01:31:25.240And being able to like weigh in and that devastating soundbite by McAuliffe saying parents don't have the right to dictate what their what their children are taught.
01:31:34.940But was it what was it was it about more than that?
01:31:37.440Or like what's what's your point in terms of what the Democrats need to learn?
01:31:40.540Well, first of all, I think what he was saying, which is really it's interesting because it reflects a point of view that people have.
01:31:50.100And Nicole Hannah-Jones and I actually had a little bit of a sparring session about this online.
01:31:55.760You know, her point of view is that education is a is a public good.
01:32:01.120And so it's more important that school is more about attaining a collective public good than it is about personal development.
01:32:12.320And there's a major philosophical dispute.
01:32:15.940And I think there are arguments on both sides for this.
01:32:20.840But, you know, when you when you have all these parents in Loudoun County and what they're thinking about is, well, I have to get my my son or daughter into a really good school.
01:32:32.060And they've done a lot of work and they get great test scores and they get perfect grades and that's not going to be the criteria for getting into a gifted program.
01:32:44.700And I think I think what what the Democrats are are deluded about is that a lot of the salute and it's not just in Loudoun County.
01:32:56.500They're doing this all all over the country that, you know, whether it's the University of California system that's eliminating standardized tests.
01:33:03.120Same thing in New York City, where they're they're changing the rules for the gifted and talented programs.
01:33:08.840They're doing it in colleges all over the country.
01:33:11.000It's this whole idea that there's something amiss with sort of merit based admissions and that we have to go for this equity route, which is, you know, there's an argument for it.
01:33:22.760But I think I think they think it's more politically tenable than it is.
01:33:27.260I think most the larger portion of Americans think that parents should have a say in in these matters and and that, you know, there's we should teach our kids that they should.
01:33:41.000The that the student who gets the best scores and works the hardest and gets the best grades.
01:33:46.280I think there's we should be cheering for that student, especially if they're immigrants, which a lot of the students in Loudoun County were.
01:33:54.540So I think they've got this issue wrong.
01:33:58.740I think they think that that, you know, they can sell this as as being, you know, sort of racial justice.