Suburban Moms Must Punish Democrats for Closing Schools

BUCK: I want to start with a basic premise here, and it is one that I think’s gonna have a major effect — and Clay and I have been discussing this on air with you and off air a lot, a major effect — on a midterm election. But we gotta make sure everyone’s clear on it. The Democrats have betrayed kids. They’ve made decisions that have really hurt kids all across the country. Now, we can — and we will continue to — talk about the issue of abortion, Roe v. Wade and the decades-long moral stain on our country from that.

I’m actually not even speaking about that specifically right now, although that certainly comes into the equation. But they betrayed kids with the indoctrination of them from CRT, as we know, and trans-identity agenda for very young kids. And now, Clay, the one that I think is the most — ’cause people are gonna argue on those a whole lot, right? That’s what I mean by we’ll continue to talk about those issues. We’ll continue to talk about abortion. We’ll continue to talk about the fight for life and also the fight for non-indoctrination of kids in school.

This piece in the New York Times — you and I are both reading this this morning — on school closures is absolutely devastating ’cause this is no longer in the realm of, “Oh, we’re gonna make an argument; they’re gonna make an argument.” This is now, “We have the data, we have studies, we have test scores, we have results.”

And the quick summary of this is, Democrats overwhelmingly push for — and put aside… I’m not even gonna talk about the second semester, you could call it, of 2020. I’ll give that one a pass for people were scared, it was early, we didn’t know as much. Starting in the fall of 2020 when Florida was open — fall of 2020 going into that election and then certainly in 2021 — we had more than enough data to know the following things were true:

Children were at no real risk for covid; children were not a major source of spread of covid; children were going to be dramatically harmed — socially, developmentally — by the school closures. Democrat enclaves, Democrat blue cities and states were much worse off with this than everywhere else. Clay, top to bottom, school closures were wrong and disastrous, and the Democrats need to be made to own it.

CLAY: Yeah, if I could go back in time, Buck, and get Trump to focus on one thing that I think was wildly underplayed in the 2020 presidential election, he should have gone all-in on everybody school needs to be back open — and I’m fortunate because I live in a red state, in a red county in a red state. My kids went back to school in early August of 2020 with no issues.

But the New York Times finally (chuckles) getting around to covering this after two years, reading it this morning. We talked about this, Buck, and I’ve known and been talking about it really since the summer of 2020, because I talked to a bunch of different teachers who were in disadvantaged schools, however you want to quantify it, and they were talking about they had kids who were studying for AP exams, and they said, “Well, we’ll just go remote in the summer; we’ll be able to talk to everybody that way.”

And I was talking to an AP history teacher at, actually, a wedding, and he was discussing the fact that his kids were having to drive to McDonald’s parking lots and sit in the McDonald’s parking lot to be able to get on Wi-Fi. And that was if they had access to being able to get to the McDonald’s. And what rapidly should have become crystal clear to anyone out there was, one: Remote learning is an oxymoron. It doesn’t actually work.

And two, even for remote learning, it is a privileged process to have a laptop and a workable Wi-Fi and an adult-supervisory figure who can get you on the computer. And so the party of equity — I mean, it’s astounding irony — the party that claimed that it was so focused on “equity” in the wake of George Floyd and abandoned equality ended up with the least equitable policy in the twenty-first century and in most of our lives.

And young minority, underprivileged kids overwhelmingly bore the brunt of schools not being open. And this is a quote from Thomas Kane, who wrote a massive Harvard study on the futility of remote learning. He said, first of all, the data showed that low-income students — in particular black and Latino students — fell farther behind over the past two years relative to students who are high income, white, or Asian.

And here’s a direct quote from Thomas Kane: “This will probably be the largest increase in educational inequity in a generation.” Democrats caused that, and their teachers unions and their politicians and everybody who helped to make this policy happen, Buck. This is why this election has to be a reckoning. There have to be consequences for the biggest public policy failure of our lives, most of us, or what’s the point of an election at all? There has to be a red wave to punish these people.

BUCK: There are two areas that I want to make sure that we don’t forget, either, in all of this. Because, sure, you and I sat here together for many months talking about how as soon as they look at the numbers, you’re gonna find out. I mean, high poverty schools, they said — and this is in the Harvard University study I think that you were referencing, Clay, from that New York Times piece.

Almost 14 weeks of learning loss, meaning it’s almost like kids just weren’t in school for a third of the school year, let’s call it, right, roughly, or whatever the actual weeks add up to, beyond that, the whole premise of this was that there would be attendant benefit, right? So there was… ‘Cause everyone knew this was gonna be bad for kids at some level.

It was worse than the libs said it would be. It was worse than the Democrats said it would be, but they also said, “Well, this is a necessary thing for safety. We’re the serious people. We need better filters in school!” Huge sums of money have gone toward covid-proofing and covid assistance in the school system.

I’d be very curious to know what that money was actually spent on. But the part of this that’s so heartbreaking, we have the data on learning loss, which is catastrophic for particularly low-income black and Latino students, young students for whom the school system is so essential. So the learning loss was harder.

CLAY: They were already behind, Buck. Let’s be clear about that. They were already behind, and then we just made it so much worse as a country.

BUCK: So it was worse than anticipated by the Democrats, and then on top of this, the benefit of doing this was zero.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That’s the part that everyone has to understand: The school closures did not save any lives. The school closures did not stop covid, did not flatten the curve, did not protect children from getting covid. This was all a self-inflicted wound. And some of us saw it, and the Democrats shouted us down and stomped their feet, and the teachers union thugs mobilized, and the commissar, Randi Weingarten, pushed for this. They were as wrong as can be on all counts, Clay.

CLAY: Yeah. And this is where we need you moms. We talk about the suburban moms and how many of you are swing voters as a group. This is where we need you to mobilize. I mean this. There need to be severe consequences. These teachers unions and these Democratic politicians, they made you — in addition to the fact that a lot of you have jobs and have responsibilities that you rely on school to help you.

They made you wear all of these hats, and they told you you were doing it to protect the safety of kids, and they were a hundred percent wrong. What should happen when somebody gives you advice and is 100% wrong and your children suffer as a result from it, there have to be consequences. And that’s why moms out there, the suburban mom community in particular, you guys need to be talking. You need to be grabbing some of these clips from this show.

You need to be sharing some of these articles. You were lied to. And the people who lied to you are now saying things, Buck, like, “Oh, how could we have ever known that this was going to happen? Well, we didn’t know it was going to be this bad.” Those are lies. By the summer of 2020 — Buck, you and I know ’cause we were arguing this — the data was abundantly clear: Kids needed to be back in school.

Look at what Ron DeSantis did, look at what a lot of red state governors did in terms of getting their kids back in school in August and September of 2020. And if your kids were not back in school, it’s because Democrat politicians failed you, he didn’t look at the data, and there have to be consequences. This is the entire purpose of a democracy. We reward or punish politicians based on the judgment and the decisions that they make. And overwhelmingly blue city, blue states, Democrat politicians — and the teacher union cronies that they worked with — failed all of America’s kids.

BUCK: So can I just say, to your point about this, Clay, one thing I do like about Twitter for us is that we get to create — we have created — an archive of what we thought at different times. People don’t have to take our word for it. They can go back and look. It’s on the… You can just Google it.

You don’t even have to be on Twitter. So I just did a check to see. On August 14th of 2020, ABC News, right — big, important news organization — tweeted this: “The U.S. attempt to reopen schools has turned into a slow-motion train wreck with at least 2,400 students and staff infected with covid-19.” So 2,400 people got covid? Who cares?

CLAY: Who cares.

BUCK: Right? It was crazy. I responded to this. I’m not an epidemiologist. I’m not a doctor. I tweeted this out: “This is less than one-in-20,000 public school students in America for everybody out there who isn’t a lockdown hysteric; 99.99% of affected students will barely have symptoms, if any. ABC News is a joke.” You knew this, I knew this, we were saying this summer of 2020. Why didn’t the Democrats know this?

Just a reminder that *many* of us on the Right said- in the summer of 2020!- that schools needed to be open, kids were not at risk from covid, the Democrat insanity on school shutdowns was inexcusable, and they would do nothing but harm children. We were correct. https://t.co/0ddY81Pn8Y

— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) May 5, 2022

CLAY: They did. They did, and they should have if they didn’t. And, Buck, to your point on the tweets that you were sending out then, I don’t know how I could have been any more clear. I was intentionally taking pictures — people can go back and look — in early August of 2020 of my kids going to school, and look, every parent knows that kids matter more than anything.

So the way that I would say not only am I telling you that all kids need to back in school, I’m taking my own kids to school. I’m walking them to school this morning in early August in 2020 because it’s important for kids to be back in school. I’m not just telling you this. I’m living it with my own life. And there need to be — and last year, Buck, right after we started… We’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of Clay and Buck. We appreciate everybody listening.

But I went and spoke over the mask mandate which was a further failure of Democrat politicians. Masks made no difference. When they finally opened back up schools and let your kids go to school, you know what they made them do? For over a year and still in some cities in America right now kids are being forced to wear masks. You know what the data overwhelmingly shows about kids wearing masks?

It doesn’t protect anyone and it leads to worse educational outcomes because kids can’t communicate or understand, particularly young kids. And so I get still so fired up about this because I am still so furious that our politicians did this to our kids. I don’t know when I’m ever gonna get over it. But the only way I think you get over a failure like this is a reckoning of an election, which is almost exactly six months from now. Suburban moms, listen to us, grab this clip, share all this data, talk to your friends and make a reality of the red wave of holding Democrats responsible for the consequences of their actions.