By Tom Woods - January 11, 2022

There’s a particular sinking ship from which the rats are ostentatiously fleeing; the “keep schools closed” ship.

Now before I get lectured to, let me note: I couldn’t possibly be a bigger opponent of soul-crushing schools that teach kids propaganda.

But I promise you: that’s not the reason all the blue checks have urged us to keep schools closed.

It was all fact-free hysteria, and I’m just flat-out against that no matter what the cause is.

I would never say: “Dr. Fauci is my ally because I don’t like the public school system and he favors closing it.” Dr. Fauci is never my ally, ever.

And the blue checks are reversing themselves on this faster than you can believe.

When the teachers’ unions have lost the blue checks, the polling on keeping schools closed must be horrendous.

I am no fan of Eric Adams, the new mayor of New York, since he favors the evil and useless vaccine passport system, which can never be excused.

But I find it politically interesting that he’s been saying things like this:

“I was a cook. I was a dishwasher. If nobody came to my restaurant when I was in college, I wouldn’t have been able to survive. When you talk about closing down our city, you’re talking about putting low-wage workers out of a job. I’m not letting that happen.”

And about schools specifically, in defiance of the teacher’s unions:

“We want to be extremely clear. The safest place for our children is in a school building. And we are going to keep our schools open….

“We’re not sending an unclear message of what is going to happen day to day. I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen day to day. We are staying open….

“I know there’s questions about staffing, I know there’s questions about testing — there’s a lot of questions. But we’re going to turn those question marks into an exclamation point. We are staying open.”

Let’s also take a look at Ashish Jha, who’s currently at Brown University. He’s been downright nasty through this whole ordeal — compare his conduct to that of the decent and civilized Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, for instance — and has placed impossible obstacles in the way of school reopening: tying it to rates of “community spread,” demanding onerous measures to ensure “physical safety,” even while mountains of evidence piled up that schools were not unsafe places.

[NOTE - Sweden’s 1.8 million children all managed to avoid death, and their teachers did better than other professions, while having open schools without masking.]

Then Jha demanded the masking of students, and even told Congress: “No expert that I know of doesn’t believe masking is helpful for kids.”

Sure, Ashish. I’m sure you’ve never, ever encountered an expert who advises against masking kids — even though I myself, not even a member of the medical community, can somehow name you a whole slate of them.

And now, just this week, watch the pivot.

Here’s Jha on Twitter on January 4:

"At every turn during this pandemic we have deprioritized children and their well-being. The educational losses and mental health tolls will be felt for their lifetimes. Great @DLeonhardt thread on how American kids are in a crisis and many don’t fully grasp how bad it is"

It’s one thing to offer a sincere and profound apology for your errors in the past. It’s quite another all of a sudden to claim to care about the well-being of children when you yourself have been part of the dystopia that has targeted them . . .

[SNIP]