Two Covid-19 deaths, infinite destruction

Oct 30, 2020
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John,

Schools closed until at least January: Just two ([link removed]) California children under age 18 have died from Covid-19. Yet most classrooms across the state, including virtually all in LA County, remain closed. This week LA school board leaders said ([link removed]) schools will remain closed to in-person learning until at least January.

Understanding the severity of Covid-19 is an immense intellectual challenge. People from across the political spectrum can have good-faith disagreements on the proper role of government in attempting to reduce transmission of the disease. Yet given the fundamental role that schools play in healthy families, societies, economies, and – most of all – students, and the minute risk that this disease carries for children, ongoing support for school closures seems nothing other than an overtly political and self-interested calculation.
School reopenings are being determined by politics and unions: In his latest analysis ([link removed]) , CPC contributor Larry Sand highlights a new academic study that offers objective measures to back up this claim that reopenings have more to do with politics than public health:

A working paper released this month by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform reveals that local politics ([link removed]) – not the severity of COVID-19 – is the most important factor in determining whether k-12 public school districts opened for in-person learning in the fall. Political science professors Michael Hartney and Leslie Finger looked at about 75 percent of the nation’s 10,000 school districts and found that counties that voted 60 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016 “were nearly 20 percentage points less likely to hold in-person classes than counties that backed Donald Trump by the same margin.” They also report that districts with strong teachers unions were far less likely to bring students back to the classroom. Very interestingly, the professors note that districts “located in counties with a larger number of Catholic schools
([link removed]) were less likely to shut down and more likely to return to in-person learning.”

Please read Larry’s entire piece ([link removed]) , which provides a comprehensive look at the enormous social and economic risks and small-to-zero health rewards of school shutdowns.

Classroom closures are a war on women: This week, the Mercury News covered ([link removed]) an angle of in-person school shutdowns that has largely been overlooked: the disproportionate impact on mothers, who have often been forced to quit their jobs to stay home to supervise their kids and facilitate their Zoom lessons: “Many are facing the hardest choice of their lives: prioritize their children’s education and survive without their usual income or choose their jobs to pay the bills.”

Dire Covid-19 predictions fail to materialize: Last month, Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s health and human services secretary, predicted ([link removed]) Covid-19 hospitalizations in the state would nearly double in the next month. The reality: Covid hospitalizations in the state actually fell over this timeframe. Dr. Ghaly is just the latest prognosticator to be made a fool by this virus.

The economic consequences are real: Californians accounted for one-fifth of national unemployment claims ([link removed]) filed this week. Businesses are boarded up and bankrupt. California legislators prattle on about supporting the working class, but they seem to forget that not everyone can earn a living from their laptop.

CPC analysis of Bell's anti-corruption reforms: This week, a San Francisco outlet highlighted ([link removed]) CPC's 2018 analysis ([link removed]) of the anti-corruption measures taken by the City of Bell in a story about San Fran's Proposition B, which would root out the endemic corruption in the city's governance:

The reform elements that most clearly turned Bell around, according to a 2018 analysis by the California Policy Center ([link removed]) , were to increase public engagement and transparency by posting budgets, contracts and other records online and gathering hundreds of people to public oversight meetings. Bell voters approved the changes in 2012. Additional provisions included restricting salary increases and barring extra pay for service on boards and commissions.

Subscribe to National Review’s Radio Free California wherever you get your podcasts: On the latest episode ([link removed]) , CPC President Will Swaim and board member David Bahnsen discuss unions’ political calculus around school reopening and Gov. Newsom’s new rules for the holiday dinner table. (Passing the cranberry sauce is going to be a lot harder this year!)

They also engage in a fascinating discussion/debate on how Silicon Valley tech platforms should be regulated. Should they be considered akin to traditional publishers, with the right to censor content with which they disagree, yet with the liability exposure that publishing entails? Or, should they continue to be treated as merely internet platforms that are held harmless against controversial material so long as they don’t broadly discriminate against specific content?

Tech leaders appeared on Capitol Hill this week in front of lawmakers who want to strip them of this legal protection because tech companies are increasingly exercising editorial control, namely, censoring conservative reporting and opinions.

Vote! Many California propositions are toss-ups. Your vote matters. David Bahnsen gives his complete proposition voting guide HERE ([link removed]) . Please share.

Why are firefighters unions backing Prop 15 instead of forestry reform: In his latest analysis ([link removed]) , CPC contributor Edward Ring highlights the misplaced priorities of firefighters unions while praising firefighters themselves:

Deep respect for what firefighters do, however, cannot excuse us of our obligation to criticize the political agenda of the firefighters union. Moreover, it is likely that if the firefighter union leadership redirected their political priorities, it would save lives and property. It would free up firefighting resources, allowing them to be concentrated in remaining trouble spots…

Everyone is grateful to firefighters for the work they do. But their union needs to decide. Along with fighting for more pay and benefits for their members, are they going to remain an ancillary wing of California’s leftist ruling class? Or will they pick one fight where they defy the conventional wisdom, and perhaps provide the tipping point to change it?

A golden ticket to the Vice President’s office: By this time next week, a Californian may be Vice President-elect for the first time since Richard Nixon in the 1950s. If the Kamala Harris/Joe Biden ticket is victorious, it will win facing perhaps the least media scrutiny in U.S. history. Biden and Harris have benefited from a mainstream media blackout of any coverage related to the Hunter Biden emails. These emails seem to demonstrate that Hunter used his father as a bargaining chip to secure lucrative business deals in China and elsewhere.

With a major assist from tech platform that censored the sharing and distribution of the NY Post story on the scandal, the mainstream media simply refused to report the story. To the extent they did, they fell back on that cliched trope that the emails are “Russian disinformation.”

Given that the emails -- by all appearances -- seem authentic, the media’s failure to cover them can only come down to partisan bias. With the media providing this cover, neither Biden nor Harris have had to answer for them.

The NY Post and Fox News have done a great job covering the emails. Yet the most powerful voice has been Pulitzer Prize-winning, leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald, who resigned this week from The Intercept, the media outlet he co-founded, because it censored his reporting on the Biden scandal. As Greenwald writes from his new platform ([link removed]) :

The publicly known facts, augmented by the recent emails, texts and on-the-record accounts, suggest serious sleaze by Joe Biden’s son Hunter in trying to peddle his influence with the Vice President for profit. But they also raise real questions about whether Joe Biden knew about and even himself engaged in a form of legalized corruption. Specifically, these newly revealed information suggest Biden was using his power to benefit his son’s business Ukrainian associates, and allowing his name to be traded on while Vice President for his son and brother to pursue business opportunities in China. These are questions which a minimally healthy press would want answered, not buried — regardless of how many similar or worse scandals the Trump family has…

A media outlet that renounces its core function — pursuing answers to relevant questions about powerful people — is one that deserves to lose the public’s faith and confidence. And that is exactly what the U.S. media, with some exceptions, attempted to do with this story: they took the lead not in investigating these documents but in concocting excuses for why they should be ignored.

Given this new media reality, organizations like the California Policy Center are more important than ever. The mainstream press increasingly refuses to publish stories, like the corruption of California’s political process by government unions, that run counter to its ideology.

CPC’s regular original analyses and content will never buckle before political correctness and increasing restrictions on free speech. Even though such censorship will likely increase if Biden and Harris take office next week. Thank you for your support!


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Jordan Bruneau
Communications Director
[email protected] (mailto:[email protected])


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