Californians watching the Super Bowl on Sunday saw a spectacular show - and we’re not talking about the game or Snoop Dogg and Eminem’s halftime performance. In the heart of the most locked-down county in California, A-list celebrities danced and partied mask-free throughout the game, including Leonardo DiCaprio, LeBron James, Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck, Kanye West, Charlize Theron, Justin Bieber and more. Now official for all the world to see: California's COVID-19 mask mandates are nothing more than political theater.
The public backlash was immediate. Student protests erupted up and down California as the kids trapped in masks 8 hours a day in K-12 schools realized their celebrity-heroes had no intention of following the law. They have a right to be mad. When Governor Gavin Newsom announced last week that he would let the state’s indoor mask mandate expire Feb. 15, there was one glaring exception: Newsom said California’s students would have to keep their masks on because the state’s teachers unions needed “a little bit more time.”
Data on the state’s own Department of Public Health website shows kids are the least likely to catch, transmit or die from COVID. Californians under 18 years of age account for 0.0% of all COVID deaths in the state.
So why are the unions’ dragging their feet on masking students?
Power.
California’s teacher union leaders are heading into a big negotiation year. They need a fight to rally their troops. After two years of engaging in public-health terrorism – in which they’ve told parents and their own members that COVID is killing everybody, especially kids – they’re betting that, in the COVID panic they created, their fight to mask everyone “proves” they value teachers and kids.
This is direct from the union playbook.
The real goal isn’t “science” or “public health” or “protecting kids and teachers.” It’s about sacrificing kids, parents and teachers for bargaining power in advance of the union’s 2022 contract negotiations.
Yesterday, Newsom held a press conference to release his new “SMARTER” plan for the “endemic,” but he still punted on making a decision on masks in schools until the end of the month. And so for the foreseeable future, California kids will be forced to continue this charade.
San Francisco Voters Recall Three School Board Members
In the nation’s most liberal city, San Francisco, voters recalled three school board members in a landslide on Tuesday, the aftershocks of which are still reverberating. Call it the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 2022.
The recalls are a warning tale of progressive politics gone way, way too far. San Francisco’s leaders enforced some of the strictest responses to the pandemic in the nation, shutting down schools for far longer than private schools in the city and schools in nearby Marin.
Instead of heeding parents’ concerns, school board members focused on - and fumbled - a myriad of cosmically stupid initiatives - like renaming 44 public schools to be more “politically correct” and trying to force a popular high school for high-achievers to switch from merit-based admissions to a lottery system.
As one San Francisco parent-turned-organizer observed, school board elections in the city “increasingly became used less as a home for experienced education experts and more as a launching pad for aspiring career politicians.”
Shocker: Politically ambitious progressives with literally no skin in the game use school boards as a place to virtue signal to voters.
Aspiring progressive politicians in California also dutifully scratch the backs of the teachers’ unions. And — you guessed it — the unions in San Francisco came out against the recalls. Democrat Mayor London Breed, surprisingly, supported the recalls. The unstoppable momentum of the parents advancing the recalls, coupled with the school board’s epic budget crisis and amateurish political missteps, pushed her to side with outraged voters.
The recalls of all three school board members ultimately won by a landslide: the ouster was approved by voters by over 70 percent, succeeding across San Francisco’s diverse neighborhoods.
California politicians take note: In the battle of parents vs. progressives, parents won.
“The duty of a leader is to serve their people, not for the people to serve them,” — Elon Musk
More from CPC
National Review’s Radio Free California Podcast: Rollin’ on Dubs: CPC president Will Swaim and CPC board member David Bahnsen discuss San Francisco parents’ run over three school board members in a stunning recall vote, and common sense scores a huge win over COVID-19 panic at the Super Bowl in Los Angeles.
The Sandstorm: Are union chickens coming home to roost? Larry Sand, president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network, examines how teachers’ union policies are contributing to teachers exiting the profession en masse.
