The Biden Record, and The Democrats Who Supported It, Part 2: COVID and Education Policy Failures

    When Pres. Biden took office, the COVID vaccine was finally becoming available, and the newer variants were proving less lethal than the first wave. By late in the year, when the Omicron variant hit, even unvaccinated people were at low risk, if they didn't have any other medical conditions. Not that this kept the Biden administration, and Democrats across the country from extend their "emergency" powers and restrictions on the public. The politicized CDC was still advising people to wear masks outdoors until April, and then only the vaccinated should be able to breathe freely outside. This was the same CDC that issued a ban on evictions, which the SCOTUS ultimately struck down.

   One of the most glaring examples of the politicization of the CDC was the guidance on school closures. The CDC was ready to recommend that in person instruction should resume, in Feb. 2021. However, the teachers' union stepped in, and in a series of emails with the CDC, were able to get the CDC guidance changed to reflect word for word what the American Federation of Teachers recommended. This resulted in public schools being kept closed, and relying on remote instruction, which has now been proven to be totally ineffective. According to the reporting in the NY Post article linked above, the White House was in the loop for this, and of course Randi Weingarten, the president of the AFT, has tried to deny that they had any hand in keeping schools closed in 2021. The emails tell a different story, and the Biden administration was instrumental in this corrupt process.

   We're going to discuss other aspects of the Biden administration's completely destructive education policies later in this post, but there are a few more COVID related policies that need to be mentioned. First is the attempt to mandate vaccinations for employees of private businesses through an OSHA ruling. While it was eventually recinded, it wreaked havok on the economy, and with no real benefit. Vaccination rates were climbing, and the government never recognized natural immunity for people who had already recovered. Most of all, they tried to hide the fact that vaccinated people could still get COVID, and spread it. All the vaccination did was make it less likely that a person would be severely ill from COVID, or die. It looks as if the Biden people are still obscuring how many fully vaccinated and boosted people have died from COVID, as well as the number of people who have died, or had severely adverse reactions to the vaccination.

   The overarching story of the pandemic is how governments around the globe, including the Trump administration here in America, got the response wrong. Here in the US, Pres. Trump was clearly uncomfortable with it, and probably glad that our system allowed states to make the final decisions on public health matters. Gov. DeSantis in Florida has been proven right, as was Sweden, on the international stage, though both were under heavy criticism in 2020, during the early months of it. What happened in 2021 was interesting, because it became political. Many governments wanted to hold on to their expanded "emergency" powers to control every aspect of people's lives, so they just extended the emergency. In the US, this manifested as a divide between the right and left, with the Republicans wanting to open up, and the Democrats wanting to continue restrictions, in the name of "safety." This played out for a while, but finally was laid to rest this year, as people came to see through the politics of it. I hope voters remember who kept the economic damage going into 2021, when the US economy was showing signs of recovery in 2020.

   One big thing that resulted from the lockdowns, with both parents working and kids learning from home, was that parents got to see what the public schools were actually teaching their kids. If the teachers' unions had realized how badly this would end up, they may not have pushed so hard for remote learning.  There has been a revolution in the politics of education over the last year or so, with a flipping of the parties. Democrats no longer have the faith of the voters, as has been shown repeatedly in recent elections. Democrat Terry McCauliffe made the mistake of saying "I don't think that parents should be telling schools what they should teach" in a Sept. 29th, 2021 debate with Republican now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

   There are more recent examples, and they go down to the local school board election level, with governors getting involved. Even in progressive San Francisco, three members of the school board were actually recalled, not just voted out. Outraged parents couldn't wait until the next election, because these board members were pushing politics instead of acting in the best interest of the kids. One might think that the Biden administration, and Democrats in Congress would see this as a sign that their support of the education establishment and unions was a bad policy, especially with test scores crashing, and the failure of remote learning over 2020 and 2021. Or not.

   Indeed, the Biden administration, and Democrats at all levels of government have doubled down on support for teachers' unions, and a raft of absurdly destructive policies that do nothing to ecucate children. Let's start with "antiracism." The name suggests a concept everyone should embrace, because who isn't against racism? Much like it's ideological cousin Black Lives Matter, that was done by design, so that anyone who questioned what message they stand for could be silenced, and labeled "racist." In fact, "antiracism" is a radical ideology that seeks ro reinterpret US history through a "Black and White" racial lens. Unfortunately, history has many more facets than this ideology allows, and teaching it to grade school children is educational malpractice, besides inciting divisiveness and even hate.

   However, the Biden administration has gone ahead with support for this agenda in public schools, even though it has nothing to do with the areas that US children, especially minorities, have fallen behind during the last two years: Reading, writing, and arithmatic. US children are falling behind children from other nations in the most basic education categories, yet the federal government, and many state and local governments continue to neglect such basic learning concepts as phonics. Think about this when you go to the polls in November, and vote accordingly.

   The radical left Democrats, and the Biden team are also promoting the radicals trangender agenda on to children, and keep families in the dark. This is perhaps more harmful than any other policy they are implementing, because it can impact children's physical and mental health for the rest of their lives. Some states have banned use of puberty blockers and criminalized mastectomies and other gender-related surgeries for children, but the Biden administration is still supporting it. In addition, they are trying to enforce rules that allow biological males to not only compete in female sports, but use female bathrooms and locker rooms. Where does this leave a girl that has spent years competing in women's sports, and excelling to a level that would get her a scholarship to college, or a female college athelete that was hoping to use her atheletic status as a springboard to a career in sports? They take a back seat to a biological male, such as Lia Thomas.

   The worst part about it is that the educrats want to keep all of this secret from parents. They often justify it by claiming that parents might not be "receptive" or "affirming" of the child's choice, and guess what? They're right about that. There is a reason that they are the child's parents, and the teacher is not. Teachers and school administrators, social workers, or anyone in that bureaucracy really have NO business interfering in a child's emotional or private development. I understand that there are times that a school should alert authorities, if they see signs of abuse on a child. This is almost the opposite. If the teacher addresses your son as a female, or vice versa, you have a right to know, especially in the early grades. This is a HUGE issue, that every Democratic candidate for office should have to answer questions about, before the November elections.

   How many of you remember what happened to Scott Smith, a parent who lost his temper at a Loudoun County, VA, school board meeting, when they denied that his daughter was sexually assaulted by a transgender student. It got national attention, with predictable political divisions. Republicans took the side of the parent, and Democrats called him a national security threat. Before you think I'm exaggerating, or joking, read the article in the link above, about Mr. Smith. It turns out that the Biden administration solicited the NSBA to send a letter to AG Garland, which attempted to designate angry parents at school board meetings a "domestic threats" to national security. The transgender student in question was convicted of sexual assault on Mr. Smith's daughter, as well as another assault at another school. It appears that because of this student's transgender status, the crimes committed were covered up by school administrators. This is yet another reason why education policy MUST be a big factor in the 2022 mid term elections.

   I'm writing this series of articles on various aspects of the Biden Democrat agenda in the hope that my readers and friends will share them, and explain why it is so important to stop this destructive agenda in it's tracks, right now. I cited COVID policy, and education policy, in this chapter. I will be picking up from here in my next post, with the way that the Biden team has abused the police power of the DoJ and FBI, beyond attacking parents as domestic terrorist threats. Besides examining the politization of these law-enforcement agencies, we will also address the lack of response to the wave of illegal immigration, human trafficking, potential terrorists, and drugs flowing through our southern border.