American Thought Leaders - How School Closures Irrevocably Harmed a Generation | Natalya Murakhver

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

Filmmaker Natalya Murakhver has recently released her new documentary “15 Days: The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures.”It shows the devastating effects that remote learning had on children and families. What was the true impact of the school closures on a generation of children? How can we begin to measure it?“Viewers will bear witness to the stories of the people who experienced the closures directly. The film was shot almost immediately following the closures. We started in 2022, so the pain was still extremely raw,” Murakhver says.“I felt [that] we better get those stories in now, because people won’t want to talk about them in a couple of years. ... As we show the film, I see people’s body language, and they shudder. It takes them back to a very dark time.”Murakhver co-founded parent advocacy organization Restore Childhood in 2021 and played a leading role in mobilizing New York City parents to reopen public schools during the pandemic.In the spring of 2021, she filed a lawsuit against New York City and its Department of Education, seeking a judicial order to fully reopen public schools for five days a week of in-person learning.“People watch the film … and they realize how important it is to know the history,” she says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

You want to know what takes a kid off the streets, a ball. You know, that takes a gun out of the kid's hand, a ball. And we have Coach Ron Niclerio and he said, I needed my kids and they needed me, but we couldn't see each other. We weren't allowed to. The hoops had been removed from basketball courts outside, even outside of the schools. They had nowhere to go. Natalia Murakfer is the director of 15 Days and co-founder of Restore Childhood.

In 2020, she led a lawsuit against New York City. to get public schools reopened. When schools shut down and kids were locked out of their classrooms, they really lost the interest and the desire to learn. Also, the disconnect with the teachers. It just could not be replicated with online school. What was the true impact of the school closures on a generation of children?

How can we begin to measure it? One of my plaintiffs, her son, suffered throughout the entire pandemic. He unfortunately ended up taking his own life this past May. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellick. Natalia Murakfer, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you so much for having me. So I was looking at the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

That's the NAEP scores recently. And it seems like they've registered the largest drop of these scores, in generations. And you're kind of in the middle of trying to explain why. So tell us what happened. Well, when school shut down and kids were locked out of their classrooms, they really lost the interest and the desire to learn.

Also, the disconnect with the teachers. It just could not be replicated with online school. Prior to the pandemic, there had been research on learning loss and just aptitude in online versus in-person learning, they looked at cadets at the most elite military academy in the country, West Point, and they saw that the online cadets learned, achieved scores something like several standards of deviation lower than the ones that were coming in in person. So if the most elite cadets can't achieve parity, how can third graders?

And then I started forgetting a bunch of things that I learned in school. It was just so hard to learn. We were going different rooms, we called our quarters, and we would just start learning, but it was just still like a disconnect. You could feel the disconnect. When I was taking my Spanish classes on the computer, everything was, people just kept talking in English, like my teacher kept talking in English. So there was like only 10 words in Spanish in my classes.

It was hard on my eyes. I like my eyes were burning. Like they gave us 15 minute breaks during the school day. So like I know I guess for me it was to rest my eyes. But then we just got right back on Zoom. I could turn off my camera and go into a different room. Meanwhile the teacher's talking and not hear a single word of what she's saying and then come back when attending and saying bye.

I would just feel bad. Like, I would honestly, I would just feel isolated. Like, I didn't feel right because I knew I had stuff to do, but I just didn't feel like getting it done. I didn't know what to do, and I just, like, stayed in my room. I used to be like the goofy, joyful person, and it's just like, I never see myself like that. I missed out on friendships, I missed out on out of school activities.

Look back there, pick it up, and turn it around. turn it around it says we miss our friends it was just so abnormal kids haven't been allowed to be kids and so we saw this huge movement of course this was during the pandemic of education online for a pretty significant amount of time for for many students even across the country but in particular in New York and this is where you're from so so tell me about what exactly happened? Well, in March 2020, when we knew that the virus was virulent and spreading, everybody was kind of lost.

There were a group of parents from the very beginning that were concerned about school closures. I was one of them. I understood normal childhood development. Learning and development doesn't happen in one dimension. And if kids were going to be locked at home away from teachers and friends, I knew even back then that that would be detrimental. Could I quantify it? No, but I knew it in my gut. And so there were parents at our elementary school that organized a committee to come in and sterilize the handrails and the doors. And I remember thinking, this is so futile. I mean, if it's a virus, it's probably airborne. But at the same time, I thought that we had to figure out what the risks versus the benefits were. And it always seemed to be more beneficial for the kids to be in school. So when they shut down in March 2020, they told us. us, it would be for two weeks. And I remember I was called to my kids' school to pick up

a packet of homework. And they were like, okay, bye, see you in two weeks. And I burst out into tears. And everybody was like, why are you crying? Like, we'll be back in two weeks. And I was just like, no, because once these schools are closed, I'm not sure when they can reopen. Because it wasn't just about reopening the doors. It was about regaining the trust of the people who were supposed to walk through them and the students who would walk. walk through them and their parents. And I knew that would be very, very difficult to do. That's interesting.

I've heard from another parent at the time, Bobby Ann Cox, who was a lawyer in commercial, commercial lawyer. And she knew that it wouldn't be two weeks. And she knew just because there was no scenario where the bureaucracy could function in a way that something would reopen in two weeks after something was an issue. That, again, fascinating.

I was one of those people who thought, Two weeks? Sure. It'll be fine, right? I didn't have that instinct at all. Yeah, I mean, that's another dimension. But yeah, I just, the idea that you're going to create such unmitigated fear in people about the school building, because we were told it's so dangerous, don't stand next to each other. As I was leaving that day with the packet of homework, I remember I was walking down the sidewalk with another parent, and we were walking too close together. And she seemed to be oblivious to it, but I was like, oh, my God, am I exposing myself or her to something? We're not supposed to be walking down the sidewalk, you know, one foot apart.

This was outside. I was a pretty rational, non-anxious person about this issue specifically. And yet this is the kind of fear I was feeling. So what were, you know, more anxious parents feeling, you know? So I just thought, my God, we're entering something that's unprecedented. I don't know how we're going to come back. So you've made the film 15 days about, well, that time and also, you know, what happened afterwards and, you know, culminating in this dramatic learning loss that I described earlier.

But why is the film called 15 days? Because at the time, I mean, Fauci held up a sign. Everybody had held up signs and said, oh, it's just 15 days. It's just 15 days to slow the spread. And we have this montage of the Surgeon General and Fauci and even President Trump at the time saying 15 days. So that was what we heard over and over again. And I think that was ingrained in people's heads. That 15 days lasted for up to two years in places like California.

But we thought that that would bring people back, unfortunately. Well, and in New York, it really only lasted for several months, but then it never or it didn't fully come back. very quickly. And that actually had a profound impact as well, right? Yeah. Yeah. So schools closed in mid-March 2020. They were closed and remote for the remainder of the 2020 school year. And then in the fall, to his credit, it's probably the only good thing Bill de Blasio did. He did reopen the schools. The unions pushed hard. The UFT is very powerful in New York City. That's the branch of the American Federation of Teachers, they wanted the strictest reopening guidelines. But Bill de Blasio was able to reopen schools on September 28th, 2020 in hybrid fashion.

So depending on how many kids were in a classroom and how oversubscribed the school was, some schools had a great number of kids coming back. And in those cases, those kids were probably in the classroom fewer days because they had they were spreading them six to eight feet apart. And not all classrooms had the space for, you know, for all the students. My own kids went two days one week, three days the following week. And I have to say, you know, even with all those restrictions and masks and really draconian restrictions inside elementary schools, my kids re-bloomed once they were around their teachers

and their fellow classmates. It was dramatic. Even under the worst circumstances inside those schools, those kids, needed each other, like we need to drink water. There's also this issue of absenteeism that happened. Like basically, of course, everybody was absent in doing things online. Then there was this hybrid model. But then it turns out a lot of people just never came back.

And I don't even understand how that's possible. Like, what are these kids doing now? Do we do have any idea? Well, Michael Pinckney, who was an athlete who was junior at the time of the school closures, talks about this in the film. He was a thrower and he was competing outside of school because his father was prepared enough for something like this because he had gone to college on a sports scholarship

and he wanted to make sure that Mikey didn't miss out. But he talks about the fact that these kids who left and had been competing with him in high school, in throwing and track and field, never came back. And I think some of those kids had to stay home and take care of their, their, younger siblings or some of them, I remember reading articles, had gone to work. They were told that they weren't important.

The ones who did actually show up in schools at the time were forced to mask. We had a lawsuit that we filed because of Zoom in a room, which I don't know if you've heard that term, Zoom in a room. Many middle and high schoolers, when they did return to school in New York City public schools, and I know around the country as well, due to union contracts. The teachers were allowed to continue to teach remotely while the students were in the classrooms with their masks looking at computers and spaced apart. Nobody wanted to do that. That did not qualify as in-person real school.

So kids dropped out, kids left. They were being made to feel like pariahs inside their own classrooms. You know, I thought I knew about everything from the pandemic. I didn't know until this moment about Zoom. in the room, it has a kind of a Kafka-esque feel to it. Yeah, it was really tragic. And I had parents reaching out to me from all around the country. First, it was mostly parents in New York,

because I was part of a group called Keep NYC Schools Open. We had a Facebook group. It was very bipartisan. I'm a registered Democrat, very progressive. I was fine with BLM. I didn't. None of that was like a wake-up call for me. I was all about racial justice.

I still am. I really haven't changed. But parents from around New York City reached out to me and kept saying, hey, we're looking for leadership here. There was no leadership, right? And there was no organized movement. It was just a collection of parents. Whoever was willing to do something was asked to do it.

We organized the rallies, nothing changed. We organized petitions, nothing changed. So I finally decided to organize a lawsuit to sue the mayor and sue New York City. to reopen the schools. And I would hear from parents all around New York City. We had, I think, up to 20 plaintiffs, and we had to turn away some others. And it was, you know, everything from stories of, you know, my child's scores are going down.

They used to be, you know, in a gifted and talented program or one of the highest achievers, and now they've lost interest in learning, two suicide attempts, to one of my plaintiffs, her son suffered throughout the entire pandemic. She's a psychiatrist. She's public and always willing to talk about it. She's not hiding. He unfortunately ended up taking his own life this past May. He was in college and he never recovered.

And I think he's just one of them. Absolutely terrible. Before we continue, tell me just a little bit about your background. You know, how, you know, I know, I know, for example, that you're an immigrant, even though that might not necessarily be obvious. But tell me about your background. Yeah. I came here as a six-year-old.

I came to New York from the Soviet Union from Odessa, Ukraine. My parents decided to emigrate when Carter and Brezhnev had an arrangement where the Soviet Jews were allowed to leave. We had a choice. We could go to Australia, Israel, or the United States. And my parents were kind of stuck. They weren't sure because my father's family. had gone to Israel a few years before that and his best friend had gone to New York. And New York won.

We decided to come, they decided to bring me here in the winter of 1977 and that was a long process. We left, we had to get processed in Austria. Then we ended of spending close to five months in Rome while we were waiting for everything to come through. And we ended up in New York and it was, you know, the time of, you know, big blizzards. I remember the snow was over my head. I'd never seen anything like it, even though it was the Soviet Union. Ukraine by the Black Sea was fairly moderate and temperate. And I immediately got put in first grade.

I was six and a half and I remember my mother said, well, you know, should she be held back? It's, you know, she's going to go into a classroom where she doesn't speak a word of English. And the principal, to her credit, said, send her and she'll little kids her age acquire the language very quickly. And she was right. And I did. It was, you know, stressful at times. It was truly diverse. There were kids from all over New York City there.

It was at Brooklyn Elementary School. But I loved it and I thrived and I was fluent within a year, I'd say probably even less. So I have that public school education. We were living in a tiny apartment. My father worked as a plumber in an incinerator for, you know, $4 an hour in really terrible conditions, but he never complained. My mother commuted to Manhattan from Brooklyn. She was a bookkeeper. But they built a life for us.

I was never, you know, locked in the house. I don't know what it would have been like if everything had shut down. They couldn't go to, I mean, they couldn't go to work. They couldn't, you know, stay home with me. I think our future would have crumbled. There really wasn't the possibility to do that before, though, right? because this online world that, you know, existed during the pandemic, kind of ready to be tested in this way, it just wasn't something you could do even back then.

No, and actually, and they wouldn't have done it back then. And Monica Gandhi, who is an AIDS researcher at UCSF, talks about this in the film, that even during the Spanish flu, when it was far more dangerous for children, We know now COVID, and we knew even as early as 2020, that COVID was not a great danger to children, but the Spanish flu was. And back then, the progressive cities, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, realized the costs to children of shutting down schools and deliberately kept those kids at schools open because they said they'd live in squalor. They wouldn't get fed. Teachers are mandated reporters. All of those things were important, so they wouldn't have done that.

But yes, I think you're right. Ed Tech has been encroaching on schools for over a decade. And I think the opportunity existed to try it out. And they've had remarkable results for ed tech profits. Before we continue, tell me the rest of the other. So you grew up in school. Clearly, you were fluent very quickly. I don't think anyone would guess that even that you're an immigrant.

and where did your life take you? Well, I went to NYU. I wanted to be, I was very much a New Yorker. I wanted to get out of Brooklyn and be in Manhattan and work in the film industry. I wasn't sure exactly what that meant, but I went to NYU and majored in English and ended up getting an internship at a production company in Manhattan and eventually moving to Los Angeles for a couple of years in my early 20s. It was the early 90s, and O.J. Simpson was the big story. You know, the white bronco was being chased by police in front of my house, like right off the 405 as I was watching it on TV. That was unsettling.

We had the huge earthquake, the Northridge earthquake. And pretty quickly, I realized I wanted to be back in New York. I had enough of L.A. for just over a year and came back and continued to work in the film industry. I worked for a producer as a story editor. and looked at scripts and plays and was always trying to figure out my place in the world, but I knew it had to do with storytelling. Well, and then clearly you took advantage of that in making this film. You mentioned that you went to public school,

and I understand that this learning loss, that these scores are actually the most depressed in the public schools in the inner city, in these sort of most disadvantaged, let's call it communities. Yeah. I mean, these are the kids who had the fewest resources. And in fact, even, you know, in 2020, 2021, when we had our rallies, Mayor Eric Adams was Borough president at the time. And he showed up to most of our rallies. He was one of the only electeds who did. And he talked about the fact that these kids in the inner city didn't have access to technology. They didn't have, you know, good Wi-Fi connections. And they were pretty much left hanging. Another student in the inner city didn't have, you know, good Wi-Fi connections. And they were pretty much left hanging. Another student in the city. in our, he's a college student now, but he was a high school student at the time. Garrett Morgan, who's in our film, talks about the fact that sports keeps kids engaged. He says, you want to know what takes a kid off the streets? A ball.

You know, that takes a gun out of the kid's hand, a ball. And we have Coach Ron Neclario, who's the winningest coach in high school basketball. He's at Cardozo High School and he talks about what it was like. He said, I needed my kids. I'm their mentor. He doesn't have his own children. He has always mentored generations and generations of inner city basketball players. And he said, and they needed me, but we couldn't see each other.

We weren't allowed to. The hoops had been removed from basketball courts outside. Even outside of the schools, they had nowhere to go. So they lost interest. I mean, there's been so much depression and mental health issues. And then you hear about all these special counselors who are being hired. But my perception of this whole thing is this was a manufactured crisis.

You knew exactly how this was going to end. It's very difficult to rectify that now. And I don't think talk therapy is the way to do it. Well, so you knew, but it seems like not a lot of people did. And I mean, I can even just speak for myself, right? I was someone that saw problems in the virus origins narrative. That was very obvious to me from the beginning because of my background in biology and so forth.

But I didn't necessarily understand that this whole thing was a problem. And I don't have kids. So I wasn't faced with that, with that question. So, you know, I wonder, but we were also being fed a very serious diet of information about how we were supposed to think about all this stuff. So maybe this, of course, shows up in your film quite prominently. Tell me about that and how that fit in. And also, it wasn't even just what we were being fed.

it's what we were being starved of. How many people knew who Jay Batacharya was when he released the Great Barrington Declaration? I don't think I even knew about that. We know now through Freedom of Information Act and, you know, Supreme Court case, that these people, these scientists, the most esteemed, prestigious scientists, were being censored. So our news feeds were being curated. The New York Times was feeding us, I would say, misinformation. because their science reporter, Apurva Mondavili, who before that, I would have trusted like the Bible, was spewing things that were not true.

There was no evidence to support these claims, that COVID was the most dangerous to children, that we should keep schools closed, that we should not allow children to be around their grandparents and let them pull down their masks and take bites in between, you know, breaths of air. I mean, these things in any normal world would be considered truly barbaric. But parents were lost. I mean, you think about how frazzled parents were, parents who were working full-time jobs, parents who are working multiple jobs. Now they were responsible for doing all of the research, figuring out what's suppressed and what's being fed to them. And there was such a, as Jay Batacharya talks about this,

it was an illusion of consensus. You had so many voices saying the same. same thing that I think it was hard to see beyond that. It was parents like me who had already had, you know, children who maybe required some extra attention in certain areas. My older daughter has food allergies. And I have done a lot of medical research to try to understand what, you know, why, what the source was of the allergies. I have some theories and also what we could do about it. And I've been trying to find a cure for her. She's 15 for the last 12 years. I haven't really been successful. But I think it gave me a certain level of literacy when looking

at reports. Also, myself personally, having gone through the food studies program at NYU, I studied with Marian Nessel, who's pretty much the godmother of, you know, food nutrition and messaging in the food world. So that gave me a level of skepticism that I kind of came to it and then and most importantly having grown up in a former Soviet household with parents who didn't trust anyone certainly anyone outside the home and read the media with you know kind of a skeptical eye that you know I had a bit of an inoculation and probably a little bit more critical thinking skills but just because of my past you know something you mentioned here is that you know on

the one hand there was this voice very loud voice, right, everybody seeming to be saying the same thing. The reason they're all seeming to be saying the same thing, even if that's, even if it's, you know, loud and kind of broadcast out on these airways, the second component was the dialing down of the other alternate voices. And so it's almost like you need the combination of, that's been my conclusion. If that's the combination, that's the most pernicious, because you don't know what the other people are saying. You just kind of assume that everybody has the same idea. What got me on to the idea that there was something else going on is Florida.

I saw that the governor of Florida, Ronda Santis, was doing something different and it seemed to be working, and people were going there. So I went and reported it, a whole documentary on this, but reported on that, right, and realized, wait, wait a second, this is not, none of this makes, I mean, ultimately, you know, and got introduced to some of these skeptical sciences, but I didn't know they existed before that. Right. Yeah.

And once you found them, everything changed, and it was the same for me. And I think about those scientists and what they endured. We interviewed J. Badacharya long before he became the head of the National Institutes of Health. And he talks about how he started at Stanford as an undergraduate as an 18-year-old. And the motto of Stanford was, let the winds of freedom blow. And it was, you know, when he talks about this, his face lights up, and you know, that that was his spiritual home. But yet, just asking questions and searching for answers

and doing research, that's what he was doing. Research on infection fatality rates got him censured. He had death threats lobbed against him. He couldn't even walk down the Stanford campus without seeing his face plastered on a billboard, death to J. Badacharya. This is several years before Charlie Kirk was assassinated. But think about the messaging that was sending

to people who even dare to speak out or, God forbid, do research. You mentioned you became a leader. People were looking for a leader. You became that leader. You developed a group called Restore Childhood. And just tell me how that all came about and what its purpose is. Well, funnily enough, it's actually a reaction to a meeting I had with Randy Weingarten three years ago. In November 2022, right after.

And just very quickly, who is Randy Vinegarten for those that might not know? Randy Weingarten is the head of the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teachers union in the country. I reached out to Randy Weingarten in the fall of 20, was it 2022, I guess that it's hard to go back. Hold on one second. I can start again. It's 25 now, yeah. I reached out to Randy Weingarten in the fall of 2022 because I saw that she was receptive to speaking with parents and engaging with parents. And I knew that she had a say in CDC reopening guidelines. At that point, the New York Post and Fox had broken the story that Randy and the teachers' unions had crafted the school reopening guidelines, which, you know, up until then, parents certainly didn't know. So it was surprising. I had hoped that there was some good faith in those guidelines, and she was coming to it, you know, with an open heart.

And so I reached out to her on X, on Twitter back then, because I'd heard she was receptive to speaking with parents and said, could we meet at some point? I'd love to speak with you. My children are suffering in school with masks on. And I've done the research. There's no research supporting the safety and efficacy of masks. We need to get the kids back to normal. And she said yes.

And we met on Marathon Sunday in November 2nd. 22 on the Upper West Side for drinks. And it was very pleasant. We had a good conversation. And I asked her if she would talk to the CDC. I mean, I think this is, it's kind of ludicrous to tell this story. I can't even believe that we had this conversation. I said, I know that you, you have a say in what the CDC does. Can you talk to them about revising their guidelines and getting these kids back to normal? They need to be able to see each other's faces. And she said, you know what, Natalia, if you present an outline for how to unmask the kids, I will present it to the CDC and we'll see what we can do. I'm shocking. I, an Upper West Side mom, without a medical

degree, I mean, what am I going to present to her? I want her to remove the masks, but I guess now I need to go through the steps because I've been given an opportunity to have a say in policy. So the first thing I did was I called Tracy Hogue, who was a researcher in the Bay Area at the time and a friend. And I said, Tracy, Randy Weingarten is willing to present our proposal to unmask the kids. I need research. And she's a dual citizen between the United States and Denmark, speaks five languages, is really just a brilliant researcher. And she just laughed. And she said, of course, I'll work with you on this.

but there's no proposal. She's like, if we give them an off-ramp, we're going to have an on-ramp, she goes, there's no research behind masking kids. Just take them off. So we worked together for a few months, figured out that there was a toolkit that another virologist had developed on the West Coast for his own kids' school about the benefits and harms of masking

and the mental health issues that were developing in kids that he was seeing in his own children. And we ended up taking that toolkit and creating something. called Urgency of Normal, which was released in January, I guess, 23 or 22. I can't remember the year anymore. And it was a toolkit for parents, not for the teachers' unions. We kind of just, we realized there was nothing for us to present to Randy and the CDC. We needed to give the parents access to the data and to the stories so that they could advocate on their own local

levels. And we wrote op-eds. We had multiple doctors, including Vinay Prasad, Monica Gandhi, Lucy McBride, big-name doctors who signed on to it. We did a Zoom call that had over a thousand parents from around the country, which is great considering we didn't have a budget. This was just a Zoom call. We publicized on Twitter. And that went viral. And that created, you know, the parent, part of the parent movement. Definitely gave access to parents. They would reach out to us from all over the world, not just the United States, I'd get emails from everywhere. And then eventually that led to me forming

Restore Child at a nonprofit that produced the film. Wow. So did you end up giving any information to Randy Weingartner? There was nothing to give. My husband and I would sit at home trying to figure out what this toolkit would look like because there was no evidence to support masking,

so we couldn't find any, any evidence for her to bring to the CDC, any kind of model. And the scientists just wouldn't do it. Like, they didn't want to, they, scientists are true. They want to present the data, the best available data they have, and we just didn't have anything to give to her. So the only thing I did was I did tweet after our meeting. Randy asked when I left if I would tweet about our meeting

because she wanted to show the world that she was, working with parents this was immediately after Glenn Yunkin won in Virginia for governor Randy had been campaigning with Terry McAuliffe his challenger who I think you might remember had campaigned and said that he didn't think parents had any right to know what was happening inside their schools their kids schools so I think she was really eager to to reach out to parents and you know clean her image And so I tweeted about having met with her. She retweeted it, as she promised.

And that was mostly the end of that. We never submitted anything to her after that. We went directly to the parents. I think we knew after that meeting and just also the actions that came afterwards. Personally, I don't think the meeting was had in good faith. Maybe it was, but I don't believe so. What were the actions afterwards?

After that meeting, it wasn't like parents suddenly had a seat, at the table. The school board meetings continued to be very, very fractious. Parents were being branded as domestic terrorists. You may remember, parents were being removed from school board meetings for trying to advocate for unmasking or for showing up at school board meetings without masks on. We had op-eds that doctors from urgency of normal had in, you know, publications like USA Today, the New York Post, the Daily News, like as broadly as we could. But those doctors were also facing doxing on the internet. And I believe that the people behind the doxing, the organizations behind the doxing, had ties to the teachers' unions. They were activists.

They were trying to discredit them in the same way that Jay Batacharya and Scott Atlas and Martin Kooldoer all got discredited just for advocating for a protection of the vulnerable and a resumption of society. So basically you're saying that the teacher's union was advocating for this masking and other things and they just never changed. Yeah, they didn't change. They had no choice. I mean, some people would say that very cynically that those masks came off just around

the same time as President Biden gave them that final relief package. So they got about $122 billion to reopen the schools in the, the spring of 2021, and the masks came off shortly thereafter. Right, you talk about, you know, how much money was involved. That's an unbelievable amount of money we're talking about here. More than triple the annual school operating, the federal operating budget for schools. Yes, they got $189.5 billion. What they had done was they had convinced the teachers that it was no longer safe to be in the school building.

They convinced teachers that parents didn't care about them. They convinced teachers and the black community that it was somehow white supremacy to want schools to reopen because all it was was yoga moms who needed babysitters. But actually, it was all parents. I spoke to parents from all around the country. It didn't matter what color or demographic they were. They wanted their kids to be back in schools. It was only when they heard from the teachers union messaging that it wasn't safe,

that, you know, they were anxious, but, you know, you have to do your own research. I mean, that's something we learned during the pandemic. You have to do your own research and try to understand how propaganda works. It worked. And you have some, you know, incredible internal conversations, actually, in the film between some of these people. I mean, kind of astonishing stuff. I guess we'll let people watch the film to check that out.

I'll mention myself that I found it. It took me back into the past a bit, but it also made me think to myself, you know, what safeguards do we have now to make sure that doesn't happen or as easily as it did before? Well, I mean, it's happening on a level. It's kind of like micro doses of school closures. Ever since 2020, the teachers unions have been pushing for shorter school weeks and shorter. days. So we have some of the some of the elements of the school closures persist to this day. They say the teachers need a day off at the beginning or the end of the week or students need a mental health break as although as though schools are the place that are the most taxing. They've created this illusion that schools are kind of like a punishment. So of course people don't want

to go, not the teachers, not the students. We don't have a safeguard. to make sure that these schools are open and continue to provide the services. We were not able to keep an essential service open. I mean, that's what happened. And for as long as the teachers' unions have such tight control of our public schools, I think that it's in their hands. So I think, you know, we need to think about what our education system looks like going forward. what will people see when they watch 15 days i think they'll witness a record they'll bear witness to

the stories of the people who experienced the closures directly from them and the film was shot almost immediately following the closures we started in 2022 so the pain was still extremely raw when we started filming we just got in a car stephen Edmonds, who is my friend and was a teacher who lost her job in the New York City public schools due to the vaccine mandates. She refused to comply. The union didn't fight for her, and they fired her instead. So she was available. She was a single mom. I met her at a rally, and I thought, hey, let's make this film, and she was totally up for it. So we got on the road and just started rolling. I mean, it was, we did everything wrong. I can't believe this film is even done or out,

or you can see it. So I think for me, that's a huge triumph as it is. But... Except it doesn't, if I may, it doesn't feel like a film that was like, you know, I actually have to tell you. I think it's quite powerful. Thank you. Well, we, to be, to be fair, we did bring in an incredible producer in Eli Steele, who is a very gifted storyteller and filmmaker. And he advised us every step of the way. And then we have Hawk Jensen, who's a veteran filmmaker as well who came on board about a year and a half ago to help with the massive massive editing process. So this film in many ways has been made in post-production. I will also point out that we did almost 60 interviews over three years. So there's no way you can feature

60 interviews in a film that's one hour, nine minutes long. These are just the stories that we could fit in here. There are many, many more stories that, you know, I hope to. to at some point edit and release so that people hear them. And it was inspired very much by Steven Spielberg and what he did during the founding of the Shoah Foundation because I remember reading the story of how important it was to him to preserve the Holocaust survivors' stories while they were still alive because it was primary material.

Once they were gone, it was gone. And of course this wasn't a Holocaust. But it was a hugely avoidable tragedy for children and families in this country. And I just felt like, well, we better get those stories in now because people aren't going to want to talk about them in a couple of years. And it's true. Even now, as we show the film, I see people, I watch their body language and they shudder. It takes them back to a very, very dark time.

And I don't believe we could have gotten those stories from those people today if we try to recreate it. Yeah, that's remarkable. And almost like it's like a time capsule you have in this six. 60 hours of footage, something to think about for the future. Yes, I am thinking about it, yeah. Well, Natalia, final thought as we finish? I think that people watch the film and I think it takes them back and then it brings them forward and they realize how important it is to know the history

and they say, what can I do now, what are the actions you suggest? And I find myself kind of in a panic at that point because I'm like, well, what should I tell them to do? Is there a toolkit? Is there an expert they need to listen to? And I think that what I really just want parents to do is to diversify their news sources and expose their children to a variety of sources and not just contemporary sources, but things your grandmother would read, ancestral wisdom, intergenerational knowledge. I think that we are really desperately losing intergenerational relationships and wisdom. I mean, when I was little, my grandmother was part of my life. She told me a lot of things that I shrugged off and laughed at and maybe wasn't as polite as I should have been.

But they stayed with me. There's a gravitas to hearing from the old and from your parents, from your grandparents, great-grandparents, if you have that access. So I would love to see parents try to bring their kids. back to the basics and to also rely less on experts because ultimately we have to decide what's best for our children. I also think that it's incredibly encouraging that there's this renaissance in this country of classical schools. They're classical Christian schools opening all over the country. They're very popular, classical Jewish schools, teaching civics and humanities and ancient civilizations because I think the problem right now is that our children have lost

a sense of context. And I think that if we can restore context and all they hear in the news is numerators, but they never hear denominators and context gives that to them. So that's what I would hope for. And some of these are actually charter schools as well. So they could be, in essence, you know, publicly funded.

They're not just private. Exactly. And also, I'm not a religious person, but I do think faith in a higher power, seems to be protective on some level. And so I think in as much as we can give that to our children without pushing any sort of ideology, but just, you know, Judeo-Christian values and the magic of God or godlike, you know, beings,

I think that we need that for our souls. Well, Natalia Murakfer, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you all for joining Natalia Morakfer and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellick.