CNN host Audie Cornish said this week that the Covid-19 pandemic has caused parents across the United States to “radicize”.
On Tuesday's episode of “CNN Thong Morning,” several guest panelists, including Cornish and former Bernie Sanders presidential advisor Chuck Rocha, former Homeland security officer Ashley Davis, and Boston Globe DC Bureau chief Jackie Kucinich, discussed how the pandemic has reshaped the country's politics.
“I might also be hesitant to use the term, but I'm thinking about radicalisation, like radicalising my parents, right?” Cornish asked, naming one of the shifts she saw during that time.
The hosts nurtured the topic on Tuesday, March 11th, marking the fifth anniversary of the World Health Organization's declaration of Covid-19 into the pandemic.
“Now since then, more than 1.2 million deaths from Covid in the US have surpassed human casualties, and the pandemic has broken the country hopelessly in so many ways,” Cornish introduced the segment, adding that a recent adult survey showed that over 70% were trying to drive the country more apart than Covid came together.
Cornish pointed to “a mountain of misinformation that caused distrust in US institutions,” and in a video from current 2020 Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who said he felt “a lot” of the pandemic and the government's response.
“The pandemic has changed so many dynamics here, whether we're talking about schools, public health, just office culture, not to mention politics,” Cornish said. She then invited the panel to talk about their experiences throughout Covid.
Despite the panel being primarily adamant about discussing how their individual careers and personal lives were affected, Cornish brought the conversation back to the political realm, pointing out how the virus and lockdowns have begun to lose faith in public institutions.
“People who were really upset about the closure of these schools and struggled at home and had a hard time listening. They became a voting block,” she said.
Rocha agreed, “It has brought many weaknesses to our society. And now you're skipping ahead to this day. What's going on in five years is that people are experiencing measles in Texas because of what's spreading on the internet.”
Liberal media have published stories of attacking parents who have been trying to assert more control over their children's public school education since the start of the pandemic. In one example, the 2021 Washington Post Opinion Piece, written by a university professor and a freelance journalist, claimed that parents “have no rights to control their children's education.
Another example was that Washington Post columnist Jonathan Cape Hart attacked his parents as “foils,” which are used to establish the “far-right” agenda in the American education system.
He told PBS in 2023, denounced lawmakers who defended parental rights:
Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department sent a memo in 2021 instructing the FBI to use counterterrorism tools related to parents who spoke up at school board meetings against the K-12 curriculum and the agenda they disagreed.
The National Education Association (NEA) wrote to social media companies around the time, urging them to curb “propaganda” on key racial theories that appear to have surprised “small but violent groups of radical parents.”
