Absurd Truth: School Closures & Bailouts

It's his life mission to make bad decisions. It's time for Florida Man. That's right, Florida Man here on the Danish show, one of the absolute best traditions, especially this holiday season, right? So we've got to always get into Florida Man. So let's talk about this guy, shall we?

This is another real genius here. Florida Man pleads guilty to threatening to kill Supreme Court Judge Justice John Roberts. That's right. Remember that guy? We were told during all the protests after Roe v. Wade was overturned that there was nothing the Biden administration can do, even though we know that they were probably inciting them. Well, Neil Bridge Sidwane was found guilty, entered a guilty plea Friday to one count of making an interstate threat to injure. He's a Fernanda Beach resident, left an expletive written voicemail message with the Supreme Court in July. And he twice made the threat to kill a justice. The DOJ did not identify which justice he threatened in its statement, but the suspect named his target as Chief Justice John Roberts during a court ordered psychological evaluation.

In the voicemail message, he identified himself by name and urged the U.S. marshals to pass along a message to Roberts that I will effing kill you. He was arrested in August and has remained in custody ever since. The psychologist who conducted his evaluation found that he was competent to stand trial, but noted the fixed delusional beliefs he has held for many years, identifying a diagnosis of delusional disorder with psychosis.

He takes an antipsychotic drug, but I don't think it's really working. And he's going to face up to five years in prison for his offense. Then there's a man arrested for making a bomb threat at the Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport that was with the Broward Sheriff's Office Threat Management Unit, arrested a Rhode Island man on bomb threat charges at Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport Sunday evening.

The incident occurred at 526 p.m. The deputies were alerted to a possible bomb threat in Terminal 1. And what happened here, this guy made a statement about having trouble using a kiosk to check into his flight. Well, obviously, that is frustrating. But nevertheless, you don't make bomb threats, even though that can be a very frustrating, frustrating process. Much of what we see happening around us today results from decades of failure in American education.

Americans are increasingly divided over what policies are best for our country. So that's why I'd like to invite you to make a year end gift to Hillsdale College and their mission to preserve the blessings of civil and religious liberty through a proper education. Hillsdale College is leading an American revival. Over three and a half million citizens have enrolled in one or more of Hillsdale's free online courses. Thousands of young Americans are enrolled in over 90 Hillsdale affiliated K through 12 schools and 6.4 million Americans receive in Primus 10 times a year. Hillsdale does all of this while refusing to accept one penny of taxpayer funding. Hillsdale's independence means that they rely on the support of citizens like you who understand the importance of education and liberty. You can make your tax deductible year end gift at Dana4Hillsdale.com. That's Dana4Hillsdale.com.

On behalf of our friends at Hillsdale College, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Reason.com has a story. Emma Camp, according to an analysis from the Associated Press, 50,000 children in 22 states were still missing from schools in this past fall. That's crazy, right? Two years after the COVID-19 pandemic caused school enrollment numbers to plummet. Well, the number actually indicates an improvement in school attendance. The AP found that an estimated 230,000 children were missing in the fall of 2020. Well, the number actually indicates an improvement in school attendance. The AP found that an estimated 230,000 children were missing in the fall of 2021.

It also shows that thousands of children have nonetheless experienced multi-year disruptions to their educations following COVID era school closures. So I'm bringing this up because we keep hearing about a new variant now as everybody's getting ready to travel. There's a school in Pennsylvania that's already decided they're going to go remote. They're going to do remote learning just as a precaution. You know what I mean? And of course, I would not put anything past the Democrats to turn around and say, mail-in voting.

Got to do it. Lockdowns. There's nothing they won't try to maintain power. We know that.

We obviously all know that. Following the wave of school closures that began with the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020, as many as 3 million school children went missing from school, meaning that they weren't enrolled in their local public school. But they hadn't switched to another school district at all. They weren't enrolled in private school, and they haven't even started homeschooling.

What's that about? While most of these children soon returned, a significant minority stayed absent from classrooms. In February, research from the AP and Stanford researchers found that during the 2021 to 2022 school year, 230,000 children were still out of school across 21 states and the District of Columbia.

When AP examined data from pre-COVID years, they found virtually no children were missing. On Tuesday, the AP reported that an updated analysis found 50,000 children still missing from classrooms across 22 states and D.C. as of fall of 2022. While the numbers signal that vast majority of once missing children have returned to classrooms, graduated or formally dropped out of school, a persistent cohort of children are absent long term. And they say while exact causes are difficult to pinpoint, bureaucratic hurdles could be a major factor holding children back from returning to the classroom. Many school districts have stringent policies of unenrolling children after long absences, while others require onerous paperwork proving a child's residency within the district or complicated medical requirements.

In Atlanta, for example, parents must provide eight separate documents to enroll their children in public schools, including a complicated certificate evaluating a child's dental health, vision, hearing and nutrition. One mother of a seventh grader with autism told the AP that she tried to enroll her son in the local public school as soon as the pandemic ended. However, she didn't have reliable transportation, said she couldn't find a nearby appointment to get him the required immunizations, causing her son to miss five months of school.

She said he wasn't in school and no one cared. The report joins the large body of evidence showing permanent damage to many American school children following extended covid school lockdowns. While the children who have returned to school show devastating learning losses, those who remain absent surely have even deeper deficits, and we haven't even factored in the mental health toll of all this yet. But clearly we have a crisis of mental health in this country among young people, no doubt about it.

So as you look at all those things, you turn around and say to yourself, well, what's going to happen in 2024? If we if we look ahead and we hear all the warnings and hear all the prognostications about covid variants and numbers rising, would the Democrats pull a trick again? I think they would.

I don't think they would hesitate if it meant getting everybody to do mail-in voting and they can control the process. No doubt. No question about it. Randy Weingarten, who's the head of the American Federation for Teachers, came out and said vouchers are another example of white supremacy or something stupid like that. Vouchers, which give kids, particularly poor kids in failing schools, the ability to go to better schools. That's somehow racist.

If you can understand that. But schools, of course, are indoctrination grounds. So many people don't want their kids going near a public school these days. And a lot of parents now don't want their kids going anywhere near college after more universities have become tolerant of all this anti-Israel hate speech that's going on.

But these people are the same people that would punish you if you use the wrong pronoun in a classroom. They would cancel speakers on college campuses. They would cancel comedians. I heard Jerry Seinfeld say he wouldn't play a college campus these days. I know Chris Rock won't do it. There's a lot of comedians that won't bother because they don't want to deal with woke students getting offended and then trying to cancel them and taking one thing they said out of context and then putting it on social media. And it goes viral and then they can't get booking. So a lot of them just said, you know what, the hell with it. I'm not doing it.

I'm not playing in colleges. And now all of the news you would probably miss. It's time for Dana's Quick Five. Now, maybe you and your family are watching Christmas movies. We just watched Home Alone with the kids the other day.

That's a classic, of course, a classic of my childhood. How much would the trip to Paris that the McAllister family took cost today in today's numbers? There was a thing where Kevin took his twenty dollars and went to the grocery store and was able to buy groceries that today would cost about 60 bucks, maybe sixty three dollars for the mac and cheese and all the other things he bought. Well, the whole trip to Paris there and back with the emergency flights and everything because Kevin was left home alone would be about twenty eight thousand dollars or more in today's dollars. That's a lot.

So make sure you count your kids twice. A man in a U-Haul sprayed a substance, yelled anti-Semitic phrases outside a D.C. synagogue. There are a lot of crazy people out there. Brent Wood is accused of driving a U-Haul van around security poles and parking directly on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to Keshel, Israel congregation. Sat down on the hood of the van and then tried to open the synagogue's front door, but it was locked. There was a class going on inside, so he started to spray with an unknown substance and yelled, gas the Jews. This is what the Jewish population in the United States of America has to deal with. Crazy lunatics like this who feel emboldened based on what's happening on college campuses.

It's absolutely terrible. You can watch a gigantic fireball moving along power lines in St. Pete if you're down in Florida. That's right. A fireball moved across power lines in the Shore Acres area of St. Petersburg Sunday morning after storms moved through the area. They said it was arsing and occurs when someone hits a power line and there is a fault in the case of tree extreme winds or flying debris.

So a gigantic fireball going up and down the power lines. I feel like it's bad luck just looking at something like that, don't you think? And an Oregon woman who was hospitalized for 17 days on life support died. But after a random soup can beating, a man was a man pleaded not guilty to four felony charges relating to the alleged attack.

This is a man who beat a woman to death with cans of soup. And this is just absolutely terrible how this happens. But like I said, there are a lot of crazy people out there. No question about it. All right. We got a lot more to talk about on The Dana Show here today with me, Rich Zioli in for Dana.

Don't go away. Which then brings us to the next scam that Joe Biden is doing, which is the payoff, the bribe. You know, in the old days, if you wanted a voter to vote for you and you wanted to bribe them, you had to give them a bag of cash, maybe cigarettes. You know, street money, walking around money.

You want to get people to rally their friends to go vote? Here's a here's a carton of lucky strikes. But nowadays, they don't do it that way. Now, what they do is they send you a check in the form of a student loan repayment. So even though the United States Supreme Court came out and said Biden's student loan repayment scam was just that, an unconstitutional scam. Biden's doing it anyway. And 80,000 people in Pennsylvania have already had their college loans completely forgiven by Joe Biden. That's the must win swing state of Pennsylvania. Joe Biden getting in there and giving people money.

The ultimate bribe, the ultimate form of a bribe, a government check. Yeah, and nearly nine million student loan borrowers missed their first payment after the pause resumed. They had this covid pause and then they said you finally now three years later have to start making your student loan payments. The first one was due last week and millions, nine million people missed the first student loan payment they were supposed to make after the pandemic pause ended this fall. That amounts to about 40 percent of the 22 million people who had student loan payments due in October. The nearly nine million borrowers had not made their payments by well into November. For comparison, less than 26 percent of borrowers missed their payment in October of 2019 before the pandemic pause went into effect. The payment pause began in March of 2020 in the thick of the covid pandemic.

It ended in October of this year after more than three years. More than 28 million borrowers are supposed to be resuming payments. But that's not what's happening. They say some are confused or overwhelmed about their options.

You know what I think it is? I think a lot of people are thinking, why would I pay that? Why should I pay this? They'll they'll pay it for me at some point. The entitlement culture will say, I'm not paying this payment. They'll wind up paying it.

I'm not going to do that. And I don't blame them for thinking that because when Biden announced his student loan debt repayment plan, guys like me who paid off all my student loans many, many years ago, I was angry. I said, all right, well, how about my car loan? How about my mortgage? How about my credit card debt? Can you pay any of that stuff off for me? Can we can we pick a debt and you get to pay that off? But of course, no.

The answer was no. They knew the student debt repayment was a bribe for Democrat voters. Elites. James Carville said the Democrat Party has become the party of the faculty lounge and coastal elites and has lost touch with working people. His group found they did polling data that for the first time since the question was asked when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, working people now say the Republican Party is better for them than the Democrat Party is.

How do you think that happened? That happened because a lot of people who were plumbers and contractors, carpenters, truck drivers who never went to college turned around and saw Joe Biden trying to give all these elite, snarky little baristas at Starbucks tens of thousands of dollars to pay off their student loan debt. And these blue collar workers turned around and said, hey, not for nothing, but what do I get?

You get nothing and you'll like it. See, the Democrat Party has completely lost touch with the working class in this country, but that's by design. They're their party.

They are the party now of the academic elites in places like Harvard University of Pennsylvania and other schools across the country like that. That's why the anti-Israel fervor you see on college campuses is also playing out in the halls of Congress. It's why when Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman comes out and says that he stands with Israel, he gets blasted by progressives.

Why? How can you stand? How can you stand with Israel?

How can you do that? Because the mainstream thinking of the Democrat Party today is not stand with Israel. It's anti-Israel.

So if you break from that as a Democrat, like John Fetterman has done, you get blasted by progressives. Israel is the oppressor. How can you think that way? College campuses have taught students that there is the oppressed and the oppressor, and that's how you have to view the world. America has traditionally always been the oppressor. And there's all these people in this country who are oppressed. Now let's open your handbooks and figure out who those people are. It's everybody who's not a white male, basically. And they turn around and they indoctrinate students into thinking this. They create all this division. And they've said, well, Israel is obviously the oppressor, too.

Which is why you see this boiling over in college campuses. Thanks for tuning into today's edition of Dana Lash's Absurd Truth Podcast. If you haven't already, make sure to hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.