The Matzav Shmoooze: Why Are We Suffocating Kids?

By Rabbi Yehoishophot Oliver

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While it’s true that in many places, governments are requiring masks on little children, in other places, this decision is being left to the individual schools to decide. Why are principals all over the world—and from my perspective as an Orthodox Jew, in Orthodox Jewish schools—insisting on suffocating kids with masks, and even very little kids, as old as six?

How do they not see the terrible problems with this?

And how do parents send their kids to such a school?

One part of it is the powerful influence of fear of government on our lives.

We are all citizens of modern governments. We know that if we break the law, there will be harsh penalties and social consequences, often rightly so. This creates a strong subconscious bias towards supporting the government and viewing its laws and edicts as justified. Even if we sense that we face injustice, and even in supposed liberal democracies with supposed freedom of speech, it is very intimidating to come out openly disagreeing with the government.

The same is true for a principal. The only way for a principal to reach his position is by getting professional training on what is expected of him, and this involves understanding that he must obey the laws dictated by the government. Obviously, there are laws about what is and is not allowed in schools and of course many of these laws are good and necessary. But the very fact that the principal must obey the government or lose his job, or have his school shut down, creates a bias in favor of the correctness of whatever the government is saying, even if it has a flimsy basis.

Also, in many places, private schools receive funding for various programs, and this creates a further conflict of interest. The schools could really use this funding, but the funding is in effect a bribe that further weakens the principals’ ability to fight against government overreach and tyranny.

So although the administrators are supposed to be looking out for the best interest of the children, they have a blind spot when it comes to government edicts.

Also, like everyone else, the administrators don’t want to be seen to be endangering others by members of the community, even if they know very well that they’re not. They may fear that this will damage their reputations or even lead to them losing their positions. This creates another conflict of interest.

The masks cause great pain and discomfort by making breathing difficult. They weaken the immune system. They prevent non-verbal communication through facial expressions. They make everyone seem to be scowling at everyone else. You can’t see smiles, you can’t see any facial expressions, you can’t talk and you cant hear people talking. You feel suffocated and downtrodden. The entire atmosphere is oppressive and miserable and you just want to flee.

Masks also communicate through sustained physical and mental pain the outrageous idea that healthy children pose a risk to others, that they could kill grandma simply by breathing. Which has no proof. Masks also strengthen in the mind of children the Big Lie that everyone needs to “socially distance” from one another lest they spread the dreaded disease. This itself creates tremendous distress and trauma, and imbues the bogus, socially devastating idea that physical touch with loved ones, a basic need of children (and adults too, but children even more so), poses tangible physical danger.

All this obviously causes certain severe psychological harm and trauma; I don’t need to be a professional to see that. Certainly, any parent should be able to appreciate that. The only way these measures should be mandated despite this harm is if there were truly solid scientific proof that they are absolutely necessary.

There is no such proof.

There is great disagreement about whether there even is a significant risk of dying from Covid, i.e., if there is reason to think that the figures have been grossly inflated, whether by accident or on purpose; and there is no proof that children can catch Covid, never mind spread it (which is why some experts argued that the schools should not have been closed during the lockdown); and on top of that there is great disagreement about whether masks provide effective protection, with the CDC itself admitting that masks do not work as recently as July 31.

Moreover, California Civil Rights Attorney Leigh Dundas published a video recently highlighting the devastating consequences of isolating children and forcing them to practice “social distancing” at school. She points out that social distancing and isolation was developed 70 years ago by the CIA to break down and torture enemies of state, that it is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day AND being an alcoholic, that it doubles the risk of death, and that it destroys the part of the brain responsible for learning.

She pointed out that according to the statistics and the CDC itself, a child’s risk of dying from Covid is 0.0%, and no child has passed on Covid to a family member or third party, i.e., they do not transmit.

So what we have here is a remote doubt versus a certainty: An extremely remote, unproven and mostly fear-based possibility of the disease being spread and leading to a death on the one hand, and a clear and known certainty that masks cause psychological and physical harm on the other (the only question being just how much). The conclusion should be clear: Masks should not be required for children and social distancing propaganda should not be pushed on them.

This is all true even in New York where officially there were large numbers of deaths from Covid, but all the more so in places like Baltimore and Houston where there never even was a claim that there were mass deaths from Covid (i.e., there was and is no pandemic there at all).

There is no proof that there is a deadly virus circulating here now in these places, and even if there were, there’s no proof that masks are effective at protecting one from such a virus.

However, the idea of even asking for any solid proof from a supposed expert to justify his rulings, or to expect him to respond to the arguments of other experts who say otherwise, seems to be foreign to these principals.

I’ve approached three of them so far and they all say that they’re just following the advice of a certain expert, and so there is nothing to discuss.

I asked them if the expert showed them any solid proof for his claim and they said no, but that they trust him, because he is a supposedly an expert in infectious diseases, and they rely on him in general.

I asked them if they also consulted with an expert in child psychology on the harms of mandating masks for children. They said they hadn’t.

Just how sure is the expert of his opinion? What exactly does he base it on? Is he examining studies himself, or just following the “best practice” recommendations of some official body like the WHO or the CDC? Does he claim to view masks as an absolute necessity to prevent likely deaths or merely as an additional precaution to stay on the safe side? Has he fully taken into account the way in which masks cause one to rebreathe one’s carbon dioxide waste and weaken the immune system?

They didn’t know or wouldn’t respond.

Has he committed his opinion to writing with detailed arguments and sources?

Not as far as they know.

I also asked whether it’s right for an infectious disease expert to presume to express an opinion on a matter of child psychology that is not his field? Why is the supposed infectious disease expert not also concerned about children’s mental health, about the likelihood of psychological trauma?

Silence.

So much for science, reason, and evidence.

Another question I would ask them if they would talk to me again: Does this alleged expert have conflicts of interest? Does he stand to risk his career by disagreeing with the government or with the officially accepted academic position? If so, why do you view him as reliable at all? Shouldn’t such a person, if he has any integrity at all, recuse himself or herself?

Another pressure that the principals face is the demand from paranoid parents, victims of media mind control, fearful of the bogeyman virus, fearful of death. Even if the principal were to be skeptical of the government story, if the parents accept it religiously and view children and teenagers not wearing a mask as literally endangering their lives simply by breathing, then this puts the principals in a difficult position. The parents may choose to not send their kids back to school unless masks are mandatory. So a lot of the responsibility for this situation also rests with the parents.

However, if a significant number of parents would demand no masks on kids and no social distancing propaganda, then the principal would know that some parents may not be sending their children to school precisely because of the masks. Then the two groups would cancel each other out, and the principal might be in a better position to follow his own better judgment.

But there do not seem to be enough parents in the latter camp, sadly. In fact, I heard from one principal that most parents he has spoken with don’t care about the school’s restrictions, they are just desperate to get their kids out of their hair. They need a babysitter!

So the parents also suffer from a major conflict of interest. Even parents who sense that masks on children are unjustified and harmful have an interest in not taking a stand about it because it could mean being left stuck with babysitting and attempting to homeschool their kids, a task that many parents are really not up to or would find very challenging, or would be expensive to hire someone else to do. Also, they need to go back to work; staying home with the kids means losing much-needed income.

Another explanation of the principals is that all the other schools are doing it. I find this response particularly unfortunate, considering that I know as a father and a teacher that a regular part of raising children is explaining to them ad nauseam that the fact that the other children were doing something wrong doesn’t justify their doing likewise. We try to teach kids to overcome peer pressure and develop a conscience that guides their actions. All children have an internal sense of internal right and wrong and the well-trained child does what’s right regardless of what others are doing. Parents and teachers lecture children about this on an almost a daily basis. Yet principals will say with a straight face that they won’t look at the scientific evidence on whether children can catch and spread Covid, whether masks are effective, or whether social distancing is necessary because … all the other schools are doing it!

This really is a difficult challenge for these people, and I don’t envy them. But we need not go easy on them, because this is what they signed up for. Leadership is not about doing what the people say they want. Real leadership means standing up for what’s best for the people, in this case the children, even when it’s unpopular and flies in the face of popular perception.

The main reason that children are being subjected to this psychological torture is that the adults concerned are turning a blind eye to the inconvenient truth that even if Covid is real, masks and social distancing are totally unnecessary for children and very harmful. The information is out there to prove this, even information from official sources. Yet to face this truth squarely would lead to the inescapable conclusion that the government, in recommending these measures, is guilty of a mass deception, if only the deception that masks are needed on children, which is a very bitter pill to swallow, and it would demand they take an unpopular position that might detrimentally affect their social and family life, and that they fight against the system, all of which most people lack the courage to do.

It’s time the adults charged with caring for the kids developed that courage. Because the government tyranny will only get worse, and weakly complying with this institutionalized child abuse in its earlier, “softer” stages will lead directly to more and more outrageous compromises on the wellbeing of the children, all with the same pathetic excuses, blind rejection of any rational discussion, and willful ignorance.

And also because one day, when the devastating long-term psychological effects of social distancing and masks on children are documented, widely publicized, and undeniable (along with a full exposé of the fact that the principals know very well now that Covid doesn’t affect children and children don’t catch or spread it), the children will find out the truth and come forward with the harrowing demand (just as they are now relentlessly hunting down the predator teachers and administrators who sexually abused them):

Why didn’t you look out for me? Why did you ruin my childhood? Why did you subject me to such physical and psychological torture, such child abuse, all based on obvious pseudoscience and cowardly political considerations?

{Matzav.com}