CNN host recalls how COVID caused the 'radicalization' of parents

CNN host Audie Cornish remarked this week that the COVID-19 pandemic caused the "radicalization" of parents throughout the United States.

During Tuesday’s episode of "CNN This Morning," Cornish and several guest panelists – including former Bernie Sanders presidential campaign advisor Chuck Rocha, ex-Homeland Security official Ashley Davis, and The Boston Globe D.C. bureau chief Jackie Kucinich – discussed how the pandemic reshaped politics in this country.

"I also think about maybe the – I hesitate to use this word – but kind of radicalization of, say, parents, right?" Cornish asked, naming one of the shifts she saw during that time.

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CNN host Audie Cornish says the COVID-19 pandemic led to the "radicalization" of American parents against public school education. (Screenshot/CNN)

The host brought up the topic with Tuesday, Mar. 11 being the fifth anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring COVID-19 a pandemic. 

"Now, since then, there have been more than 1.2 million deaths from COVID in the U.S. Beyond the human toll, the pandemic also hopelessly fractured this nation in so many ways," Cornish said while introducing the segment, adding that a recent Pew survey of adults showed that over 70 percent of them believe COVID "did more to drive the country apart than to bring it together."

Cornish pointed to a "mountain of misinformation that triggered distrust in U.S. institutions," and followed the point with a video of current Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. telling people in 2020 that "a lot" of the pandemic and the government’s response feel "very planned to me."

"The pandemic has changed so many dynamics here, whether we‘re talking about schools, public health and just office culture, not to mention our politics," Cornish remarked. She then invited the panel to talk about their experiences during COVID.

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A parents rights supporter holds up a sign during Chino Valley Unified School District board meeting at Don Lugo High School in Chino on Thursday night July 20, 2023. (Getty Images)

Despite the panel mostly sticking to discussing how their individual careers and personal lives were affected, Cornish steered the conversation back into political territory, noting how the virus and lockdowns were the moment that American parents began to lose faith in public institutions.

"People who were really upset about those school closures and were struggling at home, struggling to be heard. They became a voting bloc," she said. 

Rocha agreed, adding, "It exposed a lot of weakness in our society because we weren‘t prepared for that. And now you skip forward to today. What‘s happening five years later is you have a measles outbreak in Texas because folks don‘t trust vaccines because of things that are spread on the internet."

Liberal media outlets have published stories attacking parents for trying to assert more control over their kids’ public school educations since the start of the pandemic. In one instance, a 2021 Washington Post opinion piece written by a university professor and a freelance journalist argued that parents "don’t" have a right to control their children’s education.

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Another example was Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart attacking parents as a "foil" being used to enact a "far-right" agenda in America’s education system.

Slamming lawmakers who have advocated for parental rights, he told PBS in 2023, "It just seems like, from Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida, to Gov. Huckabee in Arkansas, to the Republican-led House of Representatives, it seems like they have a problem specifically with trans kids…  And so, when I hear parental rights, I think parental rights for whom?"

The Department of Justice under the Biden administration sent out a memo in 2021 directing the FBI to use counterterrorism tools relating to parents speaking out at school board meetings against K-12 curriculum and agendas with which they disagreed.

The National Education Association (NEA) sent a letter to social media companies around that time, urging them to stifle "propaganda" about critical race theory that had supposedly stoked "a small but violent group of radicalized parents."

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