Florida Beckons as New York City Sadly Wilts

Plus episodes of Take Back Our Schools on gender dysphoria, empowering children, brave teachers and drag queens in chapel

Today, a mostly personal update.

After two years of hemming and hawing, we decided, like many thousands of others, to relocate from the New York City area to what is now formally referred to as the Free State of Florida. I’d like to share with you why.

For nearly 25 years, my wife and I (and our daughter - now 13) lived in Manhattan. Prior to 2020, we never thought we’d leave. Ever. We loved the restaurants. We loved the culture. We loved trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and concerts at the New York Philharmonic. We loved walks in Central Park and explorations of the city’s vibrant and diverse neighborhoods. Perhaps more than anything else, we loved that New York City felt alive, endlessly stimulating, with infinite possibilities for us and for our daughter.

In 25 years, we never felt unsafe. Streets and sidewalks were always full. The homeless were present, but rarely threatening. We were comfortable letting our then 11 year old daughter take public buses home from school, by herself. We never felt the need to look over our shoulders venturing out at night. We never thought twice about taking the subway in the wee hours of the morning.

And in 25 years, we never felt unwelcome. Sure, New York City leaned decidedly left. But in a city of 8 million, all were welcome. Free speech was championed, diverse opinions were valued, and intellectualism was celebrated. For 25 years, we lived in what we thought was the greatest city in the world.

Then came 2020. I’d like to say the city changed, which in many ways it did. But I think it is more accurate to say the rot was exposed. First came covid.

By the time covid hit the area in March (or at least when it was reported to have become prevalent - since it was almost certainly circulating prior to March 2020) we had enough data from Northern Italy to know with what we were dealing. Covid was a nasty and virulent virus, yes. But it was a virus that almost exclusively impacted the very old and the infirm - not the young and healthy - unlike the Spanish Flu of 1918, with which it was wrongly compared. By then, there were already solid estimates of the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR), being not more than 1 to 2 times as deadly as seasonal flu, not 10 or 100 times as deadly, as the mainstream media was reporting. Moreover, we could infer from death counts (which lag infection by 3-4 weeks) that cases had already peaked by mid-March, BEFORE any restrictions were imposed.

There was absolutely no reason to panic and no reason to shut down our beloved city. But panic and shut down the city we did. Lockdowns, distancing, mask mandates, school closures. None of which had any scientific justification prior to 2020.

It should have been obvious to any thinking person that our government’s response to the virus - and not the virus - was going to do irreparable damage to New York City. School closures would cause enormous learning loss and long-term mental health damage from which kids would never recover. Conditioning humans to see each other as no more than disease carriers would shatter all sense of community and humanity, and decimate a dense, vertical city that depends on elevators and mass transit. Encouraging and even forcing online shopping and food delivery would destroy countless retail businesses and restaurants, leaving rows of empty storefronts to be used as nothing more than homeless shelters. Conditioning people to work from home would do long-term damage to work ethics and ravage Manhattan’s business districts.

Finally, we were told by our esteemed governor that all our sacrifices were justified if they saved only one life. This naïve and childish attitude ignored something worse than the direct collateral damage of those sacrifices. By destroying the very fabric and culture of New York City in a matter of a few short months, we desecrated the life’s work of the many tens of millions of New Yorkers who made the city so special over decades and centuries.

In the early days of the pandemic, these were all points I tried to make in countless online comments to the endless fearmongering articles in the New York Times. Those comments completely fell on deaf ears. I finally gave up.

I wondered. Where were all the thinking people? Where were all the tough and cynical New Yorkers who were supposed to be better than anyone else in the world at calling bullshit?

As it turns out, a few were reprehensibly silenced, but most were easily duped and brainwashed. The constant panic inducing media onslaught proved too much. As fear overcame them, most New Yorkers gave up their minds and handed over their souls to the likes of Cuomo and Fauci, two of the most narcissistic and power hungry men to ever grace the airwaves of CNN.

Then, in the summer of 2020 came George Floyd and the so-called racial reckoning. Say want you want about the tragedy of George Floyd, but the BLM protests and riots that happened over that summer are a direct result of covid lockdowns. Young people, bored and restless, having been cruelly isolated for months with no school, no playgrounds, no outlets save toxic digital media, were all of a sudden let out of their cages. The virtue of staying home to save Grandma was instantly forgotten. The new virtue was to join the protests and atone for the sins of slavery and Jim Crow. The level of hypocrisy was hard to fathom.

I was curious so I walked through a few of those daytime protests. Big ones down Lexington Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Peaceful? Sort of. Block after block of mostly teenage and 20-something year old white males chanting “NYPD Suck My Dick.”

At night a different story. Rioting and looting. The CVS pharmacy in our building had its windows smashed. Cars outside the building were vandalized. An attempt to break into our garage was stymied only because they couldn’t get through the locked gate.

Principled activism indeed.

Defund the police became a rallying cry. So-called social justice trumped all semblance of public safety. Looting equaled reparations and property destruction was justified for centuries of oppression.

And once again, I wondered. When would New Yorkers wake up? Do we really want to go back to the bad-old days of the 1970s? The days of squeegee men and subway graffiti? Of syringes in playgrounds and drug deals on stoops? Of nighttime car thefts and daytime muggings? Or worse?

We stayed through the riots and curfews of the summer. My wife was even slapped in the head and knocked off her Citi bike while riding in Central Park. Shaken up but not hurt, she was one of many that afternoon. The police said she was welcome to press charges but also that there was no point in doing so.

We held out hope that New Yorkers would finally come to their senses. But by the fall of 2020, life in the big city was no longer viable for us. We were being harassed and fined ($500 per occurrence!) for our refusal to wear useless cloth masks in the empty lobby of our condominium building. With sadness, we left our apartment of 12 years, the only home our daughter ever knew.

By comparison to New York City, suburban New Jersey felt relatively free. We could leave our home without the Stasi writing down our names. We could go for walks without being mask-shamed. We even found a handful of restaurants that refused to enforce the absurd charade of the 30 second masked march to your table followed by the 2-hour maskless meal. New Jersey was no paradise (duh!) but it was far less stifling than life in New York City. But for us, it was always a temporary stop.

After we left Brearley, we put our daughter in a small private school in New Jersey for the 2021-22 school year. It was the only non-woke secular school we could find in the New York City area. The school, still run by its headstrong founder, valued real education: math and history, literature and Latin. No politics. No ideology. Just a school.

Unfortunately, the school only went through 8th grade (our daughter was in 7th). If we were to stay in the New York City area, we’d have to make a plan for high school. The only viable plan seemed to be the one I fantasized about since my Brearley letter went viral: a brand new school. The highest possible academics and a strong focus on history, civics and the liberal arts. In a nutshell, a classical secular school, a model completely absent from the school landscape of New York City.

I started down that path. I met with school founders from all across the country. I spoke to prospective parents and prospective teachers. I looked at Manhattan real estate. I pitched potential philanthropists. There was enthusiasm from many, even with the $100+ million price tag for a moderately sized K-12 school. I made progress, but I couldn’t fully commit to this project until I fully committed to returning to the city.

For the next year, nearly every night brought the same debate. Do we return to Manhattan or do we pack up and head down to Florida? We yearned for the old, pre-2020 New York. But would that city ever come back? Was New York City savable?

I held out just a bit of hope. Perhaps new mayor, Eric Adams, would prove the white knight the city desperately needed. Almost immediately, that hope vanished. While not the avowed Marxist of his predecessor, Adams quickly showed himself as thin-skinned and vain, surrounding himself with corrupt yes-men. He belittled the pleas of parents to remove senseless and abusive covid measures such as masking toddlers. He displayed little backbone in standing up to teachers unions and equity-obsessed health officials. And while he sometimes said the right things on crime, he proved no match for district attorneys who won’t prosecute and the progressive legislatures that support them.

My final hope was that we could rally enough parents to turn the tide, much as Virginia did in electing Glenn Youngkin governor last November. I joined a number of parent groups fighting both to save education and to restore normalcy for kids. I made many new friends in these groups of courageous and tireless moms and dads. But alas, we just didn’t have anywhere near the numbers necessary. And every week seemed to bring the sad news of another core member fleeing New York for brighter, and saner pastures.

By this past summer, the answer I had been avoiding was unavoidable. New York City is not savable. Not for a generation at least. Possibly not forever.

The city is not yet unlivable like the west coast progressive bastions of San Francisco and Portland, though it is headed that way. Residential neighborhoods are dead after 8pm and on weekends. 24-hour drug stores which now close at 9pm have most of their merchandise under lock and key. The homeless are menacing. Shoplifting is rampant. The cops are nowhere. Pot smoke is everywhere. A sense of lawlessness pervades.

New York is also a place whose political leaders and many of its residents simply cannot or will not move beyond the fear of covid. This formerly resilient city, once united and resolute in the aftermath of 9/11, has become the city of wallowing and victimhood, of the perpetually scared and lazy, and of the selfish, self-absorbed, and self-diagnosed immunocompromised.

Finally, and worst of all, New York City is hostile to children, and by natural extension, to families. For close to three years now, we have abhorrently treated children as human shields, ignoring common sense, irrefutable data and any semblance of morality. We have closed their schools, canceled their sports, made them eat lunch outside in the cold and rain, masked them for hours on end with no breaks, and forced vaccinations on them that cannot be justified by any reasonable cost benefit analysis. Even today, we exclude many from extracurricular activities and many of their parents from school functions and meetings.

The lifeblood of any vibrant city is not tourists or foodies, commuters or clubbers. The lifeblood of any vibrant city is families. New York City is no longer a place to raise a family.

So now we’re in South Florida. My parent’s generation always said Florida is where you go to die. Perhaps that used to be true. But with New York City dying, it seems fair to say that Florida is now the place you go to live.

If you’re in the neighborhood, reach out.

---

Another Professor in Need of Support - Timothy Jackson

Over the summer I shared the story of University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax. Today, I want to tell you about Timothy Jackson, another friend and embattled professor in need of financial support.

In July 2020, Professor Jackson of the University of North Texas published an article in an academic journal he led and founded, where are argued that classical music is not systemically racist. He was labeled a racist for this article and a social media mob along with graduate students and nearly all of his colleagues set out to cancel him and his journal. His university set up a special panel to investigate him, and condemned him.

Professor Jackson sued to defend his academic freedom and constitutional right to free speech. A preliminary ruling favored Jackson and the University of North Texas is now appealing. Jackson’s case is important and has the potential to set important precedent for issues of academic freedom not only in Texas but across the country. Jackson needs funds to help continue fighting his case in court.

If you are able, please consider contributing to Jackson’s case. You can read more about him and his case and donate through the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR).

---

As always, I want to share with you the last few episodes of the podcast I co-host with Beth Feeley, Take Back Our Schools. We talked about gender dysphoria with Stella O’Malley, empowering children with Ian Rowe, teachers speaking up against racialized curriculum with Ramona Bessinger and drag queens in school chapel with Paul Rossi. I hope you’ll have a listen and let us know what you think. Take Back Our Schools is available on all major podcast outlets, including Apple, Google, Spotify and Stitcher. 

The Social Contagion of Gender Dysphoria

In this episode of Take Back Our Schools, Beth and I welcome psychotherapist and author Stella O’Malley to talk about the exploding number of teenage girls with gender dysphoria. Stella shares her own difficult childhood experiences growing up thinking she should be a boy and describes her journey to a career in psychotherapy. She talks about why she thinks girls are susceptible to social contagion and the role that both schools and social media play. Stella also illustrates why so few psychologists are willing to speak out on the alarming trends of gender dysphoria affecting girls and young women but shares her own optimism that the truth will eventually win out.

Empowering Children Through Family, Religion, Education and Entrepreneurship

On this episode of Take Back Our Schools, we talk to education innovator and author Ian Rowe. Ian shares his own personal story coming from an immigrant family which ignited his passion for education. He discusses his framework F.R.E.E. – family, religion, education and entrepreneurship – which serves as an alternative to the toxic and divisive victimhood narrative currently ascendant in our nation’s schools. Ian also talks about the charter high school he cofounded in the Bronx, NY, and the vitriol he has received from teachers unions over his efforts to launch this brand new school.

A Teacher’s Stand Against Racialized Curriculum

On this episode of Take Back Our Schools, Beth and I interview Ramona Bessinger, a teacher who bravely spoke out about the racialized curriculum in her school district. Ramona talks about what prompted her to speak up and the push back she got from her school, other teachers, parents and students. She discusses the article she wrote for Legal Insurrection exposing her school’s divisive CRT based curriculum and the retaliation she received for writing it. Ramona also shares her views on why it is so difficult for other teachers to come forward and oppose the ideological takeover of our nation’s schools.

Drag Queen Chapel and Twitter Censorship

In this episode of Take Back Our Schools, we welcome back former math teacher, journalist and educational hero, Paul Rossi. Paul discusses his seven week purgatory from Twitter for exposing videos of toxic racial literacy curriculum that has infiltrated private schools across the country. Paul also talks about his recent expose of his former school, Grace Church, where a drag queen was invited to perform in bi-weekly chapel, and students were pressured to dance along. We also discuss how identity politics in schools has shifted from race to gender and sexual orientation, and Paul shares his own experiences as a teacher witnessing this transition. 

---

I hope you enjoy these episodes of Take Back Our Schools. As always, please share any ideas or suggestions, including for podcast guests. You can contact me through the website: speakupforeducation.org or email me at andrew@speakupforeducation.org. I am also on Twitter @AndrewGutmann.