How School Closures Irrevocably Harmed a Generation | Natalya Murakhver

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Filmmaker Natalya Murakhver has recently released her new documentary “15 Days: The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures.”

It shows the devastating effects that remote learning had on children and families. What was the true impact of the school closures on a generation of children? How can we begin to measure it?

“Viewers will bear witness to the stories of the people who experienced the closures directly. The film was shot almost immediately following the closures. We started in 2022, so the pain was still extremely raw,” Murakhver says.

“I felt [that] we better get those stories in now, because people won’t want to talk about them in a couple of years. … As we show the film, I see people’s body language, and they shudder. It takes them back to a very dark time.”

Murakhver co-founded parent advocacy organization Restore Childhood in 2021 and played a leading role in mobilizing New York City parents to reopen public schools during the pandemic.

In the spring of 2021, she filed a lawsuit against New York City and its Department of Education, seeking a judicial order to fully reopen public schools for five days a week of in-person learning.

“People watch the film … and they realize how important it is to know the history,” she says.

You can watch “15 Days” here. 

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Natalya Murakhver, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Natalya Murakhver:

Thank you so much for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:

So I was looking at the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP] scores, recently. And it seems like they’ve registered the largest drop of these scores in generations. And you’re kind of in the middle of trying to explain why. So tell us what happened. 

Ms. Murakhver:

When schools shut down and kids were locked out of their classrooms, they really lost the interest and the desire to learn. Also, the disconnect with the teachers just could not be replicated with online school. Prior to the pandemic, there had been research on learning loss and just aptitude in online versus in-person learning. 

They looked at cadets at the most elite military academy in the country, West Point, and they saw the online cadets learned, achieved scores something like several standards of deviation lower than the ones that were coming in in person. So if the most elite cadets can’t achieve parity, how can third graders? 

 

Speaker A:

And then I started forgetting a bunch of things that I learned in school.

Speaker B:

So hard to learn. We would go in different rooms; we called it our quarters, and we would just start learning, but it was just still like a disconnect. You could feel the disconnect. 

Speaker A:

When I was taking my Spanish classes on the computer, everything was—people just kept talking in English. Like my teacher kept talking in English, so there were like only 10 words in Spanish in my classes. 

Speaker C:

It was hard on my eyes. Like my eyes were burning. They gave us 15-minute breaks during the school day. So like, I know, I guess for me, it was to rest my eyes. But then we just got right back on Zoom. 

Speaker B:

I could turn off my camera and go into a different room. Meanwhile, the teacher’s talking and I didn’t hear a single word of what she was saying and then come back when it was ending and said, bye.

Speaker D:

I would just feel bad. Honestly, I would just feel isolated. Like I didn’t feel right because I knew I had stuff to do, but I just didn’t feel like getting it done. 

Speaker E:

I didn’t know what to do and I just stayed in my room. I used to be like the goofy, joyful person, and it’s just like I never saw myself like that. 

Speaker A:

I missed out on friendships. I missed out on school activities. 

Speaker F:

Look back there. Pick it up and turn it around. It says, we miss our friends.

Speaker B:

It was just so abnormal. Kids haven’t been allowed to be kids. 

 

Mr. Jekielek:

And so we saw this huge movement. Of course, this was during the pandemic of education online for a pretty significant amount of time for many students, even across the country, but in particular in New York. And this is where you’re from. So tell me about what exactly happened. 

Ms. Murakhver:

In March 2020, when we knew that the virus was virulent and spreading, everybody was kind of lost. There were a group of parents from the very beginning that were concerned about school closures. I was one of them. I understood normal childhood development. 

Learning and development do not happen in just one dimension. And if kids were going to be locked at home away from teachers and friends, I knew even back then that that would be detrimental. Could I quantify it? No, but I knew it in my gut. 

So there were parents at our elementary school that organized a committee to come in and sterilize the handrails and the doors. And I remember thinking, this is so futile. If it’s a virus, it’s probably airborne. But at the same time, I thought that we had to figure out what the risks vs. the benefits were. And it always seemed to be more beneficial for the kids to be in school. 

So when they shut down in March 2020, they told us it would be for two weeks. I remember I was called to my kid’s school to pick up a packet of homework. They said, okay, bye, see you in two weeks. And I burst out into tears. Everybody said, why are you crying? We’ll be back in two weeks. 

I said, no, because once these schools are closed, I’m not sure when they can reopen. Because it wasn’t just about reopening the doors. It was about regaining the trust of the people who were supposed to walk through them and the students who would walk through them and their parents. And I knew that would be very, very difficult to do. That’s interesting.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’ve heard from another parent at the time, Bobbi Anne Cox, who was a lawyer and commercial lawyer. And she knew that it wouldn’t be two weeks. And she knew just because there was no scenario where the bureaucracy could function in a way that something would reopen in two weeks after something was initiated. That, again, fascinating. I was one of those people who thought, two weeks? Sure, it’ll be fine, right? I didn’t have that instinct at all. 

Ms. Murakhver:

Yes, that’s another dimension. But yes, the idea that you’re going to create such unmitigated fear in people about the school building, because we were told it’s so dangerous, don’t stand next to each other. As I was leaving that day with the packet of homework, I remember I was walking down the sidewalk with another parent and we were walking too close together. And she seemed to be oblivious to it, but I was like, oh my God, am I exposing myself or her to something? We’re not supposed to be walking down the sidewalk one foot apart. This was outside. 

I was a pretty rational, non-anxious person about this issue specifically. Yet, this is the kind of fear I was feeling, so what were more anxious parents feeling? So I just thought, my God, we’re entering something that’s unprecedented. I don’t know how we’re going to come back. 

Mr. Jekielek:

So you’ve made the film, 15 Days, about, well, that time, and also, you know, what happened afterward and, you know, culminating in this dramatic learning loss that I described earlier. But why is the film called 15 Days? 

Ms. Murakhver:

Because at the time Fauci held up a sign. Everybody had held up signs and said, oh, it’s just 15 days. It’s just 15 days to slow the spread. And we have this montage of the Surgeon General and Fauci and even President Trump at the time saying 15 days. So that was what we heard over and over again. And I think that was ingrained in people’s heads that 15 days lasted for up to two years in places like California. But we thought that that would bring people back, unfortunately. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and in New York, it really only lasted for several months, but then it never—or it didn’t fully come back very quickly. And that actually had a profound impact as well, right? 

Ms. Murakhver:

Yes. Schools closed in mid-March 2020. They were closed and remote for the remainder of the 2020 school year. And then in the fall, to his credit, it’s probably the only good thing Bill de Blasio did: he did reopen the schools. The unions pushed hard. The UFT [United Federation of Teachers] is very powerful in New York City. That’s a branch of the American Federation of Teachers. 

They wanted the strictest reopening guidelines, but Bill de Blasio was able to reopen schools on September 28, 2020, in hybrid fashion. So depending on how many kids were in a classroom and how oversubscribed the school was, some schools had a great number of kids coming back. And in those cases, those kids were probably in the classroom fewer days because they were spreading them six to eight feet apart. And not all classrooms had the space for, you know, for all the students. 

My own kids went two days one week, three days the following week. Even with all those restrictions and masks and really draconian restrictions inside elementary schools, my kids rebloomed once they were around their teachers and their fellow classmates. It was dramatic. Even under the worst circumstances inside those schools, those kids needed each other like we needed to drink water. 

Mr. Jekielek:

There’s also this issue of absenteeism that happened. Basically, of course, everybody was absent from doing things online. Then there was this hybrid model. But then it turns out a lot of people just never came back, and I don’t even understand how that’s possible. Like what are these kids doing now? Do we have any idea?  

Ms. Murakhver:

Michael Pinckney, who was an athlete, was a junior at the time of the school closures, talks about this in the film. He was a thrower and he was competing outside of school because his father was prepared enough for something like this because he had gone to college on a sports scholarship and he wanted to make sure that Mikey didn’t miss out. But he talks about the fact that these kids who left and had been competing with him in high school in throwing and track and field never came back. 

I think some of those kids had to stay home and take care of their younger siblings. Or some of them, I remember reading articles, had gone to work. They were told that they weren’t important. The ones who did actually show up in schools at the time were forced to mask. We had a lawsuit that we filed because of Zoom in a Room. I don’t know if you’ve heard that term, Zoom in a Room. 

Many middle and high schoolers, when they did return to school in New York City public schools, and I know around the country as well, due to union contracts, the teachers were allowed to continue to teach remotely while the students were in the classrooms with their masks, looking at computers and spaced. apart. Nobody wanted to do that. That did not qualify as in-person real school. So kids dropped out; kids left. They were being made to feel like pariahs inside their own classrooms. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, I thought I knew about everything from the pandemic. I didn’t know until this moment about Zoom in the room. That’s a kind of Kafka-esque feel to it. 

Ms. Murakhver:

Yes, it was really tragic. I had parents reaching out to me from all around the country. First, it was, you know, mostly parents in New York because I was part of a group called Keep NYC Schools Open. We had a Facebook group. It was very bipartisan. I’m a registered Democrat, very progressive. I was fine with BLM. None of that was a wake-up call for me. I was all about racial justice. I still am. I really haven’t changed. 

But parents from around New York City reached out to me and kept saying, hey, we’re looking for leadership here. There was no leadership, right? And there was no organized movement. It was just a collection of parents. Whoever was willing to do something was asked to do it. We organized the rallies. Nothing changed. We organized petitions. Nothing changed. 

So I finally decided to organize a lawsuit to sue the mayor and sue New York City to reopen the schools. We had twenty plaintiffs, and we had to turn away some others. It was stories like, my child’s scores are going down, they used to be in a gifted and talented program or one of the highest achievers, they’ve lost interest in learning, all the way to a suicide attempt from one of my plaintiffs. Her son suffered thyroid throughout the entire pandemic. She’s a psychiatrist, is public, and always willing to talk about it. She’s not hiding. He unfortunately ended up taking his own life this past May. He was in college, and he never recovered. And I think he’s just one of them.

Mr. Jekielek:

Absolutely terrible. Before we continue, tell me just a little bit about your background. You know, how, you know, I know, for example, that you’re an immigrant, even though that might not necessarily be obvious. But tell me, tell me about your background. 

Ms. Murakhver:

I came here as a six-year-old. I came to New York from the Soviet Union, from Odessa, Ukraine. My parents decided to emigrate when Carter and Brezhnev had an arrangement where the Soviet Jews were allowed to leave. We had a choice. We could go to Australia, Israel, or the United States. My parents were kind of stuck; they weren’t sure because my father’s family had gone to Israel a few years before that, and his best friend had gone to New York. New York won. 

We decided to come; they decided to bring me here in the winter of 1977. And that was a long process. We left; we had to get processed in Austria. Then we ended up spending close to five months in Rome while we were waiting for everything to come through. We ended up in New York. It was the time of big blizzards. I remember snow was over my head. I’d never seen anything like it, even though it was the Soviet Union; Ukraine by the Black Sea was fairly moderate and temperate.  

I immediately got put in first grade. I was six-and-a-half. I remember my mother said, well, you know, should she be held back? It’s, you know, she’s going to go into a classroom where she doesn’t speak a word of English. The principal, to her credit, said, send her in. So little kids her age acquire the language very quickly. And she was right, I did. It was stressful at times. It was truly diverse. There were kids from all over New York City there. It was a Brooklyn elementary school. 

But I loved it, and I thrived, and I was fluent within a year, I’d say probably even less. So I have that public school education. We were living in a tiny apartment. My father worked as a plumber in an incinerator for $4 an hour in really terrible conditions, but he never complained. 

My mother commuted to Manhattan from Brooklyn. She was a bookkeeper. But they built a life for us. I was never locked in the house. I don’t know what it would have been like if everything had shut down. They couldn’t go to work; they couldn’t stay home with me. I think our future would have crumbled.

Mr. Jekielek:

There really wasn’t the possibility to do that before, though, right? Because this online world that existed during the pandemic was kind of ready to be tested in this way. It just wasn’t something you could do even back then. 

Ms. Murakhver:

No, and actually, they wouldn’t have done it back then. Monica Gandhi, who is an AIDS researcher at UCSF [University of California, San Francisco], talks about this in the film, that even during the Spanish flu, when it was far more dangerous for children, we know now COVID, and we knew even as early as 2020, that COVID was not a great danger to children. But the Spanish flu was. 

Back then, the progressive cities—New York, Philadelphia, Chicago—realized the costs to children of shutting down schools and deliberately kept those kids’ schools open because they said they’d live in squalor. They wouldn’t get fed. Teachers are mandated reporters. All of those things were important, so they wouldn’t have done that. 

But yes, I think you’re right. Educational technology has been encroaching on schools for over a decade, and I think the opportunity exists to try it out, and they’ve had remarkable results for educational technology profits.

Mr. Jekielek:

Before we continue, tell me the rest of your life. So you grew up in school. Clearly, you were fluent very quickly. I don’t think anyone would guess that you’re an immigrant. Where did your life take you? 

Ms. Murakhver:

I went to NYU [New York University]. I was very much a New Yorker. I wanted to get out of Brooklyn and be in Manhattan and work in the film industry. I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but I went to NYU, majored in English, and ended up getting an internship at a production company in Manhattan and eventually moving to Los Angeles for a couple of years in my early 20s. It was the early ’90s, and O.J. Simpson was the big story, with the white Bronco being chased by police in front of my house, like right off Route 405 as I was watching it on TV. That was unsettling. 

We had the huge earthquake, the Northridge earthquake, and pretty quickly I realized I wanted to be back in New York.  I’d had enough of LA in just over a year and came back and continued to work in the film industry. I worked for a producer as a story editor, looked at scripts and plays, and was always trying to figure out my place in the world. But I knew it had to do with storytelling. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and then clearly you took advantage of that in making this film. You mentioned that you went to public school. And I understand that this learning loss, that these scores are actually the most depressed in the public schools in the inner city, in these sort of most disadvantaged, let’s call it, communities.

Ms. Murakhver:

Yes, these are the kids who had the fewest resources. And in fact, even in 2020 and 2021, when we had our rallies, Mayor Eric Adams was borough president at the time. And he showed up to most of our rallies. He was one of the only elected officials who did. He talked about the fact that these kids in the inner city didn’t have access to technology. They didn’t have good wi-fi connections. They were pretty much left hanging.

Another student is now a college student, but he was a high school student at the time. Garrett Morgan, who’s in our film, talks about the fact that sports keeps kids engaged. He says, you want to know what takes a kid off the streets? A ball. You know, that takes a gun out of the kid’s hand—a ball. 

And we have Coach Ron Naclerio, who’s the winningest coach in high school basketball. He’s at Cardozo High School, and he talks about what it was like. He said, I needed my kids. I’m their mentor. He doesn’t have his own children. He has always mentored generations and generations of inner-city basketball players. 

And he said, they needed me, but we couldn’t see each other. We weren’t allowed to. The hoops had been removed from basketball courts outside. Even outside of the schools, they had nowhere to go. So they lost interest. 

There has been so much depression and mental health issues. And then you hear about all these special counselors who are being hired. But my perception of this whole thing is this was a manufactured crisis. You knew exactly how this was going to end. It’s very difficult to rectify that now. And I don’t think talk therapy is the way to do it. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, so you knew, but it seems like not a lot of people did. And I mean, I can even just speak for myself, right? I was someone that saw problems in the virus origins narrative. That was very obvious to me from the beginning because of my background in biology and so forth. But I didn’t necessarily understand that this whole thing was a problem. And I don’t have kids, so I wasn’t faced with that question. 

So, you know, I wonder, but we were also being fed a very serious diet of information about, you know, how we were supposed to think about all this stuff. So maybe this, of course, shows up in your film quite prominently. Tell me about that and how that fit in.

Ms. Murakhver:

And also, it wasn’t even just what we were being fed; it’s what we were being starved of. How many people knew who Jay Bhattacharya was when he released the Great Barrington Declaration? I don’t think I even knew about that. We know now through the Freedom of Information Act and the Supreme Court case that these people, these scientists, the most esteemed, prestigious scientists were being censored.

So our news feeds were being curated. The New York Times was feeding us, I would say, misinformation because their science reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, who before that I would have trusted like the Bible, was spewing things that were not true. There was no evidence to support these claims that COVID was the most dangerous to children, that we should keep schools closed, that we should not allow children to be around their grandparents and let them pull down their masks and take bites in between breaths of air. These things in any normal world would be considered truly barbaric. 

But parents were lost. You think about how frazzled parents were, parents who were working full-time jobs, parents who were working multiple jobs. Now they were responsible for doing all of the research, figuring out what’s suppressed and what’s being fed to them.  As Jay Bhattacharya talks about this, it was an illusion of consensus. You had so many voices saying the same thing that I think it was hard to see beyond that. It was parents like me who had already had children who maybe required some extra attention in certain areas.

My older daughter has food allergies. And I have done a lot of medical research to try to understand what was the source of the allergies. I have some theories and also what we could do about it. And I’ve been trying to find a cure for her. She’s 15. For the last 12 years. 

I haven’t really been successful, but I think it gave me a certain level of literacy when looking at reports. Also, myself personally, having gone through the food studies program at NYU, I studied with Marion Nestle, who’s pretty much the godmother of, you know, food, nutrition, and messaging in the food world, gave me a level of skepticism, where I kind of came to it. 

Then, most importantly, having grown up in a former Soviet household with parents who didn’t trust anyone, certainly anyone outside the home and read the media with a skeptical eye, I had a bit of an inoculation and probably a little bit more critical thinking skills, just because of my past. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, something you mentioned here is that, you know, on the one hand, there was this voice, a very loud voice, right? Everybody seemed to be saying the same thing. The reason they’re all seeming to be saying the same thing, even if that’s, even if it’s, you know, loud and kind of broadcast out on these airways. 

The second component was the dialing down of the other alternate voices. And so it’s almost like you need the combination of, that’s been my conclusion. If that’s the combination, that’s the most pernicious because you don’t know what the other people are saying. You just kind of assume that everybody has the same idea. 

What got me onto the idea that there was something else going on is Florida. I saw that the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, was doing something different and it seemed to be working and people were going there. So I went and reported, did a whole documentary on this, but did report on that, right, and realized wait, wait a second, this is not, none of this makes sense, I mean, ultimately, you know, and got introduced to some of these skeptical sciences. But I didn’t know they existed before that.

Ms. Murakhver:

Right. And once you found them, everything changed. And it was the same for me. And I think about those scientists and what they endured. We interviewed Jay Bhattacharya long before he became the head of the National Institutes of Health [NIH]. And he talks about how he started at Stanford as an undergraduate, as an 18-year-old. And the motto of Stanford was, let the winds of freedom blow. When he talks about this, his face lights up and you know that that was his spiritual home. 

But yet, just asking questions and searching for answers and doing research, that’s what he was doing. Research on infection fatality rates got him censured. He had death threats lobbed against him. He couldn’t even walk down the Stanford campus without seeing his face plastered on a billboard, death to Jay Bhattacharya. This is several years before Charlie Kirk was assassinated. But think about the messaging that was sent to people who even dared to speak out or, God forbid, do research. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You mentioned you became a leader. People were looking for a leader. You became that leader. You developed a group called Restore Childhood. And just tell me how that all came about and what its purpose is.

Ms. Murakhver:

Funny enough, it’s actually a reaction to a meeting I had with Randi Weingarten three years ago in November 2022. 

Mr. Jekielek:

And just very quickly, who is Randi Weingarten for those that might not know?

Ms. Murakhver:

Randi Weingarten is the head of the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teachers’ union in the country. I reached out to Randi Weingarten in the fall of 2022 because I saw that she was receptive to speaking with parents and engaging with parents. I knew that she had a say in the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] reopening guidelines. 

At that point, the New York Post and Fox had broken the story that Randi and the teachers’ unions had crafted the school reopening guidelines, which you know up until then parents certainly didn’t know, so it was surprising. I had hoped that there was some good faith in those guidelines and she was coming to it, you know, with an open heart and so I reached out to her on X, on Twitter back then, because I’d heard she was receptive to speaking with parents. 

I said, could we meet at some point? I’d love to speak with you. My children are suffering in school with masks on. And I’ve done the research. There’s no research supporting the safety and efficacy of masks. We need to get the kids back to normal. normal? And she said yes. 

We met on Marathon Sunday in November 2022 on the Upper West Side for drinks. And it was very pleasant. We had a good conversation. And I asked her if she would talk to the CDC. It’s kind of ludicrous to tell this story. I can’t even believe that we had this conversation. 

I said, I know that you have a say in what the CDC does. Can you talk to them about revising their guidelines and getting these kids back to normal? They need to be able to see each other’s faces. And she said, you know what, Natalya, if you present an outline for how to unmask the kids, I will present it to the CDC and we’ll see what we can do. 

It was shocking. I was an Upper West Side mom without a medical degree. What am I going to present to her? I want her to remove the masks, but I guess now I need to go through the steps because I’ve been given an opportunity to have a say in policy. 

So the first thing I did was I called Tracy Hoeg, who was a researcher in the Bay Area at the time, and a friend. I said, Tracy, Randi Weingarten is willing to present our proposal to unmask the kids. I need research. Tracy is a dual citizen between the United States and Denmark, speaks five languages, and is really just a brilliant researcher. She just laughed. 

She said, of course, I’ll work with you on this. But there’s no proposal. She’s like, if we give them an off ramp, we’re going to have an on ramp. She goes, there’s no research behind masking kids. Just take them off. So we worked together for a few months, figured out that there was a toolkit that another virologist had developed on the West Coast for his own kids’ school about the benefits and harms of masking and the mental health issues that were developing in kids that he was seeing in his own children. 

We ended up taking that toolkit and creating something called Urgency of Normal, which was released in January 2022 or 2023, I can’t remember the year anymore. And it was a toolkit for parents, not for the teachers’ unions. We realized there was nothing for us to present to Randi and the CDC. We needed to give the parents access to the data and to the stories so that they could advocate on their own local levels. 

We wrote op-eds. We had multiple doctors, including Vinay Prasad, Monica Gandhi, and Lucy McBride, big-name doctors who signed on to it. We did a Zoom call that had over a thousand parents from around the country, which is great considering we didn’t have a budget. This was just a Zoom call we publicized on Twitter, and that went viral. 

And that created part of the parent movement, and definitely gave access to parents. They would reach out to us from all over the world, not just the United States. I’d get emails from everywhere. Eventually, that led to me forming Restore Childhood, a nonprofit that produced the film. 

Mr. Jekielek:

So did you end up giving any information to Randi Weingarten?

Ms. Murakhver:

There was nothing to give. My husband and I would sit at home trying to figure out what this toolkit would look like because there was no evidence to support masking. So we couldn’t find any evidence for her to bring to the CDC, any kind of model. And the scientists just wouldn’t do it. Scientists are true. They want to present the data, the best available data they have, and we just didn’t have anything to give to her. 

So the only thing I did was to tweet after our meeting. Randi asked when I left if I would tweet about our meeting because she wanted to show the world that she was working with parents. This was immediately after Glenn Youngkin won in Virginia for governor. Randi had been campaigning with Terry McAuliffe, his challenger, who I think you might remember, had campaigned and said that he didn’t think parents had any right to know what was happening inside their kids’ schools.

 So I think she was really eager to reach out to parents and, you know, clean her image.  And so I tweeted about having met with her. She retweeted it, as she promised. And that was mostly, mostly the end of that. We never submitted anything to her after that. We went directly to the parents. I think we knew after that meeting and just also the actions that came afterward that personally, I don’t think the meeting was held in good faith. Maybe it was, but I don’t believe so. 

Mr. Jekielek:

What were the actions afterward? 

Ms. Murakhver:

After that meeting, it wasn’t like parents suddenly had a seat at the table. The school board meetings continued to be very, very fractious. Parents were being branded as domestic terrorists. You may remember parents were being removed from school board meetings for trying to advocate for unmasking or for showing up at school board meetings without masks on.

We had op-eds that doctors from Urgency of Normal had in publications like USA Today, the New York Post, the Daily News, as broadly as we could. But those doctors were also facing doxing on the internet. And I believe that the people behind the doxing, the organizations behind the doxing, had ties to the teachers’ unions. 

They were activists; they were trying to discredit them in the same way that Jay Bhattacharya, Scott Atlas, and Martin Kulldorff all got discredited just for advocating for a protection of the vulnerable and a resumption of society.

Mr. Jekielek:

So basically you’re saying that the teachers’ union was advocating for this masking and other things, and they just never changed.

Ms. Murakhver:

No, they didn’t change. They had no choice. Some people would say that very cynically, and the masks came off shortly thereafter.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. You talk about how much money was involved. That’s an unbelievable amount of money we’re talking about here.

Ms. Murakhver:

More than triple the annual school operating, the federal operating budget for schools. Yes. They got $189.5 billion. What they had done was they had convinced the teachers that it was no longer safe to be in the school building. They convinced teachers that parents didn’t care about them. They convinced teachers and the black community that it was somehow white supremacy to want schools to reopen because all it was was yoga moms who needed babysitters. 

But actually, it was all parents. I spoke to parents from all around the country. It didn’t matter what color or demographic they were. They wanted their kids to be back in school. It was only when they heard from the teachers’ union messaging that it wasn’t safe that, you know, they were anxious. But you have to do your own research. That’s something we learned during the pandemic. You have to do your own research and try to understand how propaganda works. It worked. 

Mr. Jekielek:

And you have some, you know, incredible internal conversations, actually, in the film between some of these people. I mean, kind of astonishing stuff. I guess we’ll let people watch the film to check that out. I’ll mention myself that I found it took me back into the past a bit. But it also made me think to myself, you know, what safeguards do we have now to make sure that doesn’t happen as easily as it did before? 

Ms. Murakhver:

It is happening on a certain level. It’s kind of like micro doses of school closures. Ever since 2020, the teachers’ unions have been pushing for shorter school weeks and shorter days. So some of the elements of the school closures persist to this day. They say the teachers need a day off at the beginning or the end of the week or students need a mental health break as though schools are the places that are the most taxing. They’ve created this illusion that schools are kind of like a punishment, so of course people don’t want to go—not the teachers, not the students. 

We don’t have a safeguard to make sure that these schools are open and continue to provide the services. We were not able to keep an essential service open. I mean, that’s what happened. And for as long as the teachers’ unions have such tight control of our public schools, I think that it’s in their hands. So I think, you know, we need to think about what our education system looks like going forward.

Mr. Jekielek:

What will people see when they watch your film, 15 Days?

Ms. Murakhver:

I think they’ll witness a record. They’ll bear witness to the stories of the people who experienced the closures directly from them. And the film was shot almost immediately following the closures. We started in 2022. So the pain was still extremely raw when we started filming. We just got in a car. Stephanie Edmonds, who is my friend and was a teacher who lost her job in the New York City public schools due to the vaccine mandates. She refused to comply. The union didn’t fight for her, and they fired her instead. 

So she was available. She was a single mom. I met her at a rally and I thought, hey, let’s make this film. And she was totally up for it. So we got on the road and just started rolling. I mean, we did everything wrong. I can’t believe this film is even done or out or you can see it, so I think for me that’s a huge triumph as it is. 

Mr. Jekielek:

But except it doesn’t, if I may, it doesn’t feel like a film that was—like I said, you know, I actually, I have to tell you, I think it’s quite powerful. 

Ms. Murakhver:

Thank you. Well, to be fair, we did bring in an incredible producer in Eli Steele, who is a very gifted storyteller and filmmaker. And he advised us every step of the way. And then we have Hawk Jensen, who’s a veteran filmmaker as well, who came on board about a year and a half ago to help with the massive, massive editing process. So this film, in many ways, has been made in post-production. 

I will also point out that we did almost 60 interviews over three years. So there’s no way you can feature 60 interviews in a film that’s one hour and nine minutes long. These are just the stories that we could fit in here. There are many, many more stories that I hope to at some point edit and release so that people hear them. 

And it was inspired very much by Steven Spielberg and what he did during the founding of the Shoah Foundation, because I remember reading the story of how important it was to him to preserve the Holocaust survivors’ stories while they were still alive because it was primary material. Once they were gone, it was gone. And of course, this wasn’t a Holocaust, but it was a hugely avoidable tragedy for children and families in this country. 

I just felt like, well, we better get those stories in now because people aren’t going to want to talk about them in a couple of years. And it’s true even now as we show the film. I see people, I watch their body language, and they shudder. It takes them back to a very, very dark time. And I don’t believe we could have gotten those stories from those people today if we tried to recreate it. 

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s remarkable and almost like it’s a time capsule you have in the 60 hours of footage. Something to think about for the future. 

Ms. Murakhver:

Yes, I am thinking about it. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Natalya, a final thought as we finish? 

Ms. Murakhver:

I think that people watch the film and I think it takes them back, and then it brings them forward, and they realize how important—what can I do now? What are the actions you suggest? I find myself kind of in a panic at that point, because what should I tell them to do? 

Is there a toolkit? Is there an expert they need to listen to? I really just want parents to diversify their news sources and expose their children to a variety of sources and not just contemporary sources, but things your grandmother would read, ancestral wisdom, intergenerational knowledge. 

I think that we are really desperately losing intergenerational relationships and wisdom. When I was little, my grandmother was part of my life. She told me a lot of things that I shrugged off and laughed at, and maybe I wasn’t as polite as I should have been, but they stayed with me. 

There’s a gravitas to hearing from the old and from your parents, from your grandparents, great-grandparents, if you have that access. So I would love to see parents try to bring their kids back to the basics and to also rely less on experts because ultimately we have to decide what’s best for our children.

I also think that it’s incredibly encouraging that there’s this renaissance in this country of classical schools. There are classical Christian schools opening all over the country. There are very popular classical Jewish schools teaching civics and humanities and ancient civilizations. 

Because I think the problem right now is that our children have lost a sense of context. And I think that if we can restore context—and, you know, all they hear in the news is numerators, but they never hear denominators, and context gives that to them. So that’s what I would hope for.

Mr. Jekielek:

And some of these are actually charter schools as well. They could be, you know, in essence, publicly funded. They’re not just private.

Ms. Murakhver:

Exactly. And also, I’m not a religious person, but I do think faith in a higher power seems to be protective on some level. And so I think, in as much as we can give that to our children without pushing any sort of ideology, but just, you know, Judeo-Christian values and the magic of God or God-like beings, I think that we need that for our souls.

Mr. Jekielek:

Natalya Murakhver, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. Murakhver:

Thank you so much for having me.

 

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.