The ideology behind masking always depended on lies, but the biggest lie of all was that children could be safely masked without harming their intellectual and emotional development.

As with lockdowns, where “experts” kept up the mantra of “kids are resilient,” despite decades of propaganda about the urgency of getting kids into preschools to ensure they were properly developing their brains in a professional environment, the masking fanatics rewrote the rulebook on the fly.

Everybody involved knew they were repeating nonsense, or at least unscientific wishcasting, but they did it to back the Narrative. They chose to sacrifice children to the god of “expert” opinion.

Child Speech Issues Are at Historic Highs in the United Kingdom, a New Report Found—and We All Know Whyhttps://t.co/T1bwijoeQj

— American Institute for Economic Research (@aier) September 12, 2023

Unlike so many other evils of the pandemic tyranny era the harm to children cannot be easily memory-holed. As poorly designed and executed as our metrics are for student achievement, we have them, and the results in recent years have been devastatingly bad. So bad, in fact, that some states have actually (temporarily, so far) simply dropped testing for some students.

Younger children were even more disastrously harmed, and with even less justification. Entirely predictable (and loudly predicted) disabilities were caused by pandemic-era policies (some of which are being repeated, or being considered for repetition), and the very “experts” such as the American Academy of Pediatrics fully embraced policies that they had every reason to believe would greatly harm children.

In a recent interview with Sky News, London resident Viral Bhundia described what it was like to watch his young son Jay struggle with speaking.

“If he wanted something he would scream, and it was up to us to kind of decode it and figure out what he wanted,” said Bhundia. “Does he want a cup? Does he want water?”

Jay’s struggles are not an anomaly. They are part of a broader trend of children across the world lagging in basic language communication.

The latest evidence comes from Speech and Language UK, which found one out of every five children in the United Kingdom are behind in basic speech. This is reportedly the “highest number of children with speech and language challenges ever recorded” in the UK, Sky News noted.

It’s not difficult to glean why so many children are deficient in basic language skills. Around the world, governments responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with an arsenal of blunt tools— lockdowns, mandatory mask orders, endless social distancing, and travel restrictions—which had a devastating impact on learning development. (Of these, masking in particular is viewed by many as the primary cause of speech delays.)

How many lectures did we have to endure in the pre-COVID era about how children’s brain development at early ages was so rapid and important that every effort should be made to increase their stimulation and promote their intellectual development? How much money did Western societies pour into preschools to ensure kids were being properly educated?

All of that was tossed away, in the name of protecting children and their caregivers from a virus that posed almost no risk to them? Not only did we toss away the stimulation (if not the funding for it, which continued not only unabated by was increased in many cases), but the “experts” did everything they could to slash the emotional and intellectual input that developing children desperately needed.

The result is a generation of young children who have trouble even talking, and struggle to emotionally connect with and understand the people around them.

A vast collection of research spanning decades demonstrated that children get vital emotional and intellectual cues from facial expressions, and there have been milestones recognized for years related to infants and toddlers learning vital lessons from observing others’ facial expressions. As early as Spring 2020 people were warning that mask mandates would harm child development. The American Academy of Pediatrics, which knew better, denied that children’s development would be harmed by masking.

They were lying then–they knew better. It was impossible that they didn’t know because they had relied on many of these studies in setting milestones–and they appear to have no regrets about the damage they have done. The Narrative was and is more important than the children.

You can find plenty of studies that have explored delayed development in children, and policymakers are, ironically, now calling for or currently spending vast sums of money to help students catch up.

In other words, we are sending even more vast sums of money to the very people who caused this problem, and did so knowingly. We are rewarding them for causing the damage.

What we should be doing is tossing them all out on their asses and replacing them with the people who warned that this was inevitable. But, for the most part, those people remain ostracized from their professions, having been “debunked.”

I have heard endless excuses for the failures of the “experts.” They didn’t know what they didn’t know. They were doing their best. They wanted to save lives. Fill in the blank for the excuse.

But that is simply false. Some people were right, others were wrong, and far too many others were consciously lying. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the parade of experts weren’t doing their best. They were sacrificing children, and have been rewarded for doing so. They are more influential, more powerful, and more wealthy today than before the pandemic.

Unfortunately there is a vast collection of people who would rather look away than admit that their expert class is a corrupt failure. It is easier to believe that they were trying to do the right thing and just overreacted. It is scary to believe that the people you rely on don’t actually have your best interests at heart.

Yes, but…they don’t.

Might as well come to terms with that fact. It is the only way to save the children and our society.