Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast.

Today is Tuesday, July 14, 2020. I am John Podford. It's the editor of commentary magazine,

the 70-odd year old monthly of intellectual analysis, political,

provody and cultural criticism from a conservative perspective. We invite you to join us at commentarymagazine.com,

where we give you a few free reads and ask you to subscribe with me as always executive editor,

Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe. Hi, John. Senior writer, Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine. Hi, John.

An associate editor, Noah Rothman. Hi, Noah. Hi, John. So the state of California has locked

itself down again in some ways. And I think maybe a somewhat more draconian lockdown than the first,

in part because of the emotional impact of forcing everybody inside again as a result of rising

caseloads. The most telling fact is that the school districts of Los Angeles and San Diego have

announced that they will not reopen in the fall and that all learning will be distance and remote.

This is interesting to me because one of the things that is being bandied about is this notion

of outside learning since the transmission problem appears to be indoor. And if there were any place

on earth that you could do outside learning, it would be at the schools in California, which have

often have very large campuses and certainly a lot of outdoor space and fields and football fields

and sports facilities and things where students could literally sit outside under a tent.

And apparently that wasn't considered or maybe they could revisit it. I don't know, but we were

just looking at the numbers and there's at least 600,000 kids in the LA Unified School District

who will not be going to school. And I don't know how many hundreds of thousands in San Diego. So

for parents, this is a terrifying prospect because aside from the parents in LA who are going to have

to go through this, obviously this is a kind of leading edge for the rest of the country and this

will give permission to all kinds of places where teachers unions have the whip hand and where it's

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