Want proof COVID alarmism is a cult, pure and simple?

Look no further than the Elizabeth Anne Clune Montessori school in Ithaca.

There, as chronicled by David Zweig at the Free Press, children must be masked, including outdoors, and are actually forbidden from speaking during lunch. 

That’s right: In 2023,

Still, one tiny private school is clinging to hygiene theater with insane vigilance. 

Zweig reports that the enforced silence at lunch drove the school’s children — like political prisoners in a Soviet gulag — to contrive secret hand signals as a way of communicating. 

The school kept these restrictions in place after the end of New York’s mask mandate at the request of teachers.

Proving yet again that the discipline (even beyond the grasp of the state’s unions) is filled with left-wing fanatics who embrace COVID theater with the same blind surety they bring to arguments about race or climate change.

And demand identically cruel, stupid, and anti-science solutions.  

There’s zero real evidence that Clune’s policies made the slightest difference to COVID outcomes. 

But that’s not what COVID alarmism is about. 

It’s a ritualized system of power and political conformity, enforced by hurting the most vulnerable. 

Yet it’s not unbeatable or inevitable. 

Just look at Florida’s Centner Academy. 

Equally dedicated to vague, hippy-dippy principles — it employs a “director of brain optimization” and hosts a dedicated space for failure — Centner from the get-go nonetheless took a common-sense approach to the insanities around COVID. 

The school — correctly — opened for in-person study way ahead of the curve for Miami-Dade, reasoning — again correctly — that the virus posed little threat to students or its mostly young teachers. 

And it went mask-optional in the fall of 2020. 

As a result, its students suffered none of the pointless interruptions to learning that plagued kids nationwide for more than a year, egged on by union fatcats like Randi Weingarten, hysteria-mongering media like The New York Times and the cowardly political trimmers advising President Joe Biden on science. 

Yes, Centner is not above criticism. 

The state rightly slapped down the school’s deeply silly policy that vaccinated students needed to miss 30 days post-shot. 

But there were no mass outbreaks at Centner. 

No apocalyptic virus waves or pediatric deaths.

Up north in Ithaca, change is supposedly on the way at Clune (possibly sparked by Zweig’s scrutiny). 

But it’s too late for the kids — and parents — who suffered under the school’s regime. 

And the millions of kids who suffered at other schools nationwide.

The next time public health “experts” and psychotic woke teachers make authoritarian demands, remember the lessons from Clune and Centner. 

Don’t let the cultists win.