Fox News host Greg Gutfeld unloaded on teachers unions during Wednesday’s broadcast of “The Five,” saying that they had turned public school into “a prison run by clock-watchers.”
Gutfeld joined cohosts Dana Perino, Jesse Watters, Judge Jeanine Pirro, and Geraldo Rivera to discuss the Chicago Teachers Union’s last-minute demands that shut down in-person learning just as students were set to return from their holiday breaks. Democratic Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot responded to their demands by canceling all classes Wednesday and instructing the CPS teachers to return to their classrooms by Thursday.
Watters teed up the segment, asking Perino whether she thought leadership at the federal level should go to Chicago and “knock some heads together” in order to get kids back into the classrooms.
“Biden has an opportunity here to turn something around,” Perino said, arguing that the president could make a show of standing by Lightfoot — in person, if possible.
“What I would do if I were Joe Biden, is tomorrow after I gave my January 6 commentary at the Statuary Hall at 9:00 a.m., I’d get on a plane with Dr. Jill Biden, with Miguel Cardona — the Secretary of Education, with Xavier Becerra. Remember him? The Secretary of Health and Human Services? I think he might be in witness protection for cabinet secretaries. He is like nowhere to be found during this entire crisis. And I would go to Chicago, I would stand with Lori Lightfoot,” she said.
Perino went on to say that the end result of repeated school closures and spurts of remote learning might be the rise of school choice becoming “more widely accessible.”
“Check these teachers’ Instagram accounts is all I’m saying,” she added as an aside, due to reports of teachers who had advocated remote learning only to post pictures of themselves on vacation.
Watters turned the floor over to Gutfeld, who argued that there was at least one positive way to view the current situation.
“This is the double destruction of the pandemic and of the teachers unions happening at exactly the same time, right?” he said. “We now know that the pandemic is over. The teachers unions pushed us over the cliff. It is going to happen, February 1st, this is all going to be behind us. And it’s time now to sever the ties with the least competitive entity on the planet since the Washington Generals. Our educational system is just like the Washington Generals in that we pay them to lose.”
“The only thing worse is that they are teaching our children to lose. They are going to lose in life because they are falling behind. We learned one really important thing from remote learning: No one is remotely learning,” Gutfeld continued. “Children are locked in supervised jail time in these schools, all that’s missing are three hots and a cot. The school is a prison run by clock-watchers and we’ve now figured this out.”
Gutfeld went on to say, as Perino had, that it was the perfect opportunity to promote school choice.
“This is an amazing opportunity. I think we should dive on this. It’s all about school choice, it’s all about introducing competition into the one place on planet earth besides Cuba and North Korea where competition is seen as obscene. It’s time,” he said.
Gutfeld concluded by saying that it was time for the American people to step up and be leaders in the absence of leadership elsewhere. “It is time for the American public to become the leaders to say we’ve had enough of this. If you are not teaching our kids – we are not going to pay our taxes either.”