Six years ago, on March 16, 2020, the world as I knew it slammed shut. In deep blue San Francisco, where I’d lived for three decades, panic hung in the air like fog rolling off the bay.
If you dared go outside, passersby on the sidewalk shrieked if you came within a few feet. If you went to the beach maskless with your 3-year-old – as I did – a woman might approach and spit at you that she wouldn’t care when your children died because you were a murderer.
We lost our humanity as terror took hold.
Those braving the outdoors thought themselves brave warriors in a battle that would almost certainly take their lives. San Francisco – and arguably the world – became a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The only people outside were drug addicts in exploding tent cities and DoorDash food delivery workers.
Everything closed — schools, businesses, playgrounds. Officials promised it was just for two weeks to “flatten the curve.” But I knew better. I’d been ranting about it on social media even before the lockdowns hit, warning that once the government seized such power, they wouldn’t relinquish it easily. What followed was a nightmare of authoritarian overreach that upended my life and scarred an entire generation.
From day one, I resisted. As a mother of four and a senior executive at a major corporation where I’d worked for over 20 years, I couldn’t stand by while children were treated as vectors of disease rather than human beings with rights. I simply didn’t care about the cost to me personally for speaking up.
I pushed back online, building a following of like-minded dissenters who saw the madness unfolding. I attended virtual school board meetings that dragged on for nine hours, only to watch masked officials at home alone obsess over renaming schools – the names deemed “racist” – while ignoring the real crisis: the buildings themselves remained shuttered, trapping kids at home in isolation.
I appeared on local news as a “concerned public school mom” and led rallies for which the fliers were removed by Facebook as soon as they went up. In short, I pleaded then demanded that we reopen schools. For this, I paid dearly.
The consequences were swift and severe. Friends I’d known since college — 30 years of shared history — abandoned me, save for one. I remain estranged from some family members for five years now, all because I dared to say that even poor kids deserve an education.
My life became unrecognizable.
In the end, I fled San Francisco so my own children could attend school. In the Bay Area, private institutions reopened in the fall of 2020, their affluent students resuming sports and classes, while public schools stayed closed for a full year longer. And they remained disrupted – masking, distancing, periodic closures – for another year after that.
The most vulnerable children — those from low-income families, without resources for pods or tutors, often with very young children home alone to navigate online “school” — suffered the most. Learning loss mounted, developmental delays set in, and the emotional toll was catastrophic.
The message sent to these kids was that they don’t matter, their education doesn’t matter. And when school resumed in late 2021, chronic absenteeism skyrocketed and remains a serious problem to this day, 50% higher than pre-Covid levels.
I ended up resigning from my high-powered job in 2022.
That same day, I began work on a documentary to capture the human cost of these policies. I found a directing partner – Andrew James – who, like me, is driving the making of this film out of sheer belief and passion to tell this story so that it never happens again. Once an insider in the documentary world – an alumni of the Sundance Institute – Andrew also got himself ousted from polite society for his dissenting ways and we have made this film completely outside the system, with no access to the typical funding sources.
GENERATION COVID has been a labor of love, funded largely by my own savings and consuming over four years of my life.
I’m no novice to filmmaking, though it hasn’t been my full-time career; my one previous documentary, Athlete A, which exposed the widespread abuse in the USA gymnastics training culture, was acquired by Netflix, and won an Emmy for Best Investigative Documentary in 2020. Despite this track record, GENERATION COVID languishes unseen. Conservative platforms dismiss it, saying they’re “done with Covid.” Mainstream streamers won’t even respond to my emails to please just take a look.
Why? Because nearly everyone was complicit. Politicians, media, educators — they all went along with the hysteria. Now, they want to sweep it under the rug, pretending it never happened. Everyone failed.
But we cannot forget. The violations of our civil liberties were staggering. We couldn’t leave our homes — we were literally under house arrest in some places. Families were barred from gathering for holidays or visiting loved ones in hospitals; people died alone; women gave birth in isolation; people were instructed to snitch on their neighbors. Churches and AA meetings were forbidden, yet protests for Black Lives Matter got a pass.
Censorship ran rampant; dissenters like me were silenced or shadow-banned and ousted from polite society. Toddlers were forced to mask for hours, drooling into their Old Navy face coverings as if they were the last line of defense and the only hope to save grandma. Mass child masking led to speech delays that persist today.
People were arrested for surfing alone in the ocean.
Twenty-seven million Americans lost their jobs in 2020, supply chains collapsed, sparking the inflation we’re still battling.
The harm to children was unforgivable. I’ve been a Covid dissident since March 2020, chronicling how lockdowns accelerated a mental health crisis. Isolation bred anxiety and depression; online immersion fueled a surge in “transgender” identification among vulnerable youth. Kids dropped out, turned to drugs, developed eating disorders, and grappled with suicidal ideation. Some didn’t survive. As one parent in my film, who lost his child to suicide in 2021, put it: “You can’t treat kids like prisoners and expect them to be ok.”
GENERATION COVID isn’t about blame — it’s about reckoning. It’s about understanding and analyzing what happened when this mass psychosis took hold, so that we can prevent it from happening again.
This was the biggest event of our lifetimes, a global experiment in control that failed spectacularly. If we don’t confront it, it will happen again — next time, perhaps under the guise of climate emergencies or some other panic.
I lost my career, my city, my friends because I refused to stay silent. We all suffered, and pretending otherwise dishonors the victims — especially the kids whose futures were altered forever – and sets us up to make the same egregious mistakes all over again.
Watch the trailer for Generation COVID. Wrestle with what we allowed. Only then can we ensure it never repeats.
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