LA Uprising: How Fear Shaped California’s Covid Response
Ross is a TV producer living in Los Angeles who grew increasingly concerned at the impacts of COVID-19 restrictions on his children. In response to his two teenagers being kept out of school for almost a year-and-a-half he founded an organisation called LA Uprising to campaign on their behalf. This podcast explores how political polarisation and groupthink led to the imposition of some of the United States’ most stringent controls in the state of California, and how a ‘priestly’ caste of experts were deferred to throughout the period, as politicians relied on fear to engineer consent.
About Frank Armstrong
Frank Armstrong is the editor of Cassandra Voices, a magazine with a global perspective based in Ireland. During the pandemic he wrote extensively on the impact of lockdowns and edited a wide range of articles including by marginalised doctors, dissenting lawyers and musicians unable to perform. Prior to setting up Cassandra Voices in 2018 his writing was published in the Irish Times, the London Magazine, the Dublin Review of Books, Village Magazine, and the Law Society Gazette, among others.
About Ross Novie
Ross Novie is a 30-year veteran of the entertainment industry who has worked on some of television’s best comedies, including “Arrested Development,” “The Office,” “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” and currently, “St. Denis Medical” as both an assistant director and a director. When the COVID pandemic hit, he saw firsthand the devastating impact of distance learning on students— turning bright, engaged learners into sad, unmotivated, depressed children (including his own). Out of frustration, he created a grassroots, nonpartisan campaign, LA Uprising, to coordinate the efforts of thousands of parents to push the Los Angeles School District to open for in-person learning, something that eventually took California over a year to do. After schools finally reopened, the group’s focus changed to fighting mask and vaccine mandates that endured for years longer in California
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