By Jennifer Sey at Brownstone dot org.

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 ...