Karol Markowicz on Why She’s Leaving New York

CLAY: We’re joined now by Karol Markowicz, who is fired up. She is a New York Post columnist and also a Fox News contributor. Just fantastic work. And she, like Buck Sexton, is fed up with all of the covid insanity and beyond in New York City. Karol, thanks for joining us and hope your Friday is going well. You have made a decision for you and your family. What is it and how did you come to that decision?

MARKOWICZ: Well, that’s right, and I’m taking Buck with me. (laughing)

BUCK: (laughing)

MARKOWICZ: We’re leaving New York and we’re going to the free state of Florida. It’s a long time coming, but we finally pulled the trigger on it. We’re selling our house and we’re getting out.

BUCK: What was the breaking point, Karol? ‘Cause we’ve been talking about this for a while. You’ve been an early on… I remember before Clay and I even teamed up on this show I had a guy, my producer, Mark, who is really into sports. So he’s like, “Hey, you gotta talk to Clay Travis ’cause he’s like the only other guy that thinks that this Fauci stuff is nuts and you have to stop with this mask insanity.” You were also in that very small group in April of 2020 already saying, “Hold on a second. Something’s funky here.” But what was the breaking point for you? What changed that finally made you say I’m not gonna be the last one in this New York bunker fighting against the madness?

MARKOWICZ: (laughing) Right. So there wasn’t any one thing. It was just a buildup for a while. We had moved into our dream house in March 2020. We were going to live in New York forever. My husband and I are both lifelong New Yorkers. I grew up in Brooklyn. He grew up in Queens. We were gonna raise our kids like little New Yorkers and they were gonna go to college from this house and we were gonna retire to Manhattan and we had a whole plan.

And the crazy that we’ve seen over the last almost two years, I just don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, and I root for New York. Maybe New York comes back. But it might be in 10 years. It might be in 15 years. And I can’t risk my kids’ childhood waiting out this crazy time. I need sanity. I need them to have stability. I need them to know that normal exists out there and this is not it.

CLAY: Karol, in my neighborhood, I’m born and raised in Nashville, but the number of people moving from New York, California, and the Chicago area is insane.

MARKOWICZ: Oh, yeah.

CLAY: As soon as the house goes on the market where I live, people are moving in. They’re all coming from those locations, by and large, and they’re all coming because of covid insanity. So how did you pick Florida? Did you consider other locations? And what has been the reaction of people when you tell them, “Hey, I’m leaving and going to Florida”? How do they react?

MARKOWICZ: Yeah. So, we picked Florida because it has just sort of been the leader of the pack of American states that are moving toward sanity. And it’s absolutely because of Governor Ron DeSantis. I think he sets the tone and Floridians are just more apt to adapt to going back to normalcy. So, that was a really big deal to us. I’m a big ocean person. I wanted to be on the ocean.

Things like that were part of our consideration. The thing that I hear the most… So, first of all, when I announced this, I got… I’ve never had such an avalanche of messages. I’ve had pieces go viral before, but this was different. This is like people were writing to me and saying, “I feel what you wrote in my soul.” It was just like… It wasn’t like, “I agree with you; this is great.”

It was like, “You wrote what I’m feeling,” and I’ve had so many people reach out to me and say, “I also live in New York” or “I live in one of these crazy blue areas and we also need to get out, and can you like help direct me to where I should go?” And I don’t know that much. So, I’ve been, like, “I know these places in Florida; this might work for your family,” but, you know, I don’t know.

I really think there’s a big business to be had for people, like, managing people trying to get out of these crazy blue areas and go to saner places and, like, you know, what are your priorities? Here’s someplace that might work for you. And I really think that somebody should take up that business.

CLAY: Speaking of that business idea, Karol, I have good friends who are real estate agents, and they say even if they haven’t seen the news, they can tell by email and sudden phone traffic in the city of Nashville that crazy has happened with New York or California or the Chicago area. More restrictions.

MARKOWICZ: (laughing) Yeah.

BUCK: The phones, every time a new restriction happens, it’s a breaking point for someone else and there is a tangible result in terms of relocations.

MARKOWICZ: So you know what’s interesting is I feel like doesn’t get mentioned that often, but how come we’re not seeing the reverse? How come if the left wants these restrictions, how come we’re not seeing an influx of people moving to places with vaccine mandates or mask mandates? Don’t they feel unsafe in their red states with all this freedom that they have? Don’t they want to move to these places that Bill de Blasio won’t let you go to a restaurant unless you can show your papers? I mean, how come we’re not seeing the reverse? I really think that that’s something that doesn’t get highlighted enough.

CLAY: Smart.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Karol Markowicz, columnist the New York Post, soon to be Floridian, and have been a long time New Yorker like me here. Karol, one aspect of this that I think — actually before I get into that, you’re the one who told me about the kids masking up outside to eat their lunch, which to me, under other circumstances, if you remember this to a child in 35 degree whether we, people would say, “Well, that’s child abuse, right?”

But the city of New York apparently doesn’t think so you because covid, ’cause they’re all freaking out about it all the time. But I also just want know if you think…? Are we really gonna have in Los Angeles, New York — and you know if those two cities fall, D.C., San Francisco, it will happen a whole bunch of other places. Do you think we’re heading back into, like, 50% capacity, maybe shuts down of certain businesses? Because I know one thing for sure. The mask mandate and the newly announced million test kids arriving in New York, according to Kathy Hochul, is not going to stop the surge we’re in.

MARKOWICZ: Right. That’s absolutely right. I don’t know. The thing is that you really have seen a change in the coverage in the last few days. So before all the places that we’re experiencing spikes were a bunch of rubes who didn’t understand that, they had to follow these directions and they could so easily defeat covid. But now, now the blue states are getting it, the blue areas are getting it it’s like, “Well, there’s nothing we can do. We’re all gonna get it. That’s okay.”

And it’s become kind of different pick up you could see a shift in the media coverage of this because it’s hitting areas that were, quote-unquote, “doing everything right.” So I don’t know. I don’t know if restaurants are gonna close. I do know that last night a restaurant owner said that he had lost a third of reservations already because New Yorkers are panicking and they’re staying inside.

And some schools, the last day of school is the 23rd for New York City schools. So many rumors are circulating that this weekday they’re gonna say, “Don’t come back next week like let’s just, you know. Come back after the holidays.” The thing is that we live with this and we live with, like, not knowing what’s gonna happen, and that’s the worst part. I know in Florida I know what to expect. They will not close schools no matter what, no matter what, and here I don’t have that same expectation.

BUCK: Yeah, the anxiety is its own punishment at some level.

MARKOWICZ: Yeah, absolutely. And when you have kids, you have to have child care, you know, you still have your job. And you have to find things for them to do. It’s not like you can wake up, you know, Monday morning and get them somewhere. So parents are really having a hard time in New York because they’re afraid schools are gonna close but nobody has said so yet.

CLAY: Karol, we talked a lot on this show — and I saw it because in Tennessee where I am over the mask mandate, the battle — moms were fed up. And we saw it, I think, in 2021 in Virginia with the win there. We nearly saw it in New Jersey. Do you think this is gonna carry through into the 2022 midterms where moms — and dads but especially moms — who are maybe swing suburban voters are so furious over the way schools have responded, and Democrats have been far more likely to be in favor of school shutdowns than Republicans —

MARKOWICZ: Right.

CLAY: — that it’s going to linger as an issue into the midterms? Do you buy that?

MARKOWICZ: I can’t I do. I think there’s so much residual anger over the fact that schools closed last year and did not reopen in so many places and how long they were closed. I think that parents are still fuming about this. I’m still fuming about it, and my kids barely went to school last year. And it was absolutely something that was unnecessary.

Schools were open in so many places around the country, so many places around the world, and yet blue cities couldn’t make it happen. They just were in the pockets of these teacher unions, and they did not open. And they put kids last, and they continue to put kids last. And I think parents have had it. I sense a real shift from parents. I have to say that open-schools advocates in New York are almost all on the left.

And they are all politically adrift now because they can’t bring themselves to vote Democrat anymore because of what they did with the schools. These are all parents on the left who are drifting away from that. This is absolutely something that’s happening and happening I think all around the country.

BUCK: Karol Markowicz of the New York Post. You know, Karol, you’ve been one of the originals, as I said before here, trying to just bring the truth to life to people about what’s really going on, the schools issue. Fauci’s a coward and he’s a Democrat and he’s partisan so he never… To this day, he has never admitted that they never should have really closed down schools.

They certainly shouldn’t have closed them down in the fall of 2020. That was just the teachers union calling the shots and Fauci calling it science because he’s a little hack and a coward. Where do you think this is going? We talked to Alex Berenson about this earlier this week. There is this great political sorting of sorts happening right now — Clay and I talk about it — where it feels like in the blue states, you’re just gonna have the bluest, craziest libs.

The triple masking on their tricycles alone in the woods kind of libs, and then everybody who’s rationale and normal is trying to get to somewhere a little bit more sane and it might not happen right away. I mean, it might take a year or two, but what do you see happening?

MARKOWICZ: Yeah, that’s the other thing. I think that there’s a lag with this. Like, look. We’ve been trying and thinking about getting out since about a a year ago, and now we finally are succeeding in doing it for a lot of reasons. So I don’t think that people can make a decision and pull the trigger the next day. I think we’re going to continue to see people drifting away from these areas.

They’re not gonna forget what happened. They’re not gonna forget that things closed for no reason. And, you know, talking of Fauci, one of the things that I absolutely will not forget is that he changed his mind about everything all the time, but on schools he’d be like, “Schools should open — I don’t know if schools should open. Schools should open. Yes, they should be shut.”

But then when Biden became president, he literally said that schools should only open if they could pass the Biden stimulus plan. If somebody’s that politicized that you have to pass my favorite politician’s proposed plan before we can open schools, they should not be on our television set, should not be setting health policy, should go work on the Biden campaign, honestly, like that should be his role.

CLAY: I love all of this — and I know, Karol, you talked about the response that you got from your article in the New York Post, your column. I guarantee you there are people who are listening to you right now nodding along thinking, “It’s time for me to find a new place to live. I can’t go through another winter of insanity,” and, Buck, the number of closures — I think by the time we come back on Monday and Tuesday and all through the holiday season — it’s only gonna get worse.

BUCK: They refuse to learn. They refuse to actually look at what happened. They refuse to look at last winter. Did any of the closures, did any of the stuff they did help at all? They thought, Clay, by the city’s own numbers, 1% or less of covid transmission was occurring in restaurants. One percent! They shut down restaurants over that. They’re out of their minds. Anyway, Karol Markowicz, always sound, always brave.

MARKOWICZ: Thanks so much.

BUCK: New York Post.

MARKOWICZ: Buck, I have a room for you. (laughing)

BUCK: Karol, I’ll see you down in Florida certainly over the holiday — and it might be longer than that.

MARKOWICZ: (laughing)