On his March 12 radio show, Rush Limbaugh welcomed a possible benefit of the coronavirus outbreak — that is, when he’s not otherwise downplaying it as media hype — and the lockdown conditions that people have adopted: There could be fewer public school teachers to hire.

Limbaugh responded to a caller who speculated that “the professors and the big unions” had resisted online learning, because “when you’re online, don’t you need fewer teachers?”

“Yeah, I’ve been wondering that about a lot of things,” Limbaugh agreed. “What if it’s discovered that you don’t need to go half the places we’ve been going to get done what you do when you go there?”

Limbaugh also speculated about a further political angle: “But once the students stay at home then the teachers union may lose control of the curriculum and everything else. That could open the door to homeschooling, which teaches an entirely different curriculum than what you get in the public school system.”

Limbaugh has often attributed nefarious political motives to teachers. In 2018, when a Georgia teacher fired gunshots at a school and barricaded himself in an empty classroom, Limbaugh speculated that the teacher must have been a “radical leftist” engaged in a fake attack — as no students were physically harmed — in order to discredit any efforts to arm teachers.

Limbaugh has long declared himself “all for losing public sector jobs, because those are a huge drain on the private sector.”

And he hasn’t just confined his opposition of public employees to teachers, either. “Look, as nice as they are to have — teaching jobs, firemen, policemen — they are all paid for with money out of the private sector. They are paid for with tax revenue from citizens,” Limbaugh said in 2012, also describing the alleged drain on economic growth from “the fire rolls, and the cops rolls, and teachers” as “Marxism 101.”