American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is trying to erase her role in keeping schools closed for months, but her track record shows that she did anything to stay in the good grace of the Biden administration and its tyrannical COVID regime.
In a New York Times feature of Weingarten, Michelle Goldberg paints the teachers union head as misunderstood and even lies about her past position on school lockdowns.
“Rather than championing shutdowns, she’s spent much of her energy, both in public and behind the scenes, trying to get schools open. And she’s been trying, sometimes uncomfortably, to act as a mediator between desperate parents grieving their kids’ interrupted educations and beleaguered teachers who feel they’re being blamed for a calamity they didn’t create,” Goldberg wrote.
Despite Goldberg’s and even Weingarten’s own insistence that the AFT president has always promoted in-person learning by demanding more government funding for personal protective equipment and endorsing tyrannical vaccine mandates (as well as critical race theory and reeducation programs prompted by the events on Jan. 6), Weingarten’s actions speak louder than her words.
Weingarten’s pandemic track record is nothing but an advertisement for anti-classroom learning. From the beginning, it was Weingarten’s AFT PAC that funneled more than $1.6 million to pro-lockdown Democrats and left-wing organizations. At the beginning of April, many of the same Democrats who benefit from the unions’ political donations jammed Biden’s $1.9 COVID spending plan through Congress with the hope that the funds would push schools to reopen. Biden’s spending plan, which was criticized by Republicans, allotted more than $129 billion to elementary, middle, and high schools to use in their reopening efforts, despite the 100 million unspent dollars already designated for school expenses like “cleaning and disinfecting” in the CARES Act. A few weeks later, 52 percent of K-12 districts were still not offering fully in-person classes for all of their students.
Weingarten’s AFT was just one of the hypocritical teachers unions that tried to hold taxpayers hostage by demanding more funding in exchange for giving children basic education. President Joe Biden and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) lent a sympathetic ear to these demands and repeatedly ignored scientific data, siding with teachers unions who continued to demand salary increases and benefits even after they got the COVID-19 shot that was supposed to put them back in classrooms.
It wasn’t until after data showed the damages lockdowns had on people, including young children, that Weingarten tried to flip the script and blame former President Trump for prolonging school closures. In May, shortly after making anti-semitic excuses for not returning to classrooms, Weingarten claimed members of her union have been calling to reopen schools for “months and months and months now,” but said President Trump and Republican lawmakers were standing in the way.
By the time the corporate media hyped up the Delta variant as a potential obstacle to students’ return to school in fall 2021, Weingarten was once again threatening school closures if students and teachers didn’t mask up when they returned for the fall semester. One week prior, she fell short of promising full school reopenings and instead said teachers unions such as AFT that delayed a return to classrooms are “going to try.”
As late as Monday, Weingarten was still holding in-person schooling over the heads of the unvaccinated.
As school-choice advocate Corey DeAngelis noted, no matter how hard Weingarten, her teachers union allies, and friends in corporate media try, they won’t be able to rewrite her long history of stifling students’ education to promote a political COVID agenda.
