Free Republic

Time to Change Our Language.. It is time to stop blaming “Covid” for breaking the economy, destroying businesses and livelihoods, and wreaking untold havoc upon families. It was not “Covid” that did this. It was not even the Chinese. It was our government. The government has conditioned us to blame the impersonal “Covid” for the destruction it wrought upon our businesses and families. We need to change the discussion by using the proper language to fix the blame where it belongs. Good generals can win a battle by picking the terrain upon which they fight. At Waterloo, Wellington forced Napoleon...

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten recently said that school choice “undermines democracy.” In a video of her remarks, Weingarten slammed former White House Education Secretary Betsy Devos, City Journal journalist Christopher Rufo, and prominent school choice activist Corey DeAngelis. “[School choice proponents] have not one thing that they offer as a solution other than privatizing or voucherizing schools, which is about undermining democracy and undermining civil discourse and undermining pluralism, because 90 percent of our kids goes to public schools still. They just divided. Divided, divide, divide, divide,” Weingarten claimed. “What did Rufo say? Rufo, DeAngelis, Devos,...

The leader of one of the nation's largest teachers unions was seen in a viral video saying that school choice "undermines democracy." American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten made the remarks at the "Network for Public Education Action" national conference in October. A clip of her remarks blasting methods of school choice was shared on X and went viral on social media this week. In the video, Weingarten took aim at former White House Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Manhattan Institute's Christopher Rufo, and American Federation For Children Senior Fellow Corey DeAngelis for advocating for school choice measures. "They...

This is the anthesis of JFK’s book “Profiles In Courage.” This is about how The Teachers’ Union and Randi Weingarten are fascilitating a collapse in math scores in US schools. Weingarten, who was instrumental in shutting down schools during the Covid epidemic, and the national Teachers’ Union are the existential threat to democracy, not global warming. Why? Randi and The Teachers’ Union have led America down the drain in the area of mathematics, an important subject in the global economy. American students scored an all-time low in math on a major international exam, which provided the first comparison of global...

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) PresidentRandi Weingarten was slapped with an X community note after asking where the “women” were during an all-male Jewish prayer service. Weingarten, who said in 2010 she considers herself to be a “deeply religious” Jew, quoted Jewish conservative commentator Mark Levin’s video footage of the minyan — a quorum of Jewish adults, traditionally male, required for certain religious observances — outside the White House. “Where are the women?” Weingarten asked in the post, which has its comments section limited to Weingarten’s followers. The post garnered a response from Levin as well as a community note...

Want to have some ability to choose where your child goes to school? Well, then you’re a racist. So says Randi Weingarten, leader of the American Federation of Teachers. Words like “school choice” or “parental rights,” she maintains, are the “same kinds of words” used by segregationists, so if you use them too, you’re one of them. Predictably, Weingarten is now furiously backpedaling, claiming that she was just making an innocent comment about “language” rather than actually accusing anyone of being racist, but this isn’t the first time she’s beat this drum. In 2017, she called school-choice programs the “only...

Randi Weingarten, a major proponent of school lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions, was appointed to the Homeland Security Academic Partnership Council on Wednesday. “Leaders of our academic institutions and campus life have a great deal to offer in helping us counter the evolving and emerging threats to the homeland,” Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement announcing the decision. The council’s specific tasks include advising Mayorkas on research, career development, and partnership opportunities that will help the department “safeguard the American people, and help our country think through and prepare for whatever threats lie ahead,” Mayorkas said.

“That woman murdered babies, and she knew it. And five days after we posted [Pfizer] Report 69, she announced her resignation. So that’s what Congress should be asking her about.” Walensky seemed less cool in this appearance for Congress. This is the least composed and the most nervous, I feel, like I’ve seen this woman who’s usually kind of cool as a cucumber,” noted conservative podcaster Emerald Robinson Thursday. She also “perjured herself twice,” expressed special guest and DailyClout CEO Dr. Naomi Wolf. The soon-to-be former CDC Director (June 30), Rochelle Walensky, testified before Congress for two hours on Tuesday....

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten claimed Friday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that people are “getting really angry” at the education policies of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). Anchor Nicolle Wallace said, “I want to come back to the other policy which is I think the most unpopular of all in sort of this new mom’s group and the polling that’s out is the book bans.” Weingarten said, “Two things are unpopular, the book bans and also why you would get rid of social emotional learning when we have a mental health crisis? We have to make sure that kids feel...

There is a reason why you know who Randi Weingarten, the leader of the second-largest teachers union in the country, is. She’s the one who threatened to strike if schools did not close in 2020. She is the one who said that school closures were not that big of a deal because “kids are resilient." She is the one who influenced the CDC to change its COVID-19 guidelines using almost her exact language. She is the one who introduced a campaign to bring Ibram X. Kendi’s simplistic ideas on race into “every classroom.” In other words, you know who Randi...

There are many reasons why so many US public schools remained persistently closed for well over a year, but at the top of the list is Randi Weingarten. She is the President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and served as the self-appointed and media-anointed spokesperson for teachers’ unions throughout the pandemic. Weingarten appeared regularly across national media outlets for well over two years, relentlessly touting the dangers of public schools and the risk to teachers from in-person instruction. She also painted anyone who advocated for schools to open as heartless and cruel. Now that it’s become clear what...

This week, history and civics scores across the nation plummeted to record lows among eighth graders. Just 13% of students performed at or above the “proficient” level in U.S. history. It is the latest appalling report on our declining educational system — a matter that should be treated as a national crisis of literally historic proportions. As discussed in prior columns, we are graduating students from high school who cannot proficiently read or do math. School districts have responded by solving the problem by simply lowering standards and eliminating gifted programs. Now we are producing citizens who know little about...

Some of the people most strongly associated with promoting lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have recently sought to recast their positions. Examples include Anthony Fauci, former leader of the federal COVID-19 response, teachers’ union head Randi Weingarten, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Fauci seemed eager to shirk responsibility for the lockdowns when talking to The New York Times last week. “Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did,” he said. It was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that produced the lockdown recommendations,...

Chicago voters lost Lightfoot, or perhaps better put, Lightfoot lost Chicago voters. The failure to keep children in schools and in effective learning environments undoubtedly played a big role in her political collapse, the worst in recent memory for Chicago mayors. Lightfoot herself counts that as a significant part of the “anger bubble” that pushed her out of office, and that also threatens to end the careers of other mayors of the COVID era. CNN’s Poppy Harlow points out this morning that Lightfoot went “head to head with the teacher’s union” over school shutdowns. Now Randi Weingarten wants to rewrite...

When the former secretary of state and C.I.A. director Mike Pompeo, a man who had dealt firsthand with autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, described Randi Weingarten as “the most dangerous person in the world” last November, it seemed as though he couldn’t possibly be serious. Weingarten is 65 and just over five feet tall. She is Jewish and openly gay — she’s married to a rabbi — and lives in Upper Manhattan. She is the longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, which is not even the country’s biggest union of public-school educators. (The A.F.T. has 1.7...

American Federation of Teachers comrade-in-chief Randi Weingarten recently asserted in a national newspaper that “Republicans are destroying our public schools. Teachers and parents must fight back.” Talk about pots and kettles. With a rogue person like Weingarten, it’s always about hyper-partisan politics and a faux “fight,” not the children or public education at large. She clearly will never apologize for the incalculable damage she and her allies did to vulnerable children in recent years with lies and will continue destroying them. Weingarten deems anyone who dissents an “extremist,” wishing to put “their political vendettas and ideologies ahead of children’s education....

Teachers union boss Randi Weingarten ripped into Americans critical of public education, accusing them of advancing an “extremist scheme” to replace government-run schools with private, religious, online, and homeschools. Speaking to the National Press Club this week, Weingarten — whose American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is the second largest teachers’ labor union in the nation — targeted the DeVos, Bradley, Koch, Uihlein, and Walton family foundations for their criticism of public schools. “The Betsy DeVos wing of the school privatization movement is methodically working its plan: Starve public schools of the funds they need to succeed,” Weingarten said. “Criticize them...

There are many fierce, hungry tigers living near your home and they are stalking your children. How best to protect your young ones: declaw the tigers, or equip your home with strong defenses so they cannot enter, and if they do they will be stopped dead? This is the essential question tragically raised once again in the bloody wake of the Tennessee Christian elementary school massacre. Anti-gun media talking heads, Democrat legislators, government officials, teachers’ Union chieftain Randi Weingarten, and Democrat gun-haters in general as usual are claiming the only way to stop these horrific attacks is declaw the tigers...

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten told an audience in Washington, D.C., that “private, religious, online and home schools” are an “extremist scheme by a very vocal minority of Americans” that lead to the “bullying of the most vulnerable among us.”

WASHINGTON — A top White House ally plans to paint Republicans’ focus on issues around race, gender and sexual identity as part of a GOP strategy to undermine public education as White House officials debate how forcefully to engage in the so-called culture wars dominating the right. In remarks prepared for the National Press Club on Tuesday, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is expected to say state and local laws that ban certain types of books or restrict what can be taught in the classroom are “fueling hostility and fear” and aren’t serving students, parents or teachers, according...