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...

The New York Times dropped a bombshell last weekend by admitting the leftists’ war on standardized tests such as the SAT was “misguided” after the paper has cheered for it for years (see here and here). For decades, leftists have waged war against standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT as part of college admissions, claiming these tests are racially, economically, and even gender “biased” against black and brown children and girls, have little predictability for a student’s future success, and are the root cause of persistent academic performance gaps among students of various ethnic groups. One of the...

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...

Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, took a break Sunday from championing radical causes to share an article to X detailing how the spike in home schooling that occurred during the pandemic wasn't a flash in the pan. Weingarten made the mistake of captioning the post, "What's behind the increase in homeschooling," prompting concerned parents, conservatives, and other critics of her union's ruinous initiatives to read it as a question and provide their own answers, which the AFT boss later characterized as attacks. While various commenters indicated leftist indoctrination efforts in the classroom helped drive the...

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten, who leads the nation’s most powerful teachers’ union, has a message for fellow Jews: they should not criticize the unions, because they are part of America’s “ownership class.” Weingarten’s comment, which invoked a stereotype of wealthy Jews commonly viewed as antisemitic, came during a recent interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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...

CNN political commentator Scott Jennings accused American Federation of Teachers union boss Randi Weingarten of having “no remorse” for the damage done by lengthy pandemic-era school closures during a heated discussion Thursday night. Jennings pilloried Weingarten, an influential union leader and Biden administration ally, a day after she defended her involvement in the controversial school lockdowns during a contentious hearing on Capitol Hill. “We don’t know each other, but speaking on behalf of millions of American parents — I have four at home, I had to teach them at home, my wife had to teach them at home — I...

Being a powerful advocate of draconian and ineffective COVID responses that hurt Americans means never having to say you’re sorry. We learned that anew this week as two of the country’s most well-known policy setters, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Randi Weingarten, were called upon to reckon with what their ideas had wrought. Reckon they did not. “I sleep fine,” Fauci told a sympathetic New York Times reporter in yet another in-depth retrospective on his role in American COVID pandemic policy. “I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations. But show me a school that I shut down...

On Wednesday, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten appeared in a House hearing held by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to discuss the impact of school closures due to COVID-19. In the hearing, Weingarten was pressed about the union’s influence on the federal government during this decision making process throughout the pandemic. In her opening remarks at the hearing, Weingarten claimed that in-person learning was the driving force behind the decisions made during the pandemic about school closures and re-openings. Once questioning began, Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), who is a doctor, asked Weingarten if AFT...

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 president Randi Weingarten got attention on social media for her emotional display outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday. A Student Debt Crisis Center’s rally was held in response to the Supreme Court listening to a pair of challenges to President Biden’s plan to forgive $10,000 in federal student loans for individuals making less than $125,000 per year or households earning less than $250,000 annually. Weingarten broke down during her speech. "And frankly, and this is what really pisses me off," Weingarten said. "During the pandemic, we understood that small businesses were hurting, and we helped them, and it...

It was announced Thursday morning that Joe Biden had approved a trade with Russia where they get the vicious, evil arms dealer known as "The Merchant of Death" so we get a whiny, entitled, basketball player who brought drugs illegally into Russia. All along, the stories said that we were going to get Griner back in this trade, but we would also get Marine Paul Whelan, who has been in Russian prison since 2018. But, guess what? Yeah, Biden brought back Griner and left Whelan behind. From AP: Biden says US has 'not forgotten about Paul Whelan,' will 'never give...

Randi Weingarten, president of the powerful American Federation of Teachers (AFT), backed a call by the Atlantic on Monday to declare an “amnesty” for those who pursued mistaken policies on COVID-19 that led, among other things, to harm to children. The article, by economist Emily Oster, notes that policymakers were operating in a challenging environment: “Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong.”

An open letter to Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. My Dearest Randi, What is going on! It has been a year since my last missive, and I have not heard a peep from you. This is not the first time you have snubbed me, however. When I tried to say hi to you outside the Supreme Court after the Janus oral arguments in 2018, you refused to even look at me, and then turned to a newsman and launched into a kooky rant, insisting that unions “actually make communities safer and…the right-wing is threatened by that.”...

Whatever she thinks she’s doing, American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten isn’t helping her members with such over-the-top extremism as claiming that things like Florida’s new parental-rights law are “the way in which wars start.” Yes, she actually argued on a podcast that parents and politicians worried about some teachers and school staff seeking to indoctrinate kids are just pushing “propaganda” and “misinformation.” “We’re not indoctrinating,” she said. “We’re not grooming. . . . What we’re doing is making sure we educate kids. We keep them safe. We keep them welcome. And we teach them how to think, not...

Randi Weingarten, union boss of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), said that parental rights bills such as the one recently signed into law in Florida are “the way in which wars start.” “This notion – we’ve been very lucky in America, and we in some ways live in a bubble for a long time,” the president of the nation’s largest teachers’ union said. “This is propaganda. This is misinformation. This is the way in which wars start. This is the way in which hatred starts.”

It’s being kind to call the last year and a quarter of public school – basically everything since March of 2020 – a disaster. Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, is determined to forget everything about it. Much like the kids who forget everything they’ve ever learned over summer break – if they learned it at all in this last year – Randi Weingarten has blanked about how her teachers’ union helped keep schools closed, then bent the ear of the CDC to push schools into either staying closed or meeting extraordinarily high distancing and masking requirements...

Left-wing teachers' union president Randi Weingarten has been selected to sit on a panel tasked with advising the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The DHS press release states that "Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas announced new members to the Homeland Security Academic Partnership Council (HSAPC), which he reconstituted in 2022. The Council will provide strategic and actionable recommendations to the Secretary on campus safety and security, improved coordination, research priorities, hiring, and more." Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, Northwestern University President Michael Schill, and San Diego State University President Adela de la Torre are a few of the...

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.