Randi Weingarten really tried to convince Congress and parents that SHE didn’t want school lockdowns to continue indefinitely.

Between her statement submitted to the House before her testimony, and her testimony as a whole; her gaslighting and blaming everyone else including Trump was arrogance beyond belief. Needless to say, her assertions are being picked apart piece by piece, and run through an industrial shredder. 

The school closures were the longest in modern history, they were more draconian than the rest of the developed world, they were at odds with the proof all around this country in private schools and in red-state public schools that schools could indeed open safely.

“We tried to do something that no one else was trying to do,” she said, expressing a surprising ignorance of the rest of the nation, private schools and Europe.

Oh, that wasn’t ignorance. She’s hoping parents are so ignorant that they don’t know and won’t find out that no one else had such draconian lockdowns as did the public schools. She’s also hoping that parents won’t truly realize how much of their/our taxpayer dollars she’s holding onto right now. 

Instead of looking to neighbors who served children better, she served her organization and its members by arguing closed schools needed billions and billions of taxpayer money to reopen “safely.”

They got some $60 billion in the 2020 CARES Act and another $122 billion in the American Rescue Plan, most of which remains unspent and some of which was not spent on reopening schools.

Keep in mind, as RedState pointed out, the LA school district, which is literally run by Randi’s AFT union, wanted schools lockdown indefinitely until their ransom demands were met. 

 This crisis presents an opportunity to create a new normal that supports all students.

What were their ransom demands? Among other things:

Medicare for all

Defund ALL the police

Wealth and Millionaire taxes 

Charter school moratorium 

Fund the illegals coming into the district. 

Is educating kids ANYWHERE on that list? NO. Yet here comes Randi two years after that and attempts to gaslight us into believing she WANTED schools open and all the kids are totally fine. I mean, she even said so in the spring of 2021!

.@danprimack: Is there a point at which kids' lost education isn't recoverable?

AFT president @rweingarten: "No, I don't believe that. I believe that kids are resilient and kids will recover. But we as adults have to meet their needs." #AxiosOnHBO pic.twitter.com/Dc4H0Hherc

— Axios (@axios) February 22, 2021

She doubled down on that assertion just months later. But the damage was already done. We knew, we ALL knew by the summer of 2020 the damage that was being inflicted upon our kids for the lockdowns. It was both the learning, societal, and mental health loss across all ages. It will take YEARS for our kids to recover from the damage done. 

An incredible lie. https://t.co/rwxMO81Yuo

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) April 26, 2023

But what does Randi do? Attempt virtuous gaslighting during her testimony, and then sends up tweets asserting she DID want schools open from the get go! Uh huh. There’s a reason those tweets got slapped with Twitter Notes!

she closed her replies like she closed the schools. pic.twitter.com/bJsOUnEb61

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) April 27, 2023

People all over have commentary and long Twitter threads highlighting the actual facts of how hard Randi and her union pushed to keep schools closed. All of them are well worth reading in full. Here’s one that give you the gist. 

Randi 2020 praised Governor Cuomo for threatening Jewish communities and say he was correct to threaten school shut-downs. Cuomo acted on that threathttps://t.co/hnMz9P6rMVhttps://t.co/mXoSNsKb7Z pic.twitter.com/RYksD1sMKB

— PoIiMath (@politicalmath) April 28, 2023

By the way, concerning mask guidance? Randi used faulty science and misrepresented studies, because of course. 

I was senior author of this WI study & as we said in our paper, because we had no control group:

"It was not possible to determine the specific roles that mask wearing and other disease mitigation strategies played in the low rate of disease spread"
https://t.co/vh6sgpIIT2

— Tracy Høeg, MD, PhD (@TracyBethHoeg) April 27, 2023

Then, remarkably, on CNN of all places, Randi was thoroughly roasted by Scott Jennings. 

“Yeah, we don’t know each other,” he began:

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 am stunned at what you have said this week about your claiming to have wanted to reopen schools. I think you’ll find that most parents believe you were the tip of the spear of school closures. There are numerous statements you made over the summer of ’20 scaring people to death about the possibility of opening schools.

And I hear no remorse whatsoever about the generational damage that’s been done to these ki, I have two kids with learning differences. Do you know how hard it is for them to learn at home, and not in a classroom that was designed for them? And for you to sit in front of Congress and the American people and say ‘What? I wanted to open them the whole time.’ I am shocked, I am stunned, and there are millions of parents who feel the exact same way.

Watch it all HERE. Randi’s response to that smackdown?

“Poll after poll that we did of parents — and I spent a lot of time with parents — said that they basically understood and supported that we needed to do both,” Weingarten said.

Considering how many people belong to the AFT union, want to bet that it was only THOSE parents who were polled and not parents out in the community?

Two things are clear here. 

One: Randi’s gaslighting is receiving a well-deserved roasting as parents and American taxpayers have woken up to how toxic the union push to keep schools locked down has truly been for our kids. 

Two: Her testimony has exposed the depth of the Big Labor and government collusion. 

Randi and the rest of the union should be held accountable. The roasting must continue until the lessons are learned.

Welcome Instapundit Readers!

Feature Photo Credit: Randi Weingarten in February 2020, photo by Keith Mellnick via Wikimedia Commons, cropped, CC BY 2.0