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Randi Weingarten Joins Fearmongering Campaign against Florida Parental-Rights Law to ‘Save Democracy’

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American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten speaks at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pa., in 2016. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

The teacher’s union president said one gay teacher she spoke to had been ‘terrorized’ by the law.

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Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we react to recent comments by the American Federation of Teachers president and to a New York Times report that missed the mark, and hit more media misses.

Randi Weingarten’s Latest Lie

One need not look far to find instances of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten spreading disinformation. During the last two years of the pandemic, as leader of the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union, she did everything in her power to ensure that students remained out of classrooms, even when countless studies and the example of virtually every other Western democracy suggested it was safe to return. She continued to resist reopening even as the evidence mounted that remote learning was detrimental to students.

Now, Weingarten has set her sights on Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education law, which prohibits “classroom instruction” on sexual orientation and gender identity for students in kindergarten through third grade.

Most recently, Weingarten suggested during an appearance on MSNBC that schools must allow LGBT teachers to share their personal lives with students to “save democracy.”

She claimed she had spoken to several gay teachers, including a kindergarten teacher in Florida who was “immediately terrorized after the bill was passed and signed by [Governor Ron] DeSantis because he’s gay.”

“We have to let gay kids and gay teachers — frankly we have to let everyone talk about their lived experience,” she claimed. “That’s part of how you build relationships. That’s part of how you unite people. That’s part of how you save democracy.”

Weingarten’s comments are based on the false premise that the law prevents teachers from using the word “gay,” as Democrats have dubbed the legislation the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. While the law’s critics argue that it might prevent gay teachers from discussing their personal lives, its author has said that the prohibition on discussing sexual orientation and gender identity extends only to official curricula used in K–3 classrooms.

The comment was far from Weingarten’s first dramatization of the law. Earlier this month, she suggested that parental-choice legislation could sow the seeds of violent conflict.

“This notion — we’ve been very lucky in America, and we in some ways live in a bubble for a long time,” she said during an April 13 radio interview on The Rick Smith Show. “This is propaganda. This is misinformation. This is the way in which wars start. This is the way in which hatred starts.”

“Educators welcome parent involvement in schools because our kids do best when teachers, parents and caregivers work together,” Weingarten said in a statement obtained by Fox News last week. “We have a lot to do to help kids recover and thrive this year after two years of an unprecedented pandemic. So rather than help us help our kids socially, academically and emotionally, these vocal minorities want to marginalize LGBTQ kids, censor teachers and ban books.”

A group of leaders from 19 education- and tech-policy organizations and think tanks wrote a letter last week to members of Congress in which they describe Weingarten as a “liberal union activist” who has “been a leading source of misinformation and political partisanship to obscure scientific facts” during the pandemic.

The group argues it is “hard to imagine an organization that has less credibility or standing as a judge of journalistic truth than the AFT,” given that it donates overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party and allied causes.

In the letter, the group asks members of Congress to investigate a new partnership between AFT and NewsGuard, a tool that provides “trust ratings” for news and information websites.

Under the partnership with the American Federation of Teachers, NewsGuard’s browser extension would be added to the computers of the union’s 1.7 million members and tens of millions of students they teach and their families.

Weingarten has touted the deal, which was first announced in January, as a “game-changer for teachers and families drowning in an ocean of online dishonesty.”

The group tells the lawmakers that the partnership seems to be “another effort to politicize our schools, censor disapproved political thought and sources of information, and silence critics of teachers’ unions.”

The letter notes that NewsGuard’s advisers, leadership, and investors “heavily favor to the left,” with an analysis by the Washington Free Beacon showing NewsGuard donations favor Democrats more than three to one. Additionally, NewsGuard employs several senior staff with a history of working in Democratic politics, including its deputy general manager, who volunteered for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

“This bias is clearly reflected in NewsGuard ratings,” the group argues, citing a Media Research Center NewsBusters analysis that found that “liberal outlets were rated 27 points higher on average than news organizations on the right.”

(Sub)headline Fail of the Week

The New York Times reported on the suicide of a climate-change activist with the headline “Climate Activist Dies After Setting Himself on Fire at Supreme Court.” It also affixed a subheadline explaining that “a friend described the actions of Wynn Bruce, of Boulder, Colo., as ‘a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to climate crisis.’”

In any other context, it would be completely unacceptable to glorify human suffering, self-harm, and death. Not just because it’s self-evidently wrong, but because it has real-world consequences. Self-harm is a social contagion. The more it’s glorified in the public sphere, the more likely people — especially those who are lonely or searching for meaning — are to turn to it. Even the woman who described the act as “deeply fearless” acknowledged as much, saying, “What I do not want to happen is that young people start thinking about self-immolation.”

The article goes on to include a Buddhist Zen master’s assertion that “to burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. There is nothing more painful than burning oneself. To say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with utmost courage, frankness, determination, and sincerity.”

The Times article irresponsibly handed a megaphone to those intent on casting Bruce’s suicide as an act of heroism and excluded the voices of health-care professionals and others who might balance that perspective.

Media Misses

—New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait accused journalist Christopher Rufo of having “nutty theories about social-emotional learning as a scheme to indoctrinate children in Neo-Marxism,” though plenty of evidence exists to back up Rufo’s reporting.

—Washington Post Internet-culture columnist Taylor Lorenz recently accused the right-wing media of working to “sow doubt and discredit journalism” after she received widespread criticism over her report exposing the creator behind the popular Libs of TikTok account on Twitter.

—CNN spokesman Matt Dornic remains as credible as his employer.

—Similarly, Brian Stelter, chief media correspondent for CNN, is unable to discern whether CNN+’s shuttering within a month of its launch, firing of much of its staff, and tens of millions of dollars in losses constitute a failure. On the last installment of his show on the streaming service, Stelter argued: “It’s too early to know if this product, if this service was a success or a failure. You know, you’ve got all the haters today saying this thing was a failure. I don’t know if we can ever even assess that.” It seems as though his bosses already have.

—Kate Smith, who has worked as a supposedly neutral reporter and correspondent for CBS News covering abortion, has come right out in the open with her activism in accepting a role with Planned Parenthood as a senior director of news content.

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