American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten Schooled on Effects of Her Push for School Lockdowns During Pandemic 

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Randi Weingarten, AFT president, agreed to testify before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic this week. 

In an opinion piece written by Aaron Withe, he said that Weingarten’s goal in testifying was to distract and deny any responsibility for “millions of American K-12 students being kept out of the classroom far longer than necessary.” 

The AFT president appeared live on CNN following her testimony and had a spirited debate with CNN senior political commentator Scott Jennings on the COVID response, in particular school lockdowns. 

“Speaking on behalf of millions of American parents,” Jennings said as he began an epic admonishment of Weingarten’s “pro-lockdown rhetoric.” 

“I had to teach them at home,” he added, referring to his four children. 

“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,” Jennings said, speaking directly to Weingarten.

“I think you’ll find that most parents believe you are the tip of the spear of school closures,” he said. 

“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 kids.”

“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, oh, ‘I wanted to open up them the whole time,’” I am shocked. I’m stunned. I’m stunned,” Jennings said again.

“And there are millions of parents who feel the exact same way,” he added.

Twitter users applauded Jennings for speaking up for parents across the country.

Comedian Rob Schneider shared the CNN footage and thanked the network. He called Weingarten “the chief proponent of locking kids out of school.”

Weingarten’s defense? She knew that it was important to reopen schools and the importance of “making sure” people were safe but “poll after poll” said that parents “understood and supported that we needed to do both.”

They opted to keep schools closed in the name of safety from a virus with a 99% survival rate that did not largely affect children.

Republican Whip and Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis Ranking Member Steve Scalise and House Committee on Oversight and Reform Ranking Member James Comer concluded:

“The facts are clear. Biden’s CDC overrode routine practice to allow a radical teachers union that donated millions of dollars to Democrat campaigns to bypass scientific norms and rewrite official agency guidance. The damaging edits by union bosses effectively kept thousands of schools shuttered across the country, locking millions of children out of their classrooms. The Biden Administration abandoned medical science and replaced it with political science to reward one of their largest donors, harming millions of children in the process. They bypassed the science to put union bosses ahead of children.”

The two lawmakers summed it up perfectly. The Democrats put politics over the health and well-being of our nation’s school children to placate one of the party’s biggest donors.

This generation of school-aged children will suffer for years to come.

The ATF doesn’t care about children.

It cares about political power and a radical leftist agenda. That became abundantly clear to parents across the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic school lockdowns.