THEY'RE AT IT AGAIN: THE NEVER-ENDING RIGHT-WING CRUSADE AGAINST RANDI WEINGARTEN
The Woman They Love to Hate
Here's what the right-wing noise machine doesn't want you to sit with for too long: Randi Weingarten started her career in a classroom. She taught history at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn from 1991 to 1997. She wasn't parachuted in from a think tank funded by billionaires. She didn't write a manifesto from a marble-floored office. She showed up, graded papers, and dealt with the beautiful, exhausting chaos of actual public school students.
From there, she rose to lead the United Federation of Teachers in New York City in 1998, navigating the political minefields of both Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg — two mayors who, ideological differences aside, shared a mutual enthusiasm for making a union president's life difficult. She was elected AFT president in 2008, representing 1.8 million members: teachers, nurses, public employees, and higher education faculty.
Since then, she has expanded the AFT's mission from traditional "bread and butter" unionism — wages, benefits, contracts — into what she calls community unionism: the idea that a school is not just a building where math happens, but a hub of democracy, healthcare, nutrition, and civic life. It's a vision that makes perfect sense to anyone who has ever actually been inside an underfunded public school. And it makes the Heritage Foundation absolutely furious.
The Greatest Hits of Right-Wing Outrage
Pull up a chair. The attacks come in predictable flavors, recycled with the enthusiasm of a DJ who only knows three songs.
"She Kept Schools Closed!" (The Pandemic Panic Track)
The most persistent criticism — played on a loop from Fox News to the Freedom Foundation — is that Weingarten is personally responsible for every minute of pandemic-era school closure. The narrative goes: she whispered into the CDC's ear, the CDC complied, and a generation of children was academically ruined while she cackled from her union headquarters.
The reality, as inconvenient as ever, is considerably more textured. Weingarten consistently called for a science-based approach to reopening — one that accounted for ventilation, vaccination timelines, and the fact that teachers are human beings with lungs. The City Journal, never one to let nuance interfere with a good polemic, ran a piece essentially arguing that Weingarten's book tour proves her revisionism about COVID is shameless self-promotion. What they conveniently omit: school districts across the country — run by local boards, not Randi Weingarten — made their own reopening decisions. But why let federalism get in the way of a villain origin story?
"She's a Political Operative!" (The Slush Fund Remix)
The Heritage Foundation, that venerable institution funded by the very billionaires who benefit most from dismantling public education, has declared that Weingarten "turns the teachers union into a political weapon." Their evidence? The AFT directs nearly 100% of its political contributions to Democrats.
This is presented as a scandal. It is, in fact, a logical consequence of one party spending decades trying to defund, privatize, and dismantle public education while the other party — however imperfectly — has not. When one team is actively trying to eliminate your institution, you tend not to donate to their campaign fund. This is not a conspiracy. This is arithmetic.
The Heritage piece also clutches its pearls over Weingarten leveraging teacher pension funds to pressure Target executives over ICE enforcement in Minnesota. The audacity! Using financial leverage to influence corporate behavior — the very mechanism that hedge funds, private equity firms, and Heritage Foundation donors use every single day — is apparently only outrageous when a union does it.
"Why Fascists Fear Teachers" (The Book They Cannot Stop Talking About)
City Journal dispatched a writer to a Columbia University book event, who returned with a piece dripping with contempt — mocking her appearance, her "self-promotion," and her political analysis. The irony of a right-wing publication dedicating thousands of words to a book they insist nobody should read appears to have escaped them entirely.
Meanwhile, the American Association of University Professors' journal Liberal Education ran a far more substantive interview, in which Weingarten — wearing an American flag pin alongside a Norwegian paperclip (a WWII symbol of resistance) — argued that attacks on teachers, book bans, and assaults on tenure are part of a coordinated campaign to erode democratic institutions. "When you undermine colleges," she said, "you're undermining the very institutions that produce knowledge, train civic leaders, and sustain democracy."
One of these publications engaged her ideas seriously. The other made fun of her face. You can guess which was which.
"She's Killing the Union!" (The Membership Decline Dirge)
The Daily Signal — the Heritage Foundation's in-house content arm — recently published a piece asking whether the AFT is nearing its end, pointing to post-Janus v. AFSCME membership declines and breathlessly promoting the "Teacher Freedom Alliance," a new alternative organization that has attracted 12,000 members.
For context: the AFT has 1.8 million members. Twelve thousand is, statistically speaking, a rounding error. But in the right-wing echo chamber, every defection is a revolution, every poll showing Americans want "less politics in classrooms" is a death knell, and every think-tank-funded alternative organization is the dawn of a new golden age of education.
The Real Pattern Here
Step back from the individual attacks and a clear picture emerges. The assault on Randi Weingarten is not really about Randi Weingarten. It is a coordinated, well-funded, years-long campaign to delegitimize the very concept of organized teacher advocacy — and by extension, public education itself.
The players are familiar: Christopher Rufo, who has openly stated his strategy is to make "critical race theory" a toxic brand regardless of whether it actually appears in any curriculum. The Heritage Foundation, whose Project 2025 blueprint called for dismantling the Department of Education. Moms for Liberty, whose chapters have been linked to book-banning campaigns in dozens of school districts. The Freedom Foundation, whose explicit mission is to defund public sector unions.
They are not critics engaging in good faith with education policy. They are demolition crews with a messaging budget.
Why She Keeps Fighting — and Why It Matters
Here is the thing about Randi Weingarten that the culture warriors cannot quite process: she doesn't stop. She's at a "No Kings" protest in Minnesota one week, presenting at an academic research conference the next, then on MS NOW, then on a picket line with Starbucks workers, then back in a school.
For her critics, this ubiquity is proof of megalomania. For her supporters — the teachers negotiating contracts in underfunded districts, the nurses fighting for safe staffing ratios, the adjunct professors cobbling together a living from three campuses — it looks a lot more like someone who actually believes what she says.
The right-wing echo chamber has been predicting her irrelevance, her downfall, and the AFT's collapse for nearly two decades. She is still here. The union is still here. Public schools — despite everything — are still here.
That, more than any book title or protest sign, is probably what bothers them most.
Sources: City Journal | Heritage Foundation | AACU Liberal Education | The Daily Signal
