AFTHQ
From start to finish, last week’s American Federation of Teachers national convention was all about keeping a Democrat in the White House — and educational choice off the agenda.
It started with AFT chief Randi Weingarten’s over-the-top rant against Donald Trump and ended with Vice President Kamala Harris thanking the delegates for her very first union endorsement in her sudden run for the top job.
Video of Weingarten’s remarks show her gesturing wildly, screaming and shouting as though she were at a revival-tent meeting, not a gathering of teachers.
Then again, AFT delegates are pretty radical-left these days: They offered a host of resolutions calling for a cease-fire in Israel’s war on Hamas, the end of US military aid to Israel, protecting anti-Israel campus protesters, condemning the way the United States is supposedly “enabling genocide” in Gaza and and blaming “far-right” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “prolonging” the war.
Wiser heads quashed those resolutions in committee, so delegates only OK’d one calling for an AFT statement that envisions “a democratic future where Israelis and Palestinians can both live in dignity, with peace and self-determination for all.”
That is: The union doesn’t want to muddy its Stop-Trump drive.
Randi’s rant warned of imminent violence and fascism if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election; “the eradication of the rights and freedoms we hold dear.”
Strange: He did nothing in that direction in his first term — but he did tap Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary, and she’s the opposite of a teachers-union pawn.
Whereas a Democrat in the White House literally ordered the health bureaucracy to follow Randi’s lead on guidance for reopening schools during COVID — a lead that boiled down to: “Don’t, my members would rather ‘work’ from home.”
Too bad the COVID closures set America’s schoolchildren back years, without making anyone safer.
That, and the farce of “remote learning,” opened the eyes of parents across America to how poorly union-dominated schools serve their children: Demand for educational choice (and an end to unions’ near-monopoly of public schools) is sweeping the nation.
In response, the Biden-Harris administration (at the request of teacher-union allies) sicced the FBI on parents who dare to speak out at local school-board meetings.
The “existential threat” that Trump poses, that is, is to the power of the AFT and the other main teachers union, the National Education Association — whose chief, Becky Pringle, was every bit as deranged as Randi at the NEA confab earlier in the month.
Hence Weingarten’s violent anti-Trump rhetoric, little more than a week after an assassin’s bullet nearly took his life.
Harris, meanwhile, chose the AFT gathering for her first major event since becoming Dems’ replacement candidate: the friendliest possible crowd; she of course played along with the whole “fight for our most fundamental freedoms” line.
If she wins, Randi can keep on dictating federal school policy, and the FBI will double-down against uppity parents.
Don’t forget that Randi told Fox News that measures like Florida’s 2022 parental-rights bill are “the way in which wars start.”
That is: The AFT and NEA will go to war to prevent parents from getting in the way of ever-expanding union power, and the power of the school bureaucracies the unions largely control — and desperately want a president who’ll back them.
And Kamala Harris is down with that: After all, AFT and NEA members are routinely a near-majority of delegates to the Democratic convention.
For all their moralistic posturing, Kamala, like Randi, is all about the power.