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A notorious teachers’ union boss who pushed for the closures of schools during COVID is facing mockery for whining about schools in Gaza.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten posted a tweet Monday complaining that Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas has left Gaza’s universities and schools “severely damaged or destroyed.”

Look:

The tweet prompted a flurry of mockery and pushback, especially since Weingarten made it so that only people she “follows or mentioned can [directly] reply.”

The irony was too much for school choice advocate Corey A. DeAngelis, who pointed out in a tweet that she’d closed her replies just “like you closed the schools.”

He wasn’t wrong.

In an April 2020 tweet, Weingarten pushed back on early efforts to reopen schools.

“Re-opening this soon will bring an even more powerful second wave of #COVID19. We have to be sure we are re-opening safely and not rushing things,” she wrote.

In July 2020, Weingarten declared that her organization would support teachers’ strikes if schools reopened in the fall of that year without coronavirus safety measures pushed by her organization.

“We will fight on all fronts for the safety of our students and their educators,” Weingarten said. “But if authorities don’t protect the safety and health of those we represent and those we serve, as our executive council voted last week, nothing is off the table.”

And in August of 2021, early reports suggested that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had consulted with Weingarten and the AFT to draft guidelines for potentially keeping schools closed again ahead of the next academic year.

This was confirmed as true two years later:

For years Weingarten lobbied to keep schools in America closed, but now she’s crying about schools in Gaza?

One clever critic rewrote her tweet to put the focus back on schools here in the United States.

“Education is a fundamental human right. America’s public schools are severely inept and failing. The tragic toll of lockdowns includes students and their spirits and psyches that were killed, and the impact will be felt for generations to come,” the critic tweeted.

See what they did?

Check out more responses to Weingarten’s tweet below:

The good news is that things are changing here in the states, according to DeAngelis.

Speaking with Fox News last year, he said that the growing school choice movement to allow parents to choose where to enroll their children was weakening the teachers’ unions’ grip on education.

“Finally, we are freeing families from the clutches of the teachers’ unions once and for all, and there’s not a dang thing they can do about it,” he said.

“School choice is a winner for everybody except for Randi Weingarten and the teachers’ unions who want to trap your kids in schools that aren’t working for them,” he added.

Vivek Saxena
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