When you’ve lost Lori Lightfoot …

Chicago voters lost Lightfoot, or perhaps better put, Lightfoot lost Chicago voters. The failure to keep children in schools and in effective learning environments undoubtedly played a big role in her political collapse, the worst in recent memory for Chicago mayors. Lightfoot herself counts that as a significant part of the “anger bubble” that pushed her out of office, and that also threatens to end the careers of other mayors of the COVID era.

CNN’s Poppy Harlow points out this morning that Lightfoot went “head to head with the teacher’s union” over school shutdowns. Now Randi Weingarten wants to rewrite history and claim that she worked with mayors like Lightfoot to re-open schools, and Lightfoot scoffs. After spending $100 million to refit schools and meet the demands of the American Federation of Teachers, Weingarten and the local union refused to go back to the schools.

“The union needed to work with us,” Lightfoot declared, “and they never did that.” In the end, Weingarten stiffed Chicago and other major cities:

HARLOW: “Here’s what Randi Weingarten, who heads that union said. Let’s play it.”

[Clip starts]

WEINGARTEN: “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.”

[Clip ends]

HARLOW: “Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos responded to that accusing her of revisionist history. Do you agree with DeVos?”

LIGHTFOOT: “Well, what I will say is this, that may have been what Randy Weingartner was saying, at the national level, and I believe that to be true, I had conversations with her at the time, that lead me to believe that’s what she wanted to do. That’s not the reality that was happening on the ground. In cities like Chicago, like Los Angeles, and other places. We needed to get our kids back in school, and I’m unapologetic about the fight to make sure that we put our kids and our parents first.”

Lightfoot’s looking for excuses for her own failures, of course, but that doesn’t make her wrong about Weingarten. This confirms what we already know — Weingarten and the unions did nothing to facilitate a return to normal school operation. They spoke out of both sides of their mouths constantly during the pandemic shutdowns, insisting that all they needed was X to go back, and then promptly changing their demands when they got X. For instance, remember when the unions insisted on prioritizing vaccines for teachers in order to reopen schools? When they got that prioritization, the unions then insisted that they couldn’t go back until all the children were vaccinated as well.

Weingarten’s retroactive support for reopening is self-serving to the point of pathology. The Wall Street Journal editorial board agrees today, cataloguing the gaslighting from Weingarten, Anthony Fauci, and others on this point. They openly wonder whether they’re suffering from COVID-related memory loss:

Leading the amnesia parade is Randi Weingarten, the American Federation of Teachers president who attempted to erase two years of Covid history in testimony last week to the House of Representatives that was, literally, unbelievable. …

Alas, her “detail” omitted a few things. Such as her description in July 2020 of the Trump Administration’s push to reopen schools for in-person learning that autumn as “this reckless, this callous, this cruel.” That summer she also endorsed teacher “safety strikes” if unions deemed local reopening protocols to be inadequate. Hundreds of private and charter schools did open that fall without the surge of illness that Ms. Weingarten claimed to fear.

She also left out the detail that local union affiliates were the most aggressive opponents of school reopening throughout 2021 and even into 2022. “We are practically begging [the Chicago Teachers Union] to come to the table so we can get a deal done,” Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in February 2021.

This revisionism amounts to the political version of “who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”

It is useful in one key way, especially with normal allies like Lightfoot exposing Weingarten as a liar. The campaign by Weingarten and Fauci to paint themselves as advocates for re-opening schools and other public places amounts to a tacit concession that critics of the shutdowns were right all along — especially concerning schools. The red states were right to oppose those policies and reopen in the fall of 2020, and the Faucis and Weingartens were wrong … dead wrong.

Too bad that the national media isn’t making that point more explicit. Give credit to Poppy Harlow for at least making it obvious.

Speaking of Weingarten, Phil Kerpen and I tackled her gaslighting and revisionism in the latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast:

• Was AFT president Randi Weingarten really trying to reopen schools? American Commitment president Phil Kerpen scoffs at the claim, pointing out that Weingarten fought for over two years to stop schools from opening.
• He discusses the economic and social consequences of school closures due to the pandemic, including a loss of educational attainment, lower lifetime income, lower life expectancy, mental health issues, and physical health issues.
• Plus, the quarter of a million kids have dropped off the radar, and the cost of that may be incalculable.

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!