Teachers union president vows to support members who are teaching the 'honest history' of critical race theory

Union president Randi Weingarten pledged to members of the AFT, one of the country’s largest teachers' unions in the country, to defend teachers who use critical race theory in teaching, calling it an "honest history" of the United States.

In a virtual speech to the member of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) on Tuesday, President Randi Weingarten said the union has a legal defense fund "ready to go."

"Mark my words: Our union will defend any member who gets in trouble for teaching honest history. Teaching the truth is not radical or wrong. Distorting history and threatening educators for teaching the truth is what is truly radical and wrong."

Weingarten previously said that the union is adding $2.5 million to an existing legal defense fund to fight resistance to the racist curriculum and that the union is considering filing lawsuits against newly passed state laws against the material.

Weingarten said, "We're looking at these laws to see if courts will give some clarification in advance. It just looks like it's an attempt to erase so much of the history of the United States."

Six states have passed laws against the teaching of critical race theory, a curriculum which falsely claims that racism is systemic in the nation's institutions and that they function to maintain the dominance of white people. Similar proposals are being considered in more than a dozen other states.

Over the weekend, the National Education Association, which is the largest teachers union in the country, adopted several actions in favor of critical race theory indoctrination in American schools during their Annual Meeting and Representative Assembly.

Just last week, Weingarten falsely claimed that her union had been trying to reopen schools for in-person learning since April 2020, a month after the coronavirus pandemic began.

"We tried to reopen schools safely since April 2020…" she wrote on Twitter, even though many public schools did not have full time in-person learning through the end of 2021, and her union, the AFT, advocated against reopening.

Weingarten's contradicted herself yet again when she raised concerns about the delta variant of the coronavirus in relation to opening the schools. Despite teachers across the country being bumped to the front of the line for vaccines, and the vaccine's effectiveness against the variant, Weingarten maintained "there are still risks" for full in-person learning.

The NEA and AFT were outed by the New York Post in May for their influence over the Centers for Disease Controls and Prevention, especially with regard to the CDC’s school reopening guidelines which were altered to nearly word-for-word to accommodate NEA and NFT suggestions.

Despite curriculums being published, Weingarten also falsely maintains that the concept of Critical Race Theory has mostly been taught at the college level and not in elementary, middle and high schools.