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The official J.D. Vance Bad Press Tour keeps on rolling this week, as the Republican vice presidential hopeful faces scrutiny over 2021 comments he made bashing teachers without biological children, including American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten.
Already grappling with widespread backlash over another 2021 jab calling Democratic politicians and voters “childless cat ladies,” Vance now must answer more questions about further comments he made during an October 2021 political event for the Center for Christian Virtue. “So many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children. That really disorients me and disturbs me,” Vance said during the event. “Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teachers’ union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”
Weingarten is a lesbian, and introduced the public to her wife, Liz Margolies, in 2007. Vance’s disparaging remarks, however, were also inaccurate: Weingarten, believed to be the first openly LGBTQ+ president of a major U.S. labor union, is stepmother to Margolies’ biological children, and described herself as a “mother by marriage” last year when subjected to similar attacks on her motherhood by Vance’s GOP colleague, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Still, Vance doubled down on, and falsely reframed, his own remarks while being interviewed on the tarmac outside the Trump-Vance campaign jet this week, as CNN reported. “I didn’t criticize Randi Weingarten for not having kids, I criticized her for wanting to brainwash mine,” Vance claimed. Meanwhile, Weingarten responded in an MSNBC interview, calling his comments “nonsensical” and “gross.”
A Viral Image Appears to Show Virulently Anti-LGBTQ\+ VP Candidate J.D. Vance in Drag
Content creator and podcast host Matt Bernstein posted the image to social media over the weekend.
Vance has not specifically stated in what way he believes Weingarten is “brainwashing” his children. His statement at the Center for Christian Virtue event was made in the general context of “the ideology of the left,” which Vance characterized as “control[ling] what our children learn.” Similarly vague, yet apocalyptic, rhetoric about Weingarten and the AFT has proliferated on the right over the last several years. In a 2022 interview, former Trump administration Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Weingarten “the most dangerous person in the world” and alleged that teachers’ unions are “the most likely to take this republic down.” Other Republican lines of attack have included the accusation that Weingarten and the AFT puppeteered the U.S.’ COVID-19 policy, which Weingarten flatly denied and called “wild allegations.”
It’s still not clear what the Republican Party despises so much about Weingarten in particular, though being a lesbian who supports public education may be reason enough. Weingarten has been a vocal opponent of conservative “school choice” initiatives and charter voucher programs, which have become a major part of the GOP policy platform — along with nationwide campaigns to limit LGBTQ+ rights and expression within schools. Vance’s comments about Weingarten’s family and liberal “childless cat ladies,” meanwhile, underscore more anxieties within his party: Republicans are more obsessed with natalism than ever before, yet identical attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris’ family — i.e., her stepchildren with husband Doug Emhoff — have largely failed to connect with voters.
“I am blessed to be a mom by marriage, but it’s irrelevant to whether any of us care about children,” Weingarten wrote in an official AFT press release on Wednesday. “This week, as teachers are digging into their pockets to pay for school supplies and welcoming kids and parents into their classrooms, we should all be celebrating the hope and promise of a new school year, not trashing it with gross, ridiculous comments like Vance’s.”
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