Randi Weingarten Gets Fact-Checked for Misrepresenting Story About a Fired Texas School Teacher
“Hey Randi, you forgot to turn off comments and you’re getting fact-checked & exposed for the shameless liar on which you base your entire platform.”
Among her critics, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten is not exactly known for being truthful.
It’s not uncommon to see her get Community Noted on the Twitter machine for playing fast and loose with the facts, as was the case after her incredible claim in April during a House Select Subcommittee hearing on the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic that she fought to reopen schools.
It was, of course, untrue.
Fast forward a few months, and Weingarten is at it again. This time around, her insinuations revolve around alleged book banning and anti-Semitism.
She saw a story from the Houston Chronicle about a Texas teacher fired for presenting a controversial illustrated version of Anne Frank’s diary to her 8th-grade classroom and posted the link to Twitter.
The problem, however, came in Weingarten’s sensationalistic description of what happened:
Texas teacher fired for reading Diary of Anne Frank to class-THIS Speaks for itself!!! https://t.co/fUXiEQcmv9
— Randi Weingarten 🇺🇦🇺🇸💪🏿👩🎓 (@rweingarten) September 20, 2023
In reality, that is not how things reportedly went down at all, according to the story:
A Texas middle school teacher has been fired after assigning an unapproved illustrated version of Anne Frank’s Diary to her eighth grade reading class. Per a report from KFDM, a spokesperson for Hamshire-Fannett ISD, located south of Beaumont, released a statement confirming the teacher was sent home on Wednesday after reading a passage from Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation in which Frank wrote about male and female genitalia. An investigation into the incident has since ensued.
[…]
While previous versions of Frank’s diary omitted sections in which she wrote about sexuality, the 2018 graphic novel adapted by Ari Folman and illustrated by David Polonsky, remains faithful to the original text. Folman’s parents are Holocaust survivors.
In other words, this wasn’t about a teacher getting fired for assigning the Diary of Anne Frank to her students. She was let go because she allegedly assigned an unapproved version of it that contained passages and illustrated images of a sexual nature to eighth graders.
Legal Insurrection wrote earlier this year about how the Graphic Adaptation version was, after a complaint, removed from one Florida high school’s library on grounds that it minimized the Holocaust and depicted Frank as a young lesbian girl who fantasized about seeing women’s breasts.
Upon further reading from the original source, KFDM, for the Texas teacher story, we also learned that according to at least one parent, the teacher not only assigned the book to her class but also had them read the sexually explicit parts out loud in front of other classmates:
One Hamshire-Fannett ISD parent, Amy Manuel, said her twin eighth grade sons told her about what the teacher was doing in class with the book. Manuel said, “I mean it’s bad enough, she’s having them read this for an assignment, but then she also is making them read it aloud and making a little girl talk about feeling each other’s breasts and when she sees a female she goes into ecstasy, that’s not ok.”
KFDM also reported that “district officials claim the adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary has never been approved, yet it was on a reading list sent to parents at the start of the school year,” which is why the school district is conducting an investigation (that and the fact that the teacher in question has hired an attorney).
Though the Community Note is not currently visible on Weingarten’s tweet (it still appears to be under review via Birdwatch), others copied the Birdwatch notes and posted them to her:
Noted https://t.co/8ECEMDY0HP pic.twitter.com/a5toOpBy81
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) September 20, 2023
I should point out for the record that there is no molestation shown in the illustrated book images contained in the Holly Briden tweet noted above (and see below), which may be why the Community Note as of this writing is pending review:
Oh no pic.twitter.com/8Kos7p1WP3
— 🫃🏼💉🇺🇦Hollaria Briden, Esq. & Ally (@HollyBriden) September 20, 2023
But the point is that Weingarten’s claim that the teacher was fired for merely reading the commonly known version of Anne Frank’s diary is utterly false, and that she also left out what the adaptation in question contained:
Hey Randi, you forgot to turn off comments and you’re getting fact-checked & exposed for the shameless liar on which you base your entire platform.
— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) September 20, 2023
Randi's lying (again). The teacher did NOT read The Diary of Anne Frank.
She read a "graphic adaptation" that is loosely based on the original and includes fictional sexual content. https://t.co/51iJR7mI9h
— Angela Morabito (@AngelaLMorabito) September 20, 2023
Do you really want this woman informing education policy when she bends the most basic truths for Democrat partisan gain? https://t.co/nGRbJfarTr
— James V. Barcia (@jamesbarcia) September 21, 2023
Why would the leader of the union misrepresent this to look like something other than what it is? https://t.co/3ZthLBvL0B
— Carolyn Phippen (@carolyn_phippen) September 20, 2023
“Why” indeed.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
Every accusation like this turns out to be a lie. From “don’t say gay” to “banning water breaks” to this. Does the left ever tell the truth about anything?
Well, today I learned that the diary I read in grade school was a somewhat edited version. I feel no extreme need to go look up the sections that were removed.
Fine, then… so, when will our American 8th graders be assigned to read the unedited version of The Diary of Ashley Biden?
Why should any progressive or Dem feel the need to tell the truth when their president doesn’t bother? The msm will cover for them no matter how big the lie is. It is how they run their campaigns and you would think that after all of these years of lies, that the public would catch on, but they haven’t.
Especially, Randi. She is jumping on the Ukraine money and kickbacks train. She wants to rebuild Ukraine’s educational system in the midst of a war. Yeah, right. Why doesn’t she just join the board of Burisma Energy?
Because she doesn’t know anything about… oh, wait.
Why shouldn’t dems lie? They know it won’t be fact checked by MSM. They know that the lie will be repeated by the MSM until it becomes the “truth” for a vast swath of idiotic sheeple. They know it will score political points. HeII, if all else fails they can just claim “it is true somewhere,”
There are plenty of folks who make things up or tell falsehoods about things which we can show happened. I suspect that this is b/c many of us, myself included, used to give these folks the ‘side eye’, make an internal note never to be around this person if it could be avoided, much less trust or rely upon them. We presumed others made the same sort of internal notation and hoped that would be the end.
Unfortunately the tellers of make believe found a willing audience. Not just on the left either. People tell BS things b/c they understand there are others who desperately want to believe their BS b/c they support the ideology, the agenda or the politician telling the lies. We see this from time to time on the right when there’s an initial report/story about someone doing something we agree with and suddenly many on the right ‘adopt’ the person without any further inquiry or analysis only into find out layer they are as phony as Jussie Smollett.
I’m waiting till The Diary of Barney Frank becomes required reading. That is sure to be filled with whoppers.
I wonder why nobody has ever punched that lying little troll in her lying mouth.
Weingarten lied, but so are most of the critical tweets cited in this post. The teacher was not using “a ‘graphic adaptation’ that is loosely based on the original and contains fictional sexual content”. On the contrary, it was the authentic version, from which the non-fictional sexual content had not been censored. Nor is there any depiction or discussion of molestation; a teenager’s natural sexual thoughts are not molestation. These were Miss Frank’s actual thoughts and feelings, as she recorded them. But they are not appropriate for a grade school classroom, which is why most editions of the diary for the first fifty years or so since it was published censored this content. Only the censored version was approved for use in the classroom, and the teacher had no right to use the original version (with or without graphic adaptations) without first clearing it with the administration. She was rightly fired for it, and Weingarten misrepresented that as a sign of antisemitism.
When someone says “this speaks for itself” they’re often wrong, and that is what happened here. Few things really do speak for themselves. When someone thinks something does, it’s often an indication, not of what happened, but of what’s on that person’s mind. And that’s a mistake made just as often on the right as on the left.
Leave it to you to spend many words to defend nonsense out of someone’s mouth. Your that poster who is just smarter than everyone and takes every opportunity to dissect every response to a post and let the world know it.
You’re the poster who doesn’t give a s*** about the truth, and therefore has no right to criticize Weingarten for not telling it. You are no better than she is.
Weingarten lied?! Oh noes! And right before Yom Kippur too! How will she explain that to her wife the rabbi?
</snark>
I went to the library and spent an hour skimming the graphic novel “Anne Frank’s Diary adapted by Ari Folman.”
Anne Frank’s Diary is a historical fiction, not an abridged or edited version of the Diary of Anne Frank. Much of the book is concerned with Anne and her inner monologue intercut by dialogue with family and friends.
iPad translation page 114:
One brief conversational panel shows Peter holding the family tomcat splay-legged while Anne looks at the Tom’s genitals and notes that it’s “missing the testicles, but the sexual organ remains.”
The rest of the artwork is benign. Two panels show the red and black swastika banners hanging from windows. One wide shot show a crowd hitler saluting, but the people and salute are diffuse and blurry. One 1/4 page panel shows the infamous book bonfire with the crowd saluting hitler – diffuse and blurry. One panel depicting a Waffen SS trooper guarding prison laborers.
The graphic novel is neither history or pornography. I’m not entirely sure why it exists in the first place.
The edition I looked at is a very expensive hardcover “library quality” bound book. In near pristine condition, few people have ever looked through this specific book.
.
Weingarten is a horrible failure as a human being, and not a very smart one at that. She has single handedly done more to further the cause of school choice than anyone in history. I was once a believer in (and a product of) “public” schools, but am now a committed opponent of Government Schools and the self-interested parasites like Weingarten who feast off the ruined lives of children. I am not alone.
The classic version of Tge Diary of Anne Frank is a classic in why people like dead Jews to paraphrase Dara Horne The graphic version is a grooming exercise for the LGBT world
Ugh! I think this is so awful. This CHILD was revealing her innermost thoughts that she found difficult to talk about in the cruel prison that she was forced into. The parts about sexuality should remain confidential as that is an invasion of her privacy. She deserves that! Even though she is dead, we should still honor her memory. And the best way to do this is by continuing to teach the approved version so that the children and adults who read it understand the torment the Nazis and their too many collaborators opposed on innocent children. She represents but one of the many treasures lost in the Holocaust. Anne Frank was a gifted and talented girl and what a loss it is that her life was so cruelly cut short. Focusing on her thoughts about sexuality TRVIALIZING her book!
Agreed.
It’s a strange, abstract foray; it distracts and diverts attention from the tragedy and sorrow of Anne Frank’s life.