‘The Most Dangerous Person in the World Is Randi Weingarten’

When the former secretary of state and C.I.A. director Mike Pompeo, a man who had dealt firsthand with autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, described Randi Weingarten as “the most dangerous person in the world” last November, it seemed as though he couldn’t possibly be serious.

Weingarten is 65 and just over five feet tall. She is Jewish and openly gay — she’s married to a rabbi — and lives in Upper Manhattan. She is the longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, which is not even the country’s biggest union of public-school educators. (The A.F.T. has 1.7 million members; the National Education Association has three million.) The A.F.T. did give in excess of $26 million to Democratic candidates and causes in the 2022 election cycle, but the Carpenters and Joiners union gave more than twice as much.

Pompeo, whose remarks appeared in a widely quoted interview with the online news site Semafor, had nevertheless put his finger on something: The pandemic and the ongoing culture wars over race and gender had shifted America’s educational landscape, and with it the political landscape. “It’s not a close call,” Pompeo elaborated. “If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing.”

Other Republicans quickly piled on. Pompeo had set the bar high, and they needed to invoke equally hot rhetoric and florid imagery to ensure headlines of their own. “Big labor unions have taken over public education,” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina told Fox News in late January. “That’s bad for parents, bad for kids, bad for America.” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida mounted his attack in The American Conservative magazine: “Our schools are a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination. Dangerous academic constructs like critical race theory and radical gender theory are being forced on elementary school children.” Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had already garnered national attention with his book bans, Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” and its so-called Don’t Say Gay legislation, unveiled a new proposal designed to rein in “overreaching teachers’ unions,” which a column on the Fox website enthusiastically embraced as “a blueprint to dominate union bosses.” Donald Trump, declaring that public schools “have been taken over by the radical left maniacs” and “pink-haired communists,” released his own plan to Save American Education. It was clear that Weingarten had come to stand for something much larger than herself.