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JD Vance and Randi Weingarten
“If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone,” Vance said of Randi Weingarten, who is a stepmother.
Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance once lambasted Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, saying she’s not a mother and that “if she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”
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The remarks came in a forum held by Center for Christian Virtue in October 2021, when Vance was running for a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio, which he won in 2022. It was moderated by Hugh Hewitt, a right-wing radio host and columnist, and Aaron Baer, the group’s president.
Heartland Signal, a liberal news site, posted a clip of Vance’s comments to X Tuesday, and the full recording of the event was reviewed by several news outlets.
“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. “Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teachers’ union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child.”
Weingarten has described herself as a “mother by marriage.” She is married to Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, and they have two daughters who Kleinbaum brought to the relationship.
Other right-wingers, including U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, have criticized Weingarten as supposedly childless and asserted that therefore she is not qualified to educate children. Vance is also notorious for saying the nation is run by "childless cat ladies" who want to make everyone miserable and critiquing some Democrats, including Vice President (and Democratic presidential nominee) Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, for not having biological children. Harris is the stepmother of two, and Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, are parenting twins.
Weingarten issued a statement in response to Vance. “Teachers want what children need,” she said. “I am blessed to be a mom by marriage, but it’s irrelevant to whether any of us care about children. 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.
“Vance should devote his energy to helping educators and school staff support students. Instead, he is making it harder for teachers to teach and children to learn. Shame on JD Vance.”
She also went on MSNBC's Deadline: White House Wednesday. “Somebody doesn’t have to be a parent to be a great teacher,” she told host Jen Psaki. “And in fact, so many teachers in America, so many nuns in parochial schools, are fantastic teachers who teach compassion and caring and critical thinking and context, it’s nonsensical, but what it does in this age of disinformation and misinformation, it makes the job of teaching and learning, the connection between parents and teachers and kids, it makes it harder. And that’s why it’s gross.”
Vance is a convert to Catholicism, and he and his wife, Usha, have three children, one of whom, Ewan, is school age. It's unclear if Ewan attends a parochial school, where he would likely be taught by childless nuns.
It's bad enough that Vance made the comments when he was running for Senate, but even worse now that he’s seeking to become vice president as Donald Trump’s running mate, Weingarten added.
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Vance is expressing no regrets. He “will continue to loudly call this crap out to defend our kids,” his spokeswoman Taylor Van Kirk said in a statement to NBC News and other outlets. “There is no bigger threat to American children than the left-wing indoctrination being peddled in our schools by radicals like Randi Weingarten, with the support of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz,” Van Kirk went on.
Others are defending Weingarten. Vance and Trump don’t respect educators who “dedicate their lives to serving students,” Becky Pringle, president of another teachers’ union, the National Education Association, said in a statement to NBC.
“Instead they choose to attack and demean us while pushing an extreme, unprecedented Project 2025 agenda on America that will fundamentally jeopardize our children’s futures and give Trump unprecedented power over our daily lives,” Pringle said.
