Randi Weingarten slammed for invoking Nazi occupation while promoting new book

Who taught her this was a good idea?

Teachers union honcho Randi Weingarten popped up on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Monday and invoked the Nazi occupation of Europe to shill for her new book.

The American Federation of Teachers president drew attention to the paper clip she wore on the lapel of her suit jacket.

“I wear two things now: the American flag — no one can take patriotism away from me — and a paper clip,” said Weingarten, 67. “What did the teachers in Norway do when there was the Nazi occupation? They started wearing paper clips. Kids started wearing paper clips. Why? To bind people together as a community.”

“We cannot destroy public education,” she also said on the show. “Public education is what binds society together and fascists fear knowledge and they fear society being bound together.” 

Critics slammed Weingarten for invoking crimes against humanity at a time of high political tension to try and goose sales for her book “Why Fascists Fear Teachers.”

“Is this what you call lowering the temperature?” American Culture Project fellow Corey DeAngelis wrote on X, later insisting that Weingarten resign her post.

Townhall writer Jeremy Frankel quipped that Weingarten was a “perfectly normal and well-adjusted person.”

“A woman who so casually downplays the Holocaust should not be allowed anywhere near the education of children,” added longtime Republican communications strategist Matt Whitlock.

“Randi finds many ways to be disgusting, but LARPing as someone in actual danger in Nazi-occupied Norway is a next step,” agreed National Legal Foundation research fellow David Wagner. “All families who suffered under the real Nazis should be offended.”

“[T]rivializing the [H]olocaust to promote her garbage book is revolting but also completely expected,” said another user with the moniker “semite, yo”

“A Nazi occupation!?! And this person is being interviewed like a serious person? Turning down the temperature means stopping with the Nazi name-calling,” said Maryland GOP State Sen. Justin Ready. “Because most people would want to violently resist actual Nazis. It’s not a long jump.”

In an August 2021 Medium post, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum related that educators and pupils wore paper clips in their lapels, as necklaces, or as bracelets to show “the country’s educators and learners remained united — bound together like a stack of papers — against Nazi rule.”

Meanwhile, teachers who refused to join the Nazi-led national union saw their schools closed, their salaries withheld, and were sent to concentration camps, “where they were denied food and forced to crawl through snow, march miles in darkness while being beaten, and perform hard labor.”