Randi Weingarten gave the speech of her career today. Almost nobody connected the dots to what her allies in Congress did two months ago. Here are the receipts.
She proposed pulling computers out of most classrooms before third grade.
She proposed banning student-facing AI in every elementary school in America.
She proposed prohibiting “social companion” chatbots until age 16.
She told the room that children “are drowning in tech” and that they need “real human beings, not robots and not chatbots.”
If I had heard this speech in 2019, I would have stood up and clapped. I have spent the last six years of my life fighting for less screen time in schools and more in-person human teaching. The Trump Surgeon General issued a public health advisory last week saying many of the same things. Sweden is going back to printed textbooks. Madrid is limiting computer use in primary schools to two hours a week. The parents I work with like my friend Denise Champney and her colleague Emily Cherkin have been making these arguments for years.
So why does the Weingarten version feel different?
Because it is different!
The story no one else is telling you today
Every outlet covering Weingarten’s speech this morning is treating it as a story about screens and child welfare.
They are missing the actual story.
The actual story is that Randi Weingarten just brought 1.8 million teachers into the same political coalition that introduced a bill two months ago to freeze the construction of every new AI data center in the United States.
That coalition was so transparently aligned with Chinese strategic interests that Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat, publicly labeled it “China First.”
I will give you the timeline.
March 25, 2026: Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduce the AI Data Center Moratorium Act. The bill would halt construction of new AI data centers across the United States until Congress writes a long list of new regulations. They tell reporters it is about workers and the environment.
March 25, 2026, same day: Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, responds on X. “The emerging chassis of AI must be built by America. We can put appropriate guardrails in place without handing the win on AI to China. A moratorium is China First.“
April 29, 2026: Sanders holds a public forum on what he calls the “existential risks” of artificial intelligence. The two AI scientists he puts on stage with him are Xue Lan of Tsinghua University and Zeng Yi of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance. Both are scientists from the People’s Republic of China. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calls it out within hours: “Senator Sanders is inviting foreign nationals to tell the United States how to regulate AI.”
May 2026: Fox News investigations editor Asra Nomani publishes a report documenting that the campaign against US AI data centers is being amplified by a network of Chinese state media, CCP-linked nonprofits, and a pro-China American tech tycoon named Neville Roy Singham. Nomani’s earlier five-part investigation found Singham has funneled at least $278 million into nonprofit groups pushing anti-American narratives, including CodePink, the People’s Forum, and the Marxist think tank Tricontinental. The same Singham network the New York Times described in 2023 as “a global web of Chinese propaganda.” The House Ways and Means Committee is now expanding a congressional investigation into the network.
May 27, 2026, this morning: Randi Weingarten brings the AFT into the fold. She announces a sweeping new AFT-backed push to keep American children off AI in school.
That is what happened in just sixty-three days. And until this post, no one had put the four pieces of paper next to each other on the same table.
The asymmetry is the giveaway
Chinese state media is warning American audiences that data centers will destroy our communities. The Chinese state is simultaneously subsidizing up to half the energy costs of its own AI data center operators. They do not believe what they are telling us. They are saying it because they want us to act on it.
How big is the asymmetry. Here are the numbers.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the Center for Strategic and International Studies in late November that building a data center in the United States takes about three years from breaking ground to running an AI supercomputer. In China, he said, “they can build a hospital in a weekend.” China has twice the energy capacity of the United States. China’s energy capacity is going “straight up.” Ours is flat.
Brookings reports that in 2025 alone, China added more than 540 gigawatts of new power capacity. Over the past four years China has built the equivalent of the entire American power grid in new capacity. By 2030 China is projected to have roughly 400 gigawatts of spare power capacity, three times its projected demand.
Tom’s Hardware reported in April that nearly half of planned American data center builds for 2026 are projected to be delayed or canceled. The bottleneck is transformers and switchgear. Many of those parts are now imported from China.
This is the race and the exact moment Randi Weingarten chose to call for limits on the technology that defines it.
What is actually new about her proposal
The American Federation of Teachers represents 1.8 million members. Weingarten has run it since 2008. The AFT already partnered with OpenAI and Anthropic to train its own teachers on AI.
The AFT endorsed a letter in January calling proposals to limit classroom technology foolish.
So Weingarten is fine with AI when AI is used by teachers, mediated by teachers, distributed through teachers, and paid for through partnerships with teachers’ unions.
She is against AI when children might use it directly. Without a teacher. Without a curriculum committee. Without a union member in the loop.
This is not the screen-time debate. That debate is over. The Surgeon General report Weingarten cited today is largely about banning student cellphones in school, which most American parents already support and many states have already done. What is genuinely new in the Weingarten speech is the call to cut off direct student access to artificial intelligence.
A public school child cannot ask ChatGPT how a poem works. A public school child cannot ask Claude to explain a math problem three different ways. A public school child cannot get the patient, infinite, one-on-one tutoring that wealthy children have always had through private tutors and now have for free through AI on their family iPad.
The most powerful learning tool ever invented sits in every adult’s pocket. It is on every elite private school’s server. It is in every well-funded homeschool. Randi Weingarten now wants it kept out of the public school classroom, where it would be the single greatest equalizer for low-income American children in the history of our public schools.
That is not child protection. That is gatekeeping.
The Closed Classroom never reopened
I have been documenting how the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the World Economic Forum’s education arms ended up in the same room. The overlapping memberships. The co-located offices. The federal pandemic dollars that flowed through workplace organizations into ideological infrastructure inside our schools. The Closed Classroom series is below:
The pattern repeats. The institutions and bureacrats that physically closed American public schools for eighteen months in 2020 and 2021 are the ones who pushed our kids the screens during the pandemic. They are now telling us screens are the problem and they get to decide the solution, again…
Another manufactured crisis!
The Closed Classroom never reopened. It just changed shape.
“But China limits kids’ screen time too”
I know what some readers will say. China limits student screen time. Sweden went back to paper. Madrid limits tablets. Why is Weingarten wrong if she is calling for what the rest of the world is already doing.
She is not calling for what the rest of the world is doing. She is calling for one part of it and leaving out the other.
China limits children’s screens at home and in school so that Chinese children grow up disciplined, literate, numerate, and ready to enter a workforce powered by Chinese AI. China is investing more in AI infrastructure than any country in human history while telling its kids to read books and do math. Sweden went back to paper because Swedish reading scores collapsed, and Sweden is also racing to plug into European AI development.
None of these countries is running a parallel political campaign to choke off the data centers that will power the next century.
Only one country is doing both.
America.
And it is the same coalition behind both moves.
The question every parent should be asking
So here is the question I cannot stop turning over in my head, and I think it is the question every American parent should be asking out loud today:
Does this policy serve American children, or does it serve Beijing?
I am not going to pretend I know the answer.
What I have is the public timeline I just laid out for you.
The Sanders-AOC moratorium.
Fetterman calling it China First on the same day.
Chinese state scientists on Sanders’ stage in April.
A Singham-funded propaganda network amplifying the same talking points to American audiences.
The Surgeon General telling Americans to take phones out of schools. And then, this morning, Randi Weingarten doing the one thing none of the rest of them could do: bringing 1.8 million American teachers into the project of keeping American children away from American AI.
If she is not answering to Beijing, what is she doing?
If she is, what does the American Federation of Teachers become.
I want a national conversation about that question and I want it before her proposal becomes union policy and then district policy and then federal grant criteria. I want parents asking their school boards, reporters asking Weingarten, senators asking the AFT’s funders. I want the Department of Justice asking the Singham network.
What I want for my children. And for yours.
I want my children to grow up in a country that builds. I want them in classrooms with a real human teacher and a real chalkboard. I want their math homework in pencil. I want their school libraries full of paper books and their recess long and their phones in their lockers at the start of the day.
And when they need it, I want my children to be able to ask the most powerful artificial intelligence in the world a hard question and get a real answer. I want that for your children too. I want that for every child in every public school in this country, not only for the children of the people who can afford a tutor and a Mountain View address.
The answer is not Devices Down. The answer is American teachers in American classrooms with American tools, including the tool that is going to define the rest of our children’s lives. The data centers have to be built in America. And the children of America have to grow up prepared for the world that is actually coming, not the world that the people who locked the schoolhouse doors in 2020 wish they could put them back into.
Randi Weingarten does not get to decide that.
We do.
—Natalya
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I hear you and thank you for your stellar work teasing out all the threads. Are you aware that Erin Brockovich is activated on U.S. data center rollout for a different reason; super toxicity.
You say, "I want my children to grow up in a country that builds." Yes AND: builds industrial symbiosis NOT proliferating toxic superfund sites with super-polluter design.
See Jonathan Trent, #NASA scientist who stepped away from his former role for this express purpose, to shepherd in new paradigm triple bottom line BUILD #UpCycleSystems #UpCycleSymbiosis #cradle2cradle #circulareconomy
I hear you and thank you for your stellar work teasing out all the threads. Are you aware that Erin Brockovich is activated on U.S. data center rollout for a different reason; super toxicity.
You say, "I want my children to grow up in a country that builds." Yes AND: builds industrial symbiosis NOT proliferating toxic superfund sites with super-polluter design.
See Jonathan Trent, #NASA scientist who stepped away from his former role for this express purpose, to shepherd in new paradigm triple bottom line BUILD #UpCycleSystems #UpCycleSymbiosis #cradle2cradle #circulareconomy
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonathan-trent-7742555_circulareconomy-sustainability-vision2030-share-7434283434811981824-jdEO/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAIgq14BjrUBZBysSWjgjBRRtJU-vzxbZ6s