For years, Randi Weingarten has insisted that the American Federation of Teachers exists to defend educators. We now know what that defense actually looks like. According to a new Freedom Foundation report, the union president and her inner circle siphoned more than $1.4 million in union resources to write and promote her latest book, "Why Fascists Fear Teachers," a 300-page screed that smears American conservatives, parents, and school choice supporters as enemies of democracy.
Let that figure sit on the page. Teachers in red states, blue states, and every district in between were forced to bankroll a personal manifesto by a woman who already collects a salary well over $400,000 a year. Many of them have never voted for a Democrat in their lives. Many of them are the very people Randi calls fascists in print. None of them signed up to pay for a ghostwriter, a publicist, a book tour, or a vanity hardcover. They signed up for representation. Instead, they got Randi's reading list.
This is the scandal hiding in plain sight inside America's second-largest teachers union. AFT dues do not go to the classroom. They do not go to professional development. They do not defend good teachers from frivolous complaints. A recent Free Press analysis of union financial disclosures found that the largest teachers' unions spend about ten percent of their resources on the actual teachers whose names appear on the membership rolls. The rest gets funneled into the political operation Weingarten has built on top of the profession.
The political operation is the point. Weingarten has spent the last several years showing every American who was paying attention exactly what her priorities are. When the country reopened from COVID, she fought to keep classrooms closed and refused to apologize for the damage she inflicted on our children. When immigration enforcement reached blue states, she used AFT-affiliated pension funds to pressure Target into opposing arrests of criminal aliens, treating retirees' nest eggs as her personal lobbying account. When the Democratic National Committee asked her to help broaden the tent, she quit in protest. Through it all, reading and math scores have collapsed to historic lows, and national chronic absenteeism is near 30 percent. The kids she claims to fight for are increasingly illiterate. Meanwhile, Randi was busy writing a book.
The contents of "Why Fascists Fear Teachers" make every line of this worse. It is a partisan polemic that paints half of America as a threat to democracy. Picture the AFT member in Oklahoma, Texas, or Florida whose paycheck helped fund a ghostwriter to type the word "fascist" next to a description of their own state legislators. Picture the AFT member who is a Republican, a veteran, a churchgoer, a parent who pulled their child out of a failing district school. They paid for that book. Randi owes them a refund.
There are three questions Weingarten has not been forced to answer. Who at the AFT authorized the $1.4 million expenditure? Was the executive council given a vote? Were members informed before, during, or after the fact that their dues were underwriting their president's book deal? Silence on these questions amounts to a confession that the union does not believe its own members deserve to know.
This is where actual accountability begins. State attorneys general must investigate whether expenditures of this scale on a leader's personal book project comply with the fiduciary obligations owed to dues-paying members. The Department of Labor must review the relevant LM-2 filings and follow the money. Members in right-to-work states should exercise their opt-out rights tomorrow morning. Members in agency-fee states should demand itemized accounting and Janus-compliant disclosures, every penny, every payee. And reporters who normally treat Weingarten as a sympathetic source need to ask her, on the record and on camera, who signed off on the book.
The Teacher Freedom Alliance exists because teachers should never be conscripted into politics they did not choose. The Weingarten book scandal is the cleanest illustration possible of why that mission matters. A union president built a brand on speaking for teachers while taking their money to publish a book that brands their neighbors as enemies of democracy. She did it without their consent. She did it while their students fell further behind. She did it while collecting one of the largest salaries in American labor.
Teachers were promised a champion. They got Randi Weingarten.