Randi Weingarten kept American children out of classrooms for a year to extort $122 billion from Congress.
Now her union's own federal records show what she did with the dues those same teachers kept paying.
What she built with that money – and where the profits went – is the part she never told a single one of them.
AFT Union Dues Paid the Ghostwriter Sally Kohn Over 400000 Dollars
The Freedom Foundation tore through the AFT's most recent LM-2 disclosure – the federal financial filing every union is required to submit – and found over $1.4 million in union spending tied directly to Why Fascists Fear Teachers, Weingarten's 2025 anti-Trump book.
The biggest line item: $400,270 to Sally Kohn, a left-wing commentator Weingarten credited in the book's own acknowledgments as an "indispensable" collaborator.
The AFT had paid Kohn a fraction of that amount in each prior year.
Kohn advertises ghostwriting among her services.
Weingarten's team says Kohn worked on other union projects too – including a newsletter.
A $400,000 newsletter writer whom the union president personally called indispensable to her book.
The law firm wasn't cheap either.
Attorney Charles Moerdler – thanked by name in the acknowledgments for reviewing the manuscript – supposedly did that work pro bono.
His firm, Patterson Belknap Webb and Tyler LLP, collected $977,275 from the AFT during the same period.
The AFT says the firm handled other legal work too.
There was also $6,000 to a fact-checker who lists Why Fascists Fear Teachers on her professional portfolio, $5,212 to a photographer for a single author headshot, and $64,090 to Weingarten's literary agency.
Nearly 30 AFT staff members are credited in the acknowledgments.
The cost of Weingarten's nationwide promotional tour remains entirely undisclosed.
Randi Weingarten Routed Teacher Dues Royalties Through a Secret Delaware LLC
Weingarten publicly promised that book proceeds would flow to the AFT Disaster Relief Fund and the AFT Educational Foundation.
The federal records show something different.
Two royalty payments totaling $125,000 went to a Delaware LLC called "Teachers Want What Kids Need" – an entity Weingarten controls, incorporated in June 2024 with no public presence, no tax-exempt status, and no discernible purpose other than receiving money.
The charities she named publicly received roughly the same amount.
The AFT kept the rest.
When the New York Post asked about it, Weingarten dismissed the report as a "fishing expedition" and said proceeds "are shared equally."
Shared equally – through a Delaware corporation she quietly created, drawing from dues paid by 1.8 million teachers who had no vote on any of it.
Weingarten pulls down $469,442 a year from the AFT.
She collected that salary while member dues covered the ghostwriter, the lawyer, the photographer, and the literary agent for her personal book project.
Then she routed a six-figure royalty payment to a company only she controls.
This Is the Woman Who Kept Your Grandchildren Out of School
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic spent two years investigating school closures and released a 520-page report confirming that AFT lobbying caused avoidable, substantial harm to students.
Weingarten's union held schools closed until Congress delivered $122 billion through the American Rescue Plan – after $60 billion had already gone out through the CARES Act.
The academic collapse that followed produced the largest recorded drop in student performance in modern history.
Weingarten wrote a book claiming fascists attack teachers to control the minds of citizens.
She opened it by name-dropping Hitler three words in.
She insisted she wasn't calling anyone a fascist – while her publisher marketed it as "a manifesto for our time."
The AFT tells 1.8 million teachers it exists to protect them and their students.
Federal records tell a different story: dues money flowing to Democrat politicians, union boss vanity projects, and a personal ghostwriter – with profits routed to a shell company Weingarten controls.
The AFT is not a union fighting for teachers.
It is a Democrat slush fund with a teachers union stapled to the front – and Randi Weingarten has spent two decades cashing the checks.
Sources:
- Carl Campanile, "AFT boss Randi Weingarten tapped union resources worth over $1.4M to write 'manifesto' book," New York Post, May 19, 2026.
- Maxford Nelsen, "Sparing no expense: How AFT members unknowingly financed Randi Weingarten's literary vanity project," Freedom Foundation, May 19, 2026.
- "American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten Testifies to Uncommon Influence Over CDC School Reopening Guidance," House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, October 2, 2023.
- "Investigation finds school closure policies teachers' union lobbied for harmed children," American Experiment, December 9, 2024.
