Teachers Paid for Randi Weingarten’s ‘Manifesto’ - Then She Took a Cut of the Royalties

Teachers union boss Randi Weingarten says she wrote her anti-Trump screed to defend public education. Turns out she made teachers' union members pay for it, and then kept part of the profits.

The Freedom Foundation dug through the AFT's federal financial disclosures and found more than $1.4 million in union expenses tied to Why Fascists Fear Teachers, Weingarten's 2025 book, which her own publisher called "a manifesto for our time." The New York Post had the exclusive.

The AFT's LM-2 filing shows the union shelled out over $400,000 to progressive commentator Sally Kohn while the book was being developed between September 2024 and April 2025 — more than triple what it had paid her in all previous years combined. Kohn just happens to advertise ghostwriting among her services. Weingarten's acknowledgments call her an "indispensable" collaborator. The Freedom Foundation calls it what it looks like: ghostwriting, paid for with dues money.

Then there's the law firm. Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP collected $977,275 from the AFT, while its attorney Charles Moerdler, thanked by name in the book for reviewing the manuscript, was supposedly doing that work pro bono. The union says the firm handled other matters too. Maybe. But that's a lot of coincidence.

The spending didn't stop there.

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Six thousand dollars to a fact-checker who lists the book on her portfolio. Another $5,212 to a D.C. photographer for a single black-and-white headshot. Another $64,090 to InkWell Management, the literary agency that represents Weingarten. Nearly 30 AFT staff members are credited in the acknowledgments, and the cost of Weingarten's nationwide promotional tour remains entirely undisclosed.

The arrangement wouldn't be quite so galling if Weingarten had at least been straight about the money. She wasn't.

Weingarten publicly promised that half the book's proceeds would go to union-affiliated charities: the AFT Disaster Relief Fund and AFT Educational Foundation. AFT received $375,000 in advance royalties from InkWell. The charities got $125,000 combined. That's one-third, not half.

Another $125,000 went to a brand-new Delaware LLC called "Teachers Want What Kids Need" — incorporated in June 2024, right when the book was getting started, with no website and no public presence of any kind. It exists to receive money. AFT confirmed to the New York Post that the payments were for Weingarten. The union kept the rest.

AFT members' dues funded the entire enterprise. Every dollar of it.

Weingarten, who pulls down $469,442 a year from the AFT, more than most of the teachers she claims to champion will earn in a decade, waved the whole thing away.

"This desperate fishing expedition by a far right group that refuses to disclose its donors only proves my book's point — that Fascists Fear Teachers," she told the New York Post, adding that "any and all proceeds from the book are shared equally."

Shared equally, through a secret Delaware corporation, routed away from the charities she promised would benefit, funded entirely by 1.8 million dues-paying members who had no idea their money was going toward their president's personal literary career.

The book name-drops Hitler three words into the opening. It compares Trump-era education policy to Nazi occupation tactics. Weingarten insists she wasn't calling anyone a fascist. Her publisher called it "a manifesto for our time."

As the Freedom Foundation pointedly noted, maybe her follow-up should be titled: Why Teachers Fear Teachers Unions.

Editor's Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America's kids get the education they deserve.

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