The book that public money touched
According to union filings reviewed by the Freedom Foundation and reported by the New York Post, the American Federation of Teachers spent more than $1.4 million on expenses tied to Randi Weingarten’s 2025 book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers. The filing covers work done while the book was being developed and promoted. The biggest line items raise the sort of questions that usually arrive after the celebratory press release has already been sent. The expenses included consultants, a law firm, a fact-checker, a photographer, a literary agency, and AFT staff who were listed in the acknowledgments. In other words, a lot of people were paid to make a book about public education look like a grassroots crusade.
The consultants and the lawyers
The filing shows more than $400,000 paid to commentator Sally Kohn during the book’s development window from September 2024 to April 2025. Kohn advertises ghostwriting services, and Weingarten thanked her as an indispensable collaborator. The Freedom Foundation says that looks like ghostwriting funded by union dues. The AFT also paid nearly $977,275 to Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP. One of its attorneys, Charles Moerdler, was thanked in the book for reviewing the manuscript, though the union says the firm also handled other work. Maybe it did. Still, that is an expensive way to describe a manuscript review, unless the review came with champagne and a billing code.
How the money was split
Weingarten said half of the book’s proceeds would go to two union-linked charities, the AFT Disaster Relief Fund and the AFT Educational Foundation. But the New York Post reported that AFT received $375,000 in advance royalties from InkWell Management, while the charities received $125,000 combined. Another $125,000 went to a new Delaware LLC called Teachers Want What Kids Need, formed in June 2024 with no website and no public footprint. The company appears to exist for one job only: receiving book money. The AFT confirmed the payments were for Weingarten, and the union kept the rest. So much for the simple half-and-half story. The math, as usual, is where the slogan starts to wobble.
Weingarten’s defense and the larger pattern
Weingarten, who earns $469,442 a year from the AFT, dismissed the report as a politically motivated fishing expedition and said all proceeds from the book are shared equally. She also argued that her book proves fascists fear teachers. The book opens with a reference to Hitler and compares Trump-era education policy to Nazi occupation tactics, so the manifesto label was not some accidental blur from the marketing department. What stands out is the machinery around the message: dues-funded promotion, murky disclosures, and a charity setup that seems designed to make a simple money trail look like modern art. Bureaucracies do love a noble cause, especially when nobody asks for the ledger.
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