Why Fascists Fear Teachers

Why Fascists Fear Teachers 

by Randi Weingarten

President, AFT

Teachers are under siege not for anything they do wrong, but for what they do right.

An excellent read. (2025)

The title of my new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers, is intended as a warning, but it may belie what the book is at its core: a love letter to teachers. I write about teachers’ seemingly small everyday acts, like fostering empathy, confidence, critical thinking and mastery, that cultivate opportunity and humanity in our young people. And I look back at historic acts of heroism, such as the teachers in Norway who were among the first and most resolute to protest the Nazi takeover, even when the Nazis tried to violently force them into submission. When I heard that story many years ago, I would never have believed that echoes of authoritarianism would reverberate in the United States today. Nor could I have imagined that this book would come into the world at a time when heinous acts of political violence are occurring with horrifying frequency, violence that I condemn with every fiber of my being. Yet here we are.

 

Weingarten signing her book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers, on Sept. 16 in New York. Photo credit: Mario Jose Ibarra 

I try in this book to answer several questions. Teachers are widely recognized and appreciated for dedicating themselves to helping all children reach their unique potential. So why are there so many attacks on teachers? Why do so many extremist politicians think it’s OK to smear and insult teachers? Why are we seeing the defunding of already strapped schools, the book bans, the censoring of honest history and so many other actions that prevent our children from getting the education they deserve? Why are these actions, which are warning signs of increasing authoritarianism, happening in the United States today?

The answer is that authoritarians fear a well-educated citizenry. They fear what educators do—the teaching of critical thinking, of honest history, of pluralism—because their brand of greed, power and privilege cannot survive in a democracy of diverse, educated citizens. Public education is essential to a free and fair America, and teachers are essential to public education. We’re under siege not for anything we do wrong, but for all the things we do right.

The Founding Fathers believed public education was a bulwark against tyranny. Why Fascists Fear Teachers lays out the plot to undermine public education, which a conservative activist declared outright required his allies to be “ruthless and brutal.”

Extremists are executing that plot with alarming resolve: Starve public schools of the funds they need to succeed, then criticize them for their shortcomings. Erode trust in public schools by stoking fear and division, including attempting to pit parents against teachers. And replace them with homeschooling and private, religious and online schools. All toward their end goal of destroying public education as we know it, atomizing and balkanizing education in America, bullying the most vulnerable among us and leaving the students with the greatest needs in public schools with the most meager resources.

I tell the stories of teachers who have fought for their students and for the promise of public education. I hope educators will see themselves in its pages. And I hope it will help parents, students, policymakers and everyone invested in our nation’s future understand why teachers and public schools are essential to individual opportunity, our collective prosperity and the survival of our democracy.

That feels especially crucial as the country reels from another horrific political assassination. Political violence is never acceptable. Never. As every living former president has said in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, all Americans must condemn violence and de-escalate the tensions roiling the country. In many ways, teachers can serve as the antidote to them, by helping students navigate this trauma and division and by modeling civil discourse.

No one should condone—and certainly no one should celebrate—violence. But in this highly charged moment, many people are paying a high price for exercising constitutionally protected speech, and some have even been accused of hate speech for decrying hate speech. We must recommit as a nation to the right to express ourselves nonviolently without fear and to resolving disagreements peacefully and civilly.

Ninety percent of America’s young people attend public schools, where educators strive to prepare them with the fundamentals for full and productive lives—with the academic foundation they need, of course, as well as the ability to participate in civic life and to work together across differences. Our public schools are America’s great engine of opportunity. They are where teachers dedicate themselves to providing children of every background an education that is safe, welcoming, relevant and engaging. When we strengthen our public schools and support our children’s teachers, we sustain the American dream and democracy itself.

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Fear and Expulsion: Under Trump, History Is Poised to Repeat Itself

 Fear and Expulsion: Under Trump, History Is Poised to Repeat Itself

On our blog. https://www.dsanorthstar.org/blog/fear-and-expulsion-under-trump-history-is-poised-to-repeat-itself

 

The U.S. has repeatedly tried to remove nonwhite people from society, often leading to generational trauma.

 January 31, 2025

By

 Kate Morrissey

 

President Donald Trump has wasted little time since returning to the White House carrying through on his vows to stop certain immigrants from coming to the United States and to remove many who are here. Over the past months, Capital & Main has explored and reported on migrants and asylum seekers who’ve been detained at the border, examining their fate and the rules that keep them in custody. This is the first in a two-part series looking at the history of mass deportations in the United States and what it portends for the future.

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Pedro Rios’ paternal grandparents were both born in the United States, yet the government forced them to move to Mexico in the 1930s. They were teenagers at the time.

Rios, the director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S./Mexico Border Program, guesses that government officials sent his grandparents on trains to the border, but he doesn’t know the story. That’s because neither of them talked about the experience. 

He said his grandmother seemed to be unable to forgive the part of herself that led her to be expelled from her home country.

“She despised being Mexican to some extent,” Rios said. “I think it was because of the discrimination that she lived through.”

Over its history, the United States has repeatedly worked to exclude and remove people in moments when xenophobic, nativist and white supremacist voices have been able to sway public opinion towards fear, including the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, forced removals of Mexicans and Mexican Americans and the relocation and incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans. The result of those efforts was often generational trauma, with elders unable to talk about what they went through, as in the case of Rios’ family. 

Now, with promises of mass deportation from the Trump administration, many academics see that history poised to repeat itself. 

 

More;

https://www.dsanorthstar.org/blog/fear-and-expulsion-under-trump-history-is-poised-to-repeat-itself

 

 

Stop Trump and His Enablers - Save Lives- Vote

Contrary to the recent Trump Administration statements, we are not being invaded by people from Central America.  President Trump  has called the upcoming midterms an “election of the caravan”in reference to migrant caravan group of Central Americans currently walking towards the U.S.-Mexico border. 

Referring to the caravan as “an assault to [the U.S.],” Trump is extending  his racist rhetoric he used against Mexicans—calling them “rapists” and “criminals”—to migrants from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. 

This fear campaign being mounted by the Administration is an attempt to win the November Congressional electionat the cost of once again promoting racially exploitive politics and violence.  See more here

http://www.sacramentoprogressivealliance.org/2018/10/trumps-politics-produced-hate-in.html

As NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff wrote, while the Trump campaign tries to raise the fear that we are being invaded, during the same time 16,800 Americans will die from drug abuse, 690,000 will become homeless, including 267,000 children, 8,850 will die from gunshot wounds, and another 9,000 will die from lack of health insurance.  But, Trump and his enablers are worried about the possible migration of 1,000 refugees. 

Within the past year under Donald Trump, the U.S. has admitted only 22,491 refugees—one of the lowest numbers on record. The admissions count for the 2018 fiscal year, which ended on September 30, was less than half the number of refugees admitted in FY 2017 (53,716) and about one-quarter of the number of people admitted in FY 2016 (84,994). 

Trump has arbitrarily reversed the U.S. traditional position of welcoming refugees. 

Rather than joining in this fear campaign, we need to defeat Trump and his enablers. The Trump  fear campaign could cost the Democrats several seats in the very close Congressional election on Nov. 6.  What we can do is work twice as hard to defeat the Trump/Republican  anti -immigrant agenda. 

The caravan of poor people, mostly Hondurans, heading toward the border should not be stopped.  The Trump administration now threatens to deny refugee status to all of the migrants.  That would be a violation of our treaty obligations as required by the Convention Relating to the Status of Migrants a United Nations Multilateral Treaty (1951) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1946), which the U.S. government helped to draft. Many migrants are seeking asylum because the communities from which they are fleeing are taken over by violence. The U.S. has laws that allow suchrefugees to seek asylum and we have a due process system for determining who is eligible.