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Under the current Trump administration, at both the state and federal level, far-right forces and wannabe dictators are smearing teachers, slashing public school funding, banning books, outlawing honest history, and expanding private school vouchers.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten‘s upcoming book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy, draws on cautionary tales from history and Weingarten’s decades of experience in America’s public schools to argue that teaching critical thinking is essential, not just to learning but to resisting would-be dictators. It tells the story of what teachers do and why those who are afraid of freedom and opportunity try to stop them, and explains why all Americans should care about attacks on schools and teachers — whether they have school-age children or not.
“Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint,” writes historian Heather Cox Richardson in her book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Fascist leaders may campaign for our votes, but modern democracies more often fall because of autocratic candidates who work within the system to dismantle it, rather than coups or military takeovers.
“Authoritarian regimes have become more effective at co-opting or circumventing the norms and institutions meant to support basic liberties, and at providing aid to others who wish to do the same,” writes the international democracy-monitoring organization Freedom House, reporting on the trend of “democratic backsliding” worldwide. It was Donald Trump, for instance, who fought endlessly to overturn the results of the 2020 election, still refusing to admit that he lost. And during the 2024 election, Trump said to his supporters that after this election “you’re not going to have to vote.” He’s not the first. Far-right political strategist Paul Weyrich once famously declared, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
Prominent authoritarianism historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains that fascist and authoritarian leaders want to “damage or destroy democracy.” Democracy is people power. But fascists want one leader or a small group of elites to have all the power. And that is what’s happening in the United States right now — with billionaire Trump having enabled his shadow governing partner Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world, to act as his co-president. Meanwhile, Trump’s initial second-term Cabinet was on track to be the wealthiest in history, “worth at least $382 billion — higher than the GDP of 172 countries.” The problem for fascists, then, is that a public with strong critical thinking muscles is more likely to strengthen democracy and resist authoritarianism. Scholars who study democracy worldwide are incredibly clear on this point: “On the whole, higher levels of education are associated with stronger democracies — a country with an educated populace is more likely to become or remain a democracy.” Looking at data from Latin American elections, researchers Amy Erica Smith and Mollie J. Cohen found, “The more education you have, the less likely you are to vote for an authoritarian.” In fact, some global scholars have gone as far as to suggest that “education causes democracy.”
So is the opposite true? Yes, history has shown us that. For instance, in 2017, the Financial Times found that among Dutch voters, having attained less education was the greatest predictor of support for the country’s anti-immigrant far-right political party. And after winning a primary election during the 2016 election, Donald Trump bragged how well he did with certain demographics, saying, “We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.” This may or may not have been just another sloppy aside from Trump, but it does reflect a deeper truth. Donald Trump was able to rise to power, yes, because of his keen political instincts and charisma, but also because he routinely says things he thinks voters want to hear, whether he can actually do anything about them or not.
Analyzing the source of his 2024 election win, Trump said, “I started using the word — the groceries. When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time, and I won an election based on that. We’re going to bring those prices way down.” But after his win, he admitted, “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard” — and indeed many of his second-term proposals, including tariffs and mass deportations, would arguably increase the price of groceries and other consumer goods. In fact, immediately after Trump’s 2025 inauguration, the price of eggs went up.
Authoritarians actively attack truth, knowledge, and critical thinking because an uninformed public is easier to control. Degrading public education and critical thinking skills may only prime more Americans to not recognize disinformation and misinformation and take authoritarian leaders like Trump at their word.
Psychologist Bob Altemeyer studied personality traits that make people more receptive to authoritarian leaders. In his 2006 book The Authoritarians, Altemeyer documented his “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” scale, writing: “The authoritarian follower makes himself vulnerable to malevolent manipulation by chucking out critical thinking and prudence as the price for maintaining his beliefs. He’s an ‘easy mark,’ custom-built to be snookered. And the very last thing an authoritarian leader wants is for his followers to start using their heads, to start thinking critically and independently about things.”
In other words, those inclined to support authoritarianism exhibit a general avoidance of or allergy to critical thinking. And authoritarians like it that way.
It makes me wonder whether far-right extremists are trying to deliberately inculcate an anti-critical thinking, pro-authoritarian disposition by undermining public education. Research conducted in 2004 and 2007 — even before our hyperpolarized current political climate — found that “blue states” that tend to vote for Democrats spend more money on education than “red states” that tend to vote for Republicans. Not incidentally, the students in red states also fare worse on math and reading assessments. As Diane Ravitch notes, if Trump loves the poorly educated, “His plans for his second term guarantee that there will be more of them to love.”
Certainly, Trump’s first executive orders in 2025 pointed in that direction — asserting unprecedented federal control of local school curricula to enforce the administration’s personal ideology against diversity, equity, and inclusion, while also directing federal funds for public schools to be used instead for private school vouchers and homeschooling. That level of federal strong-arming is contradictory, by the way, given that Trump has called for sending education “back to the states” — although states have always controlled education and have since the beginning of the republic. The federal government has a limited — but important — role to bolster opportunity for all, which of course Trump is also threatening. These tactics neither help students nor improve education. Trump’s executive orders merely perpetuate the strategy of demeaning public school teachers and sowing division while systematically defunding public education.
It’s a downward spiral. Faced with some of the lowest-performing education systems in the country, do these red states work with teachers to improve math and reading instruction or maybe incorporate innovative, skills-based learning models? Do they take action to adequately fund public education? Certainly some states have — like Mississippi, which worked with teachers to dramatically improve literacy rates statewide, a program that was so effective it inspired the AFT to work with several partners to launch a similar approach called Reading Universe.
But more often than not, instead of these states working to improve public education, we see a troubling trend in the other direction — red states doubling down on far-right indoctrination. In Oklahoma, the state’s extremist school superintendent required every school in the state to teach the Bible and tried to use taxpayer money to buy Trump Bible editions. Plus the Oklahoma superintendent tried to force every school in the state to show students a video of him praying for Donald Trump. This is the same Oklahoma superintendent who, after a terrorist attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day 2025, blamed teachers’ unions for “teaching kids to hate their country” in classrooms that were actually “terrorist training camps.” What’s more disturbing than people in positions of power saying this garbage is that people actually believe them. During the 2024 election, when Donald Trump and others falsely accused immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of “eating pets,” those outrageous, flagrant lies led to dozens of bomb threats against local schools and other public agencies. Again, the goal wasn’t knowledge and truth but lies and indoctrination.
And what do fascists do when they’re worried that students might learn about the truth on their own? They ban books. Book bans are a very old and deeply disturbing tactic that, frankly, I never thought we’d see with such horrifying scope and scale in our country. But here we are. According to the ACLU, in 2023, “more than 3,000 books have been banned in schools across America. These books disproportionately feature stories about LGBTQ+ communities, people of color, and others who have been marginalized.” Even though gun violence is the leading cause of death among children and teens today, the far right goes to extraordinary lengths to block any restrictions whatsoever on access to assault weapons or high-capacity rounds of ammunition. But they’ll use every means at their disposal to make sure high school students can’t check a book about gay identity out of the restricted section of the school library.
This has profoundly disturbing precedents. In March 1933, an election consolidated Hitler’s power. Two months later, Nazis ransacked the Institute for Sexual Science, a pioneering medical center that studied gender and sexuality. The institute advocated for queer rights. Nazis removed all of the books from the institute — 20,000 books in total — for the first book burning in the Nazi regime. Book burning is part of a broader fascist pattern of attacking knowledge, freedom of information, and critical thinking. The Nazi government also closed down or took over newspapers, controlled radio broadcasts, and even made it treasonous to tell a joke about Hitler. And the attack on gay and trans books wasn’t just symbolic. The Nazi government eventually rounded up and jailed gay and trans Germans and thousands were sent to concentration camps — which presaged slaughtering 6 million Jews as well as people with disabilities and others. Dehumanizing groups of people isn’t just rhetorical; it paves the path for violence.
The point of diverse books isn’t to promote one identity or another — it’s to make sure all students have access to age-appropriate reading to inform their lives and choices. Factual, trustworthy, honest information isn’t propaganda — it’s power. Over the past several decades, one of the most banned books in America has been It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris. At quick glance, it’s sort of easy to understand why. It’s a book about sex, all different kinds of sex, written in an age-appropriate way for a middle school audience, with illustrations. Ideally, every child would be learning about safer sex and healthy relationships at home, but many aren’t. Plus the far right has systematically attacked and undermined sex education for decades.
Age-appropriate books and curriculum about health and safety provide vital information to all students and can even be lifesaving for some. One story about It’s Perfectly Normal stopped me in my tracks. A 10-year-old girl at the library with her mother checked out a copy of the book. Eventually, the girl showed her mom the chapter on sexual abuse and said, “This is me.” The girl was being sexually abused by her father and the book gave her a way to tell her mom what was happening. Eventually, when the father was convicted, the judge in the case said, “There were heroes in this case. One was the child, and the other was the book.” Robie Harris, in retelling the story, said the girl’s mother was also a hero for listening to her daughter. And the librarian who ordered the book was a hero, too. Over the decades, Harris was smeared as a pornographer, a child abuser, and worse simply because she believed “kids have a right to have the accurate information that can keep them healthy and safe.” Banned books save lives. When we ban books, we take away power from parents to decide what information they do or don’t want their children to have access to. Banning books is anti-democratic and anti-American. That’s why the majority of Americans oppose the government legislating what can or cannot be in schoolbooks. And a majority of Americans “oppose efforts to have books removed from their local public libraries because some people find them offensive or inappropriate and do not think young people should be exposed to them.”
Books give students the power of knowledge and critical thinking. That’s why, in contrast to those banning books, the AFT gives out books. In schools and at book fairs, during school days and on weekends, we’ve given away more than 10 million free books to children and their families over the course of our decade-long initiative. In just the last two years alone, we organized four hundred book giveaway events in 25 states as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Our agenda is literacy. For students and their families, literacy is the key to knowledge. And loving reading is the key to literacy. We give away books that are geared to interest and excite young people and foster the love of reading.
I remember a grandmother of Haitian descent at one of our free book fairs in New York City. With pride in her eyes, she thanked me for the wide variety of books we were giving away while she clasped a copy of Freedom Soup, a book about the traditional New Year’s Day dish that celebrates Haitian independence. She was excited to read it to her grandchildren so they could learn about their heritage.
At another book fair in McDowell County, West Virginia, a little boy had a book clutched so tightly to his chest that I couldn’t even read the cover. He exclaimed to me, excitedly, “I’m going straight home to put this in my library!” I asked him what other books were in his library and, without missing a beat, he gushed, “This is the first one!” While fascists want to control what children read and how children think, teachers spread knowledge — and literally give away books.
We partner with the organization First Book and we use member dues to help buy books in bulk. Our members agree that buying books to give away is an expression of our values. In 2024 alone, we gave out over 575,000 books in 144 events across the country. The year before that, we put over 1 million books in the hands of children, parents, and teachers from Portland, Oregon, to St. Petersburg, Florida, and everywhere in between. Our members love this work. They know access to books and information is key. We just want kids to read and learn and think for themselves. We want to help them learn how to think, not what to think. Because that’s fundamental to their development and to a healthy democracy.
Elsewhere in this book, I talk about the extremist Moms for Liberty activists, bankrolled by billionaires and the far right, who took over school boards and launched a culture war by banning books and pride flags. In the Central Bucks School District outside Philadelphia, the Moms for Liberty-controlled school board banned several LGBTQ-themed books under a policy secretly written with the help of a far-right Christian “think tank.” In the case of one of the books they banned, there was only one copy in the whole district. But extremists were apparently so concerned it was “dangerous” that they mailed images from the book to 17,000 households in the community.
Try to wrap your head around that. It just goes to show that Moms for Liberty’s real goal is to spread anti-LGBTQ hate and fearmongering to divide the community and distract from the fact that they are trying to systematically defund public education. But remember, it didn’t work. In 2023, in that district and nationwide, Moms for Liberty school board members were roundly voted out of office — by Democrats, Republicans, and Independents horrified that fascist factions were creating problems in our schools instead of solving the actual problems local districts are facing.
Americans don’t want far-right culture wars. They want teachers, school nurses, better science labs, decent ventilation and air-conditioning — and they want their kids to be adept at critical thinking.
From WHY FASCISTS FEAR TEACHERS: Public Education and the Future of Democracy by Randi Weingarten, published on Sept. 16, 2025, by Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2025 by Rhonda Weingarten.
