Speculation about an apparent raid on the local teachers union headquarters rages.
According to a local liberal newspaper, the FBI removed material from the office, which indicates a search warrant was served.
Liberal Democrat Terrie Brady is the longtime head of the local chapter of Duval Teachers United.
Eye on Jacksonville asked the FBI for details and will update when we have a response.
In recent years, union bosses have been involved in a number of shady schemes reminiscent of the Teamsters Union and dockworkers unions.
Pat L. Tornillo Jr. pleaded guilty in 2003 to defrauding the Miami-Dade County teachers’ union he ran for more than four decades and to making false statements on his income-tax returns.
The union boss swindled the 14,500-member United Teachers of Dade out of $650,000 from 1998 to 2001, according to documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice. He siphoned the money, the documents say, from union coffers through an elaborate credit card scheme.
In 2016, Pat Sateramo, former head of the Broward Teaches Union went to prison on corruption charges.
The most powerful union boss might be Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers.
Former C.I.A. director Mike Pompeo described Randi Weingarten as “the most dangerous person in the world” last November.
“It’s not a close call,” Pompeo said. “If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing.”
President Joe Biden had delayed the return of children to school after the Red Chinese virus scare to avoid a conflict with Weingarten, according to Franklin Foer’s new book, The Last Politician.
Foer said “on the first day of Biden’s presidency, first lady Jill Biden invited Weingarten and National Education Association President Becky Pringle to the White House.”
“I said I was going to bring you with me to the White House,” the first lady told them. “And on day one, you’re here.”
A week later the president called Weingarten at home and promised to hold off the return of children to the classroom, as the unions demanded.
Teacher unions are a fund-raising machine for the Democrat Party. Weingarten’s union lavished $26 million on Democrats in 2022.
After Weingarten called Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis a “disaster on education” recently critics blasted her for causing children to lose schooling, which many now say will have long-term adverse effects on the children.
During the scuffle, Weingarten tweeted: “Disgusting. Millions of Floridians are going to die from Ron DeSantis’ ignorance.” She later apologized for the mean tweet.
A study by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute found that Democratic districts with strong teachers’ unions, returned children to schools more slowly and gradually than Republican districts with weaker unions, according to the New York times.
Membership in teacher unions has been plummeting, by 59,000 in 2021-22 and 82,000 the year before. Teachers and parents have begun to realize that the unions are political organizations that are not helping government schools, teachers or children.
