Teachers union president calls Trump a ‘dictator’ on unearthed call with Antifa-linked group
FIRST ON FOX: The president of the nation’s largest teachers union is facing backlash after calling former President Donald Trump a "dictator" during a far-left activist conference call that promoted mass disruption and political organizing.
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association (NEA), appeared on a Zoom event last week hosted by the Sunrise Movement titled "Roadmap to Political Revolution," a mass organizing call aimed at opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), targeting Trump and phone-banking for a progressive congressional candidate.
"I’m honored to now introduce President Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association. Look, there’s no way we’re going to be able to stop fascism without organized labor," Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement and a former member of Students for Justice in Palestine, said as she introduced Pringle on the call, obtained by Fox News Digital.
During her remarks, Pringle told attendees that the NEA would leverage its 3 million members and thousands of local affiliates to "advocate," "mobilize," "litigate," and "elect people" aligned with its political goals.
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"NEA is one of this administration’s top targets," Pringle said on the call, going on to label Trump a "dictator."
"Dictators always come for educators," she said, adding that teachers help students "question and analyze" and "fight and make this world a better place."
Pringle added, "Together, we will demand that this administration stop scapegoating immigrants just so they can implement cruel and callous policies and occupy our communities."
Pringle claimed that ICE is attempting to bring "fear and trauma into our schools" by "traveling through neighborhoods, wandering past schools, and following school buses."
"They've even assaulted and detained educators and students on school grounds. Educators are seeing this damage every day."
The Sunrise Movement is a far-left organization that vows to "force the government to end the era of fossil fuel elites, invest in Black, brown and working class communities, and create millions of good union jobs," according to its website.
The core of the group’s mission is fighting for the Green New Deal. Sunrise Movement listed "four pillars" that are critical to the Green New Deal, including to "stop the climate crisis" and to "invest in racial and economic justice."
Sunrise Movement's far-left ties were enough to spark concern from the House Judiciary Committee Chairman in November, Fox News Digital first reported, particularly its links to Antifa, a movement the Trump administration has labeled a terrorist organization.
In a letter to Soros' Open Society Foundations, the committee wrote, "Of particular concern, OSF has donated ‘at least $2 million’ to the Sunrise Movement, a group closely connected to Antifa. According to the Capital Research Center report, the Sunrise Movement ‘endorsed and solicited financial support for the Antifa-associated anarchist terrorists of the Stop Cop City / Defend the Atlanta Forest coalition’ which, in 2023, violently attacked law enforcement officers and utility workers constructing a training facility near Atlanta, Georgia for police officers and firefighters. During the siege, Antifa terrorists threw Molotov cocktails, bricks, and rocks at law enforcement officers, attempted to blind officers by shining lasers in their eyes, and set construction equipment and a police car on fire, among numerous other violent acts. Prosecutors later charged more than individuals with domestic terrorism due to the attacks."
During the 2020 election season, the Sunrise Movement, whose website says it wants to "force the government to end the era of fossil fuel elites," received nearly a third of its funding from the Soros-backed Democracy PAC and Sixteen-Thirty Fund, totaling $750,000.
"It is truly shocking that the head of the largest teachers union in the country, who is meant to represent the best interests of her members, would join in such a radical event — one that is openly calling to change the US political system, and to call for collective action and political activism," North American Values Institute Director of Research Mika Hackner told Fox News Digital.
"Is it any wonder that we see activist teachers in the classroom when this is what is happening at the top?"
Fox News Digital reached out to the NEA and the Sunrise Movement for comment.
Fox News Digital has extensively reported in recent months on concerns from education experts about the far-left radical activism of teachers unions, including the NEA, as they continue to mobilize protests against Trump's immigration policies.
Some, including Defending Education senior director of communications Erika Sanzi, have suggested that the NEA's federal charter should be removed.
"Their federal charter was granted because they promised to ‘elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching; and to promote the cause of education in the United States,'" Sanzi told Fox News Digital in November. "Seeing as their leadership — and by extension, the organization itself — has morphed into a far-left insane asylum that is actively destroying the cause of education, that charter is no longer defensible."
In January, a whistle-blower in the NEA told Fox News Digital the organization is not focused on the needs of students and teachers, but rather on promoting far left agenda items.
"It's a cult," the NEA employee said. "It's 100% a cult and if you don't have their mindset, you're the enemy."
Fox News Digital’s Peter Pinedo and Joshua Q. Nelson contributed to this report.