The National Educational Association is the largest of America’s teachers’ unions. It is perhaps the #1 force for evil in our contemporary politics. Naive observers assume that the teachers’ unions represent children and their parents or, at a minimum, the average teacher. Sadly, this is not true.

The NEA is a far-left organization that relies on state power to forcibly extract dues and “fair share” payments from innocent teachers, which it uses to further a socialist agenda that most of its members do not endorse. This is America’s one great campaign finance scandal: the theft of many millions of dollars from unwilling teachers and other public employees, whose dues or “fair share” payments are used not to further their interests, but to advance a far-left political agenda.

Happily, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to this corrupt enterprise last week in the Janus decision, which holds that governments cannot force public employees to pay tribute to a union as a condition of employment. Janus has sent public employee unions like the NEA into a panic. From this time forward, they will have to convince teachers and other public employees that the union doesn’t just steal their money, but actually serves their interests. Otherwise, employees will not be forced to pay tribute. Good luck with that!

That is the background against which this year’s NEA convention is taking place at the Minneapolis Convention Center. The activist organization that I run, Center of the American Experiment, sent an intern to report on what is going on at the NEA convention. You can read his report here. These are some highlights:

Marxist philosophy, abortion, gun control, open borders and transgender advancement were among the political ideas marketed to educators and their classrooms last weekend at the National Education Association (NEA) annual union meeting, hosted at the Minneapolis Convention Center. As teachers perused booths retailing titles such as “Marxist Education,” “A World to Win, the Life and Works of Karl Marx,” and “How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America,” some attendees questioned the legitimacy of the union as a representative body. As one vendor put it, “[D]o you really think that the average joe, like a normal guy just off the street would come in here and be like yeah–this is what I think a teachers union should look like?”

Heh. I doubt it. The National Education Association endorses Marxism:

Is Marxism a good idea? Ask any Venezuelan. But the leftists who run the NEA are still hoping for a Marxist paradise, that is, a country where the rulers get everything and salt it away in Swiss bank accounts, while the rest of us starve. But don’t worry: NEA officials will be on the winning end of that deal.

The NEA’s left-wing activism isn’t limited to the convention hall. On Saturday, NEA members led a march that advocated abolishing ICE, i.e., open borders and an end to national sovereignty:

“Abolish ICE” was the far left’s theme over the weekend, and NEA joined right in.

Most of us are appalled by the long, corrupt history of union thuggery. But some celebrated it at the NEA convention, as exemplified by this button. Who would be proud to be a union thug? A liberal Democrat, I suppose:

For me and my colleagues at Center of the American Experiment, the question was not whether the National Education Association is a force for evil–obviously, it is–but rather, what to do about it. We decided to erect billboards to point out the epic corruption and hypocrisy implicit in the leftist world view.

This is a billboard that we erected on Highway 94W entering Minneapolis from the East:

And this is our other billboard, which is now starting to appear in locations around the Twin Cities:

Will our efforts succeed? I think that the leftists who attend this year’s NEA conclave will understand, at a minimum, that there are many millions of conservatives who do not share their worldview or their Socialist objectives.

If you want to support my organization’s daily fight for conservative principles, go here.