St. Paul teachers union president calls GOP ‘fascist’
She wants educators to ‘face down the authoritarian Republicans.’
By Hayley Feland, Alpha News – March 9, 2025
The president of a St. Paul teachers union has issued multiple statements since President Donald Trump’s inauguration describing his party as “authoritarian,” “fascist,” and supportive of a “dictatorship.”
Leah VanDassor, president of the St. Paul Federation of Educators (SPFE), issued a statement Tuesday condemning U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s plan to “decimate the Department of Education, and hand the Republican Congress a road map to eliminate it.”
VanDassor accused “authoritarian Republicans” of using attacks on “BIPOC, immigrant and LGBTQIA+ students and communities” as cover for “privatizing OUR public schools, mandating the teaching of whitewashed history—cloaked as ‘patriotism’—and dismantling the last functional social safety net in existence.”
VanDassor, a Highland Park Middle School teacher, was first elected president of SPFE in 2021. Her union is a champion of left-wing causes, including “restorative practices,” which are a “model for a healthy, racially equitable school culture.”
VanDassor asserted that “fascist regimes” always begin by “targeting the most vulnerable populations and by making it a crime to tell the truth.”
“Our union, my union, will not comply in advance by treating this statement as if it was legitimate,” she continued, apparently referring to McMahon’s statement on the future of the department.
VanDassor’s comments follow an earlier letter dated Jan. 21, 2025, responding to President Trump’s inauguration. In that letter, she stated that “it is our turn to face down the authoritarian Republicans ruling our government.” She claimed that “Donald Trump was sworn in, [but] his billionaire backers are calling the shots—spreading fear and sowing hatred, controlling our lives and threatening our livelihoods, taking our freedoms and hoarding our wealth.”
VanDassor also criticized the administration’s executive orders by calling them “dangerous.” Trump’s executive orders, according to VanDassor, share a common goal of “taking away our freedoms, silencing our voices, tearing families apart, and allowing the billionaire oligarchs to get richer and more powerful at the expense of working people.”
“There will be those in the US House, US Senate, and the Minnesota Legislature that will support these orders, because they support replacing our democracy with an authoritarian dictatorship,” she wrote.
VanDassor rejected calls to “moderate” goals and “focus on economics and ignore everything else.”
“To do these things would put many of our members, our students, their families, and potentially, our union, at even greater risk,” she said. “SPFE will continue to do what we have always done—fight for, care for, and protect all of the people in our community, stand up for what is right, and call out and fight back against authoritarianism when and where we see it.”
SPFE, which represents around 3,500 St. Paul teachers, reportedly organized a “resistance school” class to help union leaders “resist right-wing policies and advance progressive change.”
PHOTO: Leah VanDassor, president of the St. Paul Federation of Educators (SPFE) | St. Paul Federation of Educators