There’s a cosmic comedy when an institution built on swaggering moral certainty ends up looking like a tavern poker game where everyone’s chips mysteriously vanish.
And in Duval County, Florida, the latest chapter in America’s union opera featured two septuagenarian educators quietly siphoning union funds while outraged peers watched — some with a kind of wry approval that would make anarchists blush.
Let’s start with the nuts and bolts: former Teresa “Terrie” Brady, 70, and Ruby George, 82, pleaded guilty to a decade-long fraud scheme that prosecutors say drained millions from Duval Teachers United. The judge condemned the conduct as “just a decision to steal on a regular basis … for 10 years.”
Believe it or not, many of their contemporaries didn’t respond with horror. Some defended them. Perhaps their defenders rationalized their behavior as rebellion against a union that had failed its mission.
I am not condoning fraud or theft.
Federal courts have plenty of statutes reserved for such behavior, and decades-long schemes like this deserve scrutiny and consequences. But before the moralistic chorus gets too loud, it’s worth exploring why so many people responded with a shrug, an eye roll, or even a nod of commiseration.
The story isn’t just about two old school teachers sneaking funds out the back door. It’s about the institution they once believed in becoming a citadel of self-interest, far removed from its stated purpose of championing classroom excellence.
Across the country, union corruption isn’t an isolated quirk. Consider that back in upstate New York, a long-serving president of a college faculty union was indicted for allegedly stealing more than $290,000 over more than a decade while failing to maintain basic financial oversight. Meanwhile, local firefighter union officials in Los Angeles were recently suspended after an audit found over $800,000 in undocumented credit card spending — transactions that their parent organization described as harming the membership. These episodes reveal that across different sectors — teachers, firefighters, even police benevolent associations — union leadership can lose sight of its membership’s interests and instead engage in behaviors resembling an internally sponsored variety show of fiduciary missteps.
Why does this matter? Because unions on the Left have long positioned themselves as bastions of virtue against corporate greed and administrative callousness.
They demand accountability from others — school boards, legislators, private businesses — yet internally, they often resist transparency. It’s one thing to rail against inequities in education funding; it’s another to allow years of financial drift in your own organization.
What some Duval County teachers are really reacting to isn’t so much the theft itself (nobody condones stealing), but the broader context: a union that failed to deliver results for classrooms, a leadership insulated from internal challenge, and a culture that encourages ideological loyalty over rigorous financial stewardship. That breed of institutional inertia doesn’t just disappoint; it breeds contempt.
And let’s not forget: this contempt isn’t coming from conservatives alone. Many teachers — regardless of ideology — are tired of being told that the solution to every educational problem is “more union power” when what they’ve actually seen is more money directed to political causes, internal bureaucracy, and status-quo maintenance that leaves classrooms underperforming. Indeed, some New Jersey teachers accused their union of using dues to bankroll partisan political ventures rather than classroom needs, producing lawsuits and fury among rank-and-file members.
That resentment isn’t surprising.
When tens of millions of dollars in dues are diverted to political action committees and campaign expenditures, the connection between everyday classroom challenges and union priorities can feel tenuous at best. Suddenly the union appears less like a champion for teachers and more like a political machine that chews through resources while failing to resolve actual educational problems.
Enter Brady and George — two old-school educators who watched their union’s compass spin till it pointed everywhere and nowhere. Yes, they crossed a legal line. But part of the broader reaction is rooted in the very fact that the union has, for years, been spending dues on causes and bureaucracies that feel distant from the immediate concerns of teaching children how to read and do math. When an institution loses its purpose, even its deepest flaws become a kind of indictment of its decay.
Some on social media even took the sentiment a step further, arguing that the women’s audacity to “stick it to the union” was a symptom of collective frustration with mismanagement and misplaced priorities. That doesn’t excuse criminal behavior, but it does underscore a deeper cultural frustration that many teachers — and frankly, parents and taxpayers — share: the sense that key institutions on the Left have grown self-serving and stagnant.
Because when your motives are misaligned with your mission, whatever you build will ultimately erode.
This isn’t just a quaint aphorism; it’s observable reality. Vast organizations built on progressive zeal have time and again been shaken from within by corruption, incompetence, and a lack of clear accountability. From teachers’ unions to large labor federations, stories of misused funds aren’t rare anomalies but rather recurring news items.
Pandemic-era school closures, controversial curriculum debates, and perennial funding battles have inflamed tensions between educators, administrators, and unions. Yet the real tragedy isn’t simply that union leadership occasionally falls short; it’s that those failures disproportionately harm the very people the union claims to protect — teachers, students, and their families.
And that is why some of those old Duval County teachers didn’t react with pure condemnation. They saw in those two elderly union leaders not necessarily villains, but symbols of an institution that, to many on the ground, has lost sight of its mission.
Does that mean we should glorify theft? Of course not.
Legal consequences are necessary whenever public trust is violated. But when widespread frustration with an institution leads even its own members to recoil at its leadership, that frustration is a sign of deeper institutional rot — not just individual malfeasance.
In an era when partisans on the Left trumpet union influence as a bulwark of social justice, these episodes suggest that unchecked power, without robust internal accountability, tends to devour its own. Teachers feel cheated — not only of their dues, but of the promise that union advocacy would translate into better classrooms and outcomes for children.
If President Trump were looking for a symbolic gesture at this juncture, a presidential pardon or even a ceremonial commendation for honesty in exposing institutional rot — not the act of theft itself but the awakening it symbolizes — would send a message as bold as a back-bench teacher correcting a board memo in red pen.
Because this story isn’t really about two old women making bad decisions. It’s about what happens when institutions — especially those heavily aligned with Leftist ideology — lose their moral anchor and forget who they’re supposed to serve. When that happens, not only does corruption flourish, but cynicism takes root among the very people the institution claims to champion.
And maybe, just maybe, teachers around the country are recognizing that the real tragedy isn’t betrayal by a few individuals — it’s the long erosion of purpose in institutions that once stood for something honorable.
