A recording surfaced this week that drags an old, uncomfortable question back into daylight: when a public-sector union’s own officers sit on a call where a participant declares that “the United States Government must fall” and that “there must be a willingness to kill,” what, exactly, is the union responsible for — the room it was in, or only the words it spoke?
Key Points
- Conservative analyst Karlyn Borysenko says she infiltrated and recorded a call hosted by the Chicago Teachers Union with student and teacher activists in France, releasing what she describes as the full, unedited audio.
- A quoted participant on the call calls for the U.S. government to “fall,” for “destruction to the material wealth” built by the state, and for “a willingness to kill.”
- Reporting identifies CTU vice president Jackson Potter and school nurse Dennis Kossuth as participants in the meeting.
- The call is described as a solidarity and strategy session linking American union activists to French protest organizers during a period of unrest in France.
- The episode fits a decades-long pattern of heightened political engagement by teacher unions — but the recording does not by itself establish that CTU as an institution adopted or endorsed the violent rhetoric attributed to one speaker.
What the Recording Captures
Borysenko published her account on October 25, 2026, describing a call she says she joined covertly, hosted by the Chicago Teachers Union and featuring activists and teachers based in France. In her telling, a student activist on the line stated flatly that “The United States Government must fall,” followed by a demand for “destruction to the material wealth that they’ve built” and an explicit statement that “there must be a willingness to kill.” ZeroHedge’s amplification of the account reproduced the same quotations and framed them as evidence of a call for violent revolution originating inside a major American labor organization.
PJ Media’s follow-up coverage went further, naming Chicago Teachers Union vice president Jackson Potter and school nurse Dennis Kossuth as participants and describing the gathering as a “secret strategy meeting” linking CTU leadership to French rioters. That reporting treats the call not as a stray conversation but as evidence of coordinated planning between an American union and activists tied to unrest abroad — a characterization that goes beyond what the quoted dialogue alone demonstrates, since attendance on a call and authorship of its most incendiary lines are not the same thing.
The Transatlantic Thread
The French connection is not incidental framing; it’s central to how the story is being read. France has cycled through repeated waves of street protest and labor militancy in recent years, and American commentators quoted in the social reaction to this story — including radio hosts drawing parallels to “a Marxist revolution” unfolding in France — were quick to cast the CTU call as an ideological bridge between domestic teacher unionism and continental unrest. Whether the call represented genuine strategic coordination, a one-off solidarity exchange, or simply shared rhetorical sympathy between activists on two continents is a distinction the available quotations do not resolve on their own; it requires knowing who the French participants were, what organizations they represented, and whether their own public records show calls to violence or merely protest advocacy.
What is not in dispute is that the call happened, that it included identifiable CTU figures, and that the quoted language — calling for the government to fall and declaring a willingness to kill — was spoken by someone on that line. Congressional offices have reportedly begun circulating the recording, according to social commentary following its release, a sign that the episode is already migrating from media controversy into the realm of institutional scrutiny.
Why Teacher Unions Keep Showing Up in Political Fights
None of this occurs in a vacuum. Teacher unions have been unusually, measurably political for half a century. Research tracing the expansion of mandatory public-sector collective bargaining laws in the 1960s and 1970s found that organized teachers’ political participation rates climbed to nearly double those of comparable nonteachers once bargaining rights took hold. Scholarship on teacher unions more broadly identifies their political repertoire as extending well past wage negotiation into campaign spending, coalition-building, public messaging, and protest — activity that sometimes manifests as outright resistance to policy they view as hostile to members or to their vision of public education.
That history matters here because it supplies the base rate against which this episode should be judged. A politically engaged teacher union holding a call with foreign activists is not, on its own, remarkable; CTU has a long record of public political activity in Chicago and nationally. What makes this call different is the specific content attributed to a participant — not generic advocacy or protest rhetoric, but an explicit call for the collapse of the federal government and an avowed willingness to kill. That is a different category of statement than labor militancy, and it is the category that has driven the story’s reach.
What Remains Unsettled, and Why It Matters
Borysenko has characterized her recording as full and unedited, though that is her own account of the material rather than a separately audited one. The more consequential open questions are institutional rather than technical: did Chicago Teachers Union leadership organize, authorize, or merely attend the session, and will the union — which has not yet issued a public response captured in available reporting — distinguish between the actions of individual participants and any position of the organization itself. Congressional attention, union silence, and continued circulation of the recording suggest this story is unlikely to fade quietly; how CTU, its named officers, and the French participants eventually respond will determine whether this becomes a disciplinary matter, a political flashpoint, or both.
Exclusive: Chicago Teachers Union Coordinating Directly With Activists In Francehttps://t.co/aRfy7eg3mI
— Siboney Peltier (@NitaPeltier) October 27, 2026
Sources:
zerohedge.com, karlyn.substack.com, pjmedia.com, americamission.substack.com, fritz-aviewfromthebeach.blogspot.com
