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A public relations executive with a history of doing the dirty work of corporations that want to bash the labor movement and other progressive causes has unleashed an advertising campaign to smear the American Federation of Teachers and its president, Randi Weingarten.

You can see the handiwork of Richard Berman in a huge billboard in Times Square that shows Weingarten below a headline in red that charges “Randi Weingarten’s union protects bad teachers,” and you can hear it on the radio ad that he created blasting the union with the same allegation.

“It’s a form of hate speech,” said Elaine Bernard, the executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “This is not ‘Let’s have an adult discussion about schools.’ It’s a war against public-sector unions and education unions in particular, because education is the most unionized sector in the country, with the highest rates of union density.”

Berman has raked in millions of dollars from corporations who want to hide their connection to the mudslinging, said Lisa Graves, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy. “Berman is at the center of what we call front groups, which are traditionally defined as groups funded by corporations who don’t want their brand or name associated with the message they’re putting out there,” said Graves.

Berman not only created the attack ads, but also the “nonprofit” Center for Union Facts and AFTFacts.com, said Melanie Sloan, the director of the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Neither organization really exists, Sloan said. Berman runs the phony nonprofits out of his for-profit PR shop, Berman & Co. The employees at the for-profit firm staff the various “nonprofits” and hold multiple titles. Berman — as the representative of the “nonprofit organization” — contracts with his “for-profit” PR firm, Sloan explained.

Charity Navigator, the country’s largest independent evaluator of charities, issued a donor advisory for the Center for Union Facts after finding that more than half the center’s “functional expenses were paid to its CEO Berman’s for-profit management company, Berman & Co.” According to Charity Navigator, the 2011 tax filing of the Center for Union Facts revealed that $870,000 of the center’s $1.38 million in expenses were paid to Berman & Co.

The Boston Globe ran an investigative article in May 2013 about Berman and his distortion machine as it was deployed against the Humane Society, which has fought to improve the conditions of farm animals. Quoting from a 2010 speech that Berman gave in Nebraska, the article got to the heart of the Berman attack logic: “People remember negative stuff,” the article reported Berman saying. “They don’t like hearing it, but they remember it…. We can use fear and anger — it stays with people longer than love and sympathy.”

Like other 501(c)(3) organizations, Berman does not have to reveal who is funding his activities, but investigative journalists and court settlements have pulled the veil back slightly. Some reporters have raised suspicion that Daniel Loeb, a billionaire hedge fund manager, is bankrolling the campaign against the AFT. In 2013, Loeb tried unsucessfully to win the contract to invest AFT pensions — while sitting on the board of StudentsFirst, the organization led by education reformer Michelle Rhee that has fought against defined-benefit pension plans.

Weingarten told Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi, who wrote about Loeb’s play for the pension business, “It is the height of hypocrisy to solicit the hard-earned retirement savings of teachers and turn around and use that money to advocate for the dismantlement of those very same plans.”

Whoever is behind them, Berman’s anti-AFT ads ironically reflect the power of the union. “Public-sector workers are the one segment of the unionized workforce that has been growing in recent years,” said Richard Steier, the editor of The Chief Leader, the newspaper of civil service employees. The billboard in Times Square — at the crossroads of the media capital of the world — is an attempt to stir conservative voters when this year’s midterm elections could sway the balance of power in the U.S. Senate toward the Republicans, he speculated.

Closer to home, Steier sees the billboard as pushback against Mayor de Blasio’s progressive politics, which have made other elected officials sit up and take notice.

“There’s more and more consciousness about income inequality in this country,” Steier said. “If you can get people’s minds off that by focusing on unions as ‘greedy’ or protecting ‘bad’ teachers, that’s a nice bit of misdirection.”