The Very Dangerous "Moms for Liberty"

During his campaign for governor, Glenn Youngkin made public education an issue by playing to bigotry and hysteria.  Behind the scenes Youngkin was - and is - the darling of Virginia's largest hate group, The Family Foundation which has antecedents back to the :Massive Resistance" movement that fought desegregation and pushed for closing public schools and the creation of  "Christian" academies. Also behind Youngkin were precursors to the dark money funded "Mom's for Liberty" that are seeking to erase LGBT students, any honest presentation of history and inflict right wing religious views on public education (one chapter even quoted Adolph Hitler and tellingly revealed their ultimate agenda).  As we head into Virginia's November elections, be prepared for Republican candidates and "Moms for Liberty" activist - many of whom do NOT have children in the public schools - spread lies, misinformation and hatred to try to motivate the Republican Party base of religious extremists and white supremacists.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this antigovernment, anti- LGBT, and racist front organization for far right dark money.  Here are highlights:

Before the Hamilton County, Ind., chapter of Moms for Liberty achieved national notoriety this month for quoting Adolf Hitler in its newsletter, it was already at war over education in the schools of Indianapolis’s suburbs.

School board meetings blew up over “critical race theory” and “social emotional learning.” A slate of conservative school board candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty faced off last year against a slate opposed to the group’s efforts to commandeer the school system. The diversity, equity and inclusion coordinator of Carmel Clay Schools was under attack. Transgender students, or the theoretical threat such students could pose, were suddenly front and center.

“It was bad,” said Carmella Sparrow, the principal at a charter school in Indianapolis who had moved to suburban Carmel for the public schools but found herself doing battle with Moms for Liberty and its supporters at local school board meetings. “They were screaming and yelling at the top of their lungs. You could not conduct any meaningful business.”

The group’s reputation for confrontation and controversy is very much intact, but as Moms for Liberty convenes on Thursday in Philadelphia, it is doing so not as a small fringe of far-right suburban mothers but as a national conservative powerhouse — precisely because of chapters like Hamilton County’s and their energized members.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-leaning human rights organization, deemed Moms for Liberty an anti-government “extremist group” this year. But five Republican presidential candidates, including former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, will be addressing its Joyful Warriors National Summit.

The group draws power from its diffusion — 275 chapters in 45 states with nearly 115,000 members, it claims — and the social issues that animate it. These include the teaching of L.G.B.T.Q. issues, critical race theory, and school books that it considers pornographic — all of which have captivated the base of the Republican Party.

Moms for Liberty almost certainly would not have been formed in January 2021, by three Florida mothers, were it not for the coronavirus pandemic. Disparate parents’ groups on the right had for years tried to cajole, harangue or even take over school boards, but the pandemic galvanized parental rage — first over school shutdowns, then over mask mandates and finally over curriculums that parents could see firsthand through the computer screens their children were glued to.

Conservatives who flocked to school board meetings in places like Carmel, Ind., and Franklin, Tenn., either on their own or under the auspices of local groups like Unify Carmel, soon formed chapters of Moms for Liberty, whose funding sources remain mysterious but seemingly plentiful. As the pandemic receded, issues of race, gender and sexuality rose to the fore among these parents, just as they did in the Republican Party.

Critics of these groups saw their activism as demagogy, violent threats and opposition to public education masquerading as parental concern. At one meeting of the Carmel Clay Schools board in Indiana, a conservative protester was arrested after a handgun fell out of his pocket.

Diane Hannah, a Rutgers religion professor and a parent in the school district battling the Hamilton County chapter of Moms for Liberty, said many of the members showing up at school board meetings were not parents of children in the public schools. . . . “The problem is they have an audience of people who watch Fox News, who read the sensationalist reporting and who don’t have kids in the schools,” she said, . . .

Beyond Mr. Ziegler and the Florida G.O.P., the ties that bind Moms for Liberty, which is ostensibly nonpartisan, to the Republican Party, are tight. Mr. DeSantis has long been a supporter of the group hatched from his home state, but more moderate Republican voices like Ms. Haley and Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, will also be in Philadelphia to lend their support.

The candidates who are going were undeterred by the negative attention the group received when its Hamilton County chapter published a quotation from Hitler in its newsletter: “He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.”  After initially defending the quote, the chapter was forced to apologize.

This organization and its lapdogs in the Republican Party need to be stopped by Voting Democrat across the board in November, 2023, and November, 2024.