Exposing Moms for Liberty

M4L claim they're not an extremist hate group. Meanwhile, they're palling around with the Proud Boys, whose chairman, convicted seditionist Enrique Tarrio, called them "gestapo with vaginas."

When the Southern Poverty Law Center this month added the vicious hate group Moms For Liberty (M4L) to its list of active "extremist" groups in America, pearl-clutching conservatives engaged in their usual performative "how dare they!?" freak-outs.

Responding to the news, affronted M4L co-founder Tina Descovich said: "It’s quite remarkable because you look at the list, and I think the first guy on there is Nazi holding up Nazi flags giving a heil Hitler sign."

J. D. Vance, a replacement-theory-promoting Republican Senator from Ohio, tweeted: "The SPLC is a garbage organization now dedicated to harassing groups that advocate for parents. In the future, their pronouncements must be met with scorn."

The previously Atlantic-friendly but now toxically masculine Vance, whose Senate campaign was turbocharged by a $10 million donation from the "Nazi-curious" billionaire Peter Thiel was, of course, wrong.

As I have written about frequently in this newsletter, M4L is a dark-money-funded astroturf "movement" run by vicious, political operatives. Their leaders masquerade as concerned "moms" who care about protecting children from the evils of pornographic books that, according to them, lurk in every corner of your child’s school library.

While M4L and their fanboys present fantasies of a world where first graders are being handed copies of Penthouse or even Hustler magazines, the reality is that M4L's definition of "pornography" includes everything from picture books about real-life penguins to the illustrated edition of Anne Frank's Diary.

Beyond attacking anything remotely gay as "pornography," M4L is simultaneously supporting Ron DeSantis' "war on woke," and seeking to rid schools of any "discomfort-causing" history lessons that counter a triumphant white conservative Christian Nationalist narrative.

As Robin D.G. Kelley wrote in The New York Review of Books this week: "It would be a mistake to think of the current wave of attacks on 'critical race theory' as a culture war. This is a political battle."

For religious conservatives (and Dark MAGA Republicans) the goals of this political battle include: a) rejecting Black History; b) erasing LGBTQ identities; c) using immigration policy to make America whiter; and d) suppressing enough minority and student votes to cement white minority rule in America (at least until all the new Norwegian immigrants they'll be bringing in, and all the forced births they'll be mandating create enough new white conservative, Christian, book-averse voters for them to start winning national elections again).

Beyond Deplorable

M4L's hate-based propaganda campaign has been so successful that it has led to thousands of books being banned across America and, of course, national media platforming by the likes of CBS News.

In the process teachers, librarians, and authors have been vilified as "pedophiles" and "groomers."

In the words of the SPLC:

The social media accounts and real-world activity of the national organization and its chapters reflect views and actions that are antigovernment and conspiracy propagandist, anti-LGBTQ and anti-gender identity, and anti-inclusive curriculum.

In the new Elon Musk version of "blue-check Twitter," it's easier than ever for M4L trolls to harass, abuse—and bombard with aggressive tweets and replies—anyone standing up for books, including students, parents, teachers, authors, and librarians.

Elon Musk now says "cisgender" is a slur on Twitter, but—perhaps not surprising given his own history attacking innocent people as pedos—he's OK with pro-literature users being attacked as "pedophiles" and "groomers" every time the topic of book banning comes up. That's something that even happened to inaugural poet Amanda Gorman when Moms for Liberty sought to get her bestselling poetry book "The Hill We Climb" banned in Florida.

Moms with Sugar Daddies

As the Southern Poverty Law Center's fact sheet makes clear the forces of evil in America were behind M4L from Day One. Launched in January 2021, M4L "made its national debut on the Rush Limbaugh show" that same month. By the end of the month, M4L had also been featured on Breitbart and Tucker Carlson Tonight. And things took off from there:

Between June 2021 and January 2022, Moms for Liberty hosted high-priced fundraisers that featured former FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly and musicians Larry Gatlin and John Rich.

In July 2022, Moms for Liberty held its first national summit in Tampa, Florida. Speakers included Dr. Ben Carson, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his wife and Betsy DeVos, former US Secretary of Education.

With such powerful headliners cheering M4L on, the cash kept flowing:

Ticket prices for the fundraisers ranged from $50 to $20,000 and the highest sponsorship package of the sold-out summit was $50,000.

Not bad going for a supposedly "grassroots," supposedly "non-partisan" non-profit organization.

"Using Parents as Pawns"

As Media Matters reported back in November 2021, M4L has used parents as pawns in their aggressive and abusive battle against education.

While pretending to be horrified that anyone would think of them as a "hate group," M4L has had no compunction labeling teacher's unions "terrorist organizations."

Meanwhile they have built their entire national campaign on lies and misinformation.

To distract from their racist "war on woke" mission, M4L usually claim to be focused on "parents' rights" and "pornography."

As they try to generate concern among easily-shocked Christians (i.e. moms too innocent to be aware of all the dirty parts of of The Bible), M4L neglect to tell their "pawns" that the sexual content in the handful of books they've helped popularize fail to meet any traditional standard of "pornography." (That point was made eloquently this week at a meeting about public library books in Huntington Beach, California by the author Elana K. Arnold.)

While claiming to support "parents' rights," M4L also fails to tell their followers that each of them already has the right to get involved in telling schools which books their own child should have access to.

The right that M4L claims—for one parent (singular) to dictate what every child in a school or school district has the right to read—is, in fact, the exact opposite of "parents' rights" (plural).

Partying with the Proud Boys

Last month, Vice News presented a blistering exposé of M4L, highlighting the extreme tactics and targeted harassment these vicious operatives have used to intimidate parents, teachers, librarians, and students across America.

In that article, Karen Svoboda, one of the founders of Defense of Democracy, a group formed to fight back against M4L said:

“We treat Moms for Liberty like the KKK. If you knew that a KKK meeting was happening in a church down the street from your house, everyone would be alarmed.”

This week, Vice News followed up with a report detailing M4L's close ties with violent extremists and militias including "the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, sovereign citizen groups, QAnon conspiracists, Christian nationalists, and in one case, the founder of the AK-47-worshiping Rod of Iron Ministries church in Pennsylvania."

One anonymous researcher known as Trash City told Vice:

“There's an ongoing campaign by these neo-Nazi groups to radicalize some of these more benign patriot MAGA groups—and it's working because I've seen more Nazi content creeping into posts from Moms for Liberty people recently."

Vice also reported on Telegram chats obtained by researchers who track the activity of far-right extremists.

In one message, Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boy “chairman” who earlier this month was found guilty of seditious conspiracy, compares Moms for Liberty to the 'gestapo with vaginas.'

Right on Cue, M4L Are Quoting Hitler

Horrified at being called an extremist group—and finding themselves included on a list that began with "a Nazi holding up Nazi flags giving a heil Hitler sign"—the leadership at M4L was less outraged when they saw one of their own chapters actually quoting Hitler this week.

As liberal tweeter Chuds of TikTok put it: "To prove to the SPLC that they aren’t a hate group, Moms for Liberty decided to use a quote from Adolf Hitler in one of its newsletters."

The quote in question read: “He alone, who owns the children, gains the future.”

As The Daily Dot noted, "most people would probably agree that it is never a good idea to uncritically quote the dictator responsible for the Holocaust and WW II."

The fascist indoctrination squad at Moms for Liberty claimed, of course, they were only quoting Hitler to make a point about the way professional educators are indoctrinating unsuspecting Christian children with history and science and poetry and heartwarming stories about loving penguin families.

The Indiana M4L chapter that published the newsletter apologized.

And the national leadership at M4L tweeted, halfheartedly: "Everyone knows Hitler is bad."

But everyone also knows it's hard to distance yourself from Adolf Hitler when you’re actively mimicking the book-banning practices of the Nazis of the 1930s while palling around with white supremacists—and impressing them so much that the leader of the Proud Boys admiringly calls you "gestapo with vaginas."

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