“I am so tired of these psychos”
Maybe Americans are getting a clue. Maybe they are waking up, if not in the way wingnuts and QAnons think they should. The results of the last few elections suggest that, as Jamelle Bouie writes, the right’s culture war shtick — from “parental rights” to book bans to “critical race theory” to transgender kids and ad nauseum freakouts over drag shows — has finally worn thin (New York Times):
If the results of Tuesday’s elections in Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio tell us anything, however, it’s that this post-Roe form of culture warring is an abject failure, an approach that repels and alienates voters far more than it appeals to or persuades them.
It certainly turned off voters to Moms for Liberty. They got their asses handed to them in school board races in Iowa on Tuesday.
Amanda Marcotte writes that the Moms for Liberty brand is now toxic as well in Bucks County, Pennsylvania (Salon):
As I reported, parents in the Pennridge district eager to fight back against right-wing radicals formed the Ridge Network and got the word out, arguing to voters that the group was degrading the quality of the public schools. This week, those efforts paid off: Democrats won all five of the open school board seats in the district, wresting control away from Moms for Liberty.
[…]
By the time this election rolled around, Moms for Liberty seemed to have already realized their brand had become poisonous. As the Daily Beast reported, “In 2021, Moms for Liberty claimed credit for 33 seats in Bucks County,” but in this election cycle, the group “endorsed only a single candidate in the county.” The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that some Republican candidates wanted the group to keep its distance, fearful of the taint. And that was my sense of things in the Pennridge district this fall. School board members who had links to Moms for Liberty tried to downplay it and ended up getting outed by investigators from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
Just an other well-funded astrourf group in retreat. Sunlight is not their friend.
“I am so tired of these psychos,” tweeted one fed-up parent involved in pushing back.
Moms for Liberty was started, in a fairly obvious manner, to help boost the national prospects of Republicans. So it’s a delicious irony that, in two short years, the organization is mostly known as a symbol of the MAGA extremism that is driving down the overall popularity of the GOP, leading to yet another election cycle where Democrats overperformed expectations. The group was meant to put a family-friendly gloss on right-wing extremism. Instead, they got parents and teachers, many who barely have time to work and care for their families, to become political organizers. Messing with people’s schools was not, it turned out, a genius political strategy.
They’ll be back with whatever moral panic they cook up next.