Another right wing outrage-fad runs its course
What if they held a book banning and nobody showed up?
In Florida, where the right-wing Moms for Liberty group was born in response to Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates, the first Brevard County School Board meeting of the new year considered whether two bestselling novels – “The Kite Runner” and “Slaughterhouse-Five” – should be banned from schools.
A lone Moms for Liberty supporter sat by herself at the January 23 meeting, where opponents of the book ban outnumbered her.
Nearly 20 speakers voiced opposition to removing the novels from school libraries. One compared the book-banning effort to Nazi Germany. Another accused Moms for Liberty of waging war on teachers. No one spoke in favor of the ban. About three hours into the meeting, the board voted quickly to keep the two books on the shelves of high schools.
“Why are we banning books?” asked Mindy McKenzie, a mom and nurse who is a member of Stop Moms for Liberty, which was formed to counter what it calls a far-right extremist group “pushing for book banning and destroying public education.”
“Why are we letting Moms for Liberty infiltrate our school system?”
Moms for Liberty, founded in 2021, expanded its mission to include efforts to ban certain books from schools, outlaw the teaching and discussion of gender and sexuality by teachers and halt the teaching of critical race theory.
Now the group is at a crossroads.
“One of their major challenges is the fact that most Americans are actually pretty positive about their own children’s schools,” Jack Schneider, a professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said via email. “Although their message may have appeal in the abstract, at least to conservative voters, families aren’t clamoring for disruption in their own children’s schools.”
After effectively channeling conservative anger over cultural issues into action on the ground, from supporting candidates in school board races to spearheading campaigns against teachers, administrators and other political foes, Moms for Liberty’s burgeoning influence in Republican national politics may be faltering, observers say.
A sex scandal involving the husband of Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, a Sarasota County school board member, has not helped the group’s cause.
Ziegler has been on the forefront of the cultural battles GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has waged in the public schools. DeSantis named her to the board now overseeing the Walt Disney Company’s special tax district in central Florida amid his clash with the entertainment giant over a state law that restricted how sexual orientation and gender identity could be taught in the classroom. Ziegler remains on the school board despite calls for her to step down.
(The latest on the sex-scandal has Ziegler deploying his wife to “hunt” for threesome candidates…and it just gets uglier.)
The right always has some kind of culture war “uprising” going and this one was a doozy. All those “hot moms” charging the citadel of public education to save the children from the gays and the pedos got everyone very excited. But, like all of these battles, it fizzled as the wingnuts moved on to the next outrage. We’re on the border now. Book banning is so 2023.
The big problem with these events is that the media takes them so very seriously while they are raging. This one really took off during the 2021 Virginia off year election when everyone in the beltway proclaimed Glenn Youngkin the Great Whitebread Hope because he supposedly rode the Moms for Liberty train to victory. (It wasn’t true, not that it mattered.) But if the media had shown a little more restraint this ridiculous culture war battle might have been avoided. They just can’t help themselves.
Speaking of crazy right wing fads going kerflooey:
Here’s some footage of the “invasion.” Very scary: