Last week in Philadelphia Moms for Liberty held a cattle call for presidential candidates at their “Joyful Warriors” conference and they got all the big names to show up. This was quite a get for a group that only started in 2021 by Sarasota Florida school board members Tiffany Justice, Tina Descovich and Bridget Ziegler to protest masking and vaccine mandates in public schools during COVID-19. They are big players now in Republican politics with big donors and major politicians competing for their favor.
And like so many others in the GOP they also have ties with the Proud Boys, a far-right hate group and have been designated antigovernment extremists by the Southern Poverty Law Center which they are wearing it with pride, as right wing groups tend to do:
Florida GOP Chairman Christian Ziegler, quoted above, also happens to be married to Bridget Ziegler, one of the founders of Mom’s for Liberty so for all its claims to being a grassroots organization, let’s just say they had friends in high places from the very beginning. (Their very first conference was sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA.) It’s not at all surprising that it very quickly grew into a national “parents rights” movement protesting the teaching of America’s racial history and LGBTQ issues, banning books, abridging free speech, ending tenure for teachers, militant anti-transgender activism and fervent opposition to the teachers unions among other things. They are soldiers in the culture war, fighting what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would call the “woke” agenda, the most animating issue among the hardcore GOP base. So of course, the presidential candidates showed up for their little confab.
Their origins being in Florida, they have a special affinity for DeSantis. He was the star of their first gathering last year where they presented him the “Sword of Liberty” which is kind of like a wingnut Oscar, for him apparently. This year he assured them he would keep fighting the woke wherever it appears:
Sadly for him, he was upstaged by the big man, Donald Trump who gave the keynote and was received with the usual MAGA ecstasy. The moms really loved him. (And why not? He’s been married to three different women and had kids with every one.) He called them ” the best thing that ever happened to America” and they swooned. He made them some explicit, if completely unworkable, promises like this one:
Gadfly candidate Vivek Ramaswamy told the gathered throng that he was”privileged to join my favorite hate group and extremist group today” and Nikki Haley called herself a terrorist in solidarity:
“When they mentioned that this was a terrorist organization, I said ‘Well then, count me as a mom for liberty because that’s what I am.”
People seem to be very impressed by these “joyful warriors” even those who are appalled by the extremism. They seem to believe that they have done something unprecedented by inspiring all these women to become involved in politics and form grassroots chapters all around the country. They claim to have over 100,000 members who are involved at the local level. But are they really that extraordinary?
One of the largest global protest marches in history took place on January 21st, 2017, the day after Donald Trump was sworn in as president. The Women’s March that day spawned what was soon to become known as “the Resistance” which started out as a sort of worldwide support group made up of mostly women who felt, rightly, that the election over the unfit, sexually abusing, reality show host over the first woman nominee was a portent of very bad things to come. They bought t-shirts and books by the thousands, they created activist aps and online groups and came together wherever possible to commiserate and share their angst and anger over what had happened. But it wasn’t long before they began to organize.
Within a year, the Resistance had created dozens of grassroots electoral organizations like Indivisible, Run for Something and Swing Left mostly led and staffed by women, dedicated to electing Democrats to congress to put a check on Trump. It worked. The Democrats took back the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms and the Resistance groups got much of the credit.
Now. as time went on some of these groups got funding from big donors. But they weren’t married to state chairmen of the Democratic party or throwing conferences sponsored by major Democratic think tanks in the first year. It was an authentic reaction to a cataclysmic event. These Moms for Liberty are a GOP front group fanning the flames of the culture war as a cynical political strategy.
And they have miscalculated. Like Twitter CEO Elon Musk who recently agreed that childless people probably shouldn’t have a right to vote because they “have little stake in the future,” their fetishization of “parents rights” as some kind of right wing monolith is just wrong. Philip Bump of the Washington Post looked at the numbers:
[I]t is not the case that parents are inherently politically conservative. When Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) suggested letting parents cast votes for their kids — a different flavor of this same discussion — The Washington Post looked at the effect that might have. But we can summarize the divides here more succinctly, using data from the biennial General Social Survey.
More than half of those without any kids identify as Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. (From here on, I’ll just lump independents who lean toward a party in with the party itself.) More than a third of that group identify as liberal Democrats. Among those with children who are all under the age of 18, just under half identify as Democrats, nearly double the percentage that identifies as Republicans.
And that’s because people with young children are young themselves and young people are not flocking to the GOP these days. Republicans are older and while they may have kids they’re long out of school. There just isn’t a huge constituency for this crusade.
As Bump points out, while parents have always had lots of advice about how children should be raised, “schools and other institutions, meanwhile, hired professional educators and administrators who focused on understanding how to educate a diverse range of children generally with an eye toward creating well-rounded citizens.” Today everyone is an expert on everything because they “do their own research” on Facebook and it’s easily exploitable by savvy operators. Tell those people what they want to hear and they’ll believe it.
Moms for Liberty doesn’t speak for parents of schoolkids who aren’t onboard with book banning and bullying trans kids and second guessing every word that comes out of a teacher’s mouth and that’s most of them. If they are fooling themselves into believing that they do they are in for a rude awakening. But I doubt their leaders care one way or another about any of this. It’s just about getting the elderly Fox News voters riled up about the latest brouhaha. It’s infuriating that as with all these culture war battles, hardworking people and innocent kids are sacrificed so they can keep their base terrified and angry.