Moms for Liberty’s School Board Antagonism Draws GOP Heavyweights

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

School board meetings exploded over “critical race theory” and “social emotional learning.” A slate of conservative school board candidates backed by Moms for Liberty last year ran against a slate opposed to the group’s attempts to claim the school system. The Carmel Clay Schools Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion Coordinator was attacked. Transgender students, or the theoretical threat such students could pose, suddenly took center stage.

“It sucked,” says Carmella Sparrow, the principal of an Indianapolis charter school who had moved to suburban Carmel for the public schools but found herself battling Moms for Liberty and its supporters at local school board meetings. “They screamed and screamed at the top of their lungs. You couldn’t do meaningful business.

The group’s reputation for confrontation and controversy is largely intact, but as Moms for Liberty meets Thursday in Philadelphia, it does so not as a small group of far-right suburban moms, but as a national conservative powerhouse — precisely because of chapters. as Hamilton County’s and their energetic members.

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

“I look forward to seeing all my fellow moms on a mission this Friday at the @Moms4Liberty’s Joyful Warriors summit,” Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor and current presidential nominee, wrote on Twitter this week. “Nothing will stop us from using the power of our voices to shake up Washington!”

The group draws strength from its spread — 275 chapters in 45 states with nearly 115,000 members, it claims — and the social issues that drive it. These include teaching LGBTQ issues, critical race theory, and textbooks deemed pornographic—all of which have captivated the Republican Party’s grassroots.

“The American parent’s voice matters,” said Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty and former school board member from Indian River County, Fla.

Moms for Liberty almost certainly wouldn’t have been founded by three Florida moms in January 2021 were it not for the coronavirus pandemic. Various right-wing parent groups had tried for years to cajole, harass, or even take over school boards, but the pandemic fueled parental anger — first over schools closing, then masking mandates, and finally about curricula that parents could see firsthand through the computer screens their children were glued to.

“What Covid did was accelerated and accelerated the concern about the materials in our children’s education,” said Christian Ziegler, president of the Florida Republican Party, whose wife, Bridget Ziegler, co-founded Moms for Liberty. “It forced parents to basically become assistant teachers. We all became teacher assistants.

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

Critics of these groups saw their activism as demagoguery, violence and opposition to public education disguised as parental concern. At a board meeting of the Carmel Clay Schools in Indiana, a Conservative protester was arrested after a gun fell out of his pocket.

Diane Hannah, a Rutgers religion professor and a parent in the school district fighting against the Hamilton County chapter of Moms for Liberty, said many of the members who showed up at school board meetings were not parents of children in public schools.

“The problem is they have an audience of people who watch Fox News, who read the sensational coverage, and who don’t have kids in school,” she said, “so they believe there are litter boxes for students who identify as cats. They believe gay kids bully heterosexual kids into being gay.”

Ms Justice pushed back hard, denying any violent intent by her group and accusing opponents of silencing conservatives.

Parents “came to the schools to express their concerns and to see what could be done,” she said, “and instead of the schools listening to that child’s primary caregiver, the person responsible for directing of the child’s education, they shut them down.

Besides Mr. Ziegler and the Florida GOP, the ties between Moms for Liberty, which is ostensibly nonpartisan, and the Republican Party are close. DeSantis has long been a supporter of the group that emerged from his home state, but more moderate Republican voices like Ms. Haley and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson will also be in Philadelphia to show their support.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the self-funded entrepreneur in the race, already addressed a chapter this month in New Hampshire. He will speak at the national conference on Saturday.

The speaking schedule included one Democrat, anti-vaccination gadfly Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but he backed out on Tuesday, citing a “mandatory family vacation.”

The candidates who went were undeterred by the negative attention the group received when the Hamilton County chapter published a quote from Hitler in its newsletter: “He alone, who owns the youth, has the future.”

After initially defending the quote, the department was forced to apologize.

“We condemn the actions of Adolf Hitler and his dark place in human history,” Paige Miller, the department’s chairman, said in a statement. “We should not have quoted him in our newsletter and offer our deepest apologies.”

Ms Miller did not respond to interview requests, but Ms Justice said the swarm of attention only proved how the news media, teachers’ unions and the liberal establishment were trying to suppress parental voices.

“Never in a million years did this mother think she was supporting Hitler,” Ms Justice said. “That may have been naive, but the death threats we’re getting now, look what people are sending me. They want to put a bullet in the head of my children because I am a Nazi.”

But, she said, the quote pointed to the attempts of the “genocidal monsters of history” such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler to control the youth of their nations. She added: “This is like a slippery slope here folks. You have Joe Biden saying they are not your children. They are all our children.”