Thirty years ago, at the Christian Coalition’s “Road to Victory” conference, Ralph Reed outlined the right’s strategy: “We don’t have to worry about convincing a majority of Americans to agree with us. Most of them are staying home and watching ‘Falcon Crest.’ They’re not involved, they’re not voting, so who cares?’” Reed then described the essence of stealth campaigning: “I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over till you’re in a body bag. You don’t know till election night.”
Back in the day, when conservative candidates wanted to take control over local school boards they ran stealth candidates that tried to hide their true politics. Moms For Liberty, however, is fully operating in the open, as the organization claims 115,000 members, and 275 chapters scattered across 45 states, and has become a major player in Republican Party politics.
Moms for Liberty has battled mask mandates in schools, advocated the banning library books that address sexuality and gender identity, supports curtailing lessons on racial inequity and discrimination, and its members turned school board meetings in raucous shouting matches. Moms for Liberty has become one of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ most favored groups.
While conservative school board candidates in some districts may be less than forthcoming about their politics, these days, right-wing activists are bold enough to toss stealth campaigning onto the dust heap of history.
In July of last year, hundreds of conservative activists showed up for Moms For Liberty’s first national summit in Tampa, Florida (https://www.momsforliberty.org/).
On its website, Moms for Liberty maintains that it “welcomes all that have a desire to stand up for parental rights at all levels of government. Our founders are Tiffany [Justice] and Tina [Descovich], moms on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty. As former school board members, they witnessed how short-sighted and destructive policies directly hurt children and families. Now they are using their first-hand knowledge and experience to unite parents who are ready to fight those that stand in the way of liberty. Moms for Liberty is dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.”
Tiffany Justice hosts the “Joyful Warriors” podcast, which “breaks down the issues facing parents today in the American education system. Each episode of the Joyful Warriors Podcast includes experts and those on the front lines of the battle for the future of our children and our country. You will be inspired and motivated to help make changes in your community because we must partner with our children’s teachers, but we do NOT co-parent with the government.”
The goal of last July’s summit was to train conservatives to take over school boards across the country. Betsy DeVos, former president Donald Trump’s U.S. Secretary of Education told the crowd that the department of education should be abolished. At the Tampa event, organized by the rapidly growing Moms for Liberty organization, DeVos said: “I personally think the Department of Education should not exist.” DeVos, the author of a recent book called “Hostages No More,” was the keynote speaker at the “Moms For Liberty” first national summit. According to Laura Cassels, reporting for the Florida Phoenix, “Members of the audience leapt to their feet, cheering and applauding.”
As Business Insider reported, “During her tenure, DeVos controversially worked to reduce her department's authority over schools, introducing cuts to federal education spending and rolling back federal guidelines in favor of letting states and local districts decide their own policy.”
“Wearing American flag-inspired accessories, attendees received Moms for Liberty-branded pocket constitutions and bought T-shirts with John Adams quotes,” Kingkade reported. “They browsed booths set up by conservative groups, including Turning Point USA, the Leadership Institute and Heritage Action, and the evangelical Liberty University. They logged in to Wi-Fi hotspots named “We Beat School Boards” and “Don’t Teach Gender ID.”
The Florida Phoenix’s Cassels reported that DeVos’ remarks came during a “three-day summit in Tampa, which provided training to members from 30 states on how to create conservative majorities on their local school boards, in what they call a parental-rights movement.”
In a series of breakout sessions not open to the press, guest speakers instructed participants on how to recruit, vet, endorse and promote conservatives as school board candidates. Other sessions focused on legal defense of parental rights over school-board authority, strategic research, and ways to fight ‘gender ideology, in our schools’ ‘social and emotional learning’ and ‘restorative justice.’
Cassels pointed out that “Moms For Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, who interviewed DeVos, said, ‘We love teachers here at Moms For Liberty’ but she called teacher unions a ‘K-12 cartel.’ She said Moms For Liberty seeks to separate teachers from unions, which she claimed are imposing liberal politics in classrooms.
“Our laws need to evolve to respond to these new techniques and things that they’re using,” said Jeff Childers, an attorney and conservative commentator who serves on Moms for Liberty’s board, and was also on the panel about Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law. “So I look at the parents’ bill of rights and the amendments that we’ve had since — it’s a really good framework, right? That’s like taking the body of an AK-47, and then we can start mounting new accessories onto it: a flashlight, a laser pointer and things like that.”
Marisa Fuentes, a historian and associate professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University told Yahoo News, that Moms for Liberty is dedicated to promoting white supremacy: “It is the students of color who are the ones who really need to be protected from the centuries of racist education that gaslighted their histories and experiences and now are again being completely displaced by the parents of white children," she said. "The language of ‘protection of children’ is code for ‘White children should not be made to know how they benefit from centuries of violence, theft of land and slavery.’”
“Moms for Liberty is definitely pushing a political agenda that goes well beyond parental rights,” Leigh Ann Wheeler, a history professor at Binghamton University in upstate New York, told Yahoo News. “We can see this in its stand against mandatory mask-wearing in schools during the pandemic, as well as in the types of books it identifies as dangerous for children.”