The GOP Is Lining Up to Pay Homage to America's Newest Extremist Group, Moms for Liberty

This weekend, almost every major GOP presidential hopeful will take part in a conference in Philadelphia organized by Moms for Liberty, an organization that, despite barely existing two years ago, has become the well-funded and well-connected darling of the far-right. 

Former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are headlining the conference, and the majority of speakers and session topics are laser focused on Moms for Liberty’s real agenda: undermining the public education system by promoting a Christian-infused curriculum, eliminating comprehensive sex education, and promoting the benefits of private schools and homeschooling.

Mistrust of public education has been a relatively mainstream Republican position for decades, but it was supercharged by the Trump presidency, anger over pandemic restrictions, and a concerted rightwing campaign to convince parents their children are being taught “critical race theory” and “gender ideology.” And Moms for Liberty is “part of this broader right wing attack that we’re seeing on public education, on school boards,” Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at the non-profit group Right Wing Watch, told VICE News.

Moms for Liberty’s founders claim the group is a grassroots movement led by “joyful warriors” who are focused solely on “parental rights,” but VICE News investigations have found that it is an astroturf movement with deep ties to far-right Christian organizations, as well as to the GOP establishment. Moms for Liberty members have harassed and viciously attacked school board members, parents and students, as well as those who dare oppose their book ban campaigns and efforts to undermine LGBTQ protections. They’ve also succeeded in getting their own members elected to school board positions, in order to accomplish their own far-right goals. This month, the group was designated an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and a VICE News investigation found the group has close ties to many other extremist organizations, notably the Proud Boys.

The group has had an undeniable impact: Just a few months after its founding in 2020, Moms for Liberty had gone from just another Facebook group of concerned parents to a national organization that was getting airtime on Fox News. It’s now a national organization with 285 chapters and over 115,000 members.

“This is a political group that is aligned with the hard right political movement,” Montgomery said. “This is not just concerned moms. This is not the PTA supporting students and teachers. This is a group that is fully aligned with authoritarian politicians and activists.”

In addition to Trump and DeSantis, GOP presidential hopefuls Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy will speak at the conference. And they’ll all be  joined by a veritable who’s who of other right-wing politicians, far-right extremists, anti-LGBTQ activists, and virulent Christian nationalists. 

North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson will be speaking, and is known for his far-right views on abortion, LGBTQ rights, and school shootings. He has also defended sexual predators like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby.

Also speaking will be PragerU’s founder Dennis Prager, a anti-LGBTQ campaigner whose online videos have been viewed billions of times. Tim Barton, who has promoted the baseless Black Robe Regiment myth, will also address the crowd, alongside James Lindsay, who helped spark the right-wing outrage over the teaching of critical race theory and has claimed that Christians are being provoked into committing acts of violence against drag performers.

Also taking the stage will be KrisAnne Hall, an election denier and a member of the Oath Keepers militia who compared the U.S. Capitol police to Nazi S.S. troops. And just like Moms for Liberty, Hall has also quoted Hitler in the past.

But like last year’s inaugural Moms for Liberty summit, one of the central themes of this year’s event will be an attack on public education. 

“I personally think the Department of Education should not exist,” former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos told the audience during a speech at last year’s event. On Wednesday, DeSantis, who also spoke at the 2022 conference, said he too wants to eliminate the Department of Education.

Sex education has long been a divisive and fiercely debated topic at school board meetings, but in recent years, the culture war over classroom instruction has become incendiary, with Republicans making wild and baseless claims about children being indoctrinated by the left.

Experts say that some on the right, like Moms for Liberty and DeSantis, appear to be focused on gaining control of public education in order to undermine it from within.

“These groups are now saying that they should not be anti-government, they should be aggressive about using the government power that we take to impose their worldview,” Montgomery said. “DeSantis’s recent book is pretty much all about bragging, how he figured out how to use every lever of power to impose his worldview on the state.”

This year, Moms for Liberty has seemed to have shifted away from using bigger names to push their agenda, and focused instead on individuals who are already working inside the education system who espouse beliefs that it should be destroyed.

One panel at the conference this year titled the “Future of American Education,” features public officials with a track record of undercutting trust in public education. 

Panelist Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Education, will speak alongside Haley. “He’s just about as anti-teacher as you can get and here he is in charge of public education. He did this video smearing teachers as basically pro-pedophile and calls teachers unions terrorist organizations,” Montgomery said of Walker.

Also speaking is Jacob Olivia, the Secretary of Education in Arkansas. Before Olivia was appointed by former Trump spokesperson-turned-Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, he worked at the Florida Department of Education, where he implemented DeSantis’s “anti-woke” education policies. In Arkansas, Olivia is responsible for implementing the state’s new LEARNS Act, which diverts money from public schools to private and religious schools.

Panelist Ellen Weaver, South Carolina’s Superintendent of Education has supported giving public subsidies to private schools, while warning students about the “threats” of critical race theory and “woke Washington ideology.”

Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, a Tea Party activist who was elected to Congress in 2020, will be speaking at the conference as well. During his time in state government, Donalds introduced measures to reduce the authority of local school boards and harm public education. Donalds’ wife Erika, who is a former school board member, is currently the CEO of OptimaEd, a for-profit management company that operates half a dozen private charter schools in Florida.

Moms for Liberty did not respond to a request for comment about inviting these speakers to its summit.

The funding for the conference comes from a host of right wing organizations like the Leadership Institute, which was the leading financial supporter of the group’s inaugural summit in 2022 and is this year one of the top sponsors, and the Heritage Foundation. 

The Leadership Institute is an influential right-wing organization that trains conservatives to run for office, and it has become one of the main known sources of funding for Moms for Liberty while providing training for many of Moms for Liberty’s chapter leaders. Bridget Ziegler, one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty, is now the director of the institute’s school board programs. 

The Leadership Institute is sponsoring multiple sessions at this weekend’s conference, including a session by Christian Ziegler entitled, “Mastering the Spin: Effective Messaging Strategies.” (Christian Ziegler is Bridget Ziegler’s husband, and the chairman of Florida’s GOP.)

The Leadership Institute is also closely aligned to another right-wing organization, the Council for National Policy, an ultra-secretive group that is hugely influential in conservative circles. 

In 2017, the Council for National Policy published its “Education Reform Report,” a document outlining how the organization wants to dismantle the National School Board Association and teachers’ unions, both of which stand in the way of its ultimate goal of privatizing education. The document provides a play-by-play strategy for dismantling public education and explicitly putting Christianity back at the center of school life. The report also includes explicit attacks sex education, an issue that Moms for Liberty has rallied around. 

In her book “Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right,” author Anne Nelson describes Moms for Liberty as one of the Council for National Policy’s “obedient franchises.” Bridget Ziegler didn’t respond to VICE News’ request for comment about her involvement with Moms for Liberty and the Leadership Institute or its ties to the Council for National Policy.

And while Moms for Liberty is spearheading this campaign now, one expert told VICE News that they’re simply the marketable face of something much larger.

“They’re not gonna have [Leadership Institute founder] Morton Blackwell out there at 83-years old, they’re gonna have two nice, upper middle class suburban women do it,” said Maurice Cunningham, a former political science professor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston who has tracked Moms for Liberty’s growth closely. “It’s a testament to their marketing skill of the right to come up with slogans like ‘Joyful Warriors’ because there’s nothing joyful about generating threats against school board members. Or those who you perceive as your political opponents. And that’s what Moms for Liberty has been involved in over and over again.”

Blackwell told VICE News that the Leadership Institute was “happy for people from Moms for Liberty to participate in our training programs.” He did not, however, respond to questions about the institute’s role in funding the group and its conference.

Some groups plan to protest Moms for Liberty and their line up of speakers at the conference. People for the American Way (PFAW), a progressive advocacy group, is launching an organization called Grandparents for Truth alongside a protest in collaboration with half a dozen other activist organizations that will see grandparents holding signs and chanting in front of the hotel hosting the conference. 

“Our founder is 101 years old, a lot of our board members are in their 80s and 90s, and the wave of religious right-wing extremism is rearing its head again, but in a new guise, as Moms for Liberty,” Svante Myrick, president of PFAW, told VICE News ahead of the launch. “So for us it just made sense that we would meet this old threat with a new face and that we would meet that with what is a real strength of our organization which is the wisdom and righteousness of grandparents.” 

Though there is some concern about the tactics Moms for Liberty might employ against the group, Myrick recalled speaking to one grandmother joining the group about possible threats: “I’m 80, I ran out of fucks to give 10 years ago.”