New York Times reporter Jonathan Weisman, who has a history of sketching conservatives as racist and/or bigoted extremists, gleefully went after the newly influential Moms for Liberty, founded to oppose school closings and mask-vaccine mandates in schools and which now targets the teaching of Critical Race Theory principles in schools.
In the first paragraph of his story “Moms for Liberty’s School Board Antagonism Draws G.O.P. Heavyweights,” Weisman swerved right toward Hitler references. You have to dwell on the opposition research and find the embarrassing detail:
Before the Hamilton County, Ind., chapter of Moms for Liberty achieved national notoriety this month for quoting Adolf Hitler in its newsletter, it was already at war over education in the schools of Indianapolis’s suburbs.
School board meetings blew up over “critical race theory” and “social emotional learning.” A slate of conservative school board candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty faced off last year against a slate opposed to the group’s efforts to commandeer the school system. The diversity, equity and inclusion coordinator of Carmel Clay Schools was under attack. Transgender students, or the theoretical threat such students could pose, were suddenly front and center.
“It was bad,” said Carmella Sparrow, the principal at a charter school in Indianapolis who had moved to suburban Carmel for the public schools but found herself doing battle with Moms for Liberty and its supporters at local school board meetings. “They were screaming and yelling at the top of their lungs. You could not conduct any meaningful business.”
Neither did some U.S. public schools for over a year. Carmella Sparrow's LinkedIn profile notes her belonging to a "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Student Advocacy Group," so of course she's on the other side.
Weisman would only give the parents group credit for its right-wing influence and ability to draw Republican candidates to its summit.
The group’s reputation for confrontation and controversy is very much intact, but as Moms for Liberty convenes on Thursday in Philadelphia, it is doing so not as a small fringe of far-right suburban mothers but as a national conservative powerhouse -- precisely because of chapters like Hamilton County’s and their energized members.
Weisman lost more credibility when he cited the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center to attack Moms for Liberty.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-leaning human rights organization, deemed Moms for Liberty an anti-government “extremist group” this year. But five Republican presidential candidates, including former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, will be addressing its Joyful Warriors National Summit.
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Moms for Liberty almost certainly would not have been formed in January 2021, by three Florida mothers, were it not for the coronavirus pandemic. Disparate parents’ groups on the right had for years tried to cajole, harangue or even take over school boards, but the pandemic galvanized parental rage -- first over school shutdowns, then over mask mandates and finally over curriculums that parents could see firsthand through the computer screens their children were glued to.
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Critics of these groups saw their activism as demagogy, violent threats and opposition to public education masquerading as parental concern. At one meeting of the Carmel Clay Schools board in Indiana, a conservative protester was arrested after a handgun fell out of his pocket.
Liberal protests come with a side of vandalism and violence as a standard course -- but any mildly unfortunate thing that occurs when conservatives protest is painted as dangerous.
