(Headline USA) In her welcoming remarks at Moms for Liberty’s annual gathering in the nation’s capital on Friday, the group’s co-founder, Tiffany Justice, urged members to “fight like a mother” against the Democratic presidential ticket.
Later that evening, after she had interviewed Republican nominee Donald Trump onstage, she made a point to say she was personally endorsing him for the presidency. Their talk show style chat was preceded by a “Trump, Trump, Trump” chant from the audience.
The weekend’s gathering, drawing parent activists from across the country, has showcased how Moms for Liberty has moved toward fully embracing Trump and his political messaging as November’s election draws nearer.
The group is officially a nonpartisan nonprofit that says it’s open to anyone who wants parents to have a greater say in their children’s education. However, with many on the Left leaning into the promotion of radical Marxist indoctrination and sexual perversion in the classroom, there was little pretense about which side of the nation’s political divide it has chosen.
A painting that was prominently displayed on an easel next to the security station attendees had to pass through before being allowed into the conference area showed Vice President Kamala Harris kneeling over a bald eagle carcass, a communist symbol on her jacket and her mouth dripping with blood.
A Moms for Liberty spokeswoman noted that the only official signage for the event included the group’s logo.
The group’s enthusiasm for Trump is likely to benefit the former president this fall by solidifying a key part of his base—parents who share his views that the U.S. Education Department is bloated and ineffective; so-called equity programs are distracting from academic fundamentals; vaccine mandates violate parental rights; and the embrace of transgenderism in student restrooms, lockerrooms and elsewhere was putting other students in danger.
Echoing the strategy of many tax-exempt leftist organizations that have pushed to advance the very objectives they oppose, Moms for Liberty says it won’t make an official endorsement in the presidential race, but it isn’t shying away from getting involved.
The group’s founders recently wrote an open letter to parents warning that Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—a former high school social studies teacher who took students on dozens of field trips to communist China and handed out copies of Mao Zedong’s manifesto—would be “the most anti-parent, extremist government America has ever known.”
The group spent its first three years becoming synonymous with the “parents’ rights” movement in local school boards but recently has become more involved in national politics. It also has invested more than $3 million for advertising in four crucial presidential swing states: Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin.
Justice said the advertising has helped increase Moms for Liberty membership in those states and mobilized members who were not previously politically active to register to vote.
“I think you’re going to see a lot of new voters who understand now that their vote and their voice matters,” she said in an interview.
She added that as the group continues to endorse in local school board races, she is encouraged by Florida’s recent primary, in which 60% of Moms for Liberty-backed candidates—some running for office for the first time—advanced to this fall’s general election.
Countering those wins were undeniable losses for the group, among them two in heavily Republican Sarasota County, and two in Pinellas County, where a Moms for Liberty-backed candidate coasted to a school board seat two years ago.
Those results come after conservative candidates struggled to gain traction with voters in local school board elections across the country last fall. In that election, Moms for Liberty said just 40% of its endorsed candidates won.
But a group of more than 600 Moms for Liberty supporters exchanging phone numbers and listening attentively to slide presentations in Washington on Friday offered a different perspective.
Gretchen Schmid, the chair of a Moms for Liberty chapter in Orange County, North Carolina, said her chapter helped advocate a new parents’ bill of rights law in her state. It passed last year after the Legislature, which is heavily gerrymandered to favor Republicans, overrode the Democratic governor’s veto.
Schmid said when parents used to call and ask schools to share information about assignments, they wouldn’t hear back, but now, “people are getting more responses.”
On Saturday, Moms for Liberty’s four-day summit paused sessions during the day to hold a demonstration a mile away, organized by a coalition of more than 30 conservative groups. Donning yellow rhinestone visors, Rachel Mack and Sarah Recupero said they had made the drive from Florida to support the protection of all children, especially in sports.
“I am definitely somebody who stands for the whole women-in-women’s sports and men-in-men’s sports,” Mack said.
Several blocks away, those opposed to Moms for Liberty held a competing event, a Celebration of Reading, attempting to promote the counternarrative that concerned parents’ efforts to keep pornography and child-grooming literature out of school libraries constituted “book banning.”
“I have a granddaughter who’s 2, and I want her to grow up in a world where she can read whatever she wants to read and no one bothers her or makes a fuss about it, so, I hopped on that plane, really for her and all children,” said Heidi Ross—a lactation consultant from Buckeye, Arizona, who said she volunteered for the event after seeing a post on Facebook about it.
Several school-board members backed by Moms for Liberty or who carry out the group’s agenda have been recalled in recent months by left-wing activist groups who opposed the parental rights movement in favor of giving total autonomy to schools in decisions involving child-rearing.
In Woodland, California, north of the state capital, a school board member backed by Moms for Liberty members was recalled in March after she raised alarm during a 2023 school board meeting that children were coming out as transgender “as a result of social contagion.”
In Southern California, a trustee with the Temecula Valley Unified School District Board of Education was recalled after he and two of his colleagues voted to reject a controversial social studies curriculum that promoted the so-called gay rights movement—including a celebration of notorious pederast Harvey Milk.
And in Idaho’s heavily Republican panhandle, community members recall two members of their board last year who sought to root out critical race theory and institute a conservative agenda.
However, critics noted that the reason was that West Bonner County school board chair Keith Rutledge and vice chair Susan Brown had “failed to uphold their oaths of office to improve public schools” and that they didn’t “respect their constituents or fellow board members,” the Spokane Spokesman–Review noted.
The two had previously voted to appoint Branden Durst, a former Democrat state lawmaker with “no experience as a school administrator or teacher,” to be the district’s new superintendent.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
