Quote:“In school board races, PTA meetings and town halls across the nation, you have taught the radical left Marxists and communists a lesson they will never forget. Don’t mess with America’s moms,” Mr. Trump told the crowd Friday in a Philadelphia Marriott ballroom.

This is the first presidential election in which Republicans are running on children’s education curriculum as a galvanizing national issue. For years, Republicans had mostly ceded K-12 education issues to Democrats and their teacher union allies, but the pandemic energized parents opposed to liberal-leaning school establishment and opened a new front in America’s culture wars. It is a movement Republican candidates have tapped as soccer mom voters morph into parents-rights voters.


The Moms for Liberty activists say the teachers unions and school systems created the movement by mistreating parents and children during the pandemic — from the shutdown of schools to the mask and COVID vaccine mandates.

“The nation recognizes that it’s the year of the parent and that parents are tired of taking everything that the government dishes out with regards to … our children in the schools. I think that the parents are finally tired of it,” said Moms for Liberty Chairwoman Cyndi Roberts, 50, of Colleton County, South Carolina.

Summit attendee Deb Feldman said that parents have a voice that has finally come to the forefront.

“Politicians are realizing this is now an important constituency that they need to listen to. And I think that’s legitimate because taxpayers pay for the schools,” said Ms. Feldman, 57, who traveled from her home in Charlotte, North Carolina, to attend the summit.

It’s as simple as parents taking a stand, she said.

“Between the pandemic and the shutdown of schools and then seeing what virtual learning has done to the learning loss in many cases, I think parents just sort of got activated and realized we need to be more front and center with this.”

The group has also drawn fierce opposition from the political left.

The Southern Poverty Law Center recently labeled Moms for Liberty as an “extremist” group and put them on the SPLC’s “hate list.” They accuse Moms for Liberty of harassing LGBTQ people, promoting anti-gay misinformation and fighting against diversity and inclusion in school materials.

Moms for Liberty has over 100,000 members in 45 states, and they used their numbers to elect like-minded candidates to local school boards and other offices and lobby state legislatures for measures.

This included working in support of a new Florida law that banned teaching gender-identity topics to primary and middle school students. Liberal critics dubbed it the “don’t say gay” law and a book ban, and they pummelled Mr. DeSantis for singing.

Mr. DeSantis trumpeted the necessity of the law when he spoke at the summit.

“You have a book in Florida that was found in one of the school districts, instructing middle schoolers how to use sex apps on their phones. So, this is totally inappropriate. And so parents blow the whistle,” he said. “And obviously, no one defends this stuff. And so it gets removed. Now, the Left and the media try to say that that means you’re banning books. Well, let me tell you something, in Florida you can buy any of those books that you want. And there’s not been a single book that’s been banned.”

Liberal advocacy organizations demonstrated outside the hotel during the summit. Before the event, activists from Agenda PAC, an LGBTQ activist group, placed hangers on hotel room doors that read: “Please Disturb. Fascism in Progress.”

Florida resident Leslie Kirchenbaum said the GOP candidates were drawn to their summit because they, too, suffer attacks by leftwing activists.

“DeSantis said it best. ‘You guys are getting a warm welcome from everyone. Now you know what it feels like to be me. Because you receive so much hate when you’re trying to do the right thing,’” said Ms. Kirchenbaum, 39.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what’s happening in our country, and many of us are fighting back. And this comes with the territory,” she said.

Quote:Moms for Liberty is an American political organization that advocates against school curriculums that mention LGBT rights, race and ethnicity, critical race theory, and discrimination, while multiple chapters have also campaigned to ban from school libraries books that address gender and sexuality. The group began by campaigning against COVID-19 protections in schools, including mask and vaccine mandates.

The group is influential within the Republican Party. Many of the group's chapters across the U.S. have forged close ties to right-wing extremist groups, including the Proud Boys and Three Percenters, as well as sovereign citizen, QAnon, and Christian nationalist organizations.  In 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks extremists, termed Moms for Liberty a far-right extremist organization.

Moms for Liberty has been criticized for harassment, for deepening divisions among parents, for making students' education more difficult, and for having close ties to the Republican Party rather than being a genuine grassroots effort.

Quote:The SPLC compares the group to pro-segregationist parent groups

The SPLC report compares Moms for Liberty and similar organizations of today to pro-segregationist parent groups that flourished in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. That decision forced schools across the U.S. to integrate, but it also gave fire to a movement to undermine public education. The report names, as examples, the Mothers' League of Central High School and the "Cheerleaders" of New Orleans, which were established to resist inclusiveness at schools during that earlier era.

"That was hateful then, and it's hateful now," said Shannon Hiller, executive director of the Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University.

Quote:The inclusion of the Hitler quote came as no surprise to some who have tracked the actions of the Hamilton County Moms for Liberty group. One anonymous Twitter account that has highlighted the group’s troubling actions pointed out on Thursday that the founding members were photographed in front of the Betsy Ross flag, which has been embraced by far-right extremists.

“I am not surprised by anything they do,” the anonymous account holder told VICE News, highlighting the fact that the group hired a private investigator to uncover their identity and published their name online.

“They are not original by any stretch of the imagination. They follow a playbook. I am surprised that chair Paige Miller issued a written apology. This is just another step in a trend where Moms for Liberty and other groups seem increasingly empowered to discriminate, attack, and display hate. My biggest worry is where does it stop?”

Quote:Moms for Liberty is a far right dark money group that has become a leader in the conservative movement to promote the eradication of public schooling, target public school educators and push for bans on education on LGBTQ and racial history in favor of right-wing propaganda. Their messaging is couched in a movement for supposed "parents' rights," which has become code for legislative and far right activist-led attacks on Black people and LGBTQ people.

Quote:Moms For Liberty has also kept itself busy by attempting to get books banned from school libraries. I’m sure they had originally wanted to burn them like the Fuhrer they so idolize, but they seem to have settled (for now) for removing the books from shelves. They are attempting to empty libraries of all authors that are not white and cis in the name of “child safety,” and many of their leaders have been caught harassing teacher and librarians. They have even resorted to doxxing people, setting bounties on teachers, and have death threats in order to promote their twisted ideology.

Quote:The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has listed the Republican-connected “parents’ rights” group Moms for Liberty as an “anti-government extremist” organization in its latest Year in Hate & Extremism report… The group soon expanded its campaigning remit to oppose teaching about racism and racist history and LGBTQ+-inclusive policies in public schools, and has since sought to land members and supporters on school board seats.

According to the SPLC report, the group has made its way by “intimidating and harassing teachers and school officials”, battling teachers’ unions, attacking corporations like Disney that are supportive of LGBTQ+ rights, and supporting and making use of laws like Florida’s so-called “don’t say gay” statute, which limits classroom discussion of gender and sexual identity… Moms for Liberty has expanded into a nationwide network of more than 200 branches, and the SPLC now lists each of these branches as an extremist group.

While the group has claimed to be non-partisan, from the beginning it has had close ties to the Republican party, especially in Florida, where it has won the backing of the rightwing governor and 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis.

Quote:These shameful secrets are no longer hidden in shadows. The New York Times, Politico, NPR and a host of other mainstream publications are reporting on the corruption and widening credibility gap. The SPLC dismissed its co-founder in March, and its president has resigned amidst numerous claims of sexual harassment, gender discrimination and racism within the organization — a parade of disgraces that vividly force the conclusion: The SPLC is hollow, rotten and failing at the very virtues it pretends to celebrate.

The criticism comes from many corners. There’s the Current Affairs editor who seems sympathetic to the center’s progressive mission but decries its “hate group” list as an “outright fraud” and a “willful deception designed to scare older liberals into writing checks to the SPLC.” 

There’s the retired investigative journalist who helped research and write an eight-part series on the center’s “litany of problems and questionable practices” in the mid-1990s. His Washington Post opinion piece reads with a thinly veiled message: We nearly got a Pulitzer Prize for TELLING YOU SO. 


But perhaps most damning of all are the indictments leveled by former employee Bob Moser in The New Yorker. He remembers being welcomed to the “Poverty Palace” and recounts the heart-sinking reality of it all — being “pawns” in a “highly profitable scam.”

Quote:This paper has examined the claims made by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the hate group data and statistics the organization has produced over the past three decades, and the words and actions of its most visible actors, founder Morris Dees and Director of Intelligence Mark Potok.

From the fundamental lack of a fixed, universal definition for “hate group,” to the incongruous interaction between Morris Dees and the Ku Klux Klan, as well as his inconsistent hiring and fundraising policies, to the numerous contradictory public statements made by Mark Potok, it is apparent that a demonstrable credibility gap exists between the SPLC’s carefully crafted reputation and the accuracy of its widely accepted claims.

External stakeholders have their own reasons for accepting the SPLC’s unvetted data. The media, academic researchers and publishers, and law enforcement all have vested interests in perpetuating SPLC claims, and to greater and lesser extents. Those interests may be financial, as SPLC reports will often draw an audience and may be used to justify budgetary requests, though personal bias is often an ancillary motive. Ultimately, the interests of all three stakeholders, as well as that of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which generates tens of millions of dollars in donations each year, based largely on a fundraising program built squarely around its unsubstantiated hate group statistics, overlap, forming a self-feeding, self-perpetuating cycle to the benefit of all players. At best, SPLC hate group data is unsubstantiated and clearly biased. At worst, the numbers are fabricated as part of a larger fundraising program that is based largely on fearmongering.

As Mark Potok noted, the SPLC routinely “finds the 200 Nazis running around,” exaggerates the threat posed, if any, and “makes money off of it.” The ethical 135 challenges posed by the SPLC’s internal policies, such as claiming to be a civil rights organization but never hiring minorities to highly paid positions of authority, or by suggesting that the organization is in dire need of donations while it retains hundreds of millions of dollars in unrestricted funds, is also of great concern.

Such direct mail persuasion gimmicks as the Wall of Tolerance and legal-but-dubious accounting practices, such as claiming “joint costs” to lower the apparent percentage of money spent on fundraising, or the use of telemarketers at the expense of tens of thousands of unsuspecting donors each year, all call the integrity of the SPLC into question. Last, the sheer amount of money involved, from the tens of millions for the SPLC and related think tanks to the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in funding for the Department of Homeland Security, must be recognized as a significant possible influence on ignoring the accuracy of SPLC data.

Professional researchers such as Chermak and Freilich are prepared to perform a complete about-face on their criticisms of SPLC data when there are millions of DHS dollars at stake. The information is still unreliable, they note, but at least it is consistent.

Hate has always been and may always be part of the human condition. There is no denying that some people harbor racist, sexist and xenophobic attitudes and may be drawn to like-minded people in the same way as anyone else. Hate is largely based on fear, ignorance, and inequality. As with any highly emotional issue, there will always be those who will seek to exploit those feelings for gain.

The “Hate Industry” Laird Wilcox wrote of is larger than ever and the Southern Poverty Law Center continues to play a major role in that industry. The organization’s hate group data are unverified, inconsistent, inaccurate and demonstrably biased. The data shows all of the hallmarks of 136 classic propaganda and the uses to which they have been put by some recall the darkest days of McCarthyism.

As Jacques Ellul wrote, propagandists must create a need in the minds of their audience, feed it through half-truths and fearmongering, and ultimately supply a simple solution, if not to the problem itself, (which would put the propagandists out of business), then to the audiences’ question of “What can I do to help?” SPLC donors can “fight hate” and “seek justice” by simply writing a check. The SPLC even provides a self-addressed, postage-paid envelope. One could argue that the donors are being swindled, but from Ellul’s viewpoint, they are getting precisely what they paid for and feel they are getting good value for the dollar. And as Ellul posited, propaganda often works most effectively on those who arguably have the best tools with which to detect it. Propaganda, by design, circumvents logic and targets emotion.

If any other advocacy group, such as the National Rifle Association, were to produce the exact same claims as the SPLC, word-for-word, it would be met with skepticism, at the very least, by the media, academia, and law makers. Marketing master, Morris Dees, has honed his organization’s reputation over the past forty-five years, creating a singularly successful brand name in the process, noting that We run our business like a business.

Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same thing, the same basic process—just good, sound business practices (Egerton, p. 15). Unreliable information such as that produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other advocacy groups invariably taints research that is based largely upon it, and calls into question the ethical characters of those who produce and propagate it. Not only does 137 this flawed data lead to flawed research, that flawed research poses very real threats to American civil liberties.

Laird Wilcox notes The SPLC has managed to engage police and government agencies to assist them, interfacing informational resources about personal circumstances, vulnerability, and any opportunities for prosecution. They have even counseled the military in stigmatization and defamation procedures.

The rules and procedures that still pertain to law enforcement and criminal justice agencies don’t apply to the SPLC because they’re private, unsupervised, and unaccountable to anyone. Americans really need to ask themselves if they are willing to tolerate this kind of operation in a free society. Even if you agree with their stated goals, remember that sooner or later they might start looking at you or someone you love. Don’t imagine they can be contained by good will alone. What the Southern Poverty Law Center can get away with, eventually others can too (Wilcox, 2010).

We need to watch closely for possible infiltration. If they become too "obvious stupid", then they've been infiltrated by Democrat Covert Smear Operations 

(07-02-2023, 12:00 AM)xuenchen Wrote: We need to watch closely for possible infiltration. If they become too "obvious stupid", then they've been infiltrated by Democrat Covert Smear Operations