[ Reeling from school board losses, the “parental rights”
organization is collapsing on itself.]
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THE RISE AND FALL OF MOMS FOR LIBERTY  
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Maurice Cunningham
December 15, 2023
The Progressive
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_ Reeling from school board losses, the “parental rights”
organization is collapsing on itself. _

Bridget Ziegler, a founder of the advocacy group Moms for Liberty,
during a meeting of the Sarasota County School Board in Sarasota,
Fla., on Tuesday. Ms Ziegler was asked to resign her position at the
meeting., Zack Wittman for The New York Times

 

On June 30, 2023, a _Washington Post_ headline declared
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“Moms for Liberty didn’t exist three years ago. Now it’s a GOP
kingmaker.” On November 10, 2023,  after a raft of school board
elections across the country, the _Post_ ran another headline
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“Voters drub Moms for Liberty ‘parental rights’ candidates at
the ballot.” Moms for Liberty (M4L) not only didn’t make any
kings, it didn’t even make many school board members. What happened?

The pre-election headline reflected the messaging skills that M4L has
carefully honed to make itself more palatable. By November, however,
the reality on the ground became clear. 

While M4L frames itself as a grassroots organization, in October 2022,
a spokesperson for the group confessed
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to _The New Yorker _that it is more akin to a “media company.”
This is reflected in M4L’s close ties
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to far-right political technician Morton Blackwell. In 1979,
Blackwell founded
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Leadership Institute (LI) to train conservatives in political combat,
and LI has trained thousands of activists—including M4L’s
leaders. 

The Leadership Institute also partners with M4L, in training school
board candidates, and it virtually runs M4L’s national summits. A
recent Brookings Institute Brown Center for Education Policy study of
M4L’s membership found
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that it has “about 103,000 members across 278 chapters in forty-five
states.” And although M4L claims
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rights,” its main focus has been on manufacturing chaos in public
schools by, for example: pushing for book bans
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school board meetings, defaming educators as groomers
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and opposing parents as pedophiles
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placing a bounty on teachers’ heads
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and generally stoking a culture of fear
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To understand M4L, it’s worth understanding Blackwell’s
philosophy. In an essay he published on LI’s website titled “The
Real Nature of Politics
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lessons for attaining political power:

“Being right in the sense of being correct is not sufficient to win
. . . . The winner in a political contest over time is determined by
the number and the effectiveness of the activists and leaders on the
respective sides . . . . [this] is determined by the political
technology used by that side,” and, “[p]olitical technology can be
roughly divided into communication technology and organization
technology.”

At its outset in January 2021, M4L’s “communications technology”
looked like a winner. In July 2022, Media Matters for
America documented
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how the rightwing propaganda network of media outlets publicized M4L.
Tina Descovich, the organization’s co-founder, appeared on _The Rush
Limbaugh Show_ in January 2021; and since its founding through July
2022, M4L representatives appeared on Fox News up to sixteen times and
on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast fourteen times. Attention
from _Breitbart_
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Beck [[link removed]], and other
rightwing media outlets
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followed.

The mainstream press has sometimes been as obliging as rightwing
media. An October 2021 article
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in _The_ _Washington Post _quoted then-Florida Republican Party
vice-chair (now chair) Christian Ziegler praising the group for
involving women in the Republican Party, stating he couldn’t achieve
it but “Moms for Liberty has done it for me.” The article was
accompanied by a photo of Descovich in a white jacket, posing like
Superman-bursting-from-the-phone-booth to reveal a t-shirt with
M4L’s marketing slogan. An American flag stands to the left, with
Descovich herself swaddled in a halo of light.

It’s a stunning debut unless you understand the backstory of M4L
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researched by popular blogger and retired public school teacher Peter
Greene. 

According to Greene, Descovich is a former Florida school board member
and ex-president of the conservative Florida Coalition of School Board
Members. Her LinkedIn page
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as “a creative senior communications professional.” Other M4L
founding members, Greene explains, included Erika Donalds, wife of
then state representative and now Congressmember Byron Donalds; Shawn
Frost, a GOP political operative elected to school board with
financial backing from former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos; and
Bridget Ziegler, Christian Ziegler’s wife and Descovich’s
predecessor as president. Christian Ziegler is also a paid political
consultant to M4L
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In February 2021, Bridget Ziegler left the M4L board—to be replaced
by LI-trained Marie Rogerson—to successfully run for her re-election
to the school board. Then, in 2022, Blackwell hired
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school board campaign trainings. (Bridget Ziegler recently resigned
from LI after she confessed
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to a three way sexual relationship with Christian and another woman.
Christian is under investigation for sexual assault against the woman.
Leadership Institute has scrubbed its website of mentions of Bridget).

At its 2023 summit, M4L awarded
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Blackwell its “Liberty Sword” award, and Rogerson recounted how
Descovich got the idea to start M4L from attending an LI training.
Blackwell confirmed
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he became involved in M4L “in your early days.”

Descovich has stated that her _Limbaugh_ appearance came after making
107 calls to the show. That would be silly when Christian Ziegler or
Blackwell could accomplish it in one phone call.

Blackwell is also a co-founder of the Council for National Policy
(CNP), which Anne Nelson exposed as a furtive rightwing directorate
in _Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical
Right_ [[link removed]].
In 2017, CNP sent a memorandum
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to the incoming Trump Administration urging the abolition of public
education to be replaced with “free-market private schools, church
schools and home schools as the normative American practice.”

Rightwing propagandist Chris Rufo has proposed
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that “to get universal school choice, you really need to operate
from a premise of universal public school distrust.” 

As Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola show in _Free Speech and Koch Money:
Manufacturing a Campus Culture War_
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Blackwell’s LI created a franchise named Campus Reforms to target
liberal professors. Its attacks have led to doxing, online harassment,
threats, and pressure on universities to fire faculty. Trinity
University in Hartford, Connecticut was once shut down for a day due
to threats [[link removed]]
against a professor generated by Campus Reform. Blackwell’s Campus
Reform is a clear example of how sewing chaos and distrust would be
useful technologies to bring down institutions of higher learning.
Thus, it should be no surprise to see M4L deploy the same technologies
to undermine public schools.

Recounting the outrages committed by M4L would take all day—from the
Indiana chapter head who quoted
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Adolf Hitler in a newsletter to M4L members posing
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with Proud Boys while flashing white power hand signs. M4L has also
been called out by PENAmerica for leading the book ban movement
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identified by the Human Rights Campaign for its anti-LGBTQ+
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crusade and has been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as
an anti-government extremist group
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But on Election Day 2023, when thousands of school board candidates
were on the ballot, Blackwell’s first rule of politics turned out to
be wrong, and voters showed that sometimes it is important to be
right, at least in a democratic setting where right-wing culture
warrior calls for banning books and traumatizing LGBTQ+
teenagers repelled
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voters.

In Virginia, State Delegate Schuyler VanValkenburg ousted
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an incumbent Republican state senator who sponsored book ban
legislation
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VanValkenburg emphasized
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that, as a high school teacher, he understands “the difference one
book can make for a child.” Delegate Randy Willett, re-elected from
a purple district near Richmond, likely won as a result of his focus
on the loyalty and attachment that people have to their community
public schools. 

It turns out that perhaps voters don’t like the constant havoc
practiced by M4L, and it may be the case that a backlash to
Blackwell’s political techniques produced more effective activists
who cherish public schools than M4L could deploy to destroy them. 

In the Central Bucks School District in Pennsylvania, which had become
a model of a disordered rightwing takeover, moderate
candidates regained
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control of the school board, soundly defeating candidates promoted by
M4L. Heather Reynolds, who defeated the school board
president, explained
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that voters had grown exhausted by the bedlam at each monthly school
board meeting.

People who cherish their community public schools must continue to
fight, of course. But the 2023 school board elections may have proved
that while rightwing advocacy groups like Moms for Liberty can be very
good at breaking things, voters generally prefer building and
maintaining institutions, like public schools, which they believe are
genuinely working for them.

Maurice Cunningham is a retired professor of political science at the
University of Massachusetts at Boston and the author of Dark Money and
the Politics of School Privatization (2021).

A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good! Since
1909, _The Progressive _magazine_ _has aimed to amplify voices of
dissent and voices under-represented in the mainstream, with a goal
of championing grassroots progressive politics.

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