It’s easy to chuckle at the failures of Moms for Liberty. The far-right “parental rights” group — founded in Florida during the Covid-19 pandemic to encourage re-opening schools without mask mandates or vaccine requirements — has invited laughter for its distorted, sometimes bizarre claims about plots to undermine American education, warning members that “Globalists, utopians, socialists, totalitarians, and the UN are using public schools to undermine freedom and Christianity.” It requires little effort to arrange the group’s most unhinged statements into a cornucopia of lunacy, surpassed in recent memory only by the tinfoil conspiracism of QAnon.
The so-called “joyful warriors” have led harassment campaigns in school districts across the country, demanding action against curricula on systemic racism and gender identity. They’ve worked to ban recent books like Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer” and George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” as well as classics like Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” among others. But beyond lobbying for safeguards surrounding what is taught, Moms for Liberty activists have also spread harmful misinformation about those who teach it. They accuse teachers who cover systemic racism of engaging in “Marxist indoctrination” under the guise of Critical Race Theory — and those who emphasize LGBTQ+ inclusion are allegedly “grooming” and “sexualizing” children.
