Moms for Liberty Stages a Sad Comeback

It’s difficult to grasp now, but there was a time—just two years ago—when Moms For Liberty (MFL) seemed poised to become the vanguard of the conservative revolution. The Florida-based education advocacy group stormed to the crowded forefront of the right-wing culture war in the wake of the Covid lockdown, when, according to the group’s founding lore, concerned mothers began taking a good hard look at the American education system and promptly recoiled in horror. In short order, Moms for Liberty chapters sprouted up across the country and spearheaded efforts to take over local school boards, expunge libraries and curricula of age-inappropriate content, and wage holy war on the divisive and radical dogmas of critical race theory, which scheming teachers and administrators had smuggled into lesson plans to indoctrinate impressionable children. 

The GOP leadership caste immediately took note. MFL’s grassroots successes were perfectly timed to galvanize the right’s base of hardline culture warriors just ahead of the 2022 midterms, while permitting Republican strategists to indulge fond reveries of herding the hotly coveted suburban mom demographic into the MAGA fold.

Things didn’t work out that way. The right’s school wars proved an electoral bust in the 2022 cycle, and beyond. First, one of the group’s co-founders, Bridget Ziegler, was embroiled in a sex scandal involving her husband, Florida GOP state party chairman Christian Ziegler, and another woman who had taken part in threesomes with the couple and accused Christian of sexual assault. (Oh, and if you’re thinking that a collateral scandal here is that the cofounder of an alleged grassroots insurgency was married to the Republican party’s leader in her home state, you’re not wrong.) Then, the group’s remaining leaders, Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovitch (herself the spouse of a Florida GOP political operative), tanked a 60 Minutes interview where CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley pressed them for evidence that school teachers were in fact “grooming” young children as sexual prey, and the pair produced none. As Republican school crusades continued to fizzle, all that hubbub over critical race theory, school-library censorship, and “Don’t Say Gay” legislation seemed destined to join the 2004 gay-marriage panic in the right-wing memory hole. 

So it was a bit surprising to see Moms For Liberty back in action for the 2024 Republican National Convention, commandeering an afternoon-long Town Hall at Milwaukee’s stately Warner Theater, called “Giving Americans a Voice.” Tiffany Justice was the emcee, and was clearly positioning the event as the opening act of a personal and political redemption tour. (Tina Descovitch only rated a walk-on introduction, in which she darkly intoned that “there is something going on in our country right now, you can’t see it with your eyes, but we all know what it is. It’s a battle between good and evil . . .and it’s a battle for the souls of our children.”) Yet because broad interest in MFL’s pet crusades is fading, even on the right, the marathon session was a weirdly disjointed quest to find new footing for a largely played-out political narrative. An opening session featuring rightwing legislative mainstays such as Florida Rep. Byron Donalds and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson began with Justice invoking the solemn consequences of the attempt on Donald Trump’s life (“We’d be in a very different place today if God had not intervened,” she said), but then awkwardly segued into complaints about her year-old Scott Pelley interview. 

Things didn’t get any less clunky when she tried to summon the now-fashionable rhetorical sentiment on the right that, with Trump a victim of political violence, unity and civility should be restored across our fractured, polarized republic. When Johnson took up that prompt from Justice, he dilated on the excesses of large-scale bureaucracies in business and government, for some reason. (Then again, this topic doesn’t apparently rate high among Johnson’s interests; he infamously delivered a fire-breathing liberal-baiting polemic for his opening night convention speech because, he claimed, his handlers had loaded an earlier, pre-shooting version of his remarks into the Teleprompter.) A follow-up question from Justice on how education issues had become so polarized only produced more ideological boilerplate from the Wisconsin senator: “I can’t explain the vitriol in America,” he said, before professing to do just that: “You have the left that wants to control people’s lives and consolidate power. We’re the party of freedom; I can’t get inside the mind of a leftist, it makes no sense to me.” 

The following session with the attorneys general of Louisiana, West Virginia, and Wyoming went from Muskian glosses on the social-media censorship regime exposed under the Supreme Court challenge to Covid disinformation measures on Twitter, Facebook, and other sites to—without skipping a beat—the self-evident mandate for school boards to censor library collections and curricular offerings in their own preferred ideological image. This would have been a grating moment of cognitive dissonance, if any right-wing political leader actually cared about the underlying issues in both cases. Instead, the disjuncture exposed the conflicting rightwing legal strategies in the digital and school culture fronts for what they were: a cursory bid to pander to the most mobilizable constituencies on offer. 

That was also the plain message when, between panelist sessions, Justice introduced a trailer for a new MAGA film called “Trump’s Rescue Mission: Saving America,” which featured footage of Joe Biden stumbling through presidential talking points, intercut with apocalyptic imagery of border chaos and criminals running amok. At one point, the failed presidential candidate and millennial Trump cosplayer Vivek Ramaswamy took up the Descovitch refrain, declaring “we are in the middle of a war in this country.” The film was produced by the right-wing agitprop PAC Citizens United, whose similar anti-Hillary Clinton hit job furnished the basis for the 2010 Supreme Court decision dismantling campaign finance reform. And in the trailer’s roster of featured contributors is, of course, one Tiffany Justice. Gee, how did the political discourse around education get so polarized? 

The afternoon’s nearly three-hour slog culminated in a session with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders revisiting the anti-woke school inquisitions in their respective states. In the alternate political universe of 2022, this would have been a rousing call to arms for conservative school warriors, but the southern governors’ exchange had the perfunctory feel of aging rock bands playing moldering hits on the county fair circuit. For DeSantis, in particular, once touted as the GOP’s great post-Trump hope, there had to be no small indignity in thumbing through his governor’s scrapbook for an increasingly listless crowd of Trump acolytes. In some part of his brain, he had to be thinking: I spent $160 million for this? Still, the talking points tumbled out on cue: “We’re not letting the inmates run the asylum,” DeSantis barked out in his trademark mien of an incorrigibly weird guy trying to mimic common sense. “We’re not gonna use your tax dollars for indoctrination and political activism. With everything we do, we get blowback from the media, but every time we do that, it tells me we’re over the target.” At one point, as DeSantis enumerated the virtues of Florida’s legislation limiting cell phone use and access in public schools, a good third of the attendees in the thinning house were distractedly scrolling through their own smartphones. 

However, one shouldn’t be too sanguine about such things. In many ways, MFL’s thwarted quest for renewed political relevance reflects a Republican ruling coalition that finds itself, by most reliable indicators, coasting toward victory in November. Aspiring GOP office holders don’t need to pinion themselves to unpopular and inquisitorial models of public education in order to rouse a restive base, as a doddering Democratic establishment and a dramatic assassination attempt are playing into the Trump campaign’s plan for a landslide GOP victory. 

A vivid reminder of this broader dynamic came in the event’s surprise epilogue: Vivek Ramaswamy, who’d earlier been heard thundering on the Warner Theater’s soundtrack about our nation’s soul-threatening ideological war, came onstage to deliver a labored comparison of MFL with the Founding Fathers. He reprised his own campaign’s efforts to assuage the “deeper void” in our shared civic experience that continues to disfigure American public life. “It is a 1776 moment,” the unhappy culture warrior continued. “Two thousand twenty-four is our generation’s 1776 . . . . It will be moms across the country who sign our new Declaration of Independence in 2024.”

What’s weird about major party conventions, though, is that one often happens upon these battle-minded rhetoricians in unguarded moments. The first day of the convention, I wandered into the media pavilion and caught sight of Ramaswamy waiting to record a video segment with USA Today. (Ron DeSantis would be dismayed to hear that Ramaswamy was anxiously scrolling through his phone the whole time.) Later, Ramswamy sat down to eat a sad solitary salad in a plastic container not far from where I was working, as a steady stream of reporters filed by him and paid him no mind. The moral of the set piece seemed all too clear: the culture wars hadn’t gone anywhere, but the Republican Party’s moveable feast was rolling on.