Checking in with the Minivan Taliban

Kiera Butler drew the short straw at Mother Jones and had to attend the most recent Moms For Fascism conference in Philadelphia:

Last Friday morning, at the beginning of a hot June day in Philadelphia, I walked through a phalanx of about a hundred protesters in order to make my way to the Joyful Warriors Summit, the annual convention of the parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty. 

Let us pause to observe the level of Extremely Online irony behind people whose speciality is going into purple-faced, spittle-flecked rage if they catch a glimpse of RuPaul’s Drag Race on a display at a Wal-Mart calling their Klavern a “Joyful Warriors Summit.” (Elsewhere in the story, Jimmy Concepts urges the group to “keep it classy” while ranting about how media coverage of the MFL newsletter that approvingly quoted Hitler was a communist plot. “Joyful warrior” means “not literally assaulting protestors,” apparently.)

Founded in 2021, Moms for Liberty began in Florida as a protest against school closures and then mask mandates. But as the pandemic wore on, the group’s mission coalesced into what is now known as the parents’ rights movement, focusing on what its supporters see as the dire consequences of schools’ over-involvement in shaping the moral lives of their offspring. The Moms do not think children should be learning about institutional racism in the United States. The Moms consider schools’ social-emotional learning programs—which focus on soft skills like friendship, anger management, and being part of a community—to be Trojan horses for a Marxist agenda. The Moms want to purge school libraries of books that present gender as a spectrum rather than a binary. The Moms want the federal government out of the schools, and, while they’re at it, abolishing the Department of Education would be a good idea as well.

These positions have yielded powerful alliances with deep-pocketed conservative groups. Although as a tax-exempt “social welfare group” its finances are not public, Moms for Liberty acknowledges that it works intensively with the right-wing Heritage Foundation and the Leadership Institute, a Republican organization devoted to training conservative leaders. These groups—and others like them—have likely recognized the might of the parents’ rights movement, which, in addition to making inroads into school boards across the country, propelled Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to victory in 2021.

Say what you will about fascism that carefully aligns with the interests of the Republican Party, but it’s pretty much a license to print money.

As you might expect, when joy meets rote Fox News talking points and/or Hitler fangirls, the former tends to give way:

But then, during the pandemic, he became frustrated. He watched his girlfriend, a hairdresser, lose clients because she refused to get vaccinated against Covid or wear a mask. Of mask refusers, he said, “Time has proven that they were actually right, because the particles are too small, they go through the mask. Now we know it.” (A brief fact check: This is not true.) But the real turning point, he said, came in late 2020, when he began to read reports that President Biden’s son Hunter’s laptop contained evidence of his father’s corruption. He began to wonder whether Trump hadn’t been the good guy all along. “I started realizing that he was unfairly maligned over and over again,” he said. “Everybody was after this guy, and they still can’t get him, with multiple impeachment investigations. So at some point, it becomes obvious that that the media is working with the Democrats.”

As we took our seats for the gala dinner, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, who has four kids, addressed the star-spangled Moms with a fiery speech. Pacing back and forth across the stage, she urged the crowd not to be dissuaded from their mission by bad press. “One of our moms in a newsletter quotes Hitler,” she said. Someone in the audience whooped. “I stand with that mom!” she said. The crowd cheered. Then she began to talk about the protesters outside, whom she called “very unhappy or angry.” On the other hand, inside the hotel, “It’s fun!” she said. “We’re having a great time!” But in the next breath, her cheerful tone became ominous. “If you don’t stand now, what is the future for your children?” she asked. “It will be bleak, it will be dark, there will be death.”

It’s worth reading the whole thing, but another takeaway is to reaffirm Paul’s point that DeSantis trying to compete with Trump is like Beatlemania trying to compete with the Beatles.