Five years after Moms for Liberty burst onto the political scene and began mobilizing school board takeovers and anti-LGBTQ censorship campaigns, the group’s leaders headed to Dallas to support Republican efforts to maintain control of Congress is the upcoming midterm elections.
Moms for Liberty was launched in 2021 amid anger over COVID-era school closures and restrictions, which Moms and its political allies exploited as part of a renewed right-wing movement push to demonize public education and take over local school boards. In the name of parental rights, Moms for Liberty has smeared educators and parents who oppose them, turned school board meetings into divisive and chaotic events, and used school board takeovers to promote anti-LGBTQ censorship and other right-wing policy priorities. More recently, it has urged activists to take advantage of conservative Supreme Court rulings to sue local school districts.
Early on, Moms for Liberty’s national and local leaders promoted a deceptive narrative that they weren’t political, weren’t partisan – that they were just moms concerned about their kids’ education – a grassroots operation funded with T-shirt sales.
The truth is that they were political from the start. One of the co-founders was married to the chair of the Florida Republican Party. The group was adopted and funded by major organizations like the Leadership Institute and the Heritage Foundation, both big players in the right-wing political infrastructure built over the past 50 years. It has gotten a huge promotional boost from right-wing media outlets.
At its own 2023 summit and at the 2024 RNC convention, Moms for Liberty leaders made it clear that they see the group as a power-building operation for the authoritarian political right. This year is no different.
M4L co-founder Tina Descovich appeared this week on the convention livestream of FlashPoint, a Christian nationalist program that promotes a steady stream of pro-Trump propaganda. Descovich told host Gene Bailey that Moms for Liberty was at the convention to help energize conservative voters for the midterms. Descovich claimed that the group has 300 chapters in 48 states and has won 575 school board seats in the past five years. Bailey said there are plans in the works to get his show’s activist viewers—the “FlashPoint army” — working with M4L chapters.
While Moms for Liberty has touted its activists as “joyful warriors,” the group’s leaders have smeared educators and parents who oppose them as demonic “groomers” and called for spiritual warfare against them. On Tuesday night, the group pushed out a quote from Trump’s speech saying “America does not belong to those who hate it. It belongs to those who love it.”
On Wednesday, Moms for Liberty’s social media feed was gushing that “MOMS FOR LIBERTY IS REPRESENTING IN DALLAS!” It published interviews with Newt Gingrich, an architect of the modern GOP’s strategy of demonizing its opponents, and Trump’s Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, both of whom spoke at the group’s luncheon. Moms for Liberty will be back in Dallas Oct 8-11 for its 2026 national summit.
Moms for Liberty has faced some challenging days lately. Commentators have noted that the group’s focus on national politics coincides with its diminishing impact at the local level, where parents, community members, and voters have responded to the chaos created by Moms for Liberty school board takeovers by organizing to take school boards back from Moms for Liberty’s culture-war ideologues. In August, many of its school board candidates were defeated in Florida, including in deep red Sarasota County, which had been a stronghold for the group.
