Is Moms For Liberty Imploding?

Scandal, extremist ties, and an electoral thumping call the group’s future into doubt

Image courtesy of The Human Rights Campaign

The extremist group Moms for Liberty was supposed to meld the radical MAGA agenda with local politics, delivering far-right voters for the GOP. But the once high-flying Moms have been rocked by scandal, ties to violent organizations and a thumping in the 2023 elections.

Moms for Liberty brought culture war issues to the forefront by going after school boards and curricula in the name of parents’ rights. It supported banning books, prohibiting anything gay, and rewriting history to just never talk about historical racism.

But the group’s close ties to right-wing extremist groups like the Proud Boys exposed their radicalism. In one well-publicized Nazi “oops,” a local chapter even quoted Hitler favorably at the top of its newsletter.

It turns out voters don’t like Nazi-adjacent MAGA folks running their school boards, and the public lost interest in the group’s anti-woke agenda. In the 2023 general election, Moms for Liberty lost virtually everywhere it fielded a school board candidate.

Then there’s its co-founder, Bridget Ziegler. According to charges of sexual assault brought by another woman against Ziegler’s husband, the finger-wagging, puritanical couple were actually in a longtime three-way. The sheer hypocrisy has shaken the group to its rotten core.

Let’s helicopter over the hellscape of Moms for Liberty. We’ll take a broad look at their culture war agenda and how it was designed and funded from the outset to cause maximum chaos. Then we’ll examine a few examples of the group’s alarming ties to radical, violent elements. We’ll look at the results of the 2023 election and see how the Zieglers’ sexual hypocrisy might affect the group’s standing further. Finally, we’ll explore why Moms for Liberty, or some reincarnation of it, is likely to persist in order to advance a key objective of the far-right.

Moms for Liberty: a chaos agent

The group got its start during Covid-era mandates and lockdowns. It was able to tap into a deep frustration among parents over how education was being run during the pandemic. School boards and teachers became easy targets for local ire, and with the help of far-right activists, “parents’ rights” over masks and vaccines morphed into culture war issues, including protests against an imaginary teaching of Critical Race Theory, banning “offensive” books, and pearl clutching over the very mention of LGBTQ+ families and identities. 

But these issues were a smokescreen for the group’s real purpose: to serve as a MAGA political operation to cause chaos in local schools. The group “hijacked school boards, decimated academic freedom, and terrorized families: hypocrisy, lies and a relentless thirst for power no matter who they hurt in the process,” according to the Human Rights Campaign (on whose national board I serve).

While it portrayed itself as a “grassroots” organization, according to retired professor of political science Maurice Cunningham, who wrote an excellent backgrounder about Moms for Liberty in The Progressive, the group was organized and managed in large part by the far-right Leadership Institute. That institute was founded by political operative Morton Blackwell with an express goal of training extremist activists in political combat. According to Cunningham, Moms for Liberty was known for 

disrupting school board meetings, defaming educators as groomers and opposing parents as pedophiles, placing a bounty on teachers’ heads, and generally stoking a culture of fear.

The group was also supercharged by funding by the far-right Heritage Foundation, and this summer the group attracted Donald Trump as its keynote speaker at its summit.

Moms for Nazis

Given its roots in radical, disruptive extremism and its training in the use of harassment, intimidation and fear to advance its agenda, it is unsurprising that many members of the group aligned themselves with fascist propaganda and organizations. That started to bleed through in its messaging in rather obvious ways.

Earlier this year in June, a local Indiana chapter decided that its inaugural newsletter would feature a quote from Adolf Hitler on the cover. “He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future,” the quote declared, openly attributing the words to Hitler. And no one thought this might be a problem? The chapter soon apologized for its Nazi oopsie, claiming hastily in a revised newsletter, “We condemn Adolf Hitler’s actions and his dark place in human history. We should not have quoted him in our newsletter and express our deepest apology.”

But this wasn’t some one-off crazy incident. VICE News found close ties between Moms for Liberty and several extremist organizations. It summarized them as follows:

A VICE News investigation has uncovered links between numerous Moms for Liberty chapters and extremist groups like the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, sovereign citizen groups, QAnon conspiracist, Christian nationalists, and in one case, with the founder of the AK-47-worshiping Rod of Iron Ministries church in Pennsylvania. Around the country, Moms for Liberty has formed links with extremist groups and militias, which are joining forces with the “parental rights” group at protests and school board meetings, and in turn pushing the already far-right organization toward even more extreme ideology. 

Recently, images emerged of local Moms for Liberty leaders sitting down to meals and posing with Proud Boys members and even flashing the white power sign. The group’s national leadership had to scramble to put out a statement saying there was no affiliation with the Proud Boys.

Moms for Liberty is in no way affiliated with the Proud Boys and does not condone involvement with the organization. We repudiate hate and violence. 

We have been made aware that two Chapter leaders have recently demonstrated a lack of judgement [sic] and misalignment with our core values. Due to this, those leaders have been removed from their positions. 

Pro-tip: If you have to put out statements saying you really don’t support Hitler and you really don’t have any affiliation with the Proud Boys, you are already in a heap of trouble. Maybe they should just own their white nationalism.

Voter rejection

Voters have begun to consider the group’s fascist tactics and its close associations with violent extremism. That translated into an electoral wipe-out in November for Moms for Liberty candidates.

In the battleground state of Pennsylvania and in the highly contested Virginia elections this past November, liberals and moderates prevailed decisively over extremists at the school board level. Even in conservative Iowa, Moms for Liberty lost 12 out of 13 of the races where it had endorsed a candidate.

According to The American Federation of Teachers, candidates who publicly endorsed groups such as Moms for Liberty and the 1776 Project lost about 70% of their races on Election Day. The group disputes this figure, but there is no question that conservatives were routed at the school board and local level in most jurisdictions. It turns out that book bans, chaos in school boards, erasure of LGBTQ+ families and identity and the anti-woke crusade of the far-right isn’t playing well to parents, who just want quality education for their kids, free from the politics of it all.

Scandals and crimes

It’s not surprising that a radical group like Moms for Liberty got its start in a repressive, illiberal state like Florida. In fact, the wife of the Republican Party chair, Christian Ziegler, is one of the co-founders of the group. But what’s truly galling is that Bridget Ziegler, who spent the last few years railing against gay families and gay-inclusive curricula, behaves pretty gay herself. 

Anyone who follows the stories of the biggest homophobes and anti-gay legislators knows there is a high chance that fiery rhetoric often hides some big secrets. And to be clear, it’s not the fact that Christian and Bridget Ziegler were in a long-time three way romance with another woman that should upset anyone. It’s that they can so cruelly terrorize and erase the identities of millions of gay people in their state, all the while enjoying those same sexual freedoms they want to deny to others.

Even in Florida, support for the Zieglers is collapsing. Credible allegations of sexual assault and hypocrisy wider than the panhandle may prove too much in the end, even for that state’s Republican Party. The GOP there has stripped Christian Ziegler of his authority as chair of the party and voted to censure him. Bridget Ziegler faces calls for her resignation from the school board, where in a recent meeting dozens of residents correctly accused her of hypocrisy, and her colleagues voted to ask her to resign.

Useful idiots

So is Moms for Liberty dunzo? The group has taken a serious reputational hit and has suffered crushing electoral defeat. So you’d think that the GOP would want to cut the groups loose, because it’s clear that its presence brings out a sizable protest vote. 

But this is the MAGA Republican Party, where little makes sense. So long as the base is hungry for red meat cultural issues, this kind of extremism will find a home and an audience. After all, it’s what keeps the most extreme voices, like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, funded and incentivized to continue waging these wars.

But as Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider write in The Nation, there is a more insidious reason that Moms for Liberty will likely stick around. Their institutional backers, such as the Heritage Foundation, see this brand of local educational terrorism as critical toward their larger goal of disrupting public education so they can continue to press for things like school vouchers. Such vouchers are a naked giveaway by the state to wealthier, conservative, more religious elements, while simultaneously robbing public education of resources.

The push for things like vouchers can only succeed, however, if there is deep mistrust of the public education system generally. Groups like Moms for Liberty sow that distrust by upending our civil life around schools and making them cultural battlegrounds instead of peaceful learning centers.

Seen in this larger sense, Moms for Liberty is part of a full assault upon our democratic civil institutions. If it feels like everything America once held in respect—public schools, the military, prosecutors and other law enforcement—is under direct attack, that is no coincidence. It’s part of the plan, backed by powerful and wealthy Christo-nationalist extremists.

But that plan will fail if Americans continue to resoundingly reject groups like Moms for Liberty and retake local control of school boards and libraries. That pushback is now well underway and needs to gain strength going into 2024. With Moms for Liberty on the ropes from scandal and electoral losses, there is no better opportunity for voters to press them back to the far, silent edges of our civil society where they belong.