So the real problem here is The Heritage Foundation. Without their money, Moms for Fascism, or whatever they're officially calling themselves, don't exist. Maybe it's time to tweet bomb The Heritage Foundation's twitter accounts. Many of their "leaders" have been kind enough to leave their Twitter IDs for us to offer our opinions (trigger warning: You may want a strong glass of juiced up eggnog before you see some of the tweets these people retweet).
The lack of diversity in this organization speaks for itself. It seems they have their fingers in everything evil these days. And I have never heard of any of these people. There is no deep state but lobbying groups like these are much worse. Has anybody written an expose about them?
Thanks Jay—we need to continue to expose these ghouls at every turn! And everyone here that’s on Instagram stop what you are doing and follow @wordclown immediately! And throw some cash his way if you can…he has been working diligently to expose these people and he definitely made a difference last November!
I came here to recommend people follow @wordclown too. He raised $$ to put up billboards in areas where they had MFL candidates running for school boards, exposing them & their ideology for what it is, and probably influenced their numerous defeats. He also buys urls and puts up websites like this: https://www.momsforliberties.com/
Thank you Jay! My mom and I love your column and were recently discussing how you explain the importance of the situation, but always offer a little light at the end of this long dark tunnel of trump! We appreciate your amazing intellect, but we adore your snarky sense of humor and your constant commitment to make this country a better place for ALL. Have an amazing week and Happy Holidays!
Vouchers contain two time bombs. The first blows holes in local budgets, letting private groups steal money from public schools. The other is less obvious but may be just as important: Cutting public school funding undermines teachers’ unions, one of the few remaining groups aligned with the Democratic Party.
Exactly--and Nebraska Catholics, with the help of the Ricketts and Pede Families (I didn’t make up those names), have fully backed (wait for it--another bizarre name--) Gov. Pillen’s, the pig farmer, initiative to suck money out of public schools and into (Catholic) private schools.
Temecula, California has been fighting a takeover of their school board. A consortium of local citizens (Dems AND Repubs) acted in a highly organized process to recall the obv political school board president. This Christian majority has sown anger towards teachers, students, and parents, distrust, paranoia, outsiders voices, church involvement, hidden agendas, wasting of school monies, and political aggrandizement of their own larger political ambitions (appearing on Fox, etc). One of this Christian majority recently resigned to move away, and in his "goodbye" screed angrily attacked the one Jewish school board member, exposing his anti Semitism, and his 'holier-than-thou' point of view, showing once again that the majority had a right-wing Christian agenda. Which confirms Jay Kuo's (and others) theory that this chaos agenda is designed to destroy local schools, in support of school vouchers to private schools (primarily Christian).
The good news is that school board races are now very much on everyone's radar. Once again, Republicans have overreached. If they had been smart about it, they could have accomplished their goals, but they got too greedy, too fast, and now we're on to them.
It really started a long time ago, back in the day of the so-called "Moral Majority" (who were anything but). They began a dedicated effort to infest school boards way back in the 80s.
I’ll second Charles comment on it starting in the ‘80s. As a life long Californian I can tell you that Temecula’s school board isn’t the first or unique. Stealth right-wing religious candidates have been a problem for school boards and other local jurisdictions in the state for decades, especially in the red parts of California - far northern Sacramento valley, Sierra foothills, parts of San Bernardino and Riverside counties and deep dark red San Diego east county.
Thank you for this. I hope more people will start to see what's behind the curtain with this group (and so many others). I wrote an op-ed about this several months ago and received a lot of feedback and great discussion. Our community recently ousted three MFL school board members through a long and difficult recall. We all need to be spreading the word and providing the broader picture.
"Book bans are not so much about the content of specific books as they are about instilling fundamental Christian nationalism, packaged in a glossy white box with a pink OR blue bow, and sold to Americans as “grassroots efforts to protect our children.” The movements hawking that box are proclaiming loudly that American will be safe when it is white, straight, wealthy, patriarchal, and bound by biblically self-justified moralistic rules, handpicked from a 2000-year old text.
This may seem like an extreme interpretation about the actions of a few, “innocent” soccer moms who have proclaimed themselves to be “moms for ‘liberty’” and “joyful warriors” but their end game is far from innocent and far more insidious than they let on. The short-game is to destabilize and create chaos. The long-game is to dismantle public libraries and privatize public schools using voucher systems. Private schools where the white nationalistic narrative can be indoctrinated and strictly controlled."
I now say (to myself only) that MFL is actually an acronym for M****r F**king Ladies. It’s probably too extreme for a 77 year old lady such as myself, but it just seems more honest than Moms for Liberty.
Based on the leadership - it might stand for Mothers F***ing Ladies (the f word being a verb not a modifier of Ladies.)
Somebody should be going to schoolboard meetings where they are with signs that ask - Who's In Your Threesome? Need to remind everyone that they are freaks in the sheets. That gives everyone a big ick about them.
While I actually believe that what consenting adults do in private is their own business, you can't dump on LBGT+ people when you are one of them or at least enjoying the sex you rail against.
I agree Dani. If you have read Project 2025 their plan, with another trump administration is to get rid of all the alphabet agencies including the Department of Education and replacing it with only white Christian private schools. Project 2025 is just an update to Mandate For Leadership that the GOP and the Heritage foundation started during the Reagan administration and each update has IMO gotten more radical. It seems Orban of Hungary had a lot of input into Project 2025. They began writing it in 2022 while holding their CPAC convention in Hungary and having him as a keynote speaker for their convention in Dallas. Orban gained permanent power in 2011 when he rewrote their constitution and changed several laws. Now Mike Johnson along with ALEC and the Heritage Foundation are trying the same thing here. Thom Hartmann wrote about it in one of his substack articles. they are mainly looking at the 3rd strategy https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-secret-gop-plot-to-change-our-01b?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=302288&post_id=139736253&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1o7ei4&utm_medium=email
I held my nose and plowed my way through all 800+ pages of the Project 2025 Plan. It’s terrifying, especially that it’s so specific. They say the things out loud that I know have been the tenants of the MAGA/Movement conservatives for decades and to see it laid out so methodically and with so much detail is chilling. It very well could be paralyzing but we all need to see it as an even stronger call to action to save our democracy.
There was an excellent piece on NPR yesterday about this very topic. They emphasized that the recent school board losses for MFL should in no way relax our worries about that group or the whole movement. Control of the school boards is secondary - their primary goal (which they are achieving) is fomenting distrust of institutions- in this case the public school system. MFL and their followers are useful instruments in the whole “burn it all down” philosophy espoused by the Heritage Foundation. The whole goal of destroying public schools through vouchers is to funnel all that tax money back to the wealthy, whether through tuition money (that they don’t need)for expensive private schools or myriad other non-school uses (think Betsey DeVoss).
We can glory in their defeats but let’s not turn our backs! It’s truly whack-a-mole with these folks!
In Florida, educated people are taking note and using those Florida vouchers to send their kids to private schools because the public ones are severely stressed in terms of finances and teachers and security. Now the Florida legislature wants to let parents determine if their non-reading third grader can progress to fourth grade. Yet, at the lower end, the laws strictly forbid gifted 4-year-olds whose birthdays are after September 1 from attending kindergarten. They must spend a limbo year in pre-k if they can read?? Period. Yet at the high school end, the legislature is trying to eliminate exit exams for all students while allowing 16-year-olds to work instead. This is MAGA.
Whenever any politician, journalist or pundit points out the fascism of the Republican party or the many right wing organizations that support it, the following should also always be included, lest the poorly educated general public doesn't understand or forgets what it means to have a fascist government: Under the Nazi fascist regime, over 6 million people were killed by the Nazis, Jews, gays and political opponents included. Under the Pinochet fascist regime in Chile, more than 1200 people were 'disappeared' and at least 80,000 were jailed. Under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge fascist regime in Cambodia, an estimated 2 million people died and mostly likely more. Exact numbers aren't known and include adults as well as children. We should never, ever let anyone forget that a fascist government always results in the deaths of cultural and political foes of those in power. These people are our neighbors, friends, family members, employees, etc. There is nothing more evil, immoral or disruptive to a culture than this.
We must never forget that any fascist regime's ultimate goal is to rid 'their' country of 'undesirables.' In this case, anyone who isn't white and straight, or as the kids call it today, cis-gendered, and who practice their particular brand of churchianity.
Groups like this never really go away; they simply put on respectable clothing, choose their words carefully, and, voila, they are just trying to support all the oppressed cis-gendered white people in the world. They require constant vigilance.
Thank you for your distillation of the MFL reporting.
I had not made the connection that the Moms For Liberty's takeover of school boards was not the end in itself, but rather part of a larger strategy whereby distrust in public schools would be created and fostered so as to gain public support for vouchers and privatizing education. That is not only extremely troubling all on its own, but it makes one wonder if this "digger wasp" strategy might not be the purpose of conservatives in Congress, the Courts, and State governments in a larger sense. If elected officials do a bad enough job, they can discredit Democracy itself.
"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." 100% true.
No need to stop with legislators on the list. There’s a lot of holy-roller bible thumping preachers with lots of skeletons in the closet, under the bed, and hanging out at sleepy motels on the edge of town near the interstate.
Thinking back on the letter AG Garland sent out when the targeting of school boards by chaos actors became obvious, it is clearly a conspiracy to defraud our public school system but no charges have been brought even though we have seen where the voucher programs are a goal, are being abused, there is a pattern of successful deployment in States with Republican Governors who are in on it. When will they be held accountable? The ballot box can't be the only solution when some of these same Governors are creating private "election police" departments... Adding another opinion that shares comparisons.
I think I can safely speak for a lot of people who think that the Zeiglers (or anyone else) should be free to have any kind of sexual life in their own homes with consenting adults.
What makes them worthy of scorn is not their sex life but that they loudly condemn the exact same behavior if it's anyone but them doing it.
They talk about family values and demand the removal of books where characters have two moms but they are engaged in a long term homosexual relationship.
It is mind-blowingly hypocritical but sadly not uncommon for people and groups like them to do behind closed doors what they condemn in public.
They were never a spontaneous grass roots organization. They had big money right from the start from organizations who used them for their own objectives and will now discard them due to this incident but probably not before they secretly fund another group that will further their agenda.
The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies them as a hate group and they are on their watch list.
I hope they implode and leave school boards alone. But groups like them will never truly go away.
So the real problem here is The Heritage Foundation. Without their money, Moms for Fascism, or whatever they're officially calling themselves, don't exist. Maybe it's time to tweet bomb The Heritage Foundation's twitter accounts. Many of their "leaders" have been kind enough to leave their Twitter IDs for us to offer our opinions (trigger warning: You may want a strong glass of juiced up eggnog before you see some of the tweets these people retweet).
https://www.heritage.org/about-heritage/staff/leadership
https://www.heritage.org/about-heritage/staff/directors
Holy bloat at the top!! Talk about a top-heavy organization. Way to skim off the fund raised money Heritage Foundation!
Yay! Skim away! The more they skim, the less money they can use to stomp on your human rights!
And the wife of which unethical money grubbing Justice is on the board!
The lack of diversity in this organization speaks for itself. It seems they have their fingers in everything evil these days. And I have never heard of any of these people. There is no deep state but lobbying groups like these are much worse. Has anybody written an expose about them?
The lack of diversity is kind of the point, I'd say. Agreed about the lobbying. They do seem ripe for a ProPublica expose!
Wonderful links, and a good article.
Thanks Jay—we need to continue to expose these ghouls at every turn! And everyone here that’s on Instagram stop what you are doing and follow @wordclown immediately! And throw some cash his way if you can…he has been working diligently to expose these people and he definitely made a difference last November!
I came here to recommend people follow @wordclown too. He raised $$ to put up billboards in areas where they had MFL candidates running for school boards, exposing them & their ideology for what it is, and probably influenced their numerous defeats. He also buys urls and puts up websites like this: https://www.momsforliberties.com/
He’s awesome!
YES! Thank you for posting the url—and he has so many others, he’s just magical!
Toby Morton is a genius. I followed him when I was still on Xitter. Love his sites.
Wow, I read @worldclown and when I opened it I was shocked...Then I rechecked and realized it is @wordclown! Just followed the correct Insta!
Ooh I’ve never looked at that handle…yikes! Glad you got to the correct one though!
I realized my mistake immediately! I don't think anyone on this site would recommend that site...
Thanks for the heads up! I just began following him.
YES!!! Follow WordClown and help support his amazing efforts!!!!
Thank you Jay! My mom and I love your column and were recently discussing how you explain the importance of the situation, but always offer a little light at the end of this long dark tunnel of trump! We appreciate your amazing intellect, but we adore your snarky sense of humor and your constant commitment to make this country a better place for ALL. Have an amazing week and Happy Holidays!
Lisa🫶🏼
What a wonderful comment to read after a long hard day!
🫶🏼
@Lisa re Jay: Exactly! 😊❤️
🫶🏼
Vouchers contain two time bombs. The first blows holes in local budgets, letting private groups steal money from public schools. The other is less obvious but may be just as important: Cutting public school funding undermines teachers’ unions, one of the few remaining groups aligned with the Democratic Party.
Exactly--and Nebraska Catholics, with the help of the Ricketts and Pede Families (I didn’t make up those names), have fully backed (wait for it--another bizarre name--) Gov. Pillen’s, the pig farmer, initiative to suck money out of public schools and into (Catholic) private schools.
Sharing a post from another account that looks out for consumer interests and shares an interesting comparison;
https://open.substack.com/pub/theeducationreport/p/are-charter-schools-public-schools?r=it8vk&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Temecula, California has been fighting a takeover of their school board. A consortium of local citizens (Dems AND Repubs) acted in a highly organized process to recall the obv political school board president. This Christian majority has sown anger towards teachers, students, and parents, distrust, paranoia, outsiders voices, church involvement, hidden agendas, wasting of school monies, and political aggrandizement of their own larger political ambitions (appearing on Fox, etc). One of this Christian majority recently resigned to move away, and in his "goodbye" screed angrily attacked the one Jewish school board member, exposing his anti Semitism, and his 'holier-than-thou' point of view, showing once again that the majority had a right-wing Christian agenda. Which confirms Jay Kuo's (and others) theory that this chaos agenda is designed to destroy local schools, in support of school vouchers to private schools (primarily Christian).
The good news is that school board races are now very much on everyone's radar. Once again, Republicans have overreached. If they had been smart about it, they could have accomplished their goals, but they got too greedy, too fast, and now we're on to them.
Yes, we're onto them now. Meanwhile they have sown chaos in our community, while we continue to organize and fight them off.
It really started a long time ago, back in the day of the so-called "Moral Majority" (who were anything but). They began a dedicated effort to infest school boards way back in the 80s.
I’ll second Charles comment on it starting in the ‘80s. As a life long Californian I can tell you that Temecula’s school board isn’t the first or unique. Stealth right-wing religious candidates have been a problem for school boards and other local jurisdictions in the state for decades, especially in the red parts of California - far northern Sacramento valley, Sierra foothills, parts of San Bernardino and Riverside counties and deep dark red San Diego east county.
Thank you for this. I hope more people will start to see what's behind the curtain with this group (and so many others). I wrote an op-ed about this several months ago and received a lot of feedback and great discussion. Our community recently ousted three MFL school board members through a long and difficult recall. We all need to be spreading the word and providing the broader picture.
"Book bans are not so much about the content of specific books as they are about instilling fundamental Christian nationalism, packaged in a glossy white box with a pink OR blue bow, and sold to Americans as “grassroots efforts to protect our children.” The movements hawking that box are proclaiming loudly that American will be safe when it is white, straight, wealthy, patriarchal, and bound by biblically self-justified moralistic rules, handpicked from a 2000-year old text.
This may seem like an extreme interpretation about the actions of a few, “innocent” soccer moms who have proclaimed themselves to be “moms for ‘liberty’” and “joyful warriors” but their end game is far from innocent and far more insidious than they let on. The short-game is to destabilize and create chaos. The long-game is to dismantle public libraries and privatize public schools using voucher systems. Private schools where the white nationalistic narrative can be indoctrinated and strictly controlled."
https://open.substack.com/pub/danismart/p/book-bans-are-not-about-books?r=1c5095&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I now say (to myself only) that MFL is actually an acronym for M****r F**king Ladies. It’s probably too extreme for a 77 year old lady such as myself, but it just seems more honest than Moms for Liberty.
I was thinking M****r F**king Losers, because ladies they aren’t.
I don't think it's extreme at all and you are so right, that acronym is far more fitting.
Dani, thank you.
Stealing this, and I’ll be eighty in January. 😁
We're never too old to cuss. :-)
How about MF Liars?
Based on the leadership - it might stand for Mothers F***ing Ladies (the f word being a verb not a modifier of Ladies.)
Somebody should be going to schoolboard meetings where they are with signs that ask - Who's In Your Threesome? Need to remind everyone that they are freaks in the sheets. That gives everyone a big ick about them.
While I actually believe that what consenting adults do in private is their own business, you can't dump on LBGT+ people when you are one of them or at least enjoying the sex you rail against.
I agree Dani. If you have read Project 2025 their plan, with another trump administration is to get rid of all the alphabet agencies including the Department of Education and replacing it with only white Christian private schools. Project 2025 is just an update to Mandate For Leadership that the GOP and the Heritage foundation started during the Reagan administration and each update has IMO gotten more radical. It seems Orban of Hungary had a lot of input into Project 2025. They began writing it in 2022 while holding their CPAC convention in Hungary and having him as a keynote speaker for their convention in Dallas. Orban gained permanent power in 2011 when he rewrote their constitution and changed several laws. Now Mike Johnson along with ALEC and the Heritage Foundation are trying the same thing here. Thom Hartmann wrote about it in one of his substack articles. they are mainly looking at the 3rd strategy https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-secret-gop-plot-to-change-our-01b?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=302288&post_id=139736253&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1o7ei4&utm_medium=email
I held my nose and plowed my way through all 800+ pages of the Project 2025 Plan. It’s terrifying, especially that it’s so specific. They say the things out loud that I know have been the tenants of the MAGA/Movement conservatives for decades and to see it laid out so methodically and with so much detail is chilling. It very well could be paralyzing but we all need to see it as an even stronger call to action to save our democracy.
There was an excellent piece on NPR yesterday about this very topic. They emphasized that the recent school board losses for MFL should in no way relax our worries about that group or the whole movement. Control of the school boards is secondary - their primary goal (which they are achieving) is fomenting distrust of institutions- in this case the public school system. MFL and their followers are useful instruments in the whole “burn it all down” philosophy espoused by the Heritage Foundation. The whole goal of destroying public schools through vouchers is to funnel all that tax money back to the wealthy, whether through tuition money (that they don’t need)for expensive private schools or myriad other non-school uses (think Betsey DeVoss).
We can glory in their defeats but let’s not turn our backs! It’s truly whack-a-mole with these folks!
In Florida, educated people are taking note and using those Florida vouchers to send their kids to private schools because the public ones are severely stressed in terms of finances and teachers and security. Now the Florida legislature wants to let parents determine if their non-reading third grader can progress to fourth grade. Yet, at the lower end, the laws strictly forbid gifted 4-year-olds whose birthdays are after September 1 from attending kindergarten. They must spend a limbo year in pre-k if they can read?? Period. Yet at the high school end, the legislature is trying to eliminate exit exams for all students while allowing 16-year-olds to work instead. This is MAGA.
Whack-a-MAGA
Whenever any politician, journalist or pundit points out the fascism of the Republican party or the many right wing organizations that support it, the following should also always be included, lest the poorly educated general public doesn't understand or forgets what it means to have a fascist government: Under the Nazi fascist regime, over 6 million people were killed by the Nazis, Jews, gays and political opponents included. Under the Pinochet fascist regime in Chile, more than 1200 people were 'disappeared' and at least 80,000 were jailed. Under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge fascist regime in Cambodia, an estimated 2 million people died and mostly likely more. Exact numbers aren't known and include adults as well as children. We should never, ever let anyone forget that a fascist government always results in the deaths of cultural and political foes of those in power. These people are our neighbors, friends, family members, employees, etc. There is nothing more evil, immoral or disruptive to a culture than this.
We must never forget that any fascist regime's ultimate goal is to rid 'their' country of 'undesirables.' In this case, anyone who isn't white and straight, or as the kids call it today, cis-gendered, and who practice their particular brand of churchianity.
Groups like this never really go away; they simply put on respectable clothing, choose their words carefully, and, voila, they are just trying to support all the oppressed cis-gendered white people in the world. They require constant vigilance.
Very much so. See how the Minutemen became the Tea Party.
Wow! Republicans are exhausting and the hypocrisy is so obvious!
Thank you for your distillation of the MFL reporting.
I had not made the connection that the Moms For Liberty's takeover of school boards was not the end in itself, but rather part of a larger strategy whereby distrust in public schools would be created and fostered so as to gain public support for vouchers and privatizing education. That is not only extremely troubling all on its own, but it makes one wonder if this "digger wasp" strategy might not be the purpose of conservatives in Congress, the Courts, and State governments in a larger sense. If elected officials do a bad enough job, they can discredit Democracy itself.
@Douglas Brown: Apparently so! Love the analogy "digger wasp". Must look up!
"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." 100% true.
Over and over again!
No need to stop with legislators on the list. There’s a lot of holy-roller bible thumping preachers with lots of skeletons in the closet, under the bed, and hanging out at sleepy motels on the edge of town near the interstate.
Thinking back on the letter AG Garland sent out when the targeting of school boards by chaos actors became obvious, it is clearly a conspiracy to defraud our public school system but no charges have been brought even though we have seen where the voucher programs are a goal, are being abused, there is a pattern of successful deployment in States with Republican Governors who are in on it. When will they be held accountable? The ballot box can't be the only solution when some of these same Governors are creating private "election police" departments... Adding another opinion that shares comparisons.
https://open.substack.com/pub/theeducationreport/p/are-charter-schools-public-schools?r=it8vk&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
As a South Floridian I certainly hope so while I am LMAO! Ziegler also wants a lot of money to step down. Let’s see how that works for him.
Hmmm sounds like this shoe fits;
ex·tor·tion ~ a NOUN~
the practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats.
Allegedly $2 MILLION to "go away". Grifting conman accused rapist.
Why would they pay him to go away when they can fire him for nothing?
Thank you, Jay, for an awesome, extensive article about the disgusting, disgraceful "Mom's (NOT) for Liberty" group of un-useful idiots.
Please consider distributing your article as an "Op-Ed" in newspapers around the USA
I think I can safely speak for a lot of people who think that the Zeiglers (or anyone else) should be free to have any kind of sexual life in their own homes with consenting adults.
What makes them worthy of scorn is not their sex life but that they loudly condemn the exact same behavior if it's anyone but them doing it.
They talk about family values and demand the removal of books where characters have two moms but they are engaged in a long term homosexual relationship.
It is mind-blowingly hypocritical but sadly not uncommon for people and groups like them to do behind closed doors what they condemn in public.
They were never a spontaneous grass roots organization. They had big money right from the start from organizations who used them for their own objectives and will now discard them due to this incident but probably not before they secretly fund another group that will further their agenda.
The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies them as a hate group and they are on their watch list.
I hope they implode and leave school boards alone. But groups like them will never truly go away.