The GOP Embrace of Fascist “Moms for Liberty”

The GOP Embrace of Fascist “Moms for Liberty” with David Gilbert

Refuse Fascism Episode 163

Sun, Jul 09, 2023 1:53PM • 45:07

David Gilbert 00:00

What you see with Moms for Liberty is they claim is this grassroots movement, but it’s actually an astroturf movement where the message is designed at the top and it’s spread. They use harassment tactics. They break school board members. This group is trying to destroy people’s lives. It is undermining minority groups. It is attacking minority groups. It is making their lives worse. It is undermining kids’ educations. That’s how they are laying out the battlefields; they’re saying that everyone who opposes them is evil and they’re the ones trying to do good by protecting people by putting Christian values back at the center of US society. They want to create this Christian nationalist Christian fascist education system and that everyone has to get in line and get behind it.

Sam Goldman 01:05

Welcome to Episode 163 of the Refuse Fascism podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States.

In today’s episode, we’re sharing an interview I did with David Gilbert, senior reporter at VICE News, continuing our coverage and analysis of Moms for Liberty, aka Moms for Fascism. Apologies in advance for poor audio on my part of the interview. Thanks to everyone who goes the extra step and rates and reviews the show on Apple podcast or wherever you listen. If you appreciate the show and want to help us reach more people who want to Refuse Fascism, be a gem, go write a review and drop five stars wherever you listen to your pods.

I wanted to share one of these reviews we got from JJ M inquiring who titled the review “Moms for Fascism and the Anniversary of the Fall of Roe.” They gave us five stars and wrote “5 stars every time! You should be listening to and sharing this podcast! The danger of fascists taking over education by bullying people at school board meetings, one year since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. How to resist the fascism rising everywhere.” Please be like them and go tell the people out there in podcast land why you listen and they should too. Subscribe/follow so you never miss an episode, and of course keep up all that great commenting, sharing on social media and the YouTubes.

Thank you to everyone on Patreon for supporting the show for $2 or more a month. Thanks patrons! Not one yet? Become one at patreon.com/RefuseFascism. Need an extra reason to support? July 23 Coco Das and I will be holding a q&a Zoom. You’ve gotta sign up to become a patron at $5 or more to get that invite, so go, do it, join us!

Before we get into the interview, I wanted to share some important insights from scholars who have attended or analyzed the Moms for Liberty summit. Annika Brockschmidt attended the conference and reported back on the spiritual battle that Moms for Liberty is waging. She writes: “The vibe was strange, eerie and excited, a cross between a white supremacist sorority meeting, a capitalist love fest with deep bonding over hatred for “the left,” the LGBTQ+ community and anti-racism efforts, all dressed up as expressions of love for their children and a Pentecostal revival with some distinct NAR overtones.

“Our children belong to the Lord, not the government,” declared one Patriot mobile spokeswoman, “This is not a political war. It’s a spiritual war.” Her reporting also provides a helpful reminder of just who the Leadership Institute, the main sponsor of the summit is. She writes, “Founded by Morton Blackwell, a close personal friend of Jerry Falwell, and one of the key architects of the Christian Rights’ alliance with the Republican Party, the Leadership Institute was founded to professionalize conservative activists, teach them how to fundraise, strategize, give them media training, and present a polished image while advancing right wing causes.”

Dr. Anthea Butler, who also attended the summit, reflected that “These moms are on a crusade, a holy calling, and that is what makes them dangerous and effective.” She goes on to dig deep into the lineage of Moms for Liberty as part of the modern Christian fascist movement that came to be a political force through opposing desegregation, a plank of their program that never went away; see efforts on vouchers and moves to dismantle Public Education. Dr. Butler likens Moms for Liberty to the Eagle Forum founded by Phyllis Schlafly, in her successful campaign to block the Equal Rights Amendment, done in the name of protecting families.

The night before, the Moms for Liberty summit had their welcoming reception at the Museum of the American Revolution, activists with Refuse Fascism displayed a series of slides on the entrance to the museum reading: “Tomorrow we’re hosting Moms for Liberty”, Tomorrow, we’re hosting Daughters of the Confederacy”, “Tomorrow, we’re hosting Women of the Klan”, “Tomorrow we’re hosting Mothers of the Fatherland”, “Tomorrow, we’re hosting Moms for Liberty.”

Historian Dr. Nicole Hemmer, in her op ed on CNN, provides crucial history on the women who propelled white supremacy through schools and society. She writes, “The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920’s, which had a women’s axillary, the WKKK, that brought the Klan’s anti-black, anti-semitic, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant politics to places like schools and churches.” She goes on to say, “Precisely because women had long been excluded from electoral politics, however, they had tended to be most active in institutions considered part of the “women’s sphere”, schools, churches, charities and settlement houses.”

As Dr. Butler’s work reminds us, many white women came to political life in the massive resistance to school desegregation, becoming a major political force. Dr. Hemmer makes the connections to Moms for Liberty, stating, “Many white mothers argued that the Supreme Court had superseded local and parental authority.” This is in relation to Brown v Board. “They sought to wrest back control by adopting segregationist textbooks, promoting private academies, and at times shutting down Public Schools altogether, while conducting private lessons at home.”

Meanwhile, the ‘Save our Children’ campaign of the late 70s spread dehumanizing lies that LGBT people are pedophiles or groomers, leading to mass hysteria, that people who defy patriarchal gender norms are a dangerous threat to our children. Sound familiar? That campaign’s charismatic leader, Anita Bryant, used her identity as a mother to make moral arguments for stripping gay folks of their rights, which they successfully did in Miami, where they eliminated employment protections for gay workers.

One key point that Dr. Hemmer makes in her article that’s worth really thinking about is this: “These mothers’ movements, from the WKKK, to Massive Resistance (to desegregation), to Save Our Children, all relied on the image of mothers protecting children, but they were in service of a much larger political project: shoring up traditional hierarchies of race and sexuality. They were about motherhood and education, but as a means to an end.

Moms for Liberty operates in precisely the same way, building on this century-long tradition, the book bans, the curriculum battles, the efforts to fire teachers and disrupt school board meetings — little here is new, except perhaps the proximity to presidential power. The WKKK, Massive Resistance, ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights) and Save our Children were all influential political movements with profound consequence for US politics, but they did not draw former and potentially future presidents into their circle of influence so quickly.”

As Refuse Fascism has stated and will continue to state, this continuity of the past does not negate the urgency at the present. We have a wealth of history to compare our experience to. We have mounting evidence that fits known pattern we should recognize, acknowledge and unite against. Those who rule are deeply divided in a way they have not been since the Civil War. This is a country ripped apart with one section moving toward an outright fascist form of rule — Republi-fascist — with the other fighting for the way things have been, including the foul legacies I just mentioned — those aligned with the Democratic Party.

What we are witnessing is a dramatic metastasis of the frustrated ambitions of a white supremacist Christian fascist movement — one that did tremendous damage in the four years they held power — one that nearly succeeded in overturning an election, and a base that is only hardened since their coup attempt. As Dr. Butler aptly notes, “The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Moms for Liberty as an “Anti-government organization,” but Moms for Liberty isn’t anti-government, it seeks to reshape the government in a way that would essentially limit democracy.”

As Refuse Fascism has stated and will continue to state: Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive reinstitution of oppressive, “traditional values.” Fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build the movement and consolidate power. What is crucial to understand is that once in power, fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights. Fascism has direction and momentum, dissent is piece by piece criminalized, the truth is bludgeoned, group after group is demonized and targeted along a trajectory that leads to real horrors. All of this took dramatic leaps under the Trump regime. History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late.

Now, here’s my interview with David. Last week we gave a brief update on the Moms for Liberty summit that was held in Philadelphia that Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump and lesser GOP hopefuls spoke at. Today, we’re going to get into how and why Moms for Liberty have become such major players, both influencing and advancing what we on the show, call the Republi-fascist cause.

To do that, I am so happy to talk to David Gilbert, senior reporter for VICE.com, who recently wrote an article titled: The GOP is lining up to pay homage to America’s newest extremist group, Moms for Liberty. It was last week’s recommended reading, and shout out to David P. for encouraging me to reach out to David to bring him on to the show. Our listeners are awesome. Welcome, David. Thanks for joining us.

David Gilbert 11:00

Great to be here Sam, thanks for having me.

Sam Goldman 11:03

Let’s start with reminding our listeners who Moms for Liberty are. What do these mama bears actually do? Or as ABC insanely put out these joyful warriors who are just fighting back?

David Gilbert 11:17

What they do is they market themselves extremely well. I was speaking to Mark Cunningham recently, he’s a professor who’s tracked this group closely, and he is of the opinion that what they are is a marketing group. They portray themselves, as you said, as this grassroots moms group who are just concerned about students rights, and they ironically, I guess, call themselves these joyful warriors, but there’s nothing joyful about what they do. They use harassment tactics, they berate school board members, they are undermining LGBTQ rights, they are banning books, they are limiting what kids learn about in schools across the country.

But it’s all wrapped up in this shiny package of kind of suburban moms who are just out fighting for their kids rights. And who wouldn’t support that? It kind of reminds me a bit of — I covered QAnon conspiracies while they lasted, and those conspiracies repackaged under the Save the Children mantra i kind of 2020/2021, and that really got a lot of people on board because, again, who doesn’t want to save the children? It’s a great thing to do. What they do is they push this kind of far right, Christian nationalist agenda, but do it in such a way that it seems as if it’s just a couple of moms who are looking out for their kids education. And that has been an extremely, extremely powerfully successful way of getting their policies and their messages adopted across the country.

Sam Goldman 12:49

One of the things that strikes me is how been able to take, as you said, QAnon like ideas, put them forward into a much more mainstream audience ready language and packaging. Their program has been so effective that at their summit, they had headliners like Trump and DeSantis. Haley and others. One of the things that you did in your piece was you talked about some of the other players that they have onboarded that I would call Christian fascists, I think you might use the terms Christian nationalist, or you might talk about extremists. Can you tell our listeners about some of the other speakers that they’ve collaborated with, what they were presenting on, and kind of why they should alarm people

David Gilbert 13:36

From the very beginning, the group has been kind of in bed with the GOP. Bridget Ziegler, one of the co-founders who’s no longer officially involved — her husband was the vice chair at the time, he’s now the chair of the GOP in Florida. So it’s always been very, very closely linked with these groups. Other groups and it was linked to from very early on with groups like the Leadership Institute and the Council for National Policy, who are kind of these right wing groups who for decades have been pushing this idea to undermine education; to basically eradicate the Department of Education, pushing private schooling, religious school in homeschooling. So they were in bed with those as well.

The policies that the Council for National Policy had kind of created, and the Leadership Institute were kind of implementing are being pushed wholesale by Moms for Liberty. So that’s this kind of far right conservative idea of what education should be. So what we saw was the culmination of that at their summit last week, where they were able to get, as you say, headliners like Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, all vying for the presidency in 2024, speaking at the conference, because they see that these are a really engaged group of women who will be hugely valuable to them come 2024, to get people to vote.

Kind of below that surface then, you have a list of speakers: KrisAnne Hall — she’s a member of the Oathkeepers, she’s spoken at white supremacy rallies before, she’s a Christian nationalist — she was speaking at the event as well and she is espouses this really hateful rhetoric about immigrants and non Christian, non white people. That kind of typifies the level of people that are engaging with Moms for Liberty, and who Moms for Liberty are happy to give a platform to.

You also had speaking, actually at the opening night, was Tim Barton, and he is from a group called the Wall Builders his dad, David Barton, founded, who’s this kind of pseudo historian who claims that the Founding Fathers created America as a Christian nation. He came up with this idea of this black robe regiment. It’s a complete myth of these pastors who took up arms against the British during the revolution and lead their flocks into battle. It never happened, but they’ve created this myth, and now there’s a new modern day black robe regiment after being created as well, and they are now waging a similar war online and trying to bring their parishioners with them — so he was speaking.

Throughout the weekend, at the summit, you had numerous people who are pushing this Christo-fascist idea of what America should be, and it had very, very little connection to education or to what was being taught in schools. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of: This is our vision for what education should be and how our kids should be taught. Instead, they were just pushing these talking points and talking about how they were anti woke and how the left and liberals and Democrats are trying to indoctrinate our kids — basically speaking in conspiracies without actually doing anything or speaking about education at all.

Sam Goldman 16:34

Correct me if I’m wrong. Am I correct that Ryan Walters spoke? [DG: Yeah] For listeners, Ryan Walters is Oklahoma State Superintendent of Education and Public Instruction, I think is the precise term.

David Gilbert 16:47

Yeah. He spoke on a forum with Nikki Haley about future American education.

Sam Goldman 16:51

Yeah. He is someone who fully embraces the absolute Trumpian 1776 project. He was in a forum, something was posed about teaching particular historic events, so they’re in Oklahoma, and the teaching of the Tulsa massacre was brought up. He was saying that we should teach the Tulsa massacre but not teach that the massacre was an act of white supremacist violence; that Tulsa race massacre should be taught but not that it happened because of the color of people’s skin. When they’re talking about anything that touches education, this is the type of thing that they’re talking about.

David Gilbert 17:29

Ryan Walters, he was one of, I think, three people — there was the Secretary of Education of Arkansas, Jacob Olivia, was also speaking on that panel and Ellen Weaver from South Carolina, she’s the Superintendent of Education. But these are people who are in the education system. These aren’t concerned parents, these aren’t [just] conservatives, these are people who are running public education in their states. The kind of range of viewpoints that they have and what you spoke about, Tulsa, that’s the perfect example.

Ryan Walters is completely anti-teacher. He is in the past compared teacher unions to terrorist organizations and claimed that teachers who taught kids anything to do with LGBTQ rights, were pro pedophile. If you have those people running the public education system already in your state, then Mom for Liberty are obviously going to jump on that they’re going to bring you there, and they’re going to say that this is how the education system should be run all across America, not just in this particular state. And that’s deeply troubling. Because these are the people who are already in there, they’re already running the system, they have been elected, they’ve been put in place to take care of your kids, yet they are supposing these really, really dangerous fascist ideas openly.

Sam Goldman 18:40

The overt nature of it is deeply, deeply concerning. How did Moms for Liberty, a group that barely existed two years ago, that came out of the anti-COVID guidelines world’s become such a force where every GOP candidate has to go to where as you put it “The well funded and well connected darling of the far right?” How did they get to this point? Can you tell us a little bit more about how that happened?

David Gilbert 19:14

The official start of Moms for Liberty was, January 1, 2021. They incorporated as a nonprofit, a 501C4, which means that no one can see who is donating to them because it’s dark money effectively. But it actually started a few months before that, and it was started because Tina Descovich, one of the co founders, lost her school board and a deeply red county to Jennifer Jenkins, and it was highly embarrassing because Trump won that county by 10, 16 points, something huge.

So Tina Descovich decided, along with another woman who lost her school board seat in a neighboring county, Tiffany Justice, that they would start this group as a kind of way to fight back. Initially, all they were doing was attacking the school board members who took their seats. But then, when Bridget Ziegler got involved, and her husband, as I mentioned, was at the time, the co chair of the Florida GOP, and so he was kind of highly influential, and DeSantis was kind of an ally of his as well, it seems that Moms for Liberty changed, and what they were about changed — what they were going to do.

Initially, it seemed like they were just kind of set up as a very local, parochial thing where they’re going to attack a particular person or a group of people. When Bridget Ziegler got involved, and it was incorporated as a 501(C) (4), Christian Ziegler had said previously that he’d always wanted a vehicle to get parents, and moms in particular, active politically. So he obviously saw this as a way of doing that.

What it then developed into very, very quickly, they got onto Fox News, they got onto Steve Bannon’s War Room, they got huge national coverage within like three, four months of funding, which is unheard of for a nonprofit — but not for nonprofit, which has huge ties to the GOP, to the Leadership Institute, to The Council of National Policy. So it very quickly gained momentum because it leveraged its links in those areas. It also had funding, so it was able to start a proper website and they were able to promote themselves and they were able to spread really quickly across the country.

This was because they had jumped on the mask mandates and COVID policies that schools have implemented across the country, so that was their first kind of rallying cry, and they became the kind of face of the right’s push back against COVID restrictions. So that helped them recruit a huge number of people all across states, because no matter where you are, there were people who didn’t believe that those masking policies and that COVID policies should be in place. So from California to Florida, and in between, they were able to start up new chapters, they got people on board, and it grew at a rapid pace.

I think the latest figures I saw was that there was nearly 300 chapters now in 45 different states and that’s 130,000 members. It’s kind of tapered off a little bit, but it’s still growing. Once the mask mandate stuff kind of calmed down, then they moved into CRT, that was the next kind of big hot button issue for the right, so Moms for Liberty jumped on that. What you see with Moms for Liberty is they claim it’s this grassroots movement, but it’s actually an astroturf movement where the message is designed at the top and it’s spread.

That’s how they were able to grow so quickly, because they were able to jump from one topic to another and they were then able to go and use a centralized messaging to get their message across. They knew it worked so they spread it to all chapters across the country. Initially as mask mandates, then CRT and then they moved on to the anti LGBTQ movement, especially in Florida with it ‘don’t say gay’ bill, and then more recently, it’s banning books. That’s been a huge thing. They’ve even launched the subgroups within Moms for Liberty just specifically to tackle book bans. They were able to get people involved because they spoke about the issues that were exciting the Republican base at the time; masking CRT, LGBTQ rights, book bans.

As I said at the start, they market themselves really, really well; they have a very good clear, simple message that these are just moms out to protect their kids, and who can argue with that.

Sam Goldman 23:15

And they’ve made these shifts — as you detailed the anti mask/anti vaccine mandates to CRT to anti LGBTQ and book banning, all while they’ve been doing that, they’ve been gaining momentum; they’ve been growing this whole time for an overall program and power that is now nationwide. I’m wondering what shifts do you see them going after next? Or do you think this anti LGBTQ, in particular this anti trans campaign — I think, in my opinion, that may may last because it’s continuing in a more fervent way to me than the anti CRT stuff. What are your thoughts on this? Do you see something that’s next in line for them? You know, they never give up the target. It’s not like they gave up on being anti CRT. They hold on it. They just add targets.

David Gilbert 24:05

I don’t think if you ask Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich themselves, they probably wouldn’t be able to tell you because they don’t ultimately decide. It’s the Leadership Institute, it’s Morton Blackwell at the Leadership Institute or the Council for National Policy and there are people in the background pulling the strings on Moms for Liberty, which is pretty clear that they do whatever their puppet masters tell them to do.

I agree 100% that the trans issue is going to speak here for a while. They may just write it straight into the 2024 election because I think the GOP see it as a big message that they want to push. We saw the shooter in Philadelphia on Monday was a man with two pictures of him dressed in women’s clothing on his Facebook page along with dozens and dozens of posts about the Second Amendment and being pro-guns and pro-Trump and anti-Joe Biden. But they picked up on those two pictures and they labeled him a trans shooter, which, this has become thing in the far right because there was the Nashville shooter who identified as a transgender man earlier on the year, and suddenly, they now claimed that this is an epidemic, effectively.

It’s kind of like the satanic panic back in the 1980s. They’re building it up, building it up. His grandmother came out on Wednesday and said he wasn’t trans. The police have said he only identifies as a man, he is not trans. That doesn’t matter. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s tweet saying another trans shooting is still up there, still getting views. That is the issue I think. It’s the one that has the most legs, I think, of what they’ve been talking about. Something else may come along, because who knows what they’re gonna get mad at next.

I wouldn’t be surprised, if Trump wins the vote, there’s going to be a huge push to resurrect the 2020 election was stolen, elections are fraudulent, all that stuff, that they then become a vehicle for that. Could they possibly be used to go out to finance or ballot boxes? They could kind of be subsumed into all of that next year in the lead up to the election, that they become these kinds of groups who are monitoring voting. It’s highly possible that that could happen because they are this active engaged base all across the country and they could be deployed to do something like that.

Sam Goldman 26:13

I wanted to go back to this tricky dynamic that I think that Moms for Liberty is having to deal with this tension, and I wanted to get your read on it. There’s this tension within the American fascist movement between this desire to demolish public education, while also remaking it as a tool for indoctrination, as a tool to further their overall agenda. I think that that to some people is just very contradictory. How can they want to simultaneously have a nationwide curriculum — the 1776 project, for example — while simultaneously saying: We don’t want a Department of Education?

You have both Trump and DeSantis, both talking out both sides of their mouth. they both were saying: We’re gonna get rid of the Department of Education. Trump didn’t use those exact words, but basically [DF: Yeah] aluded to that. DeSantis used those exact words. But also talking about having national rules for education. Where does Moms for Liberty sit in that? And how can we understand that dynamic?

David Gilbert 27:23

Yeah, it’s a really, really interesting topic. I was speaking to Peter Montgomery, from Right Wing Watch about this exact thing last week. It’s really interesting to see what people are saying and what they’re doing. I think Ron DeSantis is an interesting example, as you said. He’s flat out said that he wants to get rid of the Department of Education. But at the same time, if you look at what he is doing in Florida, he is actually using the levers of power that he has at his disposal as Governor, to push the most draconian and right wing and conservative rules into place in education and elsewhere.

You’ll see Moms for Liberty wearing those shirts saying “we don’t co-parent with the government.” They seem to have come to the conclusion that they need to be in power, So that’s why they’re pushing either their members or their preferred candidates onto school boards. And they’re not only just saying this scattergun approach, Ron DeSantis is sitting down with Moms for Liberty and saying: Okay, we’re in Florida, can we target that we will then split the board conservatives so that we have control and we can push through these agendas. So he did that last year, he’s done it again this year.

That’s what they’re doing. They are going after power, but it’s kind of hypocritical, obviously, because they’re saying “we don’t co parent with the government”, but they’re also wanting to be in government because they want to be in control. We saw it with Bridget Ziegler and Sarasota County. She is the chair of the board there, now, and she, earlier this year, attempted to bring in a consultant from the conservative college Hillsdale to introduce Christian curriculum that had been developed at that school into her district.

Now, just beware her children do not go to public school, so it wouldn’t affect her kids, but she wants to push it on other kids. Now, thankfully, because of the activists, the actual grassroots groups that have grown up to combat Moms for Liberty, they were able to stop it. They highlighted it, they protested at school board meeting, and even one of Ziegler’s own Republican school board members who she helped get elected, voted against her, which was a huge deal, because she thought she would be able to get it through without any problem.

That is a kind of example of how they are using their positions of power within the system to undermine the system. I think that’s their goal. I think that’s how they see it; that if Trump or DeSantis whoever gets into power that maybe they won’t eradicate the Department of Education, but they’ll turn it into a Department of Education that they can get behind. Because I think they seem to be coming around to the understanding that they won’t be able to get rid of the Department of Education, so what they need to do is they need to remold and recreate the Department of Education and their Christo-fascist kind of worldview. That’s terrifying.

Sam Goldman 30:03

Agreed. What do you say t o people who say that Moms for Liberty is Tea Party 2.0?

David Gilbert 30:10

I think it’s much more dangerous than Tea Party 2.0. It’s much more organized, it’s much slicker. It’s much more cohesive in terms of its messaging. It’s not fighting against a lot of people in the Republican Party, it’s kind of being embraced wholesale by the Republican Party. I don’t know anyone on the Republican Party who’s spoken out against Moms for Liberty. I guess you could call it an evolution because they maybe you have seen what the Tea Party was about and are kind of going: Okay, well, this is what we can do better and this is what we can do better. I can understand why people would call it that, but I think it’s a much more kind of concerning group than if the Tea Party kind of was relaunched.

Sam Goldman 30:49

I wanted to kind of look at the Moms for Liberty movement with a little bit more of a historical lens, basically, because of what you just said there in terms of the level of concern that that they should rightly raise in people. While there are new dynamics at play here, you can’t help but look at, in this country, historical parallels to Moms for Liberty; the white women screaming at children during the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the process of integration. How does Moms for Liberty fit into what some may call the long standing right wing cult of motherhood; the right wing framing of themselves as the protectors and champions of families and family values, both here and now and in the fascist movements historically, around the world?

David Gilbert 31:43

I think they fit in perfectly because they are aligning perfectly with the view of womanhood is to a lot of people in those communities; they were seen as mothers, kind of primarily, and housewives. The fact that they’re standing up for their kids, and that they are standing up for traditional values means that they are prototypical women within those groups, the concerns that they’re raising are not new. It’s just that in this kind of hyper-connected world, where lives of TikTok can edit the video quickly and posted out of context on Twitter and get huge outrage clicks, where people are outraged in their millions, instantly, rather than maybe kind of a slow, slow buildup of outrage in decades in the past through the media and whatever else.

They’re kind of a modern day version of those women that are screaming at the civil rights organizations I’m still not convinced whether they’re going to be this long lasting group that will be written about in decades to come, or whether they are just a vehicle through which the kind of people who have been there for decades, like Reagan’s people who were involved in the Moral Majority. They had this idea that they would bring the U.S. back to this Christian nation, even though it was never a Christian nation — let’s not get into that. They have been specifically created to advance this agenda.

Now, whether that agenda succeeds, and you get a new education system in the U.S. is dependent, I guess, on who gets elected as president in 2024. And if it does happen, then Mom for Liberty will lose a lot of their reason for being and a lot of people will just stop supporting them or will ignore them effectively. But if it doesn’t happen, then they’re probably just going to continue to grow and get stronger and louder. And I think then they could become a group that defines this era of, as they put it, a battle between good and evil for a lot of their supporters, which is crazy. But that’s how they are kind of laying out the battlefield.

They’re saying that everyone who opposes them is evil, and they’re the ones trying to do good by protecting people by putting Christian values back at the center of US society. I think it’s hard to position them in historical context, but it’s nothing revolutionary what they’re doing, but they’re doing it now on the internet, where they can get their message across much faster, and therefore, that’s how they’ve been able to grow so quickly, because people have heard about them.

Whereas previously, all they could do is show up at rallies or marches or protests and they wouldn’t be able to create this kind of massive interconnected network of like minded people across the country. I think the jury’s still out on how they’ll be judged historically, whether there’ll be a footnote or something more substantial.

Sam Goldman 31:54

There’s also the role that the media plays in terms of determining that. It’s not the only only way, you know. Power is the most fundamental to the degree in which they lock down state houses across the country and seal in leadership that aligns with their worldview, the degree to which they propel forward in terms of re-seizing power within the White House, all of those things are paramount. But I do think that there is a role that greases the wheels to that re-seizure of power that the media plays, and I think that one of the things Is that we’ve seen if we look at some of these more traditional male foot soldiers to the Christo fascist movement.

You look at, like a Patriot Front, who overwhelmingly have very little power, and the coverage they get and the fact that they are looked at as extremists by all media platforms that aren’t overtly fascist — I’m not talking about how Newsmax might cover them. I’m talking about traditional mainstream news — they may say that they’re a joke, but that their ideas are white supremacist. They are an all male entity. And the way that Moms for Liberty gets covered, their threat is kind of lessened and kind of belittled.

I’m not advocating for Moms for Liberty, but I do believe that women fascists should be taken seriously, too. They’re like: These are the cute and cuddly ones, and those are those real scary ones, even though there’s interplay between the two — when you look at Proud Boys and Moms for Liberty, there’s not just interplay, [DG: massive overlap.] but collaboration

David Gilbert 36:05

You’re absolutely correct in terms of how the two different types of fascists are portrayed. I see Moms for Liberty as this undercover group who are infiltrating America in the name of fascism, but looking like these white blond suburban moms in in nice clothes and white teeth. They don’t look as if they’re going to do anything dangerous, yet the amount of damage that they have done to people’s lives and kids lives and kids educations compared to what Patriot Front has done is absolutely incomparable.

Patriot Front, what have they done effectively? Whereas Moms for Liberty have impacted probably millions of kids lives by banning books, limiting what access they have to information. I’ve spoken to people whose lives have been destroyed effectively because of the harassment they face from Moms for Liberty members who kind of targeted them and set their members upon them. It’s really weary, seeing the type of coverage that Moms for Liberty gets, still, in the mainstream media, even after everything that’s come out about them. They’re still given a pass.

It’s kind of this thing where there are a lot of media trying to be impartial, but by being impartial, they’re ignoring the facts — that this group is trying to destroy people’s lives. It is undermining minority groups, it is attacking minority groups, it is making their lives worse, it is undermining kids educations. Yet they’re just a parental rights group. They’re not called far right, they’re not called fascists, they’re not called dangerous, all of which are terms that should be used for them. Their links to the GOP and to other conservative groups are kind of ignored a lot of the time.

If the Patriot front was deeply connected to the GOP, do you think we’d not be hearing about that? Of course we would. But it just doesn’t come up because it’s not overt and it’s kind of in the background. And it’s like: Oh, well, that’s just politics or something. It’s troubling, but again, it comes back to the fact that the GOP saw this as a perfect vehicle because they knew this would happen. They knew that Moms for Liberty would not be attacked by the mainstream media. Who’s going to attack a group called Moms for Liberty, with people like Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice as their spokespeople who are very impressive when they’re speaking in public and can talk in platitudes about problems that they see in the education system that kind of, if you listen to them without context, they make it seem as if, yeah, maybe there is an issue here.

But if you actually look at what’s happening on the ground, in reality, and give people that context, you’d never give those people a platform because, would you have the leaders of the Patriot front on your Sunday morning show on CBS without critically questioning them about their motives? I completely agree with you that a lot of the media has gotten Moms for Liberty very wrong a lot of times, and even still they do it.

Sam Goldman 38:59

As we close out the interview, I wanted to ask: If you were to write your article after this summit, what would you add?

David Gilbert 39:06

What I would add… I suppose when I was writing the article, obviously the summit hadn’t happened, we didn’t see what people were talking about, and were kind of looking at people’s past. I was talking about Ryan Walters there and the stuff he had said in the past and many other people there who had said kind of really disturbing things in the past. And what I would write after the summit is just how mind bogglingly it is to see these people so openly express the opinions that they expressed.

Several speakers commented on the fact that one of the Moms for Liberty groups quoted Hitler the week before the summit in their newsletter. They didn’t reference it saying or they shouldn’t have done it, they referenced it saying: Oh, they should never have apologized for it, or they should never have taken it down. What amazed me reading through the comments of what people said at the thing was just how this isn’t being hidden. This is out there, this is in the open. They’re happy to talk about how they want to create this Christian nationalist, Christian fascist, whatever you want to call it, education system, and that everyone has to get in line and get behind it.

The breakout sessions where Christian Ziegler was running one group, talking about how to master the spin. So, they’re constantly working on their marketing. The groups the chapter leaders I’ve written about, and their horrible harassment campaigns and their links to Proud Boys, if I’m writing about that in a year’s time, we won’t see any of that because they’ll have moved those people out. They’ll have massaged the PR because they realize that even though a lot of the mainstream media are ignoring them, those stories are not good for their brand.

So they have removed the troubling people who are involved with Mom for Liberty and replaced them with more Tina Descovich-es, more Tiffany Justice-s, more Bridget Ziegler-s. They’ll get those people to talk about Christian nationalism and fascism and put it in a way that people will kind of think: Oh, that’s okay, they’re just moms, they’re just protecting their kids. That was my big takeaway from the weekend, is just how much they don’t care about openly stating the stuff that we think is extremely dangerous and worrying.

Sam Goldman 41:08

Thanks, David, for coming on and talking with us, for sharing your expertise, your perspective and your time. If, because I know folks will want to read more of your reporting, where should they go?

David Gilbert 41:22

You can just find me if you go on Twitter, you can find me, I’m David Gilbert [@Daithaigilbert], I’m on Blue Sky if you don’t want to be on Twitter, which most people don’t. I’m on Instagram. If you just Google David Gilbert in any of those platforms, you’ll get me, or else just go to VICE.com and you’ll find my reporting there.

Sam Goldman 41:38

Historian Dr. Gillian Frank pointedly wrote that “In the 1930’s, James Waterman Wise famously warns that American fascism would be “Wrapped up in the American flag,” and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the Constitution.” Wise was partially right. These anti-democratic impulses also come wrapped in images of family and as pleas to save “our” children. Indeed, Moms for Liberty’s well tested strategy of protecting “our” children from external dangers reinforces the notion that LGBTQ and African American youth are not “us,” and that they and their stories do not belong in “our” spaces.

Even more pernicious, the language of paternalism and child protection seeks to obscure the anti-democratic political machinery at play to make the work look “homey and grassroots.” Look, if you are still relying on institutions to save us, it’s time to wakey, wakey! The latest case in point being the Sixth Circuit allowing Tennessee’s ban on gender affirming care for minors to go into effect. These fascist bans, nothing short of violence against our trans youth, must be stopped! We must stop them! It’s on us to sound the alarm to get loud, louder, still and relentless in our refusal of fascism for all our children, and the world they will inherit!

Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts, questions, ideas for topics or guests. Or lend a skill. Tweet me, Yeah, still there @SamBGoldman, or you can drop me a line at [email protected]. We are also now on threads, Refuse Fascism on there. We’re on Mastodon as well. See the show notes for links. You can also see a link in the show notes to leave us a voicemail. So try that out.

Want to support the show? It’s simple! Show us some love by rating and reviewing on Apple podcasts or your listening platform of choice. And of course, subscribe so you never miss an episode. Become a patron to support our pod and content creation to help people understand and act to stop the fascist threat. For as little as $2 a month. You can help make a difference in producing and promoting this independent weekly podcast. Sign up at $5 a month and you’ll get an invite for a virtual Q&A with Coco Das and me on July 23. It’s happening! You want to give today at patreon.com/refuseFascism or donate at RefuseFascism.org.

Big Big thanks to Richie Marini for dealing with my terrible audio this week. Thanks to Lina Thorne and Mark Tinkleman for also helping produce this episode. Thanks to incredible volunteers. We have transcripts available for each show. So be sure to visit refuse fascism.org and sign up to get them in your inbox. We’ll be back next Sunday. Until then, in the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America!