The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) strikes again. The organization, which used to be an honorable institution, has once again shown that it is nothing more than a propaganda mill filled with authoritarian leftist shills. The SPLC has placed Moms for Liberty, a parental rights advocacy group, on its hate list in an effort to paint the organization as a hate group.
For those who hadn’t already heard of the story, RedState’s Brittany Sheehanreported:
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has labeled Moms for Liberty, a grassroots organization advocating for parents’ rights, as an “anti-government” and “extremist” group in their 2022 Year in Hate & Extremism report released Tuesday.
In a statement released alongside the report, a representative from SPLC stated that Moms for Liberty stood out among a dozen groups as the premier “anti-student inclusion” group. The SPLC report alleges that the mommy group employs tactics such as intimidation and harassment of teachers and school officials, targeting teachers’ unions, and supporting legislation that progressives don’t like.
The SPLC’s report excoriates Moms for Liberty for its protests at school board meetings and advocacy against those pushing a progressive agenda in K-12 classrooms:
At the forefront of this mobilization is Moms for Liberty, a Florida-based group with vast connections to the GOP that this year the SPLC designated as an extremist group. They can be spotted at school board meetings across the country wearing shirts and carrying signs that declare, “We do NOT CO-PARENT with the GOVERNMENT.” The group hijacks meetings, preventing officials and parents from conducting their normal proceedings. “I can be sitting in a meeting minding my own business, and they turn around and scream at me that I am a commie and teachers want to see all kids fail,” a teacher’s union president in Brevard County, Florida, explained to a Washington Post reporter.
The report goes on to state that Moms for Liberty’s objectives are to “fuel right-wing hysteria and to make the world a less comfortable or safe place for certain students – primarily those who are Black, LGBTQ or who come from LGBTQ families.”
As an example, the SPLC cites an instance in which a Tennessee-based Moms for Liberty chapter objected to the inclusion of books about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ruby Bridges in second-grade classrooms.
Moms for Liberty rose to prominence over the past few years when a backlash arose against the revelation that progressives were introducing far-leftist ideas to small children. School districts across the country were infusing their curricula with concepts related to critical race theory and gender identity. The situation became even more pronounced when it became clear that these learning institutions are also encouraging children suffering from gender dysphoria to undergo “gender-affirming care” ostensibly to transition to the opposite sex.
The organization has received no small amount of vitriol from the hard left, which has pulled its collective hair out trying to discredit it. The SPLC is clearly attempting to up the ante in the left’s war against groups like Moms for Liberty by placing it on a list alongside actual hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis. It’s an old trick that the group has been using for decades. By including Moms for Liberty on its list, it is essentially branding them as a terrorist organization.
Sound familiar?
It’s the same tactic the left used when it convinced the Justice Department to approach parents protesting at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists.”
It’s clearly an act of desperation at this point. While I did not agree with the situation in Tennessee, it involved only one chapter and did not necessarily reflect the entire organization. Nevertheless, the activist media did what it always does: lie about it.
The real issue here is that the left sees that groups like Moms for Liberty and others are making headway in their efforts to prevent progressives from indoctrinating children into their ideology. They have been instrumental in electing school board officials who refuse to go along with the agenda. This is why groups like the SPLC are resorting to such malevolent tactics.
Of course, this will only fool people who already want to believe that Moms for Liberty is a hate group. But to the rest of the public, the propaganda effort might not be quite as successful given that most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, are not on board with what the left is trying to do with the education system.