"We are people that do not back down," Moms co-founder Tina Descovich tells AFN. “When you tell us we can't do something, it emboldens us to want to do it more and to work even harder."
Moms For Liberty was started in 2020 by Descovich and Tiffany Justice, both former public school members. Both were elected school board members in Florida during the COVID-19 pandemic when they witnessed parental frustration over closed schools and forced mask wearing. Both women saw how parents were ignored and mocked by school board members, too, and vowed to stand up for the parents who were standing up for their kids.
Descovich paid a price for standing up for parents. After publicly supporting open schools and opposing masks, she was defeated in her re-election bid for the Brevard School Board in the summer of 2020.
Justice, who served one term on the Indian River School Board, did not seek re-election for the seat in 2020.
During that same period, when fear over the pandemic died down, many parents had been jolted awake by their experience with their children’s schools and school boards. So those frustrated parents were paying closer attention when they learned the schools were teaching their children transgender-based ideology about gender and pronouns, and race-based “equity” curriculum based on Critical Race Theory.
Moms says it has grown to 285 chapters in 45 states, with 120,000 “joyful warriors” participating, so it is not surprising the fast-growing group caught the attention of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center. The group’s controversial “hate map” was updated this week to include Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and Parents Defending Education.
All three groups advocate for parental rights in schools and for that they are now designated “anti-government” groups by the SPLC.
American Family Association, the parent organization of American Family News, is also a "hate group" according to the SPLC.
Corke calls Moms 'new battlefront'
Southern Poverty’s new focus on parental rights groups is attributed to one SPLC employee, Susan Corke. A former globe-trotting State Department official, she now leads the “Intelligence Project” there that oversees and updates the “hate map” that includes literal Neo-Nazi groups as well as Moms for Liberty.
“Groups like Moms for Liberty are a new battlefront vs inclusivity in schools, but are rooted in age-old white supremacy,” Corke announced in a Tweet.
"This is a calculated attack,” Descovich counters, “to silence parents that have been very effective the last couple of years taking their seat back at the table and directing the education of their children.”
Alex Nester, with Parents Defending Education, tells AFN that group exists to help parents who express a “genuine concern” over what is happening in their children’s school.
“What's funny is we often fight schools who segregate kids or teachers by their race in the form of affinity groups,” she points out. “So it's really sad that this organization is slapping this silly label on us for doing things for parents."
It also shows a lot of chutzpah for Corke and the SPLC to link a parental-rights group with “white supremacy” since Southern Poverty’s own former employees have described a racist and sexist work environment at the Alabama-based organization.
'They cannot silence us'
According to Descovich, the new attention to parental rights at the SPLC is no accident. She has not forgotten how the Biden administration worked with the president of the National School Board Association, Chip Slaven, whose well-timed letter to the White House in 2021 asked the federal government to investigate parents.
Slaven's now-famous letter, which compared parents to "domestic terrorists," was drafted with help from the Biden administration. That fact was only uncovered thanks to a Freedom of Information request from Parents Defending Education, now designated a "hate group" according to the SPLC.
"This stuff – these behaviors, these attacks that are relentless and endless – started with the Biden administration,” she warns. “With the FBI and DOJ, with threat tags last year, and moved into the NSBA and other three-letter organizations within the U.S. government.”
In fact, according to The Washington Free Beacon, in its story about Moms for Liberty and the SPLC, Corke visited the White House with a team of SPLC-affiliated researchers as recently as January of this year.
Visitor logs show Corke and the left-wing researchers met with John Picarelli, who is counterterrorism director for the National Security Council, the Beacon reported.
“They all failed because they cannot silence us. They cannot stop us from trying to protect our children,” Descovich vows. “So now the Southern Poverty Law Center thinks that they can bully us into silence, and it's not going to happen."
