'A leftist attack': Co-founder of Moms for Liberty rejects SPLC's 'extremist' label

After the Southern Poverty Law Center announced it was designating the right-wing school activist group Moms For Liberty as an extremist group, one of the group's three co-founders questioned the research organization's credibility and called the label "reckless."

"Outside of it being a leftist attack, political hit job, there's no credibility behind it. It's truly laughable," said Bridget Ziegler, one of the Florida-based group's co-founders, who is the chair of the Sarasota School Board.

Moms for Liberty and 11 other groups were labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as "anti-government extremist groups," according to a report released by the group Tuesday.

The SPLC, a civil rights advocacy nonprofit organization, detailed the new designations in its annual 2022 Year in Hate and Extremism report. The SPLC’s standard criteria for determining if a group is anti-government is spelled out on its website:

“An anti-government group is an organization or collection of individuals that — based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities — believes the federal government is tyrannical and traffics in conspiracy theories about an illegitimate government of leftist elites seeking a ‘New World Order.’”

Ziegler did not respond to requests for comment from USA TODAY, but later told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune on Tuesday night that she believed the SPLC had no merit.

"The Southern Poverty Law Group is not a legitimate organization with any merit," Ziegler said, misstating the SPLC's name. "Outside of it being a leftist attack, political hit job, there's no credibility behind it. It's truly laughable."

"They're utilizing the term hate group in a very reckless manner and I think that they should be held accountable," she said, mischaracterizing the SPLC's designation. The organization labeled Moms for Liberty an "anti-government extremist group," but did not list it among the 523 hate groups it tallies nationwide.

The SPLC is one of the most widely recognized research organizations tracking hate and extremism in the United States. Being added to its watchlist means almost certain notoriety. Over the years, the center has brought new focus to self-described militias, anti-immigrant groups and outright hate groups. The SPLC has also sued hate groups and individual extremists in the civil courts, often with great success.

But the SPLC has also been criticized for designating as extremist some groups that argue they simply take a political position, and has defended itself in lawsuits, including from immigration policy groups it has designated as anti-immigrant hate groups.

In 2018 the SPLC paid $3.38 million and issued public apologies to Maajid Nawazan, an Islamic activist and the founder of the Quilliam Foundation, to avoid a defamation lawsuit after the SPLC labeled him and others as “anti-Muslim extremists.”

Alexis Spiegelman, the Sarasota chapter chair of Moms for Liberty, said the mission of the group is to protect parental rights in education, which she said were "God-given and fundamental."

"You'd have to ask, what kind of government are (SPLC) advocating for? Because we're just pushing back against government overreach and a tyrannical form of government that does not align with our founding principles or constitution," she said.

"Parents' rights" groups: SPLC designates a key Florida group as anti-government extremists

Growing influence of Moms For Liberty

The 12 new groups added to the SPLC's roundup brought the total number of active "extremist" groups listed in the 2022 report to 1,225 nationwide. That’s almost flat from 2021 when the SPLC counted 1,221 extremist groups.

Founded by three Florida Republicans in 2021, as a “social-welfare” nonprofit group, Moms for Liberty can engage in political activity without disclosing its financial backers.

The group pitched itself as a potent grassroots movement of outraged parents, many of whom weren’t active in school politics until COVID-19 restrictions forced them to pay attention. It has sprouted local chapters in at least 40 states, claims more than 100,000 members and has the ear of the Republican establishment: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has championed their efforts to restrict teaching about race in schools and universities. Critics in Florida slam the group for turning schools into a political battlefield.

That influence solidified the group’s position in national politics. At the end of this month, barely two years after the group came into existence, both DeSantis and former President Donald Trump will speak at Moms for Liberty’s national summit in Philadelphia and may now compete to win the Moms for Liberty vote.

Designated 'extremist'

The SPLC study concludes the group is part of a broader anti-government movement focused on local politics that sprung up during the coronavirus pandemic. Despite the national profile, these organizations spread conspiracy theories and operate on the myth that educators are engaged in “Marxist indoctrination” of the nation’s children by imbuing them with dangerous ideas about equality and sexuality, the SPLC said.

While the movement may be reasonably new, it is founded on the same traditional racist, misogynist and homophobic views that brought people out to protest the desegregation of schools in the 1950s and '60s, the SPLC argues.

“Over the past two years, reactionary anti-student inclusion groups have been popping up from coast to coast, claiming to battle for parents’ rights. Just like their predecessors, their rhetoric takes on marked anti-LGBTQ, racist and nationalist themes, excluding from their parental concern large demographic segments of American society,” the report states. “These groups publicize their fight for alleged parents’ rights while simply attempting to maintain absolute authority on issues they oppose.”

The primary focus of these groups has been twofold: They have fought against curriculums that teach about America’s racist and violent history and have more recently taken aim at any educational efforts to teach children about LGBTQ issues. To attract attention and seek new followers, groups like Moms for Liberty promote the false claim that left-wing teachers and educators are engaged in a conspiracy to “sexualize” or even “groom” the schoolchildren under their care.

It’s a narrative that has had significant success, the SPLC notes.

Moms for Liberty alone claims to have “flipped” 17 school boards nationwide to parental-rights supportive majorities, the report states. “Almost immediately following elections, many of these boards began making sweeping changes at school board meetings, such as firing superintendents and making curriculum changes,” the researchers found.

In Sarasota, Moms for Liberty-backed candidates helped overturn the ideological makeup of the school board, where a new, conservative-leaning board took over and immediately moved to fire the sitting superintendent Brennan Asplen.

This article originally appeared on USATNetwork: Moms for Liberty co-founder defends group after SPLC 'extremist' label