Moms for Liberty, with foothold in Livingston County, named 'extremist group'
LIVINGSTON COUNTY — The Southern Poverty Law Center is, for the first time, labeling several "parents' rights" groups as extremist, including one group with a member leading the Livingston County GOP.
The Florida-headquartered Moms for Liberty and 11 other right-wing “parents' rights” groups received the "extremist" designation in the SPLC's annual report released Tuesday, June 6.
Moms for Liberty and the other organizations are being designated as “anti-government extremist groups" based on longstanding criteria, SPLC Intelligence Project Director Susan Corke told USA TODAY. Corke said the grassroots conservative groups are part of a new front in the battle against inclusivity in schools, though they're drawing from ideas rooted in age-old white supremacy.
“[The movement] is primarily aimed at not wanting to include our hard history, topics of racism, and a very strong push against teaching anything having to do with LGBTQ topics in schools,” Corke said. ”We saw this as a very deliberate strategy to go to the local level.”
Jennifer Smith, who heads the Livingston County Chapter of Moms for Liberty, was elected chair of the Livingston County GOP in December to serve through 2023.
Smith has been a vocal opponent of quarantines, mask mandates and other public health policies discussed by school boards over the course of the pandemic.
More: Livingston County GOP selects new leadership
The 12 new groups brought the total number of active extremist groups to 1,225 nationwide. Of those, the SPLC designates 702 as anti-government groups and 523 as hate groups. That’s almost unchanged from 2021, when the SPLC counted 1,221 extremist groups.
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. (The organization is also currently fighting a lawsuit from Gavin McInnes, who founded the Proud Boys and who has argued the SPLC’s hate group designation harmed his career.)
Moms for Liberty did not respond to USA TODAY's request for comment Tuesday. Smith did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily.
The report also has other findings, including that the so-called “militia movement” declined significantly last year, that antisemitism continues to be a major force animating the extreme far-right and that alternative tech sites aren’t as niche as perhaps might be expected.
Moms for Liberty
Moms for Liberty has made headlines across the country since its founding in 2021.
The SPLC study concludes the group is part of a broader anti-government movement focused on local politics that sprung up during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Founded by three Florida Republicans, the “social-welfare” nonprofit group 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's 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.
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.
Smith in Livingston County has been vocal since the onset of the pandemic.
In December 2021, she filed lawsuits against some members of the Brighton Area Schools Board of Education, alleging a school board subcommittee in charge of public health policies violated the Open Meetings Act. She later dropped the suits.
She's faced backlash in the news and on social media for comments made during BAS board meetings — which some found threatening.
Brighton resident Sarah Cross was granted a temporary personal protection order against Smith in late November after Cross advocated for tougher COVID-19 protocols in the district. When she believed a pair of school board members disparaged her, coughed in her direction and dismissed COVID-19 safety, she sought recalls against them.
More: PPO against Livingston County GOP chair terminated by judge
Because of her COVID-19 stance and the recalls, Cross said Smith harassed her. She alleged Smith posted on social media that Cross was often alone while she collected recall signatures and that Smith and her husband allegedly drove by and made crude gestures to Cross while screaming insults at her.
The PPO was terminated in March after a judge said, although the harassment ended once the PPO was granted, there was no direct evidence to prove Smith was orchestrating the acts.
While the Moms for Liberty movement may be reasonably new, it's 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've 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's 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.
“They have just been really successful in leveraging their relationships with school officials, and extremist groups, to put them kind of in a place where they can make sweeping changes for the majority of people, when they're actually in the minority,” said Maya Henson Carey, a research analyst at SPLC.
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.’”
The SPLC report notes that, at the group's first national conference, former U.S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said, “I personally think that the Department of Education should not exist,” a quote the group then used on its website.
Moms for Liberty joins the ranks of the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters and the United Constitutional Patriots, a self-styled militia that “patrols” the U.S.-Mexico border.
The 12 "parents' rights" groups labeled by the SPLC as extremist groups include: Moms for Liberty; Moms for America; Army of Parents; Courage is a Habit; Education First Alliance; Education Veritas; No Left Turn in Education; Parents Against CRT (PACT); Parents Defending Education; Parents Rights in Education; Purple for Parents Indiana and Parents Involved in Education.
Other findings
The comprehensive annual SPLC report has a number of additional findings, including:
Extremist flyering and propaganda incidents continued to increase in 2022: The SPLC counted 155 incidents on campuses, 4,739 public propaganda incidents and 169 “banner drops” where groups hung hateful messages on banners in public spaces. Flyering incidents have increased 291 percent since 2018, the report found.
Hate at public events: As USA TODAY has reported, the SPLC found that hate groups have increasingly descended on public events, primarily targeting drag shows and school board meetings to protest against LGBTQ-inclusive programming.
The so-called “constitutional sheriffs” movement continues: In 2022, members of the group, who believe that local sheriffs are the highest authority in the country and are not beholden to state or federal law enforcement, began interfering with elections, the SPLC said. “Members melded their extremist positions with their law enforcement authority to investigate rogue, conspiratorial allegations of fraud in the 2020 presidential election and brought doubt into the legitimacy of the 2022 midterm elections,” the report states. The movement has also been used to react to gun laws. Livingston County joined the fray in April in reaction to newly passed and proposed gun control laws in Michigan. Although such resolutions are symbolic and have no legal basis, they establish county officials' mindsets when it comes to enforcing and funding gun control measures passed by a higher legislative body.
Antisemitism continues to motivate the extremist far-right: “In 2022, Jewish people and spaces were regularly harassed, assaulted, vandalized and threatened,” the report found.
— Contact executive editor Sarah Leach at sleach@livingstondaily.com. Follow her on Twitter @SentinelLeach.
This article originally appeared on Livingston Daily: Moms for Liberty, with foothold in Livingston County, named 'extremist group'
