'Parents' rights' groups labeled extremist: SPLC lists a key Florida group as anti-government

The Southern Poverty Law Center is for the first time labeling Florida-headquartered Moms for Liberty and 11 other right-wing “parents' rights” groups as extremist groups in its annual report, released Tuesday.

Moms for Liberty and the other organizations are being designated as “anti-government extremist groups,” based on longstanding criteria, explained the law center's Intelligence Project Director Susan Corke. Corke said the grassroots conservative groups are part of a new front in the battle against inclusivity in schools, though they are 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.”

The new designations are detailed in the law center's annual 2022 Year in Hate and Extremism report.

The 12 new groups brought the total number of active extremist groups included in the 2022 report to 1,225 nationwide. Of those, the law center designates 702 as anti-government groups and 523 as hate groups. That’s almost flat from 2021 when the law center counted 1,221 extremist groups.

The Southern Poverty Law Center 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 law center has also sued hate groups and individual extremists in the civil courts, often with great success.

But the law center 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 also is fighting a lawsuit from Gavin McInnes, who founded the Proud Boys and who has argued the center's hate group designation harmed his career.)

Moms for Liberty did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

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 makes the extremist list

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The Florida-headquartered Moms for Liberty has hit the headlines across the country since its founding in 2021.

The law center study concludes the group is part of a broader anti-government movement focused on local politics that sprung up during the Coronavirus 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 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.

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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 law center 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 law center 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 law center 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 the law center.

The law center’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 law center report notes that at Moms for Liberty’s first national conference, former U.S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos stated “I personally think that the Department of Education should not exist,” a quote that the group then used on its website.

Moms for Liberty joins the ranks of groups including the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters and the United Constitutional Patriots, a self-styled militia that “patrols” the U.S.-Mexico border.

• The 12 "parent's rights" groups labeled by the SPLC as extremist groups: 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. "Nowhere ever have we been anti-government or anti-inclusive," Elicia Brand, who identified herself as the founder of Army of Parents, told USA TODAY in a statement.

‘Militia’ movement cratering

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Largely because of a law enforcement crackdown following the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, the so-called “militia movement” of armed extremists saw some of the wind taken out of its sails last year, the law center found.

Probably the country’s most high-profile armed militia leader, Stewart Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers, was found guilty of seditious conspiracy in a Washington, D.C., courtroom late last year, along with a co-conspirator. Last month, Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison – the longest sentence handed down to a Jan. 6 participant.

“The attention brought by the insurrection has done severe damage to the militia movement, driving away members who no longer want to be associated with the day’s violence,” the law center report states. Researchers found the total number of armed militia groups nationwide decreased from 92 in 2021 to 61 in 2022.

But that doesn’t mean the threat from organized armed groups has gone away, the law center warns. Anti-government rhetoric and beliefs run as deep, if not deeper, today as they have for decades. While organized militia groups may be out of vogue for now, their attraction persists for armed, conspiracy-minded Americans, the report concludes.

“As legal cases run their course through the justice system, militia groups have had to go underground to reorganize and recruit,” it states.

The law center report also includes several recommendations for keeping this trend going, including federal and state authorities using existing legislation that outlaws organized militias to hold these groups accountable and keep them from growing.

The alt-tech space isn’t that alternative

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For years now, since major tech companies started getting serious about enforcing their terms of service and de-platforming extremists in about 2018, a succession of “alt-tech” sites has grown up to cater to extremists, especially on the far-right.

Websites including social media platforms, crowdfunding sites and video-streaming services have grown to accommodate white supremacists and other extremists. And the law center's research shows that these sites aren’t quite as “alternative” as one might assume.

Law center researchers analyzed data estimating the number of people visiting 12 of these sites, including the message board 4Chan and the far-right social media site Gab.

“Five of the 12 sites that the SPLC analyzed regularly ranked among the top 10% of domains in the United States, according to data from the network security technology company Cisco,” the report states.

The growth of these sites has allowed far-right personalities and propagandists to thrive despite being banned from most of the major tech platforms, law center researchers concluded. The report states:

“We found that the majority of 'alt-tech' sites, whose purveyors emphasize minimal or nonexistent content moderation, have developed and sustained a dedicated user base. This stability allows hard-right extremists to resist some of the repercussions, such as loss of audience or funding streams, that result from deplatforming.”

Other findings

The comprehensive annual law center report includes a number of additional findings, including:

• Extremist flyering and propaganda incidents continued to increase in 2022: The law center 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 by 291% since 2018, the report found.

• Hate at public events: As USA TODAY has reported, the law center 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 law center 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.

• Antisemitism continues to motivate the extremist far-right: “In 2022, Jewish people and spaces were regularly harassed, assaulted, vandalized and threatened,” the report found.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: SPLC designates Moms for Liberty an anti-government extremist group