The members of Moms for Liberty who invaded Philadelphia on the weekend before the July Fourth holiday called their gathering the Joyful Warriors National Summit, but as a scholar who attended the conference to get a look at the organization, I can report that its definition of joy isn’t the textbook one. It’s more like the joy that comes from cruelty. Its members are true culture warriors who see themselves as such, and Philadelphia was their big training ground to fight the “woke” public educational system and by extension, the United States.
I can report that its definition of joy isn’t a textbook one. It’s more like the joy that comes from cruelty.
As the group’s members walked between the many protesters lining the streets in front of the convention hotel, one could see how their disdain for those protesters steeled them for the work ahead. These moms are on a crusade, a holy calling. And that is what makes them dangerous and effective.
As a professor who has written for over 20 years about conservatives and women, it’s clear to me that Moms for Liberty isn’t just another flash-in-the-pan organization. It’s only existed since 2021, but in that short time, the group has quickly grown its membership and amassed clout within the Republican Party and the conservative ecosystem. Moms for Liberty has fashioned itself into the tip of the spear of the Republican Party’s culture wars, and its members may have already been raising hell at a school board meeting near you.
But that’s just a part of it. The group aims not to just take over school boards, ban books and help elect conservative candidates on the local and state level. No, as the visits to the convention from Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Hayley, Asa Hutchinson and Vivek Ramaswamy demonstrate, Moms for Liberty intends to play a major role in choosing the Republican who runs for president in 2024.
And it likely will.
The group Moms for Liberty may be new, but its strategy is not. Education has always been a valuable culture war and wedge issue, one that often attracts allies across class, race and gender lines. Capturing school boards was a tactic religious right conservatives used to oppose progressive ideas such as sex education in the 1960s.
In 1974, a conservative-led battle in resistance multicultural textbooks that were proposed in Kanawha County, West Virginia, led to at least one protester being shot, others being beaten, cars being set on fire and schools being dynamited and firebombed. Between then and now we’ve seen the larger battle to effectively destroy public schools through voucher programs and charter schools.
Not only is the strategy of focusing on education not new, the strategy of employing women isn’t either. Moms for Liberty is similar to the Eagle Forum that Phyllis Schlafly founded in 1972 in her successful campaign to block the Equal Rights Amendment. Schlafly’s group used the rhetoric of protecting families to fight against the ERA and to promote anti-abortion and other conservative causes. Ronald Reagan and later other Republican presidential hopefuls understood the value of having women — white women mostly — espouse conservative causes.
Moms for Liberty is similar to the Eagle Forum that Phyllis Schlafly founded in 1972 in her successful campaign to block the Equal Rights Amendment.
Moms for Liberty, a much more sophisticated 21st-century iteration of the Eagle Forum, is a concerned woman’s group with lots of backing, and unlike the Eagle Forum, has social media and a robust conservative media environment to support its messaging.
At a convention sponsored in part by The Leadership Institute and the Heritage Foundation, attendees could sit in on sessions that included such titles as “Protecting Kids from Gender Ideology” and “The first 100 days: Getting Flipped Schoolboards to Take Action.” But that’s not all. In addition to training its attendees on what to say, one of the goals of the convention was to teach attendees how to be heard.
In a session called “Mastering the Spin: Effective Messaging Strategies,” Christian Zeigler gave participants advice on how to write op-eds, how to put together strategic talking points and how to take the negative publicity to gain more members. For example, shortly before the convention began, the Indiana chapter of Moms for Liberty was blasted for using a quote from Hitler in its newsletter: “He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.” But in what amounts to a philosophy, that there’s no such thing as bad press, Zeigler taught them how to transform negative attention such as that from the Hitler quote into more clicks and attention to draw in new members.
The Southern Poverty Law Center lists Moms for Liberty as an extremist group in its Year in Hate and Extremism report for 2022 for what it calls the group’s opposition to an inclusive public school environment. On Fox News, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice called that designation “absolutely absurd.” She said, “We are a group of moms and dads and grandparents and aunts and uncles, community members that are very concerned about the direction of the country” and added that Moms for Liberty is “upsetting the balance of power in public education.” Nikki Haley alluded to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s depiction of the organization in her comments to the convention, even as she got wrong the label the center used. She said, “When they mentioned that this was a terrorist organization, I said, ‘Well, then count me as a mom for liberty, because that’s what I am.’ ” The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Moms for Liberty as an anti-government organization, but Moms for Liberty isn’t anti-government; it seeks to reshape the government in a way that would essentially limit democracy. That’s why the gathering resulted in lively protests, especially from LGBTQ groups outside the convention hotel. At the same time, historians protested the group’s event at the Museum for the American Revolution. People are beginning to understand the danger that the group represents to American democracy, but it is going to take more than just vocal protests to dismantle its relentless takeover of school boards. It will take parents and people who aren’t parents going to school board meetings to challenge these Moms for Liberty members and candidates. And it will take skilled organizing by the Democratic Party and other groups to counter the damage that has been done on the local level to school boards, libraries and teachers. Moms for Liberty coming to Philadelphia to pretend to care about the nation’s history belies its role in trying to limit other Americans’ freedoms. But like the Founding Fathers, who believed that inalienable rights like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness belonged only to white men, the group has to contend with the fact that our nation is not simply for “joyful warriors” trying to destroy our hard-earned democracy with their Orwellian definition of liberty.
Anthea Butler is a professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. 
