A feat. Just over two years after its creation, the "Moms for Liberty" movement was added Tuesday, June 6, to the list of hate groups in the United States, established by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the main North American NGO fighting extremism. This annual report on hate in the United States has become the reference document on the subject, says the daily USA Today.

This is the first time in the United States that a group of parents of students has been designated as a dangerous extremist movement, in the same way as supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or the Proud Boys.

Brutal methods

"These are warriors who are fighting inclusive education and have become notorious for their methods of systematic harassment and intimidation," the authors of the Southern Poverty Center report said.

Originally, however, the "Moms for Liberty" was just a group of three ultra-conservative mothers very upset against a woman: Jennifer Jenkins, who had defeated one of the founders of the group in an election to the board of education of a school in Florida.

They then made her live a real hell, as she told the site Vice. The "Moms for Liberty" are suspected of filing a false complaint with the Early Childhood Advocacy Services, alleging that Jennifer Jenkins was a drug addict and was hitting her daughter. Relatives of the group have several times challenged the child by telling him to "be careful [because] your mother hurts the children". Other supporters would crane in front of Jennifer Jenkins' house to insult her as soon as she put her nose outside.

The foundations of the "Moms for Liberty" method were then laid, and these women would soon benefit the whole country. In two years, more than 110,000 angry mothers in 42 states have joined the ranks of this army speaking out against everything "woke in education," according to their website.

Due to the pandemic, they began by protesting against the wearing of masks at school and social distancing measures. Their mission? "Rekindling the flames of freedom" in schools accused of wanting to deprive children of this sacrosanct freedom under the guise of fighting the coronavirus.

Crossed against "ungodly" books and the LGBT+ community

When the health crisis came to an end, these "Moms for Liberty" bounced back by becoming crusaders against "godless" books. A book in which we talked about the reproduction of seahorses? To be banned. A comic book in which two teenagers sleep in the same bed? Too "explicit", and therefore to disappear too.

In contrast, the controversial book "The Making of America" is at the top of the list of books recommended by "Moms for Liberty". This 1980s history digest claims that the owners of the cotton fields of the southern United States were the "greatest victims of slavery."

Their hatred of the current education system, which they describe as "Marxist", has led them to call for the dismantling of the Ministry of Education, but also for teachers' unions to be treated as terrorist organisations.

But this group of ultra-conservative mothers has also found another hobbyhorse: chasing away anything pro-LGBT. They denounce, for example, all teachers suspected of any sympathy whatsoever for homosexuals as "dangerous predators who want to 'sexualize' children," says the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Their hunt for sexual minorities is not limited to classrooms. They call "mental illness normalized by sexual predators" anything that deviates from their sacrosanct heterosexual model. Twitter even temporarily shut down the "Moms for Liberty" account in 2022 for homophobia.

A dazzling success for the far right

Beyond the ideology advocated by these women, the SPLC is especially concerned about the speed with which the "Moms for Liberty" have gained influence in conservative circles. "They are often compared to the 'Moral Majority' movements of the 1980s [very influential under President Ronald Reagan] and the Tea Party [libertarian anti-Obama movement, editor's note]," reports the Washington Post.

They have already managed to make their national convention – which is only in its second edition – one of the obligatory passages of the heavyweights of the Republican Party. All the conservative candidates in the 2024 presidential election – starting with Rond DeSantis and Donald Trump – will speak at the "Moms for Liberty" high mass to be held in Philadelphia from June 29 to July 2.

This rise of the group in the conservative galaxy, "meteoric" according to The New Yorker magazine, owes much to the early support of some historical figures of the American far right.

Indeed, in January 2021, when the group has only been around for a few weeks and has only a handful of members in Florida, the founders of "Moms for Liberty" were the guests of honor on the radio show of Rush Limbaugh, one of the most influential voices to the right of the Republican Party. A month later, it was Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson who spoke of these "angry mothers."

The American ultra-conservative right had everything to gain from seeing this movement grow. The activism of these women in school boards is of utmost importance to Republicans. It is, on the one hand, to demonstrate that one can be a woman while being very right-wing: Donald Trump, like his main rival on the right Ron DeSantis, "have always struggled to seduce the female electorate," recalls the magazine The New Republic.

On the other hand, "there has often been a tendency to underestimate the role of education issues in the process of mobilizing conservative voters in modern America," Robert Mason, a specialist in American politics and the history of the Republican Party at the University of Edinburgh, told France 24 in April 2023. These school boards "are very important places of politicization for conservatives," added Tamara Boussac, a specialist in the United States at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. The Republican Party hopes that these "Moms for Liberty" will become a weapon of mass recruitment.

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