Episode 230: Gamergate For Moms feat David Gilbert
What happens when you combine gamergate and yelling at local elected officials? You get something akin to Moms For Liberty. The nonprofit bills itself as a parental rights organization and grew to hundreds of chapters over the past three years. Though many victims have claimed that the group pushes its agenda through harassment and intimidation, they say they just care about ethics in school curriculums. To help get a better sense of what Moms For Liberty is really about, we spoke to Vice News reporter David Gilbert. He spoke to people targeted by Moms For Liberty for his report "A Far-Right Moms Group Is Terrorizing Schools in the Name of Protecting Kids.”
David Gilbert
https://twitter.com/daithaigilbert
References
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy3gnq/what-is-moms-for-liberty
https://buckscountybeacon.com/2022/10/the-right-wing-money-and-influence-behind-moms-for-liberty/
https://twitter.com/daithaigilbert?lang=en
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/07/the-right-wing-mothers-fuelling-the-school-board-wars
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like 'Manclan' and 'Trickle Down': http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
QAA's Website: https://qanonanonymous.com
Music by Anahedron. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 230 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Gamergate for Moms episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
The school year is coming to a close.
If you're a student or teacher, you're probably listening to this instead of completing your final assignments.
To celebrate the Class of 2023, today we're exploring the group Moms4Liberty, a non-profit that basically does Gamergate against school administrators.
Though victims say that Moms4Liberty tried to get their way through harassment and intimidation of school boards and teachers, the organization claims they just care about ethics in the school curriculum.
Since the group's founding in Florida in 2020, its influence over local and national Republican politics has grown exponentially.
It's now a nationwide movement with 260 chapters.
To help us learn how we got here, Travis is going to walk us through some of the organization's history of harassment, book banning, and their ties to conspiracists.
Then we're going to speak to Vice News reporter David Gilbert about what he uncovered while speaking to students, administrators, Parents, superintendents, school board members, and teachers who have faced attacks by moms for liberty.
So let's get right into this.
Just right off the bat, I'm going to say moms loved you better when you were against drunk driving.
I think there's probably a lot of work still there to do.
Not sure why we shifted to anti-CRT or whatever.
Yeah, I feel like there are a lot of great causes for moms to get involved in that aren't stupid.
Like both of your moms, they've stayed busy, you know?
Yeah!
You know, yeah, there there are lots that moms can do.
But for some reason, yet again, yeah, they decide to subtly some moms decide to get mad both online and offline.
If you mix together the Tea Party Movement, Kiwi Farms, and people who have nothing better to do than yell at their local school boards, then you probably get the subject of today's episode.
Moms for Liberty.
So Moms4Liberty, they promote themselves as a grassroots organization that advocates for parental rights in public schools.
But in practice, they have campaigned against mask mandates and vaccine mandates in schools and the teaching of issues related to LGBT rights, race, and historical discrimination.
Like Julian mentioned in the intro, Moms4Liberty also have targeted people they don't like with just this never-ending harassment campaign, both inside of the school boards and on Facebook, often.
Moms4Liberty was founded in 2020 by two former school board members from Florida, Tina Deskovic and Tiffany Justice, as well as then-current school board member Bridget Ziegler.
And the entire organization was formed because Tina Deskovic lost an election in Brevard County School District to a former school board employee, Jennifer Jenkins, Jennifer Jenkins campaigned against Deskovich's opposition to teacher raises and mask mandates, and Jenkins won the election by 10 percentage points in a very heavily Republican county of about 600,000 voters.
Someone in Tina Deskovich's position might simply realize that their message wasn't resonating with the parents of the county and try again next election, but instead she connected with Republican activists to form Moms for Liberty.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
So this whole thing, this whole thing started because they lost to a Democrat?
They lost to a Democrat in a, like I said, a very heavily Republican district.
Oh my God.
And they got so fucking mad that they formed a group to basically yell at Jennifer Jenkins.
It actually formed immediately after Milf Manor stopped shooting.
Yeah, this is like, it's like, yeah, you didn't pay attention to your politics.
You know, this Democrat snuck in, you know, in a hugely Republican district.
And then, like, you're so mad about it that you're like, oh, well, now I'm going to fight and I'm going to start this organization.
We're going to war.
Like, it's hilarious.
The group in its early days mostly focused on Brevard County and Jenkins specifically.
In fact, Jenkins used to call the group, jokingly, bombs against Jennifer Jenkins because they didn't seem to have any coherent agenda beyond that.
At first, the group attacked her during board meetings over her support of COVID
restrictions. Then members of Moms for Liberty, which at that point just had a few dozen members, started
getting in Jaquen's face at the meetings, recording videos of her and then posting them on their
Facebook page where they would mock her.
Now things got really nasty in February of 2021. Tina Duskovich used her Facebook page to post
the school district's LGBTQ guideline document, and this provides privacy rights to trans students.
She further claimed that the schools were implementing this policy behind people's backs.
This is, of course, not true.
The document wasn't actually new.
The school board had been working on it for over a year, even when Deskovic was part of the school board.
She even had meetings with the superintendent about the guidelines.
But the group presented it as like a new secret school policy in order to maximize outrage.
This led to protests not only at school board meetings, but at Jennifer Jenkins' home.
Jenkins herself wrote about the treatment she received during this time in an article for the Washington Post.
Their first battle in March was over bathrooms.
Moms for Liberty had zeroed in on the county's LGBTQ guidelines for administrators, a document outlining the rights of students as delineated in state and federal laws, including the right to dress and use bathrooms according to the gender they identify with.
The group carried the torch for fears that their daughters would be exposed to sexual harassment and abuse by their male peers.
A disinformation campaign spread through social media, leading the public to believe that this document was newly developed.
It wasn't, and being kept secret.
Protesters became regulars outside school board meetings.
Trump flags waved in the parking lot.
Young children accompanied by their parents shouted into megaphones, Don't touch me, pedophiles!
LGBTQ students tried to speak while adults chanted shame.
Meetings were packed, and those who couldn't get in banged on the windows and doors.
By April, protesters had begun to gather, not just at board meetings, but also in front of my house.
A group of about 15 shouted, Pedophiles!
as my neighbors walked their dogs, pushing their infants in strollers.
We're coming for you, they yelled, mistaking friends standing on my porch for me and my husband.
We're coming at you like a freight train.
We're going to make you beg for mercy.
If you thought January 6th was bad, wait until you see what we have for you.
In July, the battle shifted to mandated masks for students.
Brevard is one of 11 Florida school districts to institute mask mandates in defiance of
Governor Ron DeSantis' executive order banning them.
Randy Fine, an anti-mask crusader, posted my cell phone number on his Facebook page and urged residents to call me.
When my voicemail box filled, he encouraged text messages.
During televised board meetings, I still received texts commenting on what I am saying and wearing.
After DeSantis removed me from the audience of a news conference promoting monoclonal antibody treatments and addressing concerns about mask mandates at the County Department of Health last month, more protesters arrived at my home.
They claimed to have been sent by Fine, who had been standing beside the Governor at the news conference.
Be careful, your mommy hurts little kids.
One shouted at my daughter, You're going to jail!
They chanted.
As I read my daughter a bedtime story inside, they walked outside her bedroom window toward their parked cars.
I went out to ensure that they were leaving.
One coughed in my face while another shouted, Give her COVID!
A third swung a don't tread on me flag near my face.
My neighbors told me they had seen protesters brandishing weapons in the church parking lot behind my house.
The next day a large FU was burned into my lawn with weed killer.
The bushes in front of my house were hacked down.
Jesus Christ!
Oh my God, it's like a land invasion.
Yeah, holy shit.
Oh my God.
These moms are armed and dangerous.
All because, like, they're... This is so funny.
It's like children.
Like, you know, you... There's a toy at your house and you've, you know, you've grown tired of it, right?
It's an older action figure, whatever, so you don't pay that much attention.
Then all of a sudden like some friend comes over and they're like, Oh my God, like you have the, you have this toy in there.
They love it.
And so just because like they love it and now they have it.
You're like, Oh, is this analogy making any sense?
It's not.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
It's also not an allergy, but I like it.
I like it.
Let's keep going with this allergy.
Allergy?
I mean, speaking of allergies, mine are really, really bad.
You guys, I'm really stuffed up.
This rain has got me just bussing.
A breaking point for Jennifer Jenkins finally occurred when an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families called her home in October of 2021 over baseless allegations that she was abusing her own children.
Jenkins spoke about her experience and footage from her speech quickly went viral and gained national media attention.
I don't reject people coming here and speaking their voice.
They do it all the time.
We don't stop them from doing that.
I don't reject them standing outside my home.
I reject them following me around in a car, following my car around.
I reject them saying that they're coming for me, that I need to beg for mercy.
I reject that when they are using their First Amendment rights on public property, they're also going behind my home and brandishing their weapons to my neighbors.
That they're making false DCF claims against me to my daughter?
That I have to take a DCF investigator to her playdate to go underneath her clothing and check for burn marks?
That's what I'm against, which is a credible threat and calculated.
This group grew very rapidly in 2021, thanks in part to a major boost from conservative media.
Tina Deskovich appeared on The Rush Limbaugh Show, Breitbart News, Newsmax, and The Daily Caller.
So, as a consequence, the antics of Moms for Liberty wasn't constrained to Florida.
It spread nationwide, and in some instances, the organization forcefully objected to completely innocuous material in the school curriculum.
The New Yorker reported on one really bizarre incident that occurred in Williamson County School District, which serves more than 40,000 students in suburban Nashville.
In August of 2020, they started using an English and language arts curriculum called Wit and Wisdom.
So this is a comprehensive curriculum published by a company called Great Minds, and it was a pretty conventional choice.
Hundreds of school districts nationwide use it, including in like liberal states like Massachusetts and more conservative states like Louisiana.
The curriculum assigns or recommends portraits of heralded pioneers like Leonardo da Vinci, Sacagawea, Claire Barton, Duke Ellington, Ada Lovelace.
The lessons revolve around readings, augmented with paintings, poetry, speeches, interviews, films, and music.
Sounds lovely!
It is very, it's fine.
More to the point, so the Witten Wisdom curriculum was chosen through a comprehensive and open process.
Williamson County Schools assembled a selection committee composed of 26 parents and 28 elementary school teachers.
The committee presented four options of teachers, and Witten Wisdom was the overwhelming favorite.
After the selection committee ratified the teacher's choice, the school board, which was 12 members, unanimously adopted Wit and Wisdom along with a traditional phonics program for K-5 students.
So, nothing unusual about the curriculum, and there's nothing secretive about or underhanded about how it was chosen.
It was chosen with the input and approval of dozens of parents.
Mm-hmm.
Yes, seems above board.
Yeah, so, given all of that, one would hope that there be no reasonable objection to the material in the curriculum, but that's not the case because Moms for Liberty got involved.
No, no, no, no.
Travis, no, no, no, no, absolutely not.
No, what happens is they don't pay attention.
It's exactly what happened with Jenkins.
They don't pay attention, and then all of a sudden, you know, they find something wrong with, you know, whatever the outcome is, and then instead of, you know, privately complain, like, you know, Most of us do or, you know, like, I don't know, write in a, you know, a poignant email or something.
It's like, no, no, no.
They're going to burn letters into your lawn with weed killer.
They are going to hang out in the church parking lot with, I don't know, pitchforks and torches.
I mean, for God's sakes.
I mean, this whole thing feels like the Dr. Frankenstein.
It's like an angry, an angry mob, an angry mob of parents.
Nothing I haven't done to you, and I hope you're not complaining in private.
Me?
I don't complain at all!
Uh, maybe a little.
I mean, maybe a tiny bit, but, you know, I'm not calling the other podcasters and getting a group together, alright?
That'd be awesome, though.
Podcasters for Liberty?
That would be awesome.
I've got a couple good people, I think, that I would call to pick it outside your home.
In May of 2021, as the district finished its first year with the Wit and Wisdom curriculum, women wearing Moms for Liberty t-shirts started appearing at school board meetings.
They brought large placards that contained images and text from 31 books that they didn't want students to read.
In public comments and in written complaints, the women complained that Wit and Wisdom was teaching children to hate themselves, one another, their families, and America.
They claimed that the lessons included stealth-critical race theory, Which is absurd because really it just taught, in some cases, about the history of civil rights.
The New Yorker described the material that Moms for Liberty found objectionable.
Readings about Ruby Bridges, who in 1961 became the first black child to attend an all-white
school in New Orleans, exposed students to "psychological distress" because they described
an angry white mob.
Bridges in a memoir designed for young readers wrote, they yelled at me to go away.
The moms also declared that though they admired Martin Luther King Jr.' 's iconic line about judging others on the content of their character, the book Martin Luther King Jr.
and the March on Washington was Unacceptable because it contained historical photographs, segregated drinking fountains, firefighters blasting black Americans with hoses that might make kids feel bad.
The moms considered it divisive for wit and wisdom to urge instructors to remind students what racial slurs are, quote, words people use to show disrespect and hatred towards people of different races.
I mean, I think that these moms forgot about what it's like to be a student and be in school.
I remember, like, learning about, like, this kind of stuff, you know, when I was growing up, and, you know, the general consensus, you know, as kids was like, wow, we've come a really long way.
You know, be like, oh, wow, God, things were fucked up, like, you know, in the olden days, in the historical days.
There's never, like, you hear about it and you go, Oh, no, I'm a bad person because of something that this person did 100 years ago.
You know, it's just like they've completely forgotten what it means to be in school and what it's like to learn a fact about history.
You don't have to take on everything.
And in fact, most kids don't.
We do that.
I mean, we learn that as adults later on to internalize everything and make it about us.
But kids don't.
They're pure.
Are they?
I think so!
I don't think you were pure as a kid.
Travis, you have a kid!
She's pure, right?
I mean... Yeah, yeah.
I mean, yeah, she... I gotta say, I don't think that she ever, like, learned about civil rights and then decided that she hates everyone and wants to destroy the state.
That didn't happen, I have to say.
Yeah, yeah, you don't come away from those lessons hating yourself.
This is, oh God, it's like projection at the finest.
Everything that they're preaching, everything that their t-shirt slogan stands for and standing outside people's lawns and all this stuff is about discrimination.
It's like, you know, fear about gay kids, fear about trans people, fear about, you know, black kids, whatever.
It's like all their own prejudices.
And so it sounds to me like they just sort of like projected onto their own kids, be like, oh, well, if they learn about this stuff, They're gonna feel so bad about all the feelings inside of them!
Equally as bizarre, the Moms for Liberty group claimed that a picture book about seahorses taught sexual and gender perversion.
So, this is a book about the behavior, basically, of a kind of fish, and it touched on everything from their ability to change color to the independent movement of their eyes.
But to the group, it threatened to, quote, normalize that males can get pregnant by explaining the Indisputable scientific fact that the male seahorses give birth.
So the mom suspected it was part of a covert endorsement of gender fluidity.
So this led to an absurd scene during a school board meeting, during which one of the Moms for Liberty members held up illustrations of the seahorses while another mom read from the book as if its contents were scandalous.
Today's seahorse is made is full of ripe eggs.
The two of them dance till sunset.
And then she puts her eggs into his pouch.
Seahorses are the only male fish to get pregnant, like this, growing their young inside their own bodies.
A few weeks later, Seahorse finds a quiet place to hide among the corals.
It's time for the babies to be born.
He works hard all day and through the night, bending, squeezing, and pushing, shooting hundreds of babies out of his pouch.
This book provides many illustrations Oh, the horror!
What if my child saw a male seahorse give birth?
Fucking demented.
These people's brains are cooked.
I mean, I'm sorry.
They're cooked.
Yeah, they're cooked.
Everything is interpreted as part of a culture where everything is, you know, creeping communism into their daily life.
I mean, this woman is holding up a big poster with two seahorses fucking, and she's rotating around so that everybody in the boardroom can see the picture.
Like, if I was a kid and I heard that, I would be like, oh, that's fucking cool.
Whoa.
Cause like, I thought, you know, it's like, from what I understand, it's like mostly, you know, the female species that's like, you know, that carrying the egg, but the, oh, and seahorses, it's the male.
That's really interesting.
Nature's fucking weird and unpredictable.
Not like, oh my God.
Be like, well, yes, yes.
Yeah.
Like what are they?
Oh my God.
You're right, Julian.
There's nothing, there's nothing to say.
There's nothing to say.
It's just, it's just a cooked egg.
For them, it's not nature is unpredictable that they want as an outcome for the kid.
It's nature is actually highly ordered and designed by God.
Yeah.
And God does not want male seahorses laying eggs.
You know what's going to come next?
They're going to object to lessons about cells because they teach, you know, asexual reproduction.
They're going to like, they're going to say they're teaching my children to be ace.
Yup.
Can't wait.
Moms for Liberty members escalated the conflict and claimed that the Williamson County schools
adopted Witten Wisdom hurriedly in violation of state rules.
That wasn't true. Nonetheless, the district assembled a reassessment team to review the
curriculum and the adoption process.
At a public work session in June of 2021, the team announced that after a preliminary review,
it hadn't found any violations of protocol.
So, huge waste of time.
Moms for Liberty chapters all over the country targeted more than just books in the curriculum.
They also targeted books available in school libraries.
For example, in Indian River County, Florida, a chapter requested that the local school board remove 51 books that the group deemed to be pornographic or sexually explicit.
I swear, if these moms had their way, their kids would learn about, like, one animal.
They would be like, there's only one animal in the world, and it is the kangaroo, and it keeps its little baby in its pouch for many, many years, close to mommy, and the little Joey, close to mom, and that's the animal that we have on the planet.
We're so lucky we have one of the, we have one really spectacular animal, very straight animal, keeps its child very, very close, tucked in a little Skin pocket, actually.
And yeah, that's all you need to know.
We're hearing the kangaroo has sex before marriage.
We are eliminating the kangaroo.
(laughter)
That was nice.
That was nice and stupid.
I like that.
That's a good.
That's nice for this early morning recording.
In Vero Beach High School, a critically acclaimed young adult book about growing up gay titled All Boys Aren't Blue was pulled from the library after the group claimed that the book violated a Florida statute against providing access to pornography to children.
The animosity towards school librarians extended to even fantasizing about murdering them.
Melissa Bosch, head of comms for the Lenoak County, Arkansas chapter of Moms4Liberty, told her fellow activists that the school librarians that she was harassing would have been plowed down with a freaking gun by now if she had any mental issues.
So she's saying she has no mental issues.
But if she did, she would murder the librarians.
That's what she's suggesting.
Okay, so she's saying, thank God I'm sane, because if I wasn't, I would murder those librarians.
I'm doing the sane thing, which is fantasizing about murdering the librarians.
The mentally ill person would actually murder them.
My brain works.
My brain works!
I should not feel like I am under a microscope and I am asking someone who is getting paid $85,000 a year
that librarian is and still won't answer my questions.
I'm telling you, if I was any mental issues, they would all be plowed down with a freaking gun right now because I am
pet.
That is so...
She sounds really... I'm so glad that she doesn't have...
She doesn't have any mental issues because, you know, any more sane than she is now, I don't know, I mean...
Yeah, it'd be hard to be that sane.
Yeah, it's pretty tough.
Of course, he says freakin' too.
I love people who talk about murder and substitute the word fuck for frig or freak.
You know, it's friggin', freakin'.
You can't say fuck!
God, that's embarrassing.
That is.
Hey, if you're going to fantasize about murdering people, you're going to say you're going to murder those fucking librarians, okay?
Yeah, go ahead and swear.
Go ahead and swear.
You're already kind of past that point.
Yeah, go ahead and swear.
Yeah, exactly.
What's holding you back?
What's holding you back?
Surely, if God can forgive the thirst for blood, he can forgive the naughty word.
Some activity from Moms4Liberty leadership amounts to little more than bizarre online harassment.
According to a recent report in the Daily Beast, the leader of the Monroe County, Pennsylvania chapter of Moms4Liberty has been accused of hijacking a dead woman's Facebook account.
She then allegedly sent n-word laden texts to the deceased woman's surviving husband after she took out credit cards in his name.
So that woman is Nicole Prussman and she faces a summary trial for harassment.
So Prussman admitted to stealing the laptop of a former friend who was stabbed to death by her babysitter in 2021.
She then spent months using the dead woman's Facebook account to harass and intimidate multiple individuals, including a New York woman who opposed Moms4Liberty's efforts to ban books and censor teachers.
Prussman used the dead woman's account to post this about the critic.
Oh my god, alright, I have so much, I have so many thoughts about this.
Okay, but here's what she posted.
EVERYONE, in all caps, say hi to a real dumb worst word you can call a woman because she earned it.
Can't wait for her to meet her KARMA.
It's already beginning, but until then, I think a taste of her own medicine is amusing.
However, I will be sharing legally and everywhere.
So, following several more unsolicited messages, Prussman's accuser replied, And this only sent Prussman further off the edge.
She said this, You're a, with asterisks, she won't write the actual swear.
She goes, you're a fucking coward and shameful example of a human.
You're a fucking piss ant and I will laugh as your family suffers.
Jesus Christ!
These are moms on the warpath.
Yo, this is like... They are out of control.
These are... I'm so glad, actually, that they have no mental issues because I think a lot of people would be getting freaking plowed down, you know, if things were a little bit different.
Pressman added that she would distribute an unflattering flyer of the victim and her children,
and then said this.
"Real great image of you and the girls.
Threats.
Calls to violence.
See you in court.
Whore."
All in caps.
All in caps.
This is making the Scarlet Letter look like a nice, warm tale of mirth and friendship inside a community.
Yeah, and you know the really fucked up thing is, like, look, I mean, I'm probably gonna take some heat for this, but, like, it would be a little different if, like, the friend had, like, maybe died of, like, natural causes, you know?
Like a stroke, or old age, or brain aneurysm, I don't know.
But the fact that, like, this poor woman was, like, murdered by her babysitter and now her account is being repurposed for this just makes it even more, like, aw, just, like, a little bit more gross, don't you think?
Uh, no, I'm not gonna weigh in on that one.
I'll let you have it.
No, yeah, I gotta say.
I can't say.
I mean, it's horrifying to use a dead person's Facebook account for harassment purposes under any circumstances.
I gotta say, maybe the murder thing just adds to it, but I don't know.
I think it doesn't add that much.
It's already pretty horrifying already.
Fair, okay fair, but the little piece of marginal that it adds is a significant piece.
Surely you can come with me on this.
It's worse to use a murdered person's as opposed to a merely dead person's Facebook page for harassment.
That's all I'm saying Travis, that's all I'm saying.
Unsurprisingly, Moms4Liberty has found common cause with conspiracists.
In 2021, the chair of the Miami chapter of Moms4Liberty was a woman named Eulalia Maria Jimenez.
She even stood with Governor DeSantis at a press conference as he touted legislation to combat critical race theory.
But on Instagram, Jimenez echoed QAnon conspiracy theories by writing about, quote, children being smuggled through underground tunnels for the enjoyment of demons.
Oh God.
She posted a picture of the January 6th riots with a caption that said, The storm is upon us.
Trust the process.
Wow.
Who can say if that's QAnon?
She also called the COVID vaccine poison.
This embrace of conspiracies continues into 2023.
Media Matters reported that just in March, conspiracy theorist and QAnon sympathizer Lara Logan headlined a Moms4Liberty chapter launch in Gillespie County, Texas.
During her speech, Lara Logan recommended the QAnon film Out of Shadows.
We previously covered this, but it's basically a story about a Hollywood stuntman who got injured and then, while he was recovering, decided, without evidence, that everyone in the entertainment business was worshipping Satan and murdering children for their adrenochrome.
If you haven't watched Mike Smith's film Out of Shadows, I would urge you to watch Out of Shadows.
Mike Smith is a very good friend of mine.
And he did a very beautiful film about... He was a stuntman in Hollywood.
One of the best.
He opened his eyes to what was around him and he realized he was literally surrounded by Satanism.
And he hadn't seen it.
Been blind to it.
His best friend had seven human skulls on a shelf in his office.
And he never said where'd they come from.
Whose skulls are they?
So the next time you read in somewhere, or hear on one of your shows or something, that the secret to everlasting youth is young blood, why don't you ask, whose blood?
How young?
How much?
Is it a baby's blood?
How much of a baby's blood do you need?
Whose baby?
What happened to that baby?
How do you get new blood?
You know, it's not the hard questions.
It's a simple question, because the devil is always in the details.
Gotta say, I'll understand what this has to do with public education.
But this is who they had speaking at this chapter for Moms4Liberty launch.
Whose skulls are they?
It's a new book.
New book from Laura Logan.
Penguin Books, proud to announce Laura Logan's latest bestseller, Whose Skulls Are They?
Who Baby They?
You know, the children aren't learning about who the skulls belong to, about where the blood's coming from.
They should learn that in school.
You guys, we made a big mistake.
We made a big mistake covering all of this stuff.
This is so stupid.
Like, I can't believe, I wish, I wish I was...
Ignorant and had no idea that conferences like this were taking place.
I wish I had no idea who Laura Logan was.
I wish I knew nothing about Moms for Liberty and their anger against the seahorses and their mating habits.
I wish I hadn't come back.
I'm feeling really bad, actually.
But also funny.
I'm laughing.
It's kind of like a maniacal sort of laughter.
But, yeah.
Alright.
Go.
Travis.
One might reasonably ask, how exactly did this group grow so quickly?
Who exactly is funding them?
Well, the answer is we don't know, and the founders of the group have stated explicitly that they're not willing to say.
A direct quote from a Newsweek article about the group says, while the two moms say it was all t-shirts and small donors in the beginning, they recently got some bigger donations from more prominent sources, though they're happy to keep them a secret for as long as they're legally able to do so.
A report by Maurice Cunningham for the publication Our Schools provides some clues as to how they're getting their money.
They have been holding fundraising events where people can pay thousands of dollars to meet conservative celebrities.
For example, in June of 2021, Moms for Liberty threw a fundraiser called Fearless, an evening with Megyn Kelly.
This is the former Fox News celebrity.
The highest price ticket was $20,000 and it included 20 tickets to a meet and greet along with a photo op with Megyn Kelly and it came with some other benefits.
Now for the price of $10,000 or $15,000 you could get lesser benefits.
Good deal.
Yeah.
However, Moms4Liberty's biggest event so far has been its National Summit, and this took place between July 14th and 17th in 2022 in Tampa, Florida.
The National Summit featured speeches by Governor DeSantis, Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis, former Florida Governor and U.S.
Senator Rick Scott, and Trump's Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
The highest-priced sponsorship for the National Summit was $50,000.
So that, believe it or not, sold out, but other people could purchase and become sponsors for paying anywhere between $2,500 and $30,000.
The largest donor for the National Conference is an organization called Leadership Institute, and this is an affiliate of the shadowy conservative network Council for National Policy, or CNP.
In addition to that, public records show that Julie Fancelli, who is an heiress to the Publix supermarket fortune, donated $50,000 to the group.
So that's basically Bonds for Liberty.
It's a group founded over bitterness over losing a single school board election, and it's dedicated to changing school curriculum through harassment tactics, and it's funded by dark money and people born into wealth.
That's awesome.
Yeah, it's turning into a very cool Tupperware club.
We are now joined by David Gilbert, a reporter for Vice News.
He recently published a long report about Moms for Liberty, headlined, A Far-Right Moms Group is Terrorizing Schools in the Name of Protecting Kids.
David, thank you so much for joining us.
Glad to be here, guys.
Thanks for having me.
So, we talked a little bit about Moms4Liberty and its growth before we got here, but you personally, you talked to many of the people directly affected, including Jennifer Jenkins.
This is the Brevard County School Board member who is the first person who is targeted by the group's tactics.
So, what'd you learn from speaking to her?
I suppose what Jennifer's story is all about is where Moms4Liberty comes from and it's kind of telling really where it initially was set up.
She ran against Tina Deskovic in a deeply red county in Brevard County in Florida that Trump carried by 26 points I want to say maybe that's wrong but something you know quite quite easily um and she ran for school board there in August 2020 and she beat Tina Descovitz by 10 points which was obviously highly embarrassing for um Tina Descovitz and so she decided that rather than just accept defeat she would go ahead and set up Moms for Liberty
And initially all Moms4Liberty was, was this group targeting Jennifer Jenkins.
She felt that they had no mission.
All they did was come to school board meetings and shout at her whenever she was speaking.
And then Tina Descovich decided that she would recruit Tiffany Justice from a neighboring county, Indian County.
She also had lost her school board race so they could, you know, both give out about losing school board races when they should easily have won it in conservative counties together and they continued to target Jennifer
Jenkins and it kind of continued like this. Initially she didn't think there was
much to it, she thought they'd just go away. So they joined up with Bridget Ziegler
and she is deeply connected to the GOP in Florida. Her husband is the chair
of the Florida GOP and he is well connected to Governor Randisantis and once
she got involved Moms for Liberty quickly escalated its tactics against
Jennifer Jenkins.
In February 2021, they posted this LGBT guidelines from Brevard County and tried to claim that Jennifer Jenkins was behind the guidelines, which is just a booklet about protecting privacy rights for LGBTQ students.
And in fact, Tina Descovich had been involved in drafting these guidelines while she was on the school board, but she omitted to mention that in her Facebook post.
So she told, she put up a Facebook post and it just kicked things off.
Really, really escalated things in Brevard County and Jennifer Jenkins ultimately faced protests outside her house.
School board meetings were inundated with protesters, people driving up and down outside it calling teachers and educators and school board members groomers and paedophiles.
And for the next six months there were Consistent protests at Jennifer Jenkins' house.
Her family were attacked.
She had people shouting at visitors to her home, shouting at her kids.
They burnt FU into the lawn with weed killer.
Some people saw people with weapons kind of congregating Behind her house and it kind of came to a head in September 2021 when someone knocked on her door and told her that they were from the department of the Florida Department of Families and Children and they were there to investigate a claim that she was a fake completely baseless claim that she was abusing her daughter or her child.
And so after that happened, Jennifer Jenkins decided, OK, it's time she spoke out.
So she spoke out at a school board meeting and the clip went viral and the harassment kind of went away to an extent, but it never fully went away.
But her case shows us it kind of was a template for what would happen elsewhere in the country in the coming years.
And the Moms for Liberty group, as it grew, it kind of repeated these tactics across the country.
You did a really fantastic job speaking to a lot of people all over the U.S.
who experience similar kind of like tactics.
You learned some interesting facts about a Moms4Liberty chapter in Livingston County, Michigan.
You spoke to one parent there named Sarah Cross, and what did she tell you?
Yeah, I suppose that was one of the interesting things doing this, is that I think a lot of people associate Monster Liberty with Florida, but it's very much a nationwide movement now.
And so Sarah Cross was, she's a lawyer, and she was at a meeting because one of the, the superintendent there had sent an email around comparing mask mandates to the Holocaust, and she was there to complain about this and speak out about it.
And at the meeting, there was a group of people with Moms for Liberty t-shirts there and they were making noise.
So she asked them to be quiet so she could hear the speakers and they threatened to punch her in the face.
And the Moms for Liberty chapter leader in Livingston County was a woman named Jennifer Smith.
And she kind of took it upon herself to target Sarah Cross over the coming months, weeks and months.
At one point she even stood up at a school board meeting and openly, you know, said, call the FBI, you know, tell them what we're doing.
We don't care.
So Sarah Cross did call the FBI and they did investigate Jennifer Smith and others for potential domestic terrorism.
So, because of that, and other reasons, Sarah Cross became, you know, target number one for the Livingston County chapter of Moms for Liberty, and ultimately she had to take out a restraining order against Jennifer Smith.
That restraining order was only lifted a couple of weeks ago, but it was taken out because Of all these things that happened to Sarah Cross, she had her outdoor, the cable to her outdoor lights were cut, a nail was placed behind the tyre of her car, someone tried to steal her dog twice, someone parked across the road and took pictures of her family, she had to install security cameras and just basically felt as if her and her family were in danger because they were being targeted consistently by this group.
And she even said that the kind of behavior that Moms4Liberty were, you know, endorsing, effectively, was filtering down to the people in the school.
They said in her school district that her own daughter had been called the N-word by another student in school and someone else, some other kid, had a swastika drawn on their back.
So it just, again, just like Jennifer Jenkins, the harassment and the attacks very quickly escalated from, you know, shouting and calling names at a school board meeting to physically threatening violence against someone in their home.
But thankfully for Jennifer Smith, the Moms for Liberty chair, despite all this happening, her career continues to, her star continues to rise because she was, in December, she was elected as the chair of the GOP for Livingston County.
So that's good for her, I guess.
You know, of all of the horrible things that have been listed that have been perpetrated by, you know, people within the Moms4Liberty organization, the thing that makes my blood boil the most is, like, they tried to steal her dog?
Like, how low do you have to be to want to, like, steal somebody's dog?
That is... Twice.
That is so vile and so... Oh, God.
That really gets my goat.
They were going to do a short re-education, return the dog, and from that point forward it would bark at gay people.
What's the deal?
Like you talk in your piece, Moms for Liberty, they endorse candidates, or some of them members themselves, run for school boards and stuff.
And it can be really intimidating to run against a Moms4Liberty-backed candidate.
In your report, you discuss the story of Diane Jones, who successfully ran for re-election in the Fremont Unified School Board in Alameda County last year against a Moms4Liberty-backed candidate.
So, what did Diane Jones experience?
Yeah, so Diane Jones, she was, she got in touch because she was just amazed that her opponent, Jennifer Cavuniaris, got so much traction there and she's, you know, in the Bay Area and she's kind of going, well this is, you know, liberal California and it's amazing that these, you know, candidates are even being considered there, but you know, they are. And when
Jones was being re-elected, she said it was just tiring, consistently exhausting being
up against a Monster Liberty candidate because she was just consistently being labelled,
whether it's a tyrant, an extremist, she called a Marxist, a groomer, obviously, a pedophile.
And the tactics that she used went beyond just name-calling. She, you know,
Cavuniaris also decided that she would send private messages to, you know, influential people in the community to try and undermine Jones.
And one of those messages, which Jones ultimately got and shared with me, said that she called out Jones for having a trans child who had become a teacher and had posted a picture of himself I'm sorry, of themselves in their classroom with a pride flag in the classroom.
And she included that picture in her private messages and saying that, you know, pride is very close to grooming.
And she was trying to, you know, really this nasty tactic of undermining a person who is already on the school board and using their own child against them.
And when, you know, when she was asked about this, she obviously didn't respond to any of my questions.
But even when she lost the election, she continued to spread lies about Diane Jones and her children and claimed, like a lot of these people do, that the election was rigged and therefore she shouldn't have lost.
But I think what Diane Jones had told me was that the problem with running against these people, and even if you win, is that fewer and fewer people are willing to run because they don't want to have to deal with this.
They don't want to have their own personal lives attacked.
And as a result, there's gaps there that the Monster Liberty candidates are more than happy to fill.
And it's really worrying that these tactics are going to scare away people from who would normally have run for school boards because they're worried about the attacks that they're facing and that their families will face.
Now, sometimes these harassment tactics and smear tactics are really effective in advancing the Moms4Liberty goals.
You discussed the case of Larry Levin, who worked as a superintendent in New York State at the Florida Union Free School District.
So what happened there?
Yeah, Larry, he had been an educator all his life and he, in August, he had been overseas.
He'd been in China and he'd been in Hong Kong in August 2021.
He returned to New York State, where he's appointed, as you say, to the superintendent role.
But very quickly, he became a target for Moms for Liberty there because he's First and foremost because he's an openly gay man.
And they then kind of trawled through his history, his social media postings and anything else that he had online and saw this.
They picked up on the fact that he had attended this event with an author and religion professor, Anthea Butler, who had written a book called White Evangelical Racism, which clearly Monster Liberty was not too happy about.
Then they picked up on the fact that there was a book called Gender Queer available in the school district's libraries and blamed Levin for that.
The fact is, that book was available long before he was appointed anyway, but again, that didn't really matter.
And then, kind of, I suppose, well, the final straw for Moms for Liberty was that Levin was invited to read to a group of kindergarten children at a local library, and he had the audacity to choose a book called Pink is for Boys, which I read to my kids all the time, and they love it.
But for Moms for Liberty, that was the final straw, so they just ramped up their attacks against him, both professionally and personally.
And he, when I spoke to him, he was just, he felt...
That he had kind of he had grown up in kind of an evangelical community, so he felt he had the tools or the wherewithal to deal with this because he had been kind of dealing with attacks against himself for his, you know, sexuality, his his entire life.
But he was just overwhelmed with the extreme level of anger and hatred that he was receiving.
And unfortunately, in November 2022, he decided he'd had enough and he resigned.
A similar situation happened in the Berkeley County School District in South Carolina with Superintendent Dion Jackson.
That's right?
Yeah, that was in around the same time that Larry Levin was resigning in New York State.
This is in South Carolina.
The Moms for Liberty put up Six candidates for the school board and all six won seats.
And so at the first board meeting convened, one of their members became the chair.
And in the space of two hours, I think it was, they had fired the superintendent, Dion Jackson, who was the district's first black superintendent.
They had fired the district's lawyer.
They banned critical race theory.
Which wasn't being taught in the schools anyway.
They set up a committee to decide which books and materials would be banned and a couple of hours later on the Mumps for Liberty chapters website or Facebook page they posted six new board members clean house first night on the job.
So it was just quite impressive in its efficiency, the fact that they were able to do so much so quickly, but it just shows that the impact that these groups can have on a school district and the, you know, that they are willing to kind of immediately enact the policies that they talked about.
And they weren't worried about, you know, anyone that they were going to fire or anyone who's going to push back against them because they now had the power and they were going to wield it.
And it's not just like superintendents who are getting forced out like this.
There's one case you discuss in the report of Alexander Ingram, who is a teacher who was forced out.
So what happened there?
Yeah again he was in Jacksonville in Florida and he again he had been a teacher for a while and he kind of felt he was doing a good job and that everything was going okay but then he came across Moms for Liberty and he ultimately resigned because the school board wouldn't defend him against their attacks and he when I spoke to him he was He was just very, I guess, disconsolate is probably the word I'd use.
He was just upset at the whole thing because, you know, he went into teaching to kind of nurture and care for young people.
And, you know, he kind of said that he was, you know, a lot of teachers.
Kind of imagine or go through the scenario in their head where they would, what would they do if a shooter came into the school and, you know, they would shield their children from the bullets if an active shooter came in.
So when Moms for Liberty and kind of other far right extremists came to school board meetings and called teachers groomers and paedophiles and that they were damaging their children, it really, it really got to him.
And then, of course, he was also doxxed by members of this group because he had the audacity for being an activist in the local community against Confederate monuments.
So he, as a result of that, he received death threats such as, I think it was, you shouldn't be breeding much less teaching.
So he was attacked both professionally again and personally and his, you know, his principal received emails telling him he should be fired and that he was indoctrinating children and teaching CRT again because of his activism against Confederate monuments.
And ultimately it all got too much and that's what Moms for Liberty want.
Like even if you're not going to be fired by Yeah, I mean, one of the remarkable things about this group, besides their horrifying tactics, is their explosive growth.
They're only like two or three years old, and yet they have like hundreds of chapters all over the country.
We try to like talk about like how exactly That happened, and we speculate it's just part of a pretty simple explanation.
It started with some Republican activists who were well-connected.
They were able to connect them to conservative media.
That gave them a boost.
And of course, there's also an element of dark money and big fundraising in Florida, and that was able to turn them into a formidable force in just a couple of years.
Yeah, it is quite remarkable.
And yes, the connections to the GOP definitely help.
yes, the kind of fawning pieces, not just in right-wing media outlets, but in other
mainstream media outlets as well, where they just don't question this kind of grassroots
label that they claim to have. And there's no doubt that, you know, they set themselves
up as a 501(c)(4), which is perfect for raking in loads of, you know, dark money that no
one can track. But I think when I spoke to one activist who's working with Defensive
democracy, a group that is kind of set up to specifically fight back against
I think she made a good point.
She said that there's a reason they're growing, or she said it's, you know, what they say is absolute bullshit, but they have a great message.
And that's the reason they're growing, because they're smart in how they share that message.
And I kind of, when I was thinking about that, I was thinking back about how, you know, when QAnon moved from the chans to, and Reddit to like, Facebook and Instagram, the message changed from, you know, intercipherable Q drops to save the children.
And that message resonated with millions and millions of people and it exploded to the point where we are today.
And that's what Moms4Liberty has done.
And you'll still see them referred to this even today in pieces in mainstream media.
You'll see them referred to as a grassroots movement who are defending parental rights and protecting children.
And you can't really argue with that because that's what everyone or every parent wants to do.
And they've been able to grow because people, I suppose, have a kind of existential fear that something is happening at schools.
You know, it's where you're hearing this from.
You're hearing it from everywhere, effectively, from Tucker Carlson Down.
And this group is coming along that will save your kids or will help you protect your kids.
And of course you're going to sign up.
And that's, I think, is why there's an explosive growth there is because people feel that this group is giving them a tangible way to kind of Fight back against this fear that has been spread about teachers and about educators and about school boards that they're out to indoctrinate your kids, groom your kids, whatever it is.
And so, you know, it was the perfect timing.
They came along at a time when mass mandates were happening and they used that as a kind of a rallying cry.
And ever since, they've just kind of built on that and built on that.
And yeah, of course, the GOP money doesn't hurt.
But I think their messaging has been really, really smart.
And that's why they are where they are today.
The other element of this sort of concerning to me moving forward is Moms4Liberty very close relationship to Governor Ron DeSantis, just because he is possibly the next Republican candidate for president.
And so, you know, all of a sudden you have this massive nationwide network of people who are willing to use really Filthy tactics in order to attack their critics who is, you know, who is largely very supportive of quite possibly a presidential candidate.
I don't know, that seems like a bad combination because that signals that they might be willing to use this sort of decentralized harassment network in support of DeSantis if he gets the nomination.
Oh, without a doubt.
I think they're primed.
They are ready to roll out.
This is, if you look at how Moms4Liberty operates, it's a top-down group, despite the fact that they claim to be grassroots movement and having chapter leaders and everywhere.
If you look at videos of them speaking at school board meetings in California and school board meetings in South Carolina, school board meetings in Florida, they're saying exactly the same things in each one of those Meetings their talking points are exactly the same.
They're very on point.
They have the same message and that's partly why they've kind of Worked is because those messages resonate because they're just repeated over and over and over again.
And so I think they are a perfect vector for Ron DeSantis to be used by Ron DeSantis in getting his message out in terms of education and other things as well.
It's not just education.
And I think that, you know, how we use them is going to be interesting to see.
But I think there's little doubt that he will be using them if he becomes the Republican candidate.
Well, fascinating and horrifying stuff.
Thank you so much for the really great report.
Again, check it out.
It's on Vice News and the headline is a far-right moms group is terrorizing schools in the name of protecting kids.
David Gilbert, where can people learn more about your work?
For now at least, you can look at vice.com.
I'm also on Twitter at, this is always awkward, it's the Irish name for Dahi, which I've also misspelt, so it's doubly hard for everyone else, but it's D-A-I-T-H-A-I Gilbert.
So Dahi Gilbert, yeah.
Anyway, I must get round to fixing that someday.
Tell you what, we'll just put a link in the show notes to make it easy for everyone.
Yeah, that'd be great.
Thanks.
All right.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks, David.
Thanks for having me, guys.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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Listener, until next week, may the depraved moms bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
The Texas School District is pulling the Bible from its library shelves.
It's among some 40 titles now under review in the Keller Independent School District in Texas, along with Anne Frank's diary, an illustrated version.
Now Keller ISD's administration is asking our campus staff and librarians to review books that were challenged last year to determine if they meet the requirements of the new policy Books will be returned to the libraries as soon as it is confirmed that they comply with the new policy.
So Lisa, the school district apparently got accused of having books with sexual content, so they put under review all of these books.
There were three parent complaints about the Bible, citing one was withdrawn, citing sexual content and violence.
My question is, were these people, these anonymous individuals, asleep when they learned that kindergarten through Second graders were being taught across the country sexually explicit content like body parts in vivid detail.
