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US Corporate Media Accused of 'Normalizing the Hate Group' Moms for Liberty
"Moms for Liberty is linked with the Proud Boys, a chapter quotes Hitler, they are behind book bans, they are funded by right-wing groups and... ABC News calls them 'joyful warriors,'" wrote one observer. "The whiteness of it all is exhausting."
Jul 03, 2023
ABC News this week joined other U.S. corporate media outlets in being accused of "normalizing" Moms for Liberty after publishing what one critic called a "puff piece" on the right-wing group that's behind a wave of school book bans and is linked to the neofascist Proud Boys and the Qanon conspiracy theory.
On Saturday, ABC News published an article by Brittany Shepherd titled "Moms for Liberty Are Fired Up in Philadelphia" as the self-described "parental rights" organization held its annual conference in Pennsylvania's largest city, where crowds of protesters turned out to denounce the group's bigotry.
"Did ABC let Moms for Liberty write this puff piece themselves?"
"They call themselves joyful warriors—but this group of conservative moms are mad," Shepherd wrote in her lede.
Author and Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali called the article "shameful."
"Moms for Liberty is linked with the Proud Boys, a chapter quotes Hitler, they are behind book bans, they are funded by right-wing groups and... ABC News calls them 'joyful warriors,'" Ali tweeted. "The whiteness of it all is exhausting."
Historian Kevin Kruse wondered, "Did ABC let Moms for Liberty write this puff piece themselves?"
Brandon Wolf, press secretary for the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Equality Florida, noted that a Moms for Liberty chapter in Indiana included a quote from Adolf Hitler in its inaugural newsletter. The chapter chairperson subsequently apologized.
Founded in Florida in 2021 to oppose Covid-19 lockdowns and mandates, Moms for Liberty quickly gained a reputation for its anti-LGBTQ views and its harassment of school officials in service of the organization's far-right agenda.
The group—which says it has more than 115,000 members in 245 chapters in 45 states—wants to erase mention of LGBTQ+ rights, systemic racism, diversity, and other "woke" topics from school curricula.
Moms for Liberty—many of whose chapters are linked to extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Three Percenters as well as the Qanon conspiracy theory—has spearheaded a successful movement to ban books, especially ones with LGBTQ+ and racial themes, from school libraries across the nation.
The American Library Association said earlier this year that it had recorded 1,269 demands to censor books from various groups and individuals in 2022, compared to 729 challenges counted in 2021.
In her article, Shepherd wrote how the Moms for Liberty conference "showcases how local issues like education can have tremendous, galvanizing national influence, as Gov. Ron DeSantis, former President Donald Trump, and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley tried to woo nearly 700 attendees."
The article continued:
Several key breakout sessions at the center of the group's mission, such as "Protecting Kids from Gender Ideology" and "Getting Flipped School Boards To Take Action" were kept behind closed doors, with media access barred. But still, the enthusiasm at open events was palpable, nearly bouncing off the ballroom walls.
The piece does note that Moms for Liberty is designated an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for spreading "hateful imagery and rhetoric against the LGBTQ community."
However, two paragraphs later Shepherd wrote that "Republicans will need this group to make up any lost ground" from last year's midterm elections.
In a Friday interview by MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace, extremism expert Kristofer Goldsmith urged viewers to spread the world about who Moms for Liberty are and what they stand for.
"We are talking book burning. We're talking about racism and we're talking about persecuting the LGBTQ community. These are the Proud Boys with a wig and lipstick," Goldsmith said. "That is all that they are. And because of the words 'Moms for Liberty,' not a lot of people are going to understand that."
"So folks watching this need to be evangelists, right?" he added. "You need to get out online and talk to your friends about what Moms for Liberty is, and help them understand that they are a pipeline into the most radical of extremism in this country."
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'Disturbing': 12 Million US Adults Think Violence Is Justified to Put Trump Back in White House
"We're heading into an extremely tumultuous election season," said one expert. "What's happening in the United States is political violence is going from the fringe to the mainstream."
Jun 09, 2023
More than two years after the deadly January 6 insurrection, 12 million people in the United States, or 4.4% of the adult population, believe the use of violence is justified to restore former President Donald Trump to power, The Guardianreported Friday.
This percentage has declined from nearly 10% in 2021, when the Chicago Project on Security & Threats (CPOST) first began conducting its Dangers to Democracy surveys of U.S. adults. But April data the University of Chicago research center shared exclusively with The Guardian reveals that a treacherous amount of support for political violence and conspiracy theories persists nationwide.
In the two and a half years since Trump's bid to overturn his 2020 loss fell short, Republican state lawmakers have launched a full-fledged assault on the franchise, enacting dozens of voter suppression and election subversion laws meant to increase their control over electoral outcomes. Due to obstruction from Republicans and corporate Democrats, Congress has failed to pass federal voting rights protections and other safeguards designed to prevent another coup attempt ahead of November 2024.
"We're heading into an extremely tumultuous election season," Robert Pape, a University of Chicago professor and CPOST director, told The Guardian. "What's happening in the United States is political violence is going from the fringe to the mainstream."
Several right-wing candidates who echoed Trump's relentless lies about President Joe Biden's 2020 victory lost in last year's midterms. But more than 210 others—including at least two who participated in the January 6 rally that escalated into an attack on the U.S. Capitol—won congressional seats and races for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general, underscoring the extent to which election denialism is now entrenched in the GOP and jeopardizes U.S. democracy for the foreseeable future.
The CPOST survey conducted in April found that 20% of U.S. adults still believe "the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president," down only slightly from the 26% who said so in 2021.
"What you're seeing is really disturbing levels of distrust in American democracy, support for dangerous conspiracy theories, and support for political violence itself," Pape told The Guardian.
According to the newspaper, Pape compared "sentiments about political violence" to "the kindling for a wildfire." While "many were unaware that the events on January 6 would turn violent, research shows that public support for violence was widespread, so the attacks themselves should not have come as a surprise."
"Once you have support for violence in the mainstream, those are the raw ingredients or the raw combustible material and then speeches, typically by politicians, can set them off," said Pape. "Or if they get going, speeches can encourage them to go further."
Pape pointed out that there was chatter among far-right groups and on online forums about potentially using force to prevent lawmakers from certifying Biden's win, but Trump's January 6 address at the White House Ellipse was the spark that ignited the mob to storm the halls of Congress.
CPOST's latest findings are based on polling completed before Trump was federally indicted Thursday night on seven criminal counts in the special counsel investigation into his handling of classified documents. The charges, including willful retention of national defense secrets, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy, could carry years in prison for the GOP's leading 2024 presidential candidate.
In response to the indictment, several Republican lawmakers rallied to Trump's defense, parroting his dismissal of the probe as a "witch hunt." Fox News personalities also denounced what they called the "weaponization" of the U.S. justice system, while commenters on Breibartopined that "this is how revolution begins."
The menacing language mirrored what was said after the FBI in early August 2022 searched Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort and removed boxes of documents as part of the federal probe into his handling of classified materials.
At the time, many anonymous and some well-known reactionaries called for "civil war" on Twitter, patriots.win, and elsewhere. Soon after, Ricky Shiffer, a Trump loyalist with suspected ties to a far-right group and an unspecified connection to the January 6 insurrection, was shot and killed by police following an hourslong standoff. Shiffer, wielding an AR-15 and a nail gun, allegedly attempted to break into the FBI's Cincinnati office and fled to a nearby field when he was unsuccessful.
Afterward, Trump continued to lie about the Mar-a-Lago search on Truth Social, sparking an "unprecedented" surge in threats against FBI personnel and facilities. In March, just before he was hit with a 34-count felony indictment in the Manhattan district attorney's investigation into alleged hush money payments made during the run-up to the 2016 election, Trump called on his supporters to "protest" and "take our nation back," though right-wing violence did not materialize in that instance.
The Guardian on Friday observed that "it's important to track public sentiment about political violence regularly," noting that CPOST plans to release data from its Dangers to Democracy survey every three months from now until the 2024 election. "The instigating event, usually a speech or comment by a person in power, is unpredictable and can set people off at any moment, but the underlying support for violence is more predictable and trackable."
The research center's most recent survey found that "almost 14%—a minority of Americans, but still a significant number—believe the use of force is justified to 'achieve political goals that I support,'" the newspaper reported. "More specifically, 12.4% believe it's justified to restore the federal right to abortion, 8.4% believe it's justified to ensure members of Congress and other government officials do the right thing, 6.3% think it's justified to preserve the rights of white Americans, and 6.1% believe it's justified to prevent the prosecution of Trump."
Citing Duke University political science professor Peter Feaver, The Guardian noted that "while public support for political violence might seem extreme, a confluence of factors is necessary for actual violence to occur—which is still rare. On January 6, there was a time-sensitive action, an already existing rally, and inciters including Trump who encouraged others to commit violence."
According to Feaver, "You needed all of that at the same time to turn what would have been latent sentiment of the sort that this survey captures into actual violence."
On top of broad support for Trump's "Big Lie," the survey found that one in ten U.S. adults think "a secret group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is ruling the U.S. government," meaning QAnon had roughly the same percentage of adherents in April as it did in 2021. The survey also found that a quarter of U.S. adults agree that "the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World," revealing an alarming amount of ongoing support for the white nationalist "great replacement" theory.
More optimistically, the survey found that over 77% of U.S. adults want Republicans and Democrats in Congress to issue a joint statement condemning any political violence.
"There's a tremendous amount of opposition to political violence in the United States," Pape remarked, "but it is not mobilized."
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Before There Was QAnon, There Was J. Edgar Hoover and Red-Baiting Aimed at MLK Jr.
The notorious FBI director as far-right conspiracy theorist.
Jan 16, 2023
Ours is an age beset by conspiracy theories, with the fascist QAnon cult at the center of much public lunacy. These completely implausible ideas, apparently taken seriously by millions of people, have been enabled by the internet, by social media, and by the rise of a new, militant billionaire class that funds them. Indeed, with the turn to such conspiracies by new Twitter owner Elon Musk, that site has seen an explosion of hate speech, calumny, and wacky but dangerous ideas. Just to refresh our memories, QAnon accused Hillary Clinton and other high officials of running a pedophile ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. At one point these vicious lies even led to the pizzeria being shot up. This conspiracy theory was believed and broadcast by Gen. Michael Flynn, the former U.S. National Security Advisor! More recently, QAnon acolytes were involved in the January 6, 2021, attempted coup d’etat.
You may wonder if the world has abruptly gone mad.
Alas, it is the sad duty of historians to remind everyone shocked by the present that, as Ecclesiastes 1:9 has it,
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
there is nothing new under the sun.
As we commemorate the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is worth remembering that the Q of his era was not anonymous. It was J. Edgar Hoover, the long-term head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The FBI was formed in 1908 by Teddy Roosevelt, over the objections of Congress, which feared a secret police. Its initial charge was to hunt down anarchists, who in the hysteria that swept the country after the assassination of President McKinley were thought to be lurking just about everywhere in the country and making designs to pull down Western civilization. In fact, there were not many anarchists and they weren’t, as you might expect, very well organized. Many were German, Italian and Jewish immigrants involved in labor movements and many stood against WW I. That was a legitimate stance to take, but it was made illegal, quite in contravention of the First Amendment, and an Anarchist Exclusion Act was passed making it easy to bar such people from coming to the U.S. and to deport those already here. The Red Scare gripped America. One of its teenaged proponents was a young J. Edgar Hoover.
Sixteen years after the FBI was created, J. Edgar Hoover became its head at age 29, surfing the wave of the Red Scare. He ran the organization with an iron fist until 1972, during which time he perfected the techniques later used by press lord Rupert Murdoch at Fox, of spying on prominent people, getting dirt on them, and then using the dirt to manipulate them.
Another QAnon-type conspiracy theory that gripped Washington in the 1940s through the 1960s was McCarthyism, which held that there were a lot of U.S. Communists and that they might take over the government. They were the new anarchists. There were likely about 100,000 Communists in the U.S. by the 1950s, about half of whom left after 1956 when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev revealed dictator Josef Stalin’s crimes. None of them wanted to overthrow the government and most were in provincial unions or were writers, etc., and had no power to do so. To this day, spoiled rich people and over-testosteroned rightists bemoan the proliferation of American Communists. As with the pedophile rings in pizzerias, they don’t exist and are a chimera used to beat people into submission regarding perfectly reasonable demands like a living wage. Republicans tried to defeat a corporate Democrat like Joe Biden, who may be a bit to the right of Ike Eisenhower, as a “socialist.” They meant, “Communist.”
The real purpose of red-baiting is to make sure that U.S. workers find it difficult to organize for better pay and conditions. By stigmatizing sympathy with working class people, the Right makes the demands of the latter politically and socially taboo.
Hoover had obsessed about the socialist and Communist menace all his adult life, and that was the lens through which he saw demands for rights for Black people. It seems to me that Hoover must have also been a racist, or he would have been better able to separate demands for civil rights from dialectical materialism. So Hoover saw the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as potentially a Communist. Communists don’t believe in God, so I’m not sure how that was supposed to work. In fact, King preached against Communism as incompatible with Christianity. Duh.
King was a socialist, no doubt, and much more radical than today’s mainstream news will allow him to be. But he was not a violent revolutionary who wanted to impose Bolshevism on people.
Sarah Pruitt at History.com explains that one of the attorneys who supported and advised Rev. King, Stanley David Levison, had been a Communist and appears to have been in the mass exodus from the movement of 1956. Years later, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy granted Hoover permission to wiretap Levison on these grounds.
In all the years the FBI monitored King under the COINTELPRO domestic surveillance program, no evidence ever surfaced that he was a Communist or anything like a Communist. Instead of calling off his dogs, however, Hoover doubled down and used the monitoring of King’s personal life to gather evidence of his extramarital affairs. Hoover then tried to use those tapes to convince King that his reputation would be ruined and that he should commit suicide.
Hoover actually wrote a note to King instructing him to commit suicide.
Today’s FBI looks back on this episode as one of the darkest in the Bureau’s history.
But with the reemergence of conspiracy theories at the heart of the U.S. government during the Trump QAnon presidency, we should not be sanguine about the threats they pose to democracy. King renewed American democracy by forcing his co-citizens to face the evils of racial segregation and racial discrimination enshrined in the laws of the Jim Crow states.
That’s not Communism. That’s simple human decency. That is the sum of American values. Beware the ideological termites burrowing away at the fundament of our basic rights.
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