Moms for Liberty co-founders Tina Descovich, left, and Tiffany Justice.Matt Rourke/AP
Moms for Liberty, the most prominent group in the right-wing movement against “woke” public schools, is well known for its crusades against LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and anti-racism initiatives in classrooms. Since 2021, the group, which counts 130,000 members, across 48 states, has claimed—at school board meetings, conferences, and on social media—that left-wing teachers are turning students into social justice warriors.
Those efforts—of playing politics in public schools in the name of excising politics—has proved great preparation for its leaders’ current project: Railing against what they see as an antisemitic agenda in certain public schools, even as Moms for Liberty itself reels from allegations of antisemitism in its own ranks.
Earlier this week, leaders of several public school systems testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in the latest hearing on antisemitism in America’s educational institutions. High-up officials from New York City, Berkeley, CA, and Montgomery County, Maryland defended their schools against the allegations of Republican lawmakers. Rep. Aaron Bean (R-Fla.) said they had “been accused of doing nothing and turning a blind eye” while students and teachers were “spewing Nazi propaganda” in the months since Hamas’ October 7 attack and Israel’s subsequent siege in Gaza.
After the hearing, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice connected current concerns about antisemitic activism to one of the group’s most successful battle cries: That schools focus on left-wing politics at the expense of academics.
“Parents thought they were sending their kids to school to get an education, ‘ABCs. One, two, threes,'” Justice told the conservative news site Just the News. “And at some point, the schools started becoming factories for little activist social justice warriors.”
On X this week, the Moms for Liberty’s account reposted several tweets about antisemitism in schools. Among them: a Heritage Foundation leader’s post that accused school “DEI staff” of “promoting antisemitism”; a New Hampshire parent’s complaint about the inclusion of the slogan “From the River to the Sea” in a spring concert, and this post by right-wing gadfly Christopher Rufo:
This is Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver with Palestinian Liberation Organization militants in Algiers, 1969. They were holding a conference to strategize "decolonizing" the Third World, which could then serve as a model for "decolonizing" America.
Sound familiar? pic.twitter.com/3YSOdYv1rq
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) May 8, 2024
Yet Moms for Liberty itself has been accused of antisemitism. Last year, a chapter leader quoted Hitler in a newsletter to members. A Florida leader of the group advocated for banning from schools the holocaust memoir The Diary of Anne Frank. And the group has appeared at events with the Proud Boys, an extremist group that promotes antisemitic ideology.
During the hearing, some of the school administrators pointed out that same irony as it pertained to the Republicans who had convened the hearing. “If my colleagues cared about antisemitism,” said Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), “they would condemn and denounce these comments from the leader of their party.”
