US Department of Education Tattle-Tale Line: Let’s Flood It with the Truth by Dr. Julian Vasquez-Heilig

Friends,

I agree with Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig that we need to respond to this weaponization of DEI by the U.S. Department of (Mis)education. We must all speak our truths now.

-Angela Valenzuela


US Department of Education Tattle-Tale Line: Let’s Flood It with the Truth

Julian Vasquez Heilig March 2, 2025 



In yet another attempt to weaponize the federal government against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in education, the U.S. Department of Education—at the urging of Moms for Liberty and other far-right extremist groups—has launched the “Stop DEI Portal” (https://enddei.ed.gov).

This taxpayer-funded snitch line is designed to invite anonymous complaints against public schools, colleges, and universities that are actively working to create inclusive and equitable environments for all students. Their goal? To stoke fear, intimidate educators, and dismantle efforts to address racial, gender, and socioeconomic inequities in education.

Let’s be clear: this is not about stopping discrimination—it’s about silencing efforts to eliminate it.

But here’s the thing: if this portal is truly meant to address discrimination, then let’s make sure it serves that purpose.

Let’s Turn the Tables: Report REAL Discrimination

If the Department of Education wants reports of discrimination, let’s give them exactly that. But let’s report real, documented cases of discrimination—the kind that actually harms students and families every single day, especially in underregulated charter and voucher-funded schools.

Here’s what they don’t want reported, but what we should be flooding their portal with:

1. Discrimination Against Students with Disabilities

• Many charter and voucher schools systematically exclude students with disabilities, either by refusing to provide necessary accommodations or pushing them out with discriminatory discipline policies.

• Special education students in voucher programs often lose their federal protections under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) when they transfer to private schools.

• Some schools refuse to admit students who require additional supports, effectively segregating students with disabilities from their peers.

📌 If you or someone you know has experienced this, report it here: https://enddei.ed.gov

2. Discrimination Against LGBTQ+ Students

• In some states, charter and private schools receiving taxpayer-funded vouchers have explicit policies that allow them to deny admission to LGBTQ+ students or expel them for their identity.

• LGBTQ+ students often face harassment, deadnaming, misgendering, and bullying—sometimes by school officials—without intervention.

• Books and curriculum that acknowledge LGBTQ+ history and experiences are being banned, erasing the existence of LGBTQ+ students and families from the classroom.

📌 If you’ve seen LGBTQ+ students being targeted or erased, report it here: https://enddei.ed.gov

3. Racial Discrimination and Segregation in Schools

• Many charter and private schools resegregate students by race and income, creating de facto segregation that mirrors the Jim Crow era.

• Black and Brown students face harsher disciplinary actions than their white peers for the same behaviors.

• AP African American Studies, ethnic studies courses, and other curriculum that acknowledges systemic racism are being banned or watered down, denying students an accurate understanding of history.

📌 If you have evidence of racial discrimination in schools, report it here: https://enddei.ed.gov

4. Discrimination Against Low-Income Students

• Voucher programs siphon public dollars away from neighborhood schools, making it harder for low-income students to access well-funded, high-quality education.

• Private voucher schools are not required to provide free or reduced-price lunch programs, effectively shutting out students who rely on school meals.

• School choice programs increase economic segregation, allowing affluent families to access better resources while leaving lower-income students in underfunded public schools.

📌 If you know of schools pushing out or underfunding low-income students, report it here: https://enddei.ed.gov

Weaponizing the Portal Against Its Own Purpose

The Stop DEI Portal is not about protecting students—it’s about political theater and furthering a radical agenda to dismantle public education.

Conservative groups like Moms for Liberty, the Heritage Foundation, and other well-funded organizations have pushed for Project 2025, a policy plan designed to eliminate federal civil rights protections, dismantle DEI initiatives, and privatize public education.

They want to create a parallel education system where only privileged, wealthy families benefit—while marginalized students are left behind.

What You Can Do Right Now

✅ Step 1: Submit REAL complaints to the Stop DEI Portal

Visit https://enddei.ed.gov and report discrimination against students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, students of color, and low-income students.

✅ Step 2: Share this far and wide

Encourage educators, parents, and students to flood the portal with real discrimination complaints.

✅ Step 3: Support organizations fighting back

Groups like Our Schools Our Democracy (OSOD) and the Network for Public Education (NPE) are exposing the harms of privatization and the discriminatory practices of charter and voucher schools.

✅ Step 4: Stay engaged in the fight to protect public education

The NPE/NPE Action Conference on April 5-6 in Columbus, Ohio is bringing together educators, advocates, and policymakers to discuss how to defend public schools and stop the Project 2025 playbook. I’ll be there.

There’s no time to sit on the sidelines. The Stop DEI Portal is just the beginning of a much larger battle. If we don’t fight back now, the next generation will inherit an education system built on exclusion, discrimination, and privatization.

Let’s make sure the truth is louder than deception.

🔗 Submit your complaint now: https://enddei.ed.gov

🔗 Support OSOD and the Network for Public Education

🔗 Register for the NPE/NPE Action Conference before spots fill up!

This is about more than DEI. This is about democracy, justice, and the future of public education. Let’s fight back—together.

Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig

Julian Vasquez Heilig drives change, delivers results, and disrupts inequityView all posts by Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig

A User’s Guide to All the Banned Books in Texas by Dan Solomon, TEXAS MONTHLY

Just came across this article from 2022 on banned books in Texas Monthly. Banning books is so medieval and actually untenable for the digital natives that Gen Z represents. This means that our youth can't actually be kept from learning from "banned books," considering the era we live in with so many of these accessible at young people's fingertips. If anything, banning books draws attention to books that youth might not otherwise read. 

It's good to know that organizations like PEN America and school librarians are fighting back as covered in this article authored by David Montgomery in EdWeek titled, "Librarians Fight Back Against Efforts to Ban Books in Schools."  Two organizations spearheading this are Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Commenting on banned books specifically in Texas, Texas Library Association Executive Director Shirley Robinson notes that they've not experienced challenges like these in the last 40 years. 

I recently met Moms for Libros founder Lissette Fernandez at a conference organized by PEN America in Orlando, Florida. Her organization is an obvious response to Moms for Liberty that you can learn about here from this August 13, 2023 piece on NBC Miami titled, "Moms for Libros: how the educational disputes raging in Florida will affect young learners this school year."

This won't last forever. In the meantime, do consider that reading these texts is more important now than ever. Not that parents shouldn't have a say, but that we should not establish blanket, willy-nilly policy on the basis of exceptional, individual concerns.

Angela Valenzuela

A User’s Guide to All the Banned Books in Texas

Discussions of race or sex, or just the wrong vibes, seem to be all it takes to number a book among the 801 bannings in Texas this year.

By Dan Solomon

September 20, 2022 | Texas Monthly

Over the past year, schools and libraries around the country have been banning a whole lot of books. And while this is a nationwide phenomenon, no state’s schools have embraced the practice of declaring certain stories and perspectives forbidden to their young people the way that Texas’s have. According to a list compiled by the literature and human rights nonprofit PEN America, between July 1 of last year and June 30, Texas has seen 801 bannings. That’s a huge number! Compare that with, say, Alaska or South Carolina, which have banned one book each. (In both instances, it’s Maia Kobabe’s award-winning comic book memoir Gender Queer, which has also been banned in nine districts in Texas.)

That figure—801 banned books—refers not to individual titles but rather to the number of times any school district has issued a ban. Some titles, such as Gender Queer, appear multiple times, having been banned from Canutillo (fifteen miles northwest of downtown El Paso) to Clear Creek, 785 miles to its east. Others, such as Brent Sherrard’s Final Takedown—a slim, out-of-print volume from a small Canadian publisher about a kid who faces time in juvenile detention—appear but once (in San Antonio’s North East Independent School District, the most avid banner of books in the state). Some are banned in school libraries, others in classrooms. Some have been removed pending an investigation that the school district may or may not have the time and resources to conduct in a timely manner. Most have been banned by administrators, while others are the result of a formal challenge from a parent or other community member. In any event, the guiding principle remains the same: to ensure that students are not exposed to ideas that their elders do not want them to consider, by making it increasingly difficult to access the volumes in which those ideas are contained. (Teenagers are, of course, famously respectful of such rules, and rarely seek out such materials on their own.)

Read Next: 

A Texas School District Banned My Book. Then Things Got Really Ugly.

As the full list from PEN America indicates, book banning has become a popular cause among some in our polarized electorate—but this wasn’t always the case. Back in the halcyon days of, er, March 2021, some of Texas’s political leaders fervently opposed the idea of book bans, when the topic was the decision of Dr. Seuss Enterprises, publisher of the work of Theodore Geisel under his famous pen name, to no longer publish new copies of a handful of the author’s titles that included racist stereotypes. (Ted Cruz sold signed copies of Green Eggs and Ham in protest!) That may as well have been a lifetime ago, however, as the length and breadth of the list indicates. Texas has banned books about boys and books about girls, and books where the gender is more of a swirl. It’s banned books about sex and books about race, and books about those whose white hoods hide their face. It’s banned classics, and new books, and books in-between; it’s banned best-sellers, award winners, and books rarely seen. It’s banned books about what the Nazis did to the Jews, and beloved old books by the great Judy Blume. It’s banned comics, and prose books, and books full of poems; it’s banned slim volumes, and it’s banned hefty tomes. Texas has banned a huge number of books, indeed! And here’s a quick guide to the ones schools don’t want kids to read.

A PEN America notes, these are just the incidents that have been reported to the group—the reality of book bans likely extends further throughout the state. But here are some trends.

Books about gender identity and homosexuality

Kobabe’s Gender Queer, which explores the author’s journey to the realization that their identity is beyond the gender binary, is one of just a handful of books to appear nine times on the list. It’s hardly the only book about gender identity and same-sex romance to find itself banned in a Texas school or library, however. George M. Johnson’s “memoir-manifesto” about his coming out, All Boys Aren’t Blue, appears seven times; Susan Kuklin’s 2014 nonfiction collection of interviews, Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out, appears five times, as does Mike Curato’s comic book memoir Flamer. Even titles that seem downright clinical in their examination of the history of gay folks in America make the list—Jaime A. Seba’s Gay Issues and Politics: Marriage, the Military, & Work Place Discrimination, a 64-page explanation of its eponymous topic, has been banned twice. Four books by different authors with the title Gender Identity have all been banned in at least one district. It’s not just weighty titles getting banned, either—L.C. Rosen’s queer rom-com Jack of Hearts (And Other Parts) has been banned in eight districts, while The Breakaways, Cathy G. Johnson’s lightweight graphic novel about a kids’ soccer team, is banned in six because it includes a transgender boy among the players.

Books that are about straight people but have some sexual content

As the controversy around The Breakaways indicates, book-banners seem to contend that any depiction of gay or transgender characters—or nonfiction explorations of those identities—is inherently inappropriate for kids. When it comes to straight, cisgender folks, though, things have to get a bit more specific. Books such as Ashley Hope Pérez’s Out of Darkness, Jesse Andrews’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Lauren Myracle’s l8r, g8r all appear on the list (nine, seven, and four times, respectively) for touching on sexual themes, featuring teens who talk about sex, or depicting sexual abuse. For nonfiction, books that discuss sex or its consequences openly tend to make the list—titles include Margaret O. Hyde’s Safe Sex 101: An Overview for Teens, Donna Lange’s Taking Responsibility: A Teen’s Guide to Contraception and Pregnancy, and Chloe Shantz-Hilke’s My Girlfriend’s Pregnant! A Teen’s Guide to Becoming a Dad (which seems like a useful book for kids in that situation!). And abortion, in any context, can get a book banned: Melody Rose’s Abortion: A Documentary and Reference Guide and Johannah Haney’s The Abortion Debate: Understanding the Issues, relatively straightforward histories, are on the list, as are books on the history of Roe v. Wade. Even dad-friendly political thrillers can land on the list if abortion comes up—bestselling author and occasional Fox News contributor Richard North Patterson’s Protect and Defend received an administrator’s challenge as well.

Books about race

The fervor around “critical race theory,” which describes an academic framework not taught in public schools, means that it doesn’t matter how well regarded a book about race is—such titles are all over the list of banned books. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s National Book Award–winning book-length letter to his young son about growing up Black, is on the list, as is his We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, which features essays on race in America. One needn’t be a National Book Award winner to get on the list for writing about race, either—Duncan Tonatiuh’s history book for young readers, Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation, makes the list, as does Mychal Denzel Smith’s memoir Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education. Ibram X. Kendi’s books How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America are both banned in multiple districts. Fiction bannings include some of the most acclaimed books in American literature: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and The Bluest Eye, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and white author William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner have all been removed from libraries. Poetry isn’t exempt, either—And Still I Rise, the third collection of poems by the great Maya Angelou, is on the list, as well.

Books about political violence, historical or speculative

If you’re a student who wants to learn about the history of the Ku Klux Klan, you may need to look outside of your school library to find the most acclaimed book on the subject for young adults: Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s They Called Themselves the KKK: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group isn’t on the shelves in three districts. Understanding how those roots affect the U.S. today might be a challenge too—Vegas Tenold’s Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America, which traces the history of racist violence from the early days of the Ku Klux Klan to the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, is also on the list in two districts. Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the Holocaust, the comic book Maus, appears on the list, as does Ari Folman’s graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. Even in fiction, books that explore fascist violence are verboten—the DC Comics graphic novel V for Vendetta, by legendary comic book creator Alan Moore, is banned in three districts for some reason. (The film adaptation, which similarly deals with anti-fascist themes, is also banned in China and Russia.)

Books where the vibes are wrong

For decades, Judy Blume’s Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, a puberty story from a boy’s perspective originally published in the seventies, has been a classic of the coming-of-age genre. The book hasn’t changed over the past fifty years, but frank storytelling about the issues high school students face frequently makes a book a target in Texas. Books about teen misfits such as Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park or Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower both appear. Perennial banned-book list titles such as Of Mice and Men make an appearance, as does John Irving’s The Cider House Rules. The DC Comics graphic novel Y: The Last Man also makes the list, maybe because it’s a science fiction story about everyone with a Y chromosome dying, and that’d be a bummer? Hard to say for sure, but in addition to banning books because they acknowledge that teens think about sex, or out of a desire to disappear queer folks and discussions of race from the conversation, some stuff makes the list just because of, like, vibes.

Greg Abbott Failed to Persuade Lawmakers on School Vouchers. Now He’s Threatening Them. | Texas Monthly

Gov. Greg Abbott is desperate and going against the public will. He has just called a fourth special session of the legislature to both pass vouchers and his racial profiling bill to beat up on immigrants and asylum seekers with penalties that will result in eye-popping profits for the prison-industrial complex.

As you can see in this October 4, 2023 piece by Alexandra Samuels in the Texas Monthly, he's been bullying members of his own party to accomplish this. Vouchers not only represent horrible, self-serving, de-democratizing policy, but is not all research-based. Here is but one policy brief that is based exclusively on peer-reviewed research that says as much: Will School Vouchers Benefit Low-Income Families? Assessing the Evidence," by Jabbar, H., Holme, J., Lemke, M., LeClair, Sanchez, J., Torres, E.M. & Pernetti, M. (March, 2023).

Gov. Abbott isn't interested in this research as he is party, like Florida governor Ron DeSantis, to an extremist agenda for our country from which he will surely profit where public education, environmental protections, public lands, and so on, are at enormous risk. Moreover, as cited below, he masquerades his false agenda as an "ethical" response to "right-wing outrage over alleged “woke” public school administrators teaching kids about sex and racism, public school administrators."

If elections this week are any indication—and they are—this characterization of both public schools is wildly off base. For example, read about results of school board elections where far-right Moms For Liberty candidates overwhelmingly flopped per the following news items:

Moms for Liberty and the ‘parental rights’ agenda flopped in this week’s elections

On Tuesday, Voters Rejected Moms for Liberty and Its Agenda of Cruelty and Hate

Texans and Americans, generally, are wisening up to these well-heeled, anti-democratic, white supremacist, fascist organizations, thankfully, as they should. 

Do always take a close look at that glossy flyer in your mailbox and do your research before voting. Organizations like Moms for Liberty, Right Turn, and America First—the latter of which has a notoriously anti-Semitic history that you can read about in The Atlantic—are anathema to democracy.

All told, Senate Bill 1 is moving quickly in this fourth-called special session of the Texas State Legislature. 

Do not be deceived by phrases like "education freedom" or "education savings accounts" as these are euphemisms for school vouchers. This is nothing more than taking our hard-earned, taxpayer dollars and diverting them to private schools that will seriously damage an already under-funded public education system and diverting these dollars into private schools that actually do indoctrinate and are not at all accountable to the public in the way that elected school boards are. Hence, a loss of governance with public dollars!

Plus, there's nothing holding back these schools from raising their private school tuitions meaning that these schools will segregate by class—and because class and race overlap, racial segregation will increase, as well. 

As for rural education, the price that rural schools will pay should SB 1 become law, is both declining funding and opportunity, considering that private schools mostly do not exist in rural communities—Tyler, Texas, notwithstanding.

Go to this link if you want to know who represents you in the Texas State Legislature so that you can reach out to them as soon as possible.

-Angela Valenzuela

Greg Abbott Failed to Persuade Lawmakers on School Vouchers. Now He’s Threatening Them.

 

Ahead of a special legislative session, the governor has implied there will be political consequences for those who get in his way.

by Alexandra Samuels | October 4, 2023 | Texas Monthly 

Governor Greg Abbott on September 9, 2023.

Vasha Hunt/AP

After a busy legislative session in Austin, Travis Clardy was ready for a lazy Saturday morning. It was mid-June, and the Republican state representative was finally back home in Nacogdoches, sipping coffee on the balcony of his downtown loft and watching his constituents amble about El Camino Real de los Tejas, a.k.a. Main Street, the central artery of the East Texas city. He had all but forgotten that one of his bills, regarding occupational licensing, remained unsigned on Governor Greg Abbott’s desk. Traditionally, the governor’s approval is automatic for minor proposals such as his that pass with overwhelming bipartisan support.

Then Clardy’s phone began to ring. A staffer for the governor was on the line, telling him Abbott was going to veto the representative’s bill, which would’ve made continuing education programs for state-certified fire alarm technicians mandatory rather than voluntary. The governor’s staffer explained that the bill, in Abbott’s estimation, presented an unjustified obstacle to maintaining an occupational license. But those qualms, Clardy said, could’ve been fixed in a matter of minutes during the session. “If that had been a concern,” he recalled asking, “why am I hearing about this now, after he’s already signed the veto?” The answer became clear to Clardy later, when Abbott published a missive explaining his decision. In the second paragraph of the letter, Abbott wrote: “This bill can be reconsidered at a future special session only after education freedom is passed.”

Federal grant pays $126K salary of Florida official who pushes DeSantis education agenda

The U.S. Department of Education should respond to requests for comment on how federal funds are being used in Florida. After all, the far-right seeks to abolish the department.

-Angela Valenzuela

Federal grant pays $126K salary of Florida official who pushes DeSantis education agenda

Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a press conference at Boggy Creek Elementary School in Osceola County on Monday, Nov. 30, 2020. The Florida Department of Education, part of the DeSantis’ administration, has a new office that is focused on reaching out to conservative school board members and groups. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel/TNS)

By LESLIE POSTAL | lpostal@orlandosentinel.com | Orlando Sentinel

PUBLISHED: September 15, 2023 at 11:52 a.m. | UPDATED: September 15, 2023 at 5:37 p.m.

A new Florida Department of Education employee who’s reaching out to conservative school board members makes $126,000 a year, a salary funded by a federal grant designed to boost “well-rounded educational opportunities,” health and safety and effective use of technology.

Terry Stoops was tapped in April to head the department’s new office of Academically Successful and Resilient Districts. Most of his contacts during his first months on the job were to school board members who’d been endorsed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and representatives of conservative groups, his emails and calendar show.

In April, for example, he met several school board members at a “Learn Right” summit in Sarasota spearheaded by a founder of Moms for Liberty, the conservative group launched in Florida and focused on schools.

He emailed more than a dozen school board members endorsed by the governor in the 2022 election cycle and others who had the backing of Moms for Liberty, including Alicia Farrant, elected to the Orange County School Board in November.

And in May, Stoops met with the Herzog Foundation; its goal is “Advancing Christian Education.”

The education department did not respond to several requests for information about Stoops’ role or how his work meshed with the purpose of the federal grant. In an email, spokeswoman Cassie Palelis only said Stoops was a contract employee “offering day-to-day guidance and best practices” to school board members and superintendents.

After this story published online Friday, Education Commissioner Manny Diaz responded on X, formerly Twitter, with “Cry More!”

The U.S. Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment on Florida’s use of the federal funds.

DeSantis, who is running for president, told Fox News in June that if elected he would try to abolish the federal education department and other agencies. If Congress would not approve doing that, “I’m going to use those agencies to push back against woke ideology and against the leftism we see creeping into all institutions of American life,” he said in that interview on June 28.

Friends:

There is a lot to unpack here and I'll only do a bit. Honestly, we all need to take time to parse out all of this and have conversations about it. At the most general level, who are "Moms for Liberty, also known as "M4L" and "MFL"?" As per this blog by Heath Brown, their information is hidden from view, however, they say that they have 275 chapters in 45 states and more than a hundred thousand members nationwide. Some view them as akin to the Tea Party Movement that formed in 2009.

They say that they're anti-CRT, but they really aren't because they clearly do not understand it. This stance nevertheless serves their purposes as it allows them to conveniently weaponize race that they decry as “woke indoctrination.” They're also anti-LGBTQ and they back a false ideology of Christianity known as "Christian Nationalism" that promotes allegiance to country and their specific definition of Christianity. They also have a penchant for parading Black and Brown people who align with their cause to make it seem that they're more diverse than they really are. 

As you can read from the Southern Poverty Law Center website, the SPLC characterizes M4L as an anti-government, extremist group. 

Medhi Hassan with MSNBC notes that they keep their funding sources secret yet they enjoy close ties with the Heritage Foundation, also noting that they received funding in 2021 from Judy Fancelli who bankrolled the "Stop the Steal" January 6th attack on our nation's capital. The optics are deeply troubling. You can follow them yourselves on Twitter to learn more.  

What's most revealing to me is just how toxic they are from all the various reports I'm reading right now. The things is that "rage tactics," as Williams (2022) observes in her must-read piece in The New Yorker, is actually what they're about.

They do not express a desire to actually transform schools and curriculum, as those of us in the Ethnic Studies Movement seek to accomplish, but rather to promote censureship, dismantle public education and privatize schools by fostering a campaign of disenchantment in hopes that white, suburban mothers, in particular, turn against public schools. Ethnic Studies Movement advocates like myself are diametrically opposite, seeking to mend, not end, public education.

Born out of our long, extended, historical project of democracy as a nation, that at the grassroots level, is truly about living and being in relation to our public schools, and the public sphere, M4L belies the notion that public life should be rewarding—even if in moments contentious—whether occurring at local, city, or state-level politics.

It's almost as if the more unpleasant they are, the more power they think they have. I would hope that instead of praising M4L and giving them a platform as Trump and DeSantis have done, that all people of decency and conscience see them as the enemies of democracy that they are. 

If you have any doubt about this, I urge you to read the Williams (2022) piece. Even if this organization is less ascendant than they portray themselves to be, their access to eye-popping resources from conservative non-profits and wealthy donors is impactful, with power to potentially distort the public imagination of their levels of trust toward public education as connected to the common good that they abhor.

Thanks to Diane Ravitch for sharing this piece by Heath Brown.

-Angela Valenzuela

References

MSNBC News. (2022, Nov. 30). The Far-Right Moms Fighting the School Board Wars, The Mehdi Hassan Show [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLG1LWUN0tY

Williams, P. (2022, Oct. 31). The Right-Wing Mothers Fuelling the School-Board Wars, The New Yorker.

Numbers suggest murky future for Moms for Liberty

New chapters are forming, but not where it matters most for 2024

by Heath Brown | July 6, 2023

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

There’s been a lot hay made lately about Moms for Liberty — the group formed in 2021 to oppose school mask mandates and other pandemic precautions. Jennifer Schuessler at the New York Times called them “a force in Republican politics” and Chris Lehmann at The Nation likened the group to the Tea Party.

There are good reasons to take Moms for Liberty seriously.

As Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider explain on their podcast, it’s re-positioned itself over the last 12 months as the voice of anti-teacher vitriol, eager to ban books at the mere mention of race or LGBTQ issues. Classics, like The Color Purple, Water for Elephants, and The Bluest Eye, were challenged by the Indian River County chapter of the organization in Florida last fall.

Candidates for the Republican presidential nomination also have taken the organization up on the offer to speak to its members, most recently at last week’s Moms for Liberty Summit in Philadelphia. At the event, Governor Rick DeSantis called Gender Queer, a memoir by nonbinary writer Maia Kobabe, “hardcore pornography.” The book has been banned by over 50 districts recently, the most of any book in the country, according to Pen America.