Shine a light in dark places: NCC DE Moms for Liberty -- crusaders or useful tools??

 

This is what the national Moms for Liberty organization says on its "Who We Are" page:

This is what they don't tell you:

• They are actually run by professional organizers whose preferred tactics include disrupting school board meetings: "At the top, they are political strategists, risk managers and communications professionals — high-powered women with connections to top state and national Republicans, according to LinkedIn profiles and local media report. Their followers have been among unruly crowds, disrupting school board sessions ..." (Florida Phoenix)

• They are heavily funded by far-right "dark money": Moms for Liberty’s leaders claim to get by on T-shirt sales. They’ve barely even heard of the Koch brothers! Yet perhaps they’ve heard of the Council for National Policy. Two of Moms for Liberty’s National Summit sponsors, the Leadership Institute and Heritage Foundation are critical members of the Council for National Policy, a secretive network of right wing billionaires and Christian fundamentalist leaders that underwrites and coordinates right wing politics. (Tampa Bay Times)

• They made up their own book rating system that declares American literary giants like Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, Robert Heinlein, Bernard Malamud, Toni Morrison, Jodi Picoult, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Wright and many, many more to be "pornographers" (see my earlier article)

• They routinely LIE about books and schools to justify book-banning: For example, in Florida, they claimed that students were being required to read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, by showing only one page of the letter assigning it as one of more than a dozen possible books that students could choose between. More importantly, they LEFT OUT the second page of the letter that specifically stated that parents could OPT OUT of any book they found objectionable. As Book Riot said, "Wild, isn’t it, how Moms For Liberty wants to be the authority on reading by cherry picking the passages they deem inappropriate while also conveniently leaving out the fact they’ve been granted 'parental rights' by educators this entire time? Or the fact that The Bluest Eye is ONE CHOICE among several for study?" (Book Riot)

So we're trying to look at tools to fight back against the dark money censorship karen tools, right?

Here's one: EVERY SINGLE TIME that New Castle County Delaware Moms for Liberty shows up at a School Board meeting or in front of the General Assembly, or ANYWHERE ELSE in a public venue, sign up to speak. Don't use your time to defend the books they are attacking, use it to DISCREDIT Moms for Liberty.

Use your 1-3 minutes to dispassionately point out that Moms for Liberty is NOT a grassroots organization but an astroturf rent-a-mom scam funded by dark money with a track record of lying about books, teachers, and libraries ... and calmly cite the sources above and those you have found for yourself.

The talking points are: (1) MFL is NOT run by concerned moms (its national chief of staff is the guy who used to be Florida Senator Rick Scott's chief of staff); (2) MFL is funded by millions in dark money through SuperPACs, not T-shirts and bake sales; (3) the MFL rating system is a scam that attacks Pulitzer - Prize winning American authors as pornographers; and (4) a favorite tactic of MFL has been documented to be lying about the books, teachers, and libraries that they want to censor.

By the way, here's the cherry on top. DE NCC Moms for Liberty features that John Adams quote at the top:

"LIBERTY, ONCE LOST, IS LOST FOREVER." -- John Adams

Now leaving aside that, as President, John Adams attempted to repress political criticism of the government with the Alien and Sedition Acts (thus trying to gut the 1st Amendment), it turns out that JOHN ADAMS WAS JUST WRONG --

When he wrote, after the American Revolution, his dire prediction seemed somehow prophetic, but it turned out to be ... so much horse puckey.

To wit:

• Enslaved Africans recovered their liberty in the American Civil War
• Enslaved Haitians defeated the entire power of France to achieve liberty and independence
• The French, by the way, ended the absolute monarchy
• Ethiopia held its liberty (and Christian orientation) for centuries against the Muslim Ottoman Empire and for decades against European colonizers
• Poland, the Baltic States, and all of Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe threw off the shackles of Communist rule to recover their liberties
• East Germany was recovered to become part of the democratic west
• Mexico eventually threw off European and foreign domination
• India managed to create the world's largest democratic state by breaking from the British Empire
• South Africa broke the apartheid government 

The fact of the matter is that people all over the world define freedom and independence in their own ways, and that the only way you can support this ridiculous John Adams quote is to ...

... ban enough books to keep people from knowing the truth.