The drive to reshape Florida’s ideological landscape includes at least one home-grown group.

Welcome to Moms for Liberty, where the ladies, unlike South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, do not necessarily see child-rearing as a matter of giving 2year-olds a shotgun and a rifle. Rather, they are embarked on an ongoing campaign to upend education, insisting, after 184 years of public education, that they “don’t co-parent with the government.”

Mothers for Liberty started modestly but, within a year, grew to 100,000 members in more than 200 chapters in 38 states, still a miniscule number compared to the 53 million grade school students nation-wide. But the group, formed originally to oppose mask mandates to protect against COVID-19 – which has killed more than a million Americans – quickly enlisted in the Republican culture war under Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ banner, wielding partisan political power.

“I have been trying for a dozen years to get 20- and 30-year-old females involved with the Republican Party and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic. But now Moms for Liberty has done it for me,” Christian Ziegler, then vice-chairman and now chairman of the Florida Republican Party, told The Washington Post in 2021. Ziegler’s wife, Bridget Ziegler, a member of the Sarasota School Board, is a Moms for Liberty co-founder.

Shifting from mask mandates, the group embraced “parents’ rights,” boosted Republican Party membership, shifting Florida politics to majority Republican. Perhaps more than anyone else, except maybe the anemic state Democratic Party, Moms for Liberty helped DeSantis score a 19-point reelection victory in November.

Moms for Liberty began after Tiffany Justice completed a term on the Indian River County School Board and Tina Descovich lost her re-election to the Brevard County School Board 40 miles away. They met at an awards ceremony and discovered that they had a common concern over, as The Post put it, “how little say parents had in their children’s public-school education.”

Justice and Descovich teamed up with Republican activist Marie Rogerson, who had managed Descovich’s campaign, and, along with Ziegler, launched Moms for Liberty in 2021 with chapters in Brevard and Indian River counties by merging with two organizations campaigning against COVID-19 restrictions, The Post reported. They soon discovered, they said, that a lot more was going on in schools than just mask-wearing. Many parents “were astonished to find that, instead of being simply taught reading, writing and arithmetic, their kids were being fed lessons on highly divisive topics of questionable academic benefit,” they wrote in a Post commentary. They set about pushing for change.

But Moms for Liberty has its critics. Brevard Federation of Teachers President Anthony Colucci accused the group of turning school board meetings into “The Jerry Springer Show” and said it “brings out the worst in people.” Mother Jones magazine said while it embraces “parental rights,” it has “mobilized around parental concerns that are decidedly conservative. They want to excise lessons on systemic racism, LGBTQ-friendly books, accommodations for transgender students and COVID mitigations like vaccine and mask mandates. They want to defend the Second Amendment rights that have allowed school shooters to obtain weapons.”

Harvard University and Boston University lecturer Christopher Rhodes wrote in Al Jazeera that the group’s stated concerns are “a thin veil for a broader and more sinister movement.” Mothers for Liberty, he said, is “an offshoot of the far-right movement that has come to dominate modern American conservatism, with its tactics representing a dangerous shift in strategy for this movement.” If it gains “the sustained political influence of past conservative movements, it could seriously damage civil liberties, shut down political discourse and further weaken the democratic institutions that have been under attack in recent years.”

That notwithstanding, other Moms for Liberty chapters have been just as vocal and partisan as Florida’s. At Williamson County Schools in a suburb of Nashville, Tenn., one group denounced the English and Language Arts curriculum Wit & Wisdom, published by Great Minds, even though the district had adopted it after rigorous scrutiny. Members also began disrupting school board meetings and identifying books they deemed unsuitable for classrooms, including about Ruby Bridges, who, in 1961, became the first African American child to attend an allEuropean American school in New Orleans. Such a book, they insisted, exposed students to “psychological distress” by referring to “an angry white mob.”

But something else happened in Williamson County. Revida Rahman, an African American, and Jennifer Cortez, a European American, formed another organization, One Willco, whose story Kiera Williams told in The New Yorker magazine. Cortez explained in a post on the One Willco website that she became involved after attending a meeting of the district’s Cultural Competency Council (CCC) which, The Tennessean newspaper reported, had been created in 2018 “to ensure a safe and welcoming environment for all students and families.” She said she came away appalled at what she learned.

Some parents were calling the CCC “reverse racism” and wanted it dismantled but there were “serious issues” not being addressed, including disproportionate disciplining of African American students and selecting too few of them for gifted or AP classes. There were “field trips to plantations, with sorrow expressed for Confederate soldiers who died but no mention of the evils of slavery or respect shown for what the people of color there endured.” Racial slurs “are disregarded” and hate speech “is normalized.”

Cortez, a writer and mother of four, offered to interview African American students and write about their experiences. A few families agreed and the stories she heard “were awful – not surprising, but awful. What did surprise me, though, was how regularly these students experienced racial harassment and how ill-equipped our schools were to handle it.”

The district had no standardized policies regarding clear discipline for racially motivated incidents and no standard tracking system or reliable data on racial harassment. Also, students who reported racist incidents “were regularly met with misunderstanding from teachers and administrators and were often made to feel like they had provoked the problem or should be able to handle it on their own.”

Rahman told The New Yorker’s Williams that some European American parents who chaperoned field trips to local plantations were, in Williams’ words, “astonished to see slavery depicted as benign” and heard that “the slaves didn’t really have it that bad – they lived better than we do, they had their food provided, they had housing.”

That is not Moms for Liberty’s agenda. At its Joyful Warriors National Summit last year in Tampa, some attendees waved signs proclaiming, “Mamas for DeSantis,” in support of the governor who once said, “If you just show people that you’re willing to fight for them, man, they will walk over broken glass barefoot to have your back.” After he went on stage, three leaders presented him with a bright blue sword bearing the Moms for Liberty logo. “It is what the gladiators were rewarded with after they had fought a long, hard battle for freedom,” Descovich told him. “So this is a representation from all of us moms here in Florida and across the country that appreciate all you’ve done to stand up for parents’ rights.”

The “all you’ve done” includes deploying state power against voters, gays, educators, protesters, abortion rights and gun control advocates and immigrants, municipalities, African American history, the death penalty and businesses such as Disney World. In his State of the State address in March, DeSantis said, “Don’t worry about the chattering class. Ignore all the background noise. Keep the compass set to true north. We will stand strong. We will hold the line. We won’t back down. And I can promise you this: You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Instead of taking action, as One Willco is doing in Tennessee to help students, Moms for Liberty became what Nicholas Confessore called in a New York Times profile of Tucker Carlson, “part of the white backlash [that] is jet fuel of a Republican Party striving to return to power in Washington.”