AP Promotes Moms For Liberty Myth

The headline was sandpaper on nerve endings. "Moms for Liberty wanted a seat on the school board. Trump gave them a voice in the White House." All the more annoying because this was the Associated Damn Press, who should know better than to uncritically echo the M4L mythology.

To be clear, an influential voice in politics on the state and national level has always been what M4L wanted. As with much of the culture panic crowd, "fighting to win school board seats and end 'wokeness' in U.S. schools" were useful goals for activating some folks, but the AP's summary of M4L-- "what started as a fringe of far-right mothers"-- misses the core of the story.

The oft-repeated myth  is that a couple of Florida moms sat a kitchen table in January of 2021 and decided they'd sell start a group to complain about COVID school stuff. Heck, these Just Plain Moms could even raise money selling t-shirts. This is a lovely story. It is not true.

By 2021, these moms were already well-connected political activists in the state. In 2015, future M4L co-founder Bridget Ziegler co-founded the Florida Coalition of School Board Members, a pro-voucher alternative to the Florida School Board Association. The founders included Erika Donalds, a former New York investment banker turned Florida Tea Partier, now a high-powered choice advocate in Florida who is CEO of her own charter school company and married to Byron Donalds, rising MAGA star. 

Other folks who would join in leading FCSBM included Anne Corcoran, wife of Florida’s pro-privatization legislator-turned-Education Commissioner-turned chief of New College; Rebecca Negron, the wife of the state senator who helped write the tax credit scholarship voucher bill; and Eric Robinson, former GOP party chair and sometimes called “The Prince of Dark Money.” And also future M4L co-founder Tina Descovich, who was elected to Brevard County School Board with a signature issue of her opposition to Common Core. Descovich ran on two decades in business and a degree in Communications, as well as serving on the executive staff of a US Army Commanding General. Soon after joining the group, Descovich was its president.

FCSBM operated for a few years, giving out awards and working legislative connections as it ”consistently fought above its weight” to win “key battles on school choice, charters and other hot-button education issues.” But the group ran out of steam, and in May of 2020, Descovich and Ziegler filed for voluntary dissolution of FCSBM.

At that point, Ziegler and Descovich were experienced and well-connected political operatives who had been working at anti-public ed advocacy for years. And they were looking for a new angle. On December 10, Descovich and new MFL founder Tiffany Justice were posting about the launch of the new group; Descovich even had a picture of thirteen women already wearing the group’s t-shirt and displaying their logo.

The speed with which the group launched was impressive. They claimed fundraising by selling t-shirts on Facebook, but that would not begin to account for receipts of a half a million dollars in their first year.

Maurice Cunningham, author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, has been hollering into the void for years, tracked the many benefits that M4L enjoyed on launch. By the end of the January, they had appeared on the Rush Limbaugh Show; soon they moved on to score appearances or shout outs from Breitbart, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, Fox News, and Steve Bannon’s War Room. They threw some massive fundraisers and Cunningham's research found connections to Heritage Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and the Council for National Policy. The group's media and political profile erupted quickly.

Bridget Ziegler's husband Christian, a political operative with a PR firm and great prospects in Florida GOP leadership, told the Washington Post that he has been “trying for 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.” 

That was in October of 2021, at which point Bridget's involvement had been retroactively deleted from the M4L origin story (this was a few years before the Zieglers ran into trouble for trolling bars for three-way partners).

M4L showed their interest in being national political players from the start, throwing weight behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and inviting big political names to their various conventions (instead of, say, educational experts). They had a brief bump on the local level, followed by a whole lot of people realizing they had better pay closer attention to what kinds of radicals were running for school board. But as their local school board fortunes waned, M4L's national leadership shrugged and moved on, almost as if those contests weren't really the main thing.

These days Ziegler is still making waves at the Sarasota school board. Tiffany Justice landed a cushy job with the Heritage Foundation-- and lost it after just seven months. But she was there long enough to tell ProPublica, “If America’s public schools cease to exist tomorrow, America would be a better place.” Descovich has landed in DC, connected to the current regime and serving solo as M4L CEO. She's the subject of Collin Binkley's interview for the AP.

Binkley spoke to Seth Levi at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the folks who labeled M4L as "extremist." Levi said that M4L "are more interested in platforming extremist voices and policies rather than listening to the American people." And he did speak to Cunningham, who notes that the group is more about political advocacy rather than parental input. “They’re in the White House, there’s no question,” he said. “But they are there as a voice of the organized institutional right wing.” 

And look-- if folks want to throw their weight behind the regime decide to get politically active, that's their right. M4L certainly illustrated one principle-- if you can get people all worked up about a local issue (naughty books in the school library!!) you can get them to the polls in ways that might be helpful. 

But it is frustrating to see media repeatedly go along with the momwashing of these seasoned, well-connected, political operatives, writing about them as if they just sort of fell onto the national political stage rather than getting there through working connections, hoovering up truckloads of money, and calculating the angles. Nobody is writing pieces about Stephen Miller describing him as just a dad who wanted to get involved writing about issues for his college newspaper and now, golly gosh, here he is in the White House!

There is one piece of Binkley's piece that is worth noting. Commenting on the recent M4L lobby-your-congressperson day at the capitol, Descovich offered this:

“We’re not really doing any lobbying for any specific bills at the federal level yet,” Descovich said. “That will come next year.”

 No mention of whether they'll be selling more t-shirts to fund this effort.