On Friday, the nation’s capital was cloaked in light mist as a mostly female crowd gathered in a downtown hotel to focus their collective energy on a subject that’s been occupying them for years: war. Culture war, specifically.
Over this Labor Day weekend, people from all over the country attended the national summit for Moms for Liberty. That’s the far-right parental rights group that parlayed outrage over pandemic school closures and restrictions into conservative stardom. They’ve evolved from focusing on masks and remote learning to embracing a new identity as guardians of children’s innocence.
Their focus is on supposedly protecting kids from being brainwashed by public school employees into becoming transgender, though at the summit there were signs that their focus is broadening to include the entire LGBTQ community. On Saturday, one speaker shared her tale of how she prayed the gay away; on Friday, another scoffed that her child’s school had an LGBTQ advocate and was rewarded with a chorus of boos.
Moms for Liberty’s summit was a somewhat chaotic mix of the same old standards for which they’ve become known in the handful of years since three women from Florida created the group.
Some big-time conservatives regaled the crowd with criticism for public schools, LGBTQ people, teachers’ unions, liberals, and the Department of Education. In addition to headliner former President Donald Trump, speakers included actor/comedian Rob Schneider; Democrat congresswoman-turned-Republican darling Tulsi Gabbard; right-wing personalities Glenn Beck, Sebastian “Seb” Gorka, and James Lindsay; and multiple employees of the Heritage Foundation, a summit sponsor that has lately become notorious for Project 2025, a sweeping plan to remake America in its ultra-conservative image. Multiple outlets made much of the fact that Trump spoke at an event it sponsored, given his recent attempts to distance himself from Project 2025.
I applied for press credentials to cover Moms for Liberty’s summit in late July. Nearly a month later, the nonprofit notified me that the request was denied “due to limited space.” Yet there were dozens of empty seats at Friday’s catered lunch and even Trump didn’t fill the room.
Rather than cover via the livestream, as the group offered, the Daily Dot purchased a $249 ticket and sent me to Washington, D.C. to be a fly on the wall during talks about protecting kids from public schools’ supposed plot to secretly transition their genders, marxism, and how to be an investigative journalist (according to the right-wing Daily Wire reporter Luke Rosiak).
“You wanna fire off so many [Freedom of Information Act requests] you forget you made them and when they come back, it’s a surprise,” Rosiak said.
Chaos in the capital
Although the nonprofit Moms for Liberty has been promoting it for many months, much of the summit felt disorganized and thrown together at the last minute. The clear plastic schwag bag consisted of a few handouts, a chip clip, and a red rubber bracelet proclaiming its wearer is “untrafficked.”
Trump wasn’t announced as a speaker until roughly a week prior and the complete schedule wasn’t available until just before the summit began.
Even then it wasn’t accurate.
Events started late and ran over and some sessions took place at different times and in different locations than the schedule promised, so someone thinking they were attending a speech on how to get involved with school boards might unwittingly find themselves listening to a talk on “boyhood and the changing role of the man in American life” during which they received a handout listing the 12 ways in which men supposedly experience inequality, such as reproductive rights, something called “the boy crisis,” and false allegations of sexual assault.
Saturday’s daytime event was billed as the March for Kids, but there was no marching and very few kids. Probably for the best: one speaker claimed that the society “has embraced killing children” and Beck made a quip about Transportation Security Administration workers putting their hands down his pants.
Not even the person running the table for members of the media to pick up their credentials had an itinerary for the “march,” which turned out to just be three hours of speeches followed by a photo op. People spilled out into the street, seemingly oblivious to the cars cutting across lanes to avoid running them over.
Throughout the summit, much of the subject matter consisted of dreary assessments of the school system specifically and American life more broadly. There was a sense that attendees are angered, confused, or simply feel left behind by strides toward racial and LGBTQ equality. Still, most of the time, the crowd’s energy was middling at best, as if they’re starting to become numb to concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); critical race theory (CRT); and pronouns. At one point I overheard four men who appeared to be involved with the summit in some official capacity remark that “at least they’re engaged,” so perhaps this assessment was in the eye of the beholder. On Friday, one woman told me that this was her third time attending the summit and opined that it had been “great.”
There were some moments of excitement and brevity.
People cheered for a group that included Gabbard talking about leaving the Democratic Party during a Friday morning panel; Beck, Trump, and a few others got standing ovations. Before Trump’s “fireside chat,” two women in the bathroom joked that they better go now “because Trump likes to talk.” During her session about abolishing the Department of Education, a longtime Heritage Foundation employee paraphrased a line from The Girl Next Door, the raunchy 2004 comedy whose female lead is an adult film star, something of an interesting choice given she began by praising pre-colonial education under the Puritans.
On Friday, culture warrior Lindsay, whose claim to fame is mostly calling people groomers, was bestowed with something they called the “sword of liberty,” which he proceeded to hold like a phallus. Perhaps that’s what the two remaining Moms for Liberty co-founders who haven’t been embroiled in a sex scandal meant when they called him a “lady killer.”
After the women relieved him of the sword, Lindsay gave some remarks during which he declared that the “demure” fad has become a code word for liberals.
“They’re so demure for 70 more days; they’re rubbing it in your face,” he jibed. “They’re mocking you because you know they’re not. We all know they’re not.”
The main event
You might expect that after a full day of being regaled with talks on fundraising, pestering school board members, and “secret gender transition,” people wouldn’t have much energy left when Trump lumbered onstage at little after 7pm. And you would be right.
There were some laughs and cheers and the ubiquitous “U.S.A.” chants, which were apparently boosted by the wares from multiple bars in and around the venue. But there were also yawns and long periods of silence during which the crowd absorbed Trump’s meandering, often nonsensical responses to Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich’s softball questions. Two men in my direct vicinity appeared to briefly nod off. I saw multiple people slip out before he was done talking, seemingly never to return.
There was none of the energy and fervor that characterized his 2016 campaign, nor the rage that boiled over following the 2020 election.
Maybe this was because they’ve heard nearly everything he said many, many times before.
The vast majority of his talk was a version of the same grievance filled diatribes he’s been delivering since riding down that elevator in 2015. To hear him tell it, America is a dystopian wasteland.
It may seem likely that a crowd decked out in uber-Americana gear would boo comments like, “We are a failing nation,” but instead they simply nodded along, seemingly unfazed.
Trump unleashed familiar screeds about that which he loathes—immigration, President Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, the media, Vice President Harris—interspersed with praise for himself and complaints about how unfairly he’s been treated. He talked about Biden so much and Harris so little it almost seemed as if he still thinks he’s running against his old foe.
He’s clearly salty that Democrats switched candidates.
“I spent $100 million fighting Joe Biden. And even during the convention, you know, we’re only talking about Biden, fighting Biden, and then we’re not fighting him anymore,” Trump lamented.
Other than deporting immigrants and making unfounded claims about undocumented immigrants, Trump didn’t speak much about the future, preferring instead to focus on the past. He bragged about his debate performances, what a great president he was, and an excellent reality television star before that.
At one point Trump said that he’d unsuccessfully tried to convince his daughter Ivanka to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a job he said she’d have excelled at because of her “rat-a-tat-tat.” He did not elaborate on what he meant by that.
The end of Moms for Liberty?
Some believe that Moms for Liberty is losing ground. This year’s summit suggested it isn’t the juggernaut it once was. It appeared that at best a few hundred people attended the events with the highest turnout, such as Trump’s speech.
Last year’s summit in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania drew protesters the New York Post described as “leftist bullies” participating in a “hate-filled siege.” Even though this year’s event was held in a city that Biden carried with over 90% of the vote in 2020, I didn’t see a single protester at either the JW Marriott, where the vast majority of its events took place, or DAR Constitution Hall where Saturday’s “march” was held. (The march was originally supposed to be held at the Jefferson Memorial—supposedly that had to change last-minute due to “security issues.”)
“Their electoral influence has significantly waned compared to 2022. Book bans are unpopular, their leaders have been embroiled in scandal, and their candidates continue to lose local elections,” Alejandra Caraballo told the Daily Dot.
Caraballo, an attorney and clinical instructor at Harvard Law School, thinks Moms for Liberty might have fallen out of favor with some of the electorate but that it remains an influential force in conservative politics.
“Their ideas, however, have found policy influence in Project 2025, which aims to federalize policies banning books, institutionalizing cruelty to LGBTQ students and families, and implementing curriculum that serves as far-right indoctrination,” she said.
Lissette Fernandez, co-founder of Moms for Libros, a Florida-based organization that opposes Moms for Liberty, thinks that the more parents learn about the group, the less they like it.
Fernandez pointed out that many Moms for Liberty-backed school board candidates lost in its home state’s August primary. The losses were so severe the Tampa Bay Times published an article headlined, “Do Florida school board elections signal the end of Moms for Liberty?”
Fernandez believes that book bans and the group’s overall message isn’t resonating with most parents.
“Their views are extremely unpopular and out of touch with everyday parents who just want their children to receive a good education without the misguided intrusion of adults in the community who are not stakeholders in the public schools their children attend,” Fernandez told the Daily Dot.
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