Olivia Little and Madeline Peltz returned for another Moms for Liberty summit and found a diminished group in the grip of trans panic. She wrote about it for Media Matters.
Scandal, school board election failures, and a disastrous 60 Minutes interview appear to have diminished Moms for Liberty’s once powerful influence, and last weekend’s summit provided plenty of additional evidence that the group is currently flailing.
Nearly every Republican presidential hopeful and a number of right-wing giants spoke at Moms for Liberty’s lively summit last year. But this year’s gathering was comparatively small, with far fewer panels and a weaker speaker lineup. In fact, Glenn Beck and D-list comedian Rob Schneider were advertised as the star headliners until the exceptionally late addition of former President Donald Trump just days before the event.
This is the second year that my colleague Madeline Peltz and I attended Moms for Liberty’s summit. It was immediately apparent to us that the small crowd had seemingly been reduced to largely die-hard members who, unlike many, remained loyal to Moms for Liberty through its year of scandal and failure. Co-founder Tina Descovich acknowledged that the organization was losing some support while presenting an award, saying, “You have been a friend to Moms for Liberty when some have stepped away.”
Much of the conference was spent attempting to terrify parents into believing that schools are secretly grooming, manipulating, and transitioning students. The bag handed to us at registration included an illustrated flyer laying out the ridiculous “school to clinic pipeline,” which, according to the flyer, begins at “pronouns” and ends in a hospital.
Almost every speaker we listened to incorporated transgender panic into their speech. One panel was even titled “Protecting Kids from Secret Gender Transitions in Schools.”
In a panel condemning Title IX’s protection of students from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, attorneys encouraged parents to file complaints with the Department of Education to put “sand in the regulatory gears for this administration” because each report has to be investigated and filing more will create a backlog.