Moms for Liberty: Making Waves for Children

I’ve just returned from Washington D.C., where I attended the Moms for Liberty Summit. Former President Trump spoke. So did Tulsi Gabbard. Glenn Beck too.

But the real draw was the women and men who spoke of the retaliation they endured for protesting school boards that endanger the health and education of their children. Some were fired from jobs. Others were slammed on Social Media. One was assaulted in the streets. Still others were forced to relocate their families, upending normal.

Walking into the breakfast session the first morning, sitting at a table of these warriors, felt like entering a foreign country where you were surrounded by people of shared values, where you felt free to speak your heart, without fear of being canceled. Not everyone agreed on all issues, but all coalesced on the big agenda — the kids.

Moms for Liberty was started in 2021 by Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich with $500 and a mission to win parental rights in their Florida school district. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, they protested lockdowns, masks, mandates and school closings. Now, Moms for Liberty has grown to 130,000 members in 300 chapters in 48 states, Utah and Vermont the outliers. Local chapters choose their grassroots issues, and many are now working to keep males out of women’s sports, end mutilation of children in the name of gender ideology and remove porn from school libraries.

“A tyrannical government woke a sleeping giant,” said Justice. “If we care about freedom, if we care about liberty, if we care about parental rights, we have to fight. And no one fights harder for their kids than mothers. Time to fight like a mother.”

For their growing numbers and anti-Woke agenda, the media routinely refers to them as far-right fanatics. The Southern Law Poverty Center, a radical left institution, calls them extremists. The Brookings Institution says theirs is such a polarizing organization, with such extreme positions, that its long-term impact is dubious.

Against this backdrop of hate and misinformation, speakers came to the podium, one after another, to tell us why the time has come to brave the backlash.

• From the time she was elected to the Texas House of Reps in 2016, Shawn Thierry steered into law bills on maternal mortality, elderly protections and against human trafficking. A loyal Democrat, she voted against aggressive immigration measures and a ban on diversity programs on college campuses.

  

• But last year she gave a 12-minute speech on the floor explaining why she was voting yes on a bill — since signed by Gov. Greg Abbott — banning sex change surgeries and hormones for children. This year Dems spent $1 million to primary her. She lost in a runoff to Lauren Simmons, an LGBTQ+ organizer, 35% to 65%.

• In private, most colleagues in the Black Caucus agreed with her about the issue, but told her to just vote yes anyway. She asked them how they could vote to castrate black boys, and sterilize young girls, given their community’s history of abuse. “Just hold your nose,” came one reply. She asked them what they would do if lawmakers next wanted to cut off the feet of young children. Silence.

• To a roar from the audience, she announced she was leaving the Democrat Party for the party of “faith and freedom.” She had experienced firsthand “how the Left stifles thoughtful debate, silences dissent and demands blind allegiance to an ideology that is anti-family and anti-children. If you question, or disagree, they will cancel you. This is why so many former Democrats plan to vote Republican.”

• After a career as an elite gymnast and a degree from Stanford, Jennifer Sey went to work at Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco, in 1999. For 20 years, she rose through the ranks while raising her four children, promoted to chief marketing officer and then brand president. But in January 2022, Sey spoke out against the pandemic closure of K-12 schools. Strauss fired her. She wrote a book about the experience, Levi's Unbuttoned: The Woke Mob Took My Job But Gave Me My Voice.

• Relocating her family, she started her own clothing apparel company, XX-XY Athletics, and encourages people to wear the hoodies, t-shirts and sweatpants to soccer games and basketball tourneys, to spark quiet conversations on the sidelines about protecting women’s sports. She told us already 700 men have beaten female athletes, “taking their trophies, their prize money, their scholarships.” Predictably, critics lobbed tired epithets, like anti-trans. But Sey said if enough of us say out loud the obvious — that men are more muscular than women — we can change a culture that the Left manipulates to label us transphobic when all we want is common sense to protect women.

• “It’s hard to lose jobs and friends,” she said. “But the more they came for me, the more I knew. We all have to put principles over party.”

  

  Chris is in the middle

• Chris Elston was a financial analyst when the cultural craze known as gender dysphoria began. He quit his job and decided to become an activist. Now they call him Billboard Chris, and he goes all over the world preaching against sex changes for children. “Our kids are being told they’re in wrong bodies. They need to know they are beautiful as they are, no scalpel or drugs needed. No child is born wrong.” Blasting schools for telling parents that their children will commit suicide without the surgery, he called it an “evil, manipulative thing to say.” For his campaign against transing the kids, he has been assaulted, punched in the nose and had his shoulder wrenched. Still he is clear. The Left has “conflated LGB with TQ+,” he said. “LGB is same sex attraction. Transgender is denial of reality.”

• This is not a traditional war, he said, where he as a husband and father can protect his family from the transgender cult with traditional weapons. “Our weapons are our words,” he said. “We have to arm ourselves with them and not be afraid to use them. If you can’t stand up against this, you need to question your internal courage and your morality, because our kids are being cut up, they’re being sterilized and they’re being turned into lifelong pharmaceutical patients.”

That evening, Glenn Beck spoke. At first, I did not understand why he was showing us artifacts from his collection of Nazi memorabilia. Letters signed by Auschwitz’s Dr. Josef Mengele, dubbed The Angel of Death, who did vicious medical experiments on prisoners, torturing them before they were sent to the gas chambers. When they come for the Jews, Beck explained, we all have to be Jews. And when they come for the kids, we have to stop whispering, we have to declare, we have to fight for what’s right.