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We've been meaning to get around to this, and now the time has come. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), as most readers will know, maintains a watchlist of extremist groups in the United States. Normally, this "honor" is reserved for various racist, antisemitic and anti-government groups. However, just 2 years after their founding, Moms for Liberty has made the cut.
How, exactly, does that designation make sense as a description of a group of people known for going to PTA meetings and yelling at everyone? Well, part of it is that the things that they yell are very extreme. But the larger part of it is that the things the group does after the PTA meeting is over. They have their newsletters (i.e., propaganda) that are filled with extreme rhetoric and ideas. And they have perfected the art of using social media to harangue those individuals they disagree with.
As we note above, we've had this item on the back burner for a while. And it is instructive that, every time we've thought about moving it to the front burner, we've had no difficulty finding a recent news story to use as a potential illustration of their approach. There is always something, and it's rarely more than a few days old. For example, there was just a dust-up in Telford, a small borough of Pennsylvania.
The background to the Telford incident is this: There is one library in the 5,000-person town, the Indian Valley Public Library. Margie Stern has been director of the library for the better part of a decade, and the main problems she had to deal with for most of that time were the kinds of problems you would expect—managing access to the rec room, stretching the budget to cover all expenses, etc. That changed in March, when Telford began to gear up for elections to its borough council. Two Moms-for-Liberty-backed candidates made the library a centerpiece of their campaigns, decreeing that the librarians are all "groomers" who provide "pornography" for children and engage in "sex trafficking." These days, the library often has protesters outside, who alternate between making these wild and unfounded charges and quoting scripture.
As a well-to-do suburb, the Telford Borough Council has historically been dominated by Republicans. But two of the current council members have been won over to the Moms for Liberty agenda, and they secured a 25% cut of the library's budget in order to hire a new police officer to patrol the streets for perverts. If the two additional Moms-backed candidates are elected, then that will be a majority of the seven-person council, and the library may lose all of its funding.
In response to these machinations, Natalie Cimonetti, who is a mother of two and is not an extremist, decided to counter-organize in support of two Democratic candidates. Her organization is called Red Wine & Blue, and its purpose is to resist extremism. Using the same tools that the Moms for Liberty use, Cimonetti took her fight to social media. And last week, Chief of Police Randall Floyd sent Cimonetti a letter warning her that she could be facing criminal stalking charges if she doesn't back down.
The exact nature of Cimonetti's posts is unknown, though she apparently posted the names and addresses of Moms members to Facebook. Not the most admirable thing ever, but "criminal" is a stretch, particularly since doxxing is a standard tool in the Moms for Liberty toolkit. Floyd, for his part, says he's not taking sides, but he's sent letters like this before. Also, one cannot help but notice that money taken away from the library tends to go to his department.
The council elections will happen in November, of course, and while the number of ballots cast is usually in the low hundreds, this time it's going to be in the thousands. Both sides are gearing up, and are blanketing the one-square-mile area with signage. There's no polling, naturally, but the scuttlebutt is that there's going to be big-time "support the library" turnout, and the Moms and their allies are going to take a shellacking. We'll be keeping an eye on it, because one can imagine similar situations playing out across suburbia next year.
It's also worth noting what's really going on here. There is no doubt that, at the local level, Moms for Liberty and their allies think they are fighting the good fight against... Satan or whatever. However, the people who are pulling the strings are thinking about... abortion, and its potential negative impact on Republicans in 2024. If Democrats can somehow be painted as extreme because of the books they tolerate in schools and libraries, then it could serve to cancel out attacks against Republicans for being extreme on abortion.
At least, that's the theory. We are somewhat skeptical that the people whose votes are available will draw an equivalence between, say, making Johnny Has Two Daddies available and forcing a woman with a non-viable fetus to carry it to term. Meanwhile, if a group is worried that non-right-wing voters are going to show up to the polls in large numbers, and they pursue an approach that could also cause non-right-wing voters to show up to the polls in large numbers, that's a double loss, and not a win. (Z)