What we are seeing in our politics today is a direct attack, from the inside, on American democracy. This attack isn't coming from just one man. The anti-democratic movement has been building over the past several decades, and this movement is intent on capturing the levers of power in the American system, destroying the institutions that have sustained our democracy, and stripping women and girls, among other groups, of our rights. I wrote the book Money, Lies, and God because I think it's important to understand the structure of this movement, who is really behind it, and how it works.
As a mom in Santa Barbara, California, I witnessed a program of fundamentalist religious indoctrination force its way into my kids' public elementary school. The more I learned about the program and the people behind it, the more it became clear that the leaders of the program hated public education precisely because public schools are supposed to be nonsectarian — neither affirming nor denigrating any form of religion — and because they objected to the principles of pluralism and equality that public schools are supposed to respect. They believed that any school that does not have their reactionary version of the Christian faith as its foundation is "a consequence of evil." That was 16 years ago. As I continued to delve deeper into this topic, it soon became clear to me that the attack on public education was just one part of a broader attack on America as a modern constitutional democracy.
This selection from my book, which describes my attendance at a Moms for Liberty convention, speaks to how this movement plays off the idea that it is just a group of ordinary moms fighting for their kids. But I want to convey how ideological this group really is, along with the fact that Moms for Liberty is a thoroughly partisan political operation. These "moms" aren't fighting to improve the schools; they are spreading lies and deploying the politics of outrage in order to lay the groundwork for a wholesale assault.
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It’s the late spring of 2023, I’m relaxing in Santa Barbara, and I can hear the rumble of the school board wars like distant thunder across the landscape. Books are tumbling off shelves, librarians are running scared, and a tiny population of kids who identify as nonbinary are being told they represent the greatest threat to civilization. At the center of the conflicts is a group that grandly calls itself Moms for Liberty. I learn that the Moms are planning a National Summit in Philadelphia for July. I immediately buy a ticket and pack my suitcase.
Outside the Philadelphia hotel, small clumps of protesters clog the sidewalk. It’s the tail end of the Pride festival, and the brand-name stores lining the streets of City Center are still festooned with colorful flags and glitter. A number of homeless people rest on the edges of the festive sidewalks, like extras from the wrong film set. The air, hazy from the Canadian wildfire plumes raging a thousand-plus miles away, parches the throat; overhead the sun appears orange. Donald Trump has just been indicted on seven counts in the classified documents probe regarding alleged mishandling of classified material. The vibe is slightly apocalyptic.
The first event at the Moms for Liberty conference is an evening tour of the Museum of the American Revolution. To my astonishment, a police escort accompanies the bus that takes us there. A small but noisy group of protestors have gathered outside the museum; presumably the police and event organizers are taking no chances. The police form a protective corridor from the bus to the museum. The organizers appear to welcome the security theater. “Thank the police officers for protecting us, okay?” says a staffer as we stream inside.
The Joyful Warriors National Summit, as it is billed, properly begins the following morning in the conference center. Joining me is my friend and fellow journalist Annika Brockschmidt, the German author of Die Brand-Stifter (The Arsonists) and Amerikas Gottes-Krieger (America’s Godly Warriors). A historian by training, she is tall, blond, and stylishly attired in a pale-green suit.
The atmosphere in the lobby is militantly cheerful. Groups of women in four or five chat excitedly and compare notes. Every fingernail looks carefully polished, every cheek is bronzed. Dressed in flowing trouser suits or dresses with stylish heels, the women look well prepared to take on the photographers who roam the event in search of promotional material for social media channels.
The origin myth of Moms for Liberty says that it all started in sun-dappled Florida during the pandemic, when three conventional suburban moms bonded over complaints about mask mandates and school closures. The reality is that the Moms had high-level connections to the Florida GOP from the beginning, and “conventional” is not always the best way to describe them. Cofounder Bridget Ziegler is married to Christian Ziegler, the former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, and a few months after the Philadelphia conference, it was revealed that the couple engaged in three-way sexual adventures with other women—one of whom accused Christian of rape in another incident. (In January 2024 police cleared Christian of the rape allegation but asked prosecutors to charge him with illegally recording a sexual encounter. The state attorney general declined to pursue video voyeurism charges.)
In any event, the group appears more focused on money than sex. It reported $2.1 million in total revenue in 2022, including hundreds of thousands from Publix supermarket chain heiress Julie Fancelli and the George Jenkins Foundation, of which Fancelli is the president and sole funder. (The George Jenkins Foundation also contributes substantially to reactionary and Christian nationalist groups such as Judicial Watch, Patriot Academy, and Moms for America; Fancelli was a prominent financial backer of the January 6 rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol.)
The Moms funneled a portion of that rich haul to a company funded and operated by Christian Ziegler. His firm, Microtargeted Media, specializes in targeted text messages and takes in hundreds of thousands of dollars from right-wing political campaigns. Their motto: “We do digital & go after people on their phones.” (Christian Ziegler has applied a digital strategy to his own legal defense; he used a phone video he made of himself engaging with his accuser to argue that the sex was consensual.)
The framing of the Moms’ activism has all the hallmarks of what author Michelle Nickerson calls “housewife populism.” In Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right, Nickerson points out that conservative women’s political engagement in the postwar era was a powerful tool in the battle against communism and moral degeneracy. “Capitalizing upon cultural assumptions about women and motherhood, they put themselves forward as representatives of local interests who battled bureaucrats for the sake of family, community, and God,” she writes. The challenge to public school policies and curricula here is based on the idea that the Moms have a unique moral authority—superior to that of professional educators and administrators (whom the Moms often deride as the “K-12 mafia”).
The photographers begin circling my friend Annika, having apparently mistaken her for a populist übermom. She ducks a bit, and they move on. The social media feeds begin to fill with images of mama-bear solidarity. The smiles are those of sisterhood and sacrifice: We’re just in it for the kids.
Tickets start at $249 for the three-day event, excluding transportation and lodging. All meals are catered, and several trips by bus to museums and other local attractions are included. I dip into the spread of fancy appetizers that greets us at the Museum of the American Revolution, and it is delicious. I have been attending right-wing conferences for about fifteen years, and this one is among the most lavish. These are moms with deep-pocketed sponsors.
To be fair, it is very hard to know where the proselytizing ends and the profit making begins. One speaker at the event turns out to be Erika Donalds—the Florida-based education entrepreneur who happens to be the wife of Republican congressman Byron Donalds, from Florida’s nineteenth congressional district. A close ally of Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump, Byron Donalds frequently speaks at right- wing conferences and events touting privatization as the cure for the nation’s woes. Privatization certainly appears to enhance his own household. His wife is the founder of two for-profit companies that are sure to stand first in line for the school privatization
gravy train. Her for-profit company OptimaEd is explicitly dedicated to expanding the network of schools associated with Hillsdale College, the Christian nationalist Michigan school that members of the DeSantis administration have richly praised.
She has also founded Classical Schools Network Inc., a charter management company, which is poised to cash in on the Hillsdale expansion. Erika Donalds was also savvy enough to set up a nonprofit, the Optima Foundation, which, as the journalist Keira Butler reported in Mother Jones, fundraises for the same academies that her companies help manage. But the profit-making is frequently ignored when packaged in a protective layer of sanctimony, and from the podium at Moms for Liberty, Erika Donalds delivers it sweetly. “Lord, you have elevated this organization to do your good work in this country,” she preaches. “We’re grateful that the truth is being exposed, that parents are being able to see what’s really going on in education in our country.”
A section of the conference area is given over to lively booths from an extraordinarily large number of right-wing organizations. I wander through and pick up a few of the resources on offer. Parents Defending Education offers free booklets and other materials with tendentious allegations about the content of public school curricula and instructions for parents on how to root it out. EpochTV, a division of the conspiracist right-wing media company the Epoch Times, which is associated with the Falun Gong religious movement, is promoting a documentary titled Gender Transformation: The Untold Realities.The Pennsylvania Family Institute is hosting a “biblical” leadership conference for teens that promises a “unique experience of using the political process as a means of cultivating leadership skills.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and the Southeastern Legal Foundation are giving away guidebooks and other tools for “saving America’s Public Schools.” The California-based organization Protect Our Kids, which adheres to the “biblical truth which teaches that God created mankind in His image, male and female,” offers detailed instruction on how to force schools to allow parents to “observe and volunteer” in classrooms, examine curriculum materials, and access student records and policy materials, as well as opt out of “anti-bullying” lessons.
Everywhere, parents are urged to submit open records requests, inspect instructional materials for any hint of critical race theory (CRT), complain volubly and disruptively if schools take issue with any of their findings, and threaten legal action. In short, it’s a school administrator’s nightmare.
In the main conference room at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, the speakers begin beating their drums. Public schools have become gender distortion academies, or so everyone here seems to believe. They exist to turn girls into boys and boys into freaks, all for the pleasure of a sick, woke elite.
Another repeated talking point, it soon becomes clear, is that we are all supposed to be joyful. The people out there—the speakers keep gesturing toward the streets, which are presumably crawling with leftover Pride marchers—may think that we are angry, bigoted fanatics. But we are joyful! So keep smiling.
