The Florida-based conservative group Moms for Liberty has been designated as an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In the SPLC's recent "Year in Hate and Extremism" report released Tuesday, Moms for Liberty was one of the 1,225 "hate groups" documented in 2022. It was specifically labeled as an "anti-government" extremist group and is one of the 702 identified across the U.S.
"Moms for Liberty is a far-right organization that engages in anti-student inclusion activities and self-identifies as part of the modern parental rights movement," the SPLC said on its website. "The group grew out of opposition to public health regulations for COVID-19, opposes LGBTQ+ and racially inclusive school curriculum, and has advocated books bans."
In recent months, the group has sent letters to Broward County Public Schools demanding the removal of several books from school media centers, including books that deal with gay and transgender themes.
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"Moms for Liberty and its nationwide chapters combat what they consider the 'woke indoctrination' of children by advocating for book bans in school libraries and endorsing candidates for public office that align with the group's views," the SPLC said.
Moms for Liberty was founded in 2011 by two former Florida school board members. The group has chapters across the state, including ones in Broward, Miami-Dade, Collier, Orange counties and more.
“Moms for Liberty believes that the Department of Education, a cabinet-level position of our federal government, should be dissolved, should not exist, so that is one of the reasons they are anti-government," Efren Olivares with the SPLC said. "Also they harass school board members online and on their personal social media sites — people who are doing a service to our community."
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In a statement, Moms for Liberty co-founders, Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, criticized the SPLC's report.
“Two-thirds of Americans think the public education system is on the wrong track today. That is why our organization is devoted to empowering parents to be a part of their child’s public school education. That is our fundamental goal, which began just two years ago when teacher’s unions locked students out of schools during the pandemic," the statement read. "Empowering parents continues to be our mission today and that has fueled our organization’s growth - like wildfire to now 45 states in the country. Name-calling parents who want to be a part of their child’s education as ‘hate groups’ or ‘bigoted’ just further exposes what this battle is all about: Who fundamentally gets to decide what is taught to our kids in school - parents or government employees? We believe that parental rights do not stop at the classroom door and no amount of hate from groups like this is going to stop that."
In 2022 SPLC tracked 702 total antigovernment extremist groups up from 488 in 2021. This means 214 groups were added in one year. SPLC says most are anti-student inclusion and sovereign citizen entities.
“We believe that the very first step in addressing these threats — white supremacy, white nationalism and other forms of anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrate hate — is to identify them, track, expose them so that then our government can take steps to make sure they stop being a threat to our society,” Olivares said.
SPLC documented 1,225 active hate and antigovernment extremist groups across the U.S. in 2022, 89 of the groups are from Florida.
