Moms for Liberty meets its match: Parents in this swing suburban district are fighting back

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Source: Salon

Moms for Liberty meets its match: Parents in this swing suburban district are fighting back

Amanda Marcotte
Tue, October 10, 2023 at 6:00 AM EDT·25 min read

"Monster Liberty": That's how the otherwise excellent closed-captioning service in the auditorium at Pennridge High School interpreted "Moms for Liberty," while one of several dozen citizens who had waited in line to lambast the group spoke at the podium. A chuckle rose up among the parents in the crowded school board meeting, held on a late August evening after the first day of classes for the Pennridge School District in suburban Bucks County, Pennsylvania. "Fair enough," one mother whispered to another.

That wasn't the only moment of levity that evening, which saw a robust crowd of largely irate parents speak out against the adoption of a social studies curriculum linked to far-right organizations like Moms for Liberty and Hillsdale College. Before the meeting, people exchanged wisecracks about "talented clappers" — an inside-joke reference to an email circulated among local conservatives that appealed for sympathetic outsiders to turn out and applaud the right-wing agenda: "You do not need to be a resident to attend and clap," it advised, for "policies that bless and protect our children."

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Most of the attendees saw that appeal as a minor victory, or at least as evidence that they were gaining ground in the battle for control over the school district — one of hundreds of similar battles unfolding all over the country. Yes, the Pennridge school board was dominated by far-right members, one of whom had been present in Washington for Donald Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally-turned-riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Yes, at least five of the nine board members were linked to Moms for Liberty, a right-wing "astroturf" organization that has orchestrated a national campaign to remake public education along arch-conservative and anti-intellectual lines. But Pennridge board meetings for months had been dominated by outraged parents speaking out against the Moms for Liberty incursion and the board majority's apparent agenda. Conservative forces were sufficiently worried about the optics, it appeared, that they were eager to pull in "talented clappers" from outside the community.

A tightly packed group of Moms for Liberty supporters did indeed show up, huddled together in a few rows of seats. ...

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Read more: https://news.yahoo.com/moms-liberty-meets-match-parents-100001256.html