A Bircher Take Over of Education
How Mom's for Liberty builds on the John Birch Society's push into PTAs in the 1960s
Schools are on the front line of today’s culture wars. School boards, in particular, are under siege.
With the guise of protecting kids from indoctrination by critical race theorists (CRT) and anti-American liberals, conservatives across the country are going after diversity, equity, and inclusion programs—including teaching about race and racism as well as gender identity and sexual orientation. Take the Rockwood School District in suburban St. Louis, for example. Starting during the 2020-2021 school year, the district has felt the brunt of a conservative backlash against what some folks have viewed as a CRT takeover of the curriculum.
“I send my kids to school for an education,” Adam Whittington told the Rockwood School Board during a hearing on May 6, 2021. “I don’t send them to get a moral lecture. A political lecture… an evil ideology.”
Like many districts under conservative scrutiny about their curriculum, the Rockwood situation got going as a revolt against public health measures and mask mandates during the pandemic.
From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
The uproar in Rockwood started with a debate over virtual learning during the pandemic and has moved to a focus on the district’s curriculum and reading lists. Protests became commonplace at School Board meetings, and fiery debates erupted among parents on social media.
These conservative attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in schools have prompted a upwelling of conservative challenges to open boards of education seats. And this is where the group Moms for Liberty comes into play.
Moms for Liberty has become the standard bearer for the conservative backlash against schools—leading culture war battles by hyping up hysteria about CRT and pushing a conservative takeover of local school boards.
Ali Swenson of the Associated Press described the group this way:
To its members, it’s a grassroots army of “joyful warriors” who “don’t co-parent with the government.”
To anti-hate researchers, it’s a well-connected extremist group that attacks inclusion in schools.
Moms for Liberty has been so successful at dismantling DEI-focused curriculum, pushing DEI leaders out of their jobs, disrupting school board meetings, and getting their supporters elected that the 2024 Republican candidates for president are lining up for the Moms for Liberty stamp of approval. They’re all clamoring for keynote speaker spots at the upcoming Moms for Liberty Joyful Warriors Summit in Philadelphia at the end of June.
Here’s Ali Swenson again:
The high interest in the event underscores how fights surrounding gender and race have become core issues for Republican voters. It also spotlights Republicans’ eagerness to embrace a group that has drawn backlash for spreading anti-LGBTQ+ ideas and stripping libraries and classrooms of diverse materials.
And, of course, the 2024 Republican field of candidates are vying for a Moms for Liberty endorsement at the same time:
[The group] has expanded its activism in local school districts to target books it says are inappropriate or “anti-American,” ban instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, require teachers to disclose students’ pronouns to parents, and remove diversity, equity, and inclusion programs from schools.
None of this is new, though. Moms for Liberty’s playbook harkens back to the John Birch Society’s push to take over schools in the early 1960s. Concerned about communists creeping into every aspect of American society, Robert Welch—the founder and director of the Birch Society—“urged his followers to take over Parent-Teacher Associations [PTAs] on the theory that local offices would be easier to attain than statewide seats.” Welch also viewed PTAs as susceptible to rabble rousing: good platforms for ginning up support for its causes.
According to political historian Matthew Dallek, events surrounding a small school district in western Montana illustrate how the John Birch Society attacked what it viewed as anti-Americanism in schools.
From Dallek’s book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right:
The Darby School District in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana showed what was possible when a handful of local members took an idea from the society and put it into practice. When the district’s superintendent decided to replace Bibles that were deemed to be in bad condition, a local minister advised that it would be okay to burn them. After approximately two dozen Birchers learned of the bonfire, their outrage sparked a multiyear crusade to remake the school district. A principal grew so concerned that Birchers were “using the local PTA as a springboard to infiltrate” Darby’s schools that he asked Montana’s Democratic Senator, Mike Mansfield, to send the principal any information Mansfield had on the operation. The Senator’s office reported that a local Birch chapter sought to establish review committees to study the school’s humanities textbooks for evidence of subversive teaching and expurgate what it saw as socialist propaganda from the school library. The school board voted down these Birch proposals, but the chapter members largely succeeded in their scorched-earth campaign of aggression and intimidation. They made menacing phone calls to the superintendent, trashed his home, and stalked him, and eventually he resigned. According to historian Kristian Gates, within a few years, the Darby School District lost sixteen of its twenty-three teachers, victims of the Birchers’ tear-it-all-down assault.
It’s not hard to imagine a straight line from the John Birch Society to Moms for Liberty.
More to come soon…
Primary Sources
Bernhard, Blythe. “Conservative Wave Sees Mixed Results.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 6, 2022.
Bernhard, Blythe. “Lockwood Board Defends Inclusive Curriculum, Pleads for Civility as Uproar Grips School District.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 7, 2021.
Llorico, Abby. “Rockwood Forum Turns Heated During Discussion of Race and Class Curriculum.” KSDK (NBC), April 30, 2021.
Swenson, Ali. “Moms for Liberty Rises as Power Player in GOP Politics after Attacking Schools Over Gender, Race.” PBS NewsHour, June 12, 2023.
Secondary Sources
Dallek, Matthew. Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. New York, NY: Basic Books.