“I’m worried about a new type of school board candidate that we’ve seen in the last couple of elections. These aren’t our traditional candidates who come to board elections with experience of civic engagement, participation. … Lately, we see kind of an angry parent. And sometimes they’re not even parents, but they’re running on wedge issues, culture war issues. They’re using deceptive information.”
Judith Deedy, Game On for Kansas Schools, quoted in Kansas Reflector, Aug. 21, 2023
Introduction
School board takeovers were one focus of this month’s Pray Vote Stand activist conference sponsored by the Family Research Council, evidence that religious-right political organizations are energetically participating in the broader push by right-wing political groups to take over school boards, revisiting a power-building strategy that was a focus of Christian-right organizing in the 1990s.
Two years ago, Right Wing Watch documented a growing campaign by right-wing political organizations to take over public school boards by inflaming parental fears about the supposed threat of critical race theory in public schools. In the two years since that report, efforts to take over school boards have expanded, and conservative PACS have poured millions of dollars into school board races. Right-wing political groups are expanding their investments in candidate recruitment and training with an eye to influencing elections at all levels in 2024.
The manufactured anger about critical race theory has been supplemented with a similar panic about “gender ideology.” Under the banner of parents’ rights, classrooms and libraries are being purged of books dealing with sexuality and race. Political operatives undermine support for public schools by spreading conspiracy theories about social and emotional learning and other topics. Politicians and right-wing activists make endless declarations of war against “wokeness”—a term vague enough to be wielded as an all-purpose political smear against teachers, school officials, and school board members. And right-wing legislators and governors are imposing legal bans on the teaching of specific books and topics.
These political efforts are hurting students, educators, school board members, and whole communities by turning schools into hostile political battlegrounds, and restricting the freedom of teachers to teach and students to learn. They are also intended to help elect far-right authoritarian candidates to positions where they can do more harm, from state education officials to president of the United States.
Big-Money, Powerful Connections Help ‘Moms’ Take Center Stage
Moms for Liberty, a group that was new on the scene in 2021, has seen its visibility and influence skyrocket over the past two years with the help of friendly right-wing media coverage, alliances with Republican politicians, and the sponsorship of powerful right-wing political organizations. The group’s political clout was on display at its summer conference in Philadelphia, where a parade of Republican presidential hopefuls took to the stage. The group has benefited from close ties to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
One secret of the group’s success was revealed at this year’s summit. From its first months, the group has been consulting with Morton Blackwell, whose Leadership Institute has nurtured the careers of many right-wing movement leaders. The Leadership Institute has essentially adopted M4L. It was one of the major sponsors of the summit, and, according to Blackwell, the group has trained “thousands” of M4L activists and is gearing up to train “thousands” more. In fact, the Leadership Institute hired Bridget Ziegler, an M4L co-founder whose husband chairs the Florida Republican Party, to run the Leadership Institute’s school board project. Right-wing activist James Lindsey, whose culture-war commentary has been published by the Leadership Institute, has joined M4L’s board of advisers. The Leadership Institute is offering school board candidate trainings in person, online, and via podcast.
The huge Heritage Foundation, effectively a propaganda machine for right-wing ideology and policy, is another of Moms for Liberty’s major financial supporters. The Heritage Foundation has published a toolkit for identifying supposed threats and offers its own school board training. In a recent fundraising pitch it warned, “Leftists are brainwashing vulnerable schoolchildren with radical gender ideologies and sexually explicit curricula. Woke politicians and school districts are overriding parental rights with extreme policies…By targeting our children, the Left is trying to destroy the pillars of our society…Leftists know that undermining faith, family, and traditional American values brings them closer to their goals.”
Also funding Moms for Liberty and other right-wing school board takeovers is Patriot Mobile, a cellphone carrier that uses its revenues to support Christian nationalist ideology and school board takeovers.
In 2022, more than half of the 500 school board candidates endorsed by M4L won, giving right-wing board members control of some major school boards. It did not do as well in Wisconsin this spring, where less than one-third of its candidates won. M4L plans to use its political action committee to play in school board races nationwide next year, and to “start endorsing at the state board level and elected superintendents.”
Ron DeSantis is not the only elected official to back Moms for Liberty’s school board takeover efforts. In Arizona, state superintendent of public instruction Tom Horne recently told a Moms for Liberty chapter that helping them take over school board would be “my main occupation for 2024.”
1776 Project PAC
The 1776 Project PAC, which claims to be “saving students from far-left indoctrination,” is another relative newcomer launched in the midst of right-wing fearmongering on critical race theory that has since embraced the anti-LGBTQ agenda. In a recent email newsletter, the group bragged that school board members it has helped elect are “ending critical race theory” and “destroying the pronoun mafia.”
In the 2022 election cycle, the PAC received $900,000 – about a quarter of its income -- from the Restoration PAC, a project of billionaire and far-right megafunder Richard Uhlein. Last year, the PAC claimed 102 victories, with a 60 percent win rate in races in New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, Minnesota, Kansas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Michigan. This May, it claimed that its candidates won 24 school board seats in Wisconsin and five in Texas.
Among the groups that support the 1776 PAC’s work is the American Principles Project, whose director Terry Schilling spoke at Pray Vote Stand about congressional races being targeted by right-wing groups in 2024. He has previously acknowledged that while APP is focused primarily on “retaking federal power,” the group also believes that it’s necessary to “take over the local school boards” to “reverse the policies that these guys have been implementing.”
The PAC announced Aug. 25 that it has raised more than $1 million so far this year; it has released school board candidate endorsements in Pennsylvania, Kansas, Ohio, and Virginia.
The 1776 PAC also supported Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters, who has used his office to wage war against teacher unions, which he has called “terrorist organizations.” Walters spoke at this year’s Moms for Liberty summit and Pray Vote Stand, where he said there’s no such thing as separation of church and state and vowed to return organized prayer and Bible reading to public schools.
Freedom Works
FreedomWorks, a right-wing political organization associated with the State Policy Network, was among those who jumped on the anti-critical race theory bandwagon to recruit and train activists to run for school boards to “root out CRT and other left-wing indoctrination.” It promotes “parental rights” and “school choice” legislation to divert public funding into private and religious schools. FreedomWorks’ BEST project (Building Education for Students Together) conducts live trainings and offers a free online six-week school board candidate academy “written by and for school board candidates, former school board members, and leading activists in the local education community.” BEST also holds quarterly trainings for school board members, candidates, and activists. In April it hosted a session on “How Grassroots can Win the Culture Wars in the Classroom.”
In 2022, FreedomWorks claimed that BEST had trained more than 10,000 activists since its founding in 2020, and said it planned to train another 10,000 activists this year. BEST claimed 86 school board victories in Arizona, Virginia, Florida, and elsewhere.
The Other ‘Moms’
Moms for America is another group promoting school board takeovers and attacks on public education. Moms for America was intimately involved in the “Stop the Steal” movement’s efforts to keep Donald Trump in power after his loss in the 2020 election, up to and including Trump’s rally on the ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021. The group’s founder Kimberly Fletcher spoke at the Washington, D.C. rally on Jan 5, 2021, which she said was about “saving the Republic.” Moms for America received a massive boost in funding in 2021 and 2022 from the Bradley Impact Fund and Publix heiress Julie Jenkins Fancelli, who has also been a major donor to Moms for Liberty’s PAC.
True North Research’s Alyssa Bowen reported this summer that Moms for America “launched MomForce, an initiative targeting education, in August 2021 and has hosted trainings for right-wing moms on how to disrupt their local school boards and run for office themselves.” Bowen noted that this year the group’s political action arm “has officially backed dozens of school board and other local candidates’ elections in Virginia, South Carolina, Illinois and Texas.”
Moms for America has published its own videos for school board candidates and also promotes the Leadership Institute’s candidate training and Family Research Council’s candidate “boot camp.”
The Religious Right
This summer, Rep. Michael Cloud told a gathering of Christian nationalists that "so few people vote in local elections that if two churches would get together in a school board election, you would own the school board." Religious-right organizations in several states are pursuing that strategy.
Just before this year’s recent Pray Vote Stand conference, the Family Research Council sent followers a fundraising letter warning that “millions of American children are in the clutches of the wolves” who are “seeking to devour the lambs.” The letter from FRC President Tony Perkins promoted the group’s School Board Boot Camp initiative, claiming it has trained 2,000 activists to either run for office or “effectively hold their school board accountable.” An FRC Action Boot Camp video from 2021 claimed that leftist indoctrination in “government schools” is “hindering children from coming to the truth that they were created by a creator, by God, uniquely, each one of them special, with a purpose in their lives.”
FRC’s political action arm hosted a school board candidate training the day before the official start of Pray Vote Stand, in partnership with Kingdom in Politics, a political consulting firm run by Aamon Ross, who managed the election campaign of Oklahoma’s Christian nationalist Gov. Kevin Stitt. Participants received some basic candidate training and were urged to spend hundreds of dollars for additional Kingdom in Politics instruction. Kingdom in Politics believes that “Kingdom ideals must fill the government space at all state levels” and its vision is to “raise up 100,000 Kingdom-minded believers to lead in our cities, counties, states and nation” over the next 10 years. Virginia congressional candidate Hung Cao, who has said he is running to prevent Virginia from being taken over by witchcraft, took Kingdom in Politics training before launching his run.
Perkins’ letter also touted FRC’s partnership with iVoterGuide, a conservative Christian producer of voter guides that is now operating as a project of the American Family Association’s political action arm. At Pray Vote Stand, AFA Action leaders touted iVoterGuide’s expanding participation in school board campaigns as well as traditional state and federal races.
California pastor and right-wing political activist Jack Hibbs, who was given a prominent speaking role at Pray Vote Stand between presidential candidates Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, is pushing school boards nationwide to adopt anti-trans policies, following the lead of the Chino Valley Unified School District, whose three-member majority is made up of attendees at Hibbs’ church, and the nearby Temecula school district, which has adopted a series of anti-LGBTQ policies. (Temecula's right-wing board members were also elected with the backing of a local pastor.) At PVS, Hibbs talked about conservative Christians flipping California school boards, part of his larger message that “as Christians we are to take back this nation.”
Also speaking at Pray Vote Stand was Richard Harris, executive director of Andrew Wommack’s Truth and Liberty Coalition. Wommack is a Colorado-based dominionist pastor whose supporters took over the Woodland Park school board in 2021, after which the board cut services, fired teachers, and installed a new superintendent who imposed a right-wing curriculum. In an invitation to an April 2023 candidate and campaign worker training, Harris claimed that students are “being indoctrinated by public schools in ungodly, divisive and harmful philosophies such as embracing homosexuality, redefining the murder of unborn babies as ‘healthcare,’ and that America is an illegitimate nation.”
“The Church must arise in this day and hour and lead this generation back to Christ and His Word,” Harris wrote, adding that Truth & Liberty wants “every school district in this state to teach only edifying and morally upright curriculum with an accurate and patriotic view of American history.”
Other religious-right organizations, both national operations like Turning Point USA’s faith arm and regional ones like Texas pastor Rick Scarborough, are mobilizing efforts to badger current school board members and elect more right-wing activists to those seats.
Harming Students, Educators, and Communities
While Moms for Liberty leaders claim publicly that its goal is “unifying” parents and communities, and they tout their status as “joyful warriors,” Moms for Liberty activists have sowed division with inflammatory charges against educators, harassed parents who object to their authoritarian agenda, and fired well-regarded school officials as a show of their political muscle. Earlier this year, Reckon reported that over the past 18 months it found 19 instances of school district superintendents fired after “parents’ rights” candidates took power.
Taking over school boards and installing like-minded superintendents is a prelude to banning books and targeting policies meant to make schools inclusive and supportive for LGBTQ students. In some cases, school boards are openly embracing right-wing indoctrination of students by installing propaganda produced by Prager U and Hillsdale College, which has raised millions from right-wing donors by putting itself in the center of culture-war attacks on public schools.
In June, NBC reported on controversies stoked in Pennsylvania’s Central Bucks School District after right-wing wins in 2021:
“Moms for Liberty has created this chaos,” said Diana Leygerman, a parent who ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for the Central Bucks school board in 2021. “They’re single-handedly responsible for this chaos in our communities. None of this was happening prior to these groups infiltrating school boards — none of this anger, none of this fighting. I mean, our communities weren’t perfect, but they weren’t this broken.”
In a commentary published on Substack in August, Dan Rather and Elliot Kirchner wrote:
The very ethos of public education should be one of inclusion for America’s diverse population. It should be a place where children of different backgrounds come together to learn both from teachers and from each other. Our schools should be places that allow students to wrestle with what it means to be part of this great country, including understanding America’s uneven and often bloody road to greater equality.
Sadly, in recent years, we have seen a grave regression from these noble goals. Our schools and school districts have become fiercely contested frontlines in an era of stepped-up culture wars. As reactionary political forces target what we teach our children, it is no accident that truth, empathy, and our democratic values have become casualties. …
We must see this as what it is: as much a threat to the nation as was the violent storming of our Capitol.
Protecting Students and Public Schools
The harmful war being waged against public schools, teachers, and the freedom to learn is energizing a spirited response by parents and concerned citizens who support excellent and inclusive public schools and the freedom to learn. Across the country, people are coming together to support educators, respond to threats and right-wing takeovers, and mobilize action to defend students and schools.
People For the American Way launched its Grandparents For Truth project during Moms for Liberty’s conference in Philadelphia this summer in partnership with Red Wine & Blue, PFLAG, Indivisible Philadelphia, Defense of Democracy, and Act Up Philly. People For the American Way President Svante Myrick and Grandparents For Truth have been on the ground in Temecula, California, supporting local efforts to recall the far-right school board members who are disrupting the community there. People For the American Way is also a member of the Unite Against Books Bans coalition.
Right Wing Watch will continue to cover the multiple far-right efforts to undermine public education and turn public dollars and public schools into indoctrination tools for right-wing and Christian nationalist ideology. Anyone—grandparent or not—can join Grandparents For Truth and support People For the American Way’s organizing efforts on behalf of the freedom to learn.
