Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

An unpunished coup is a training exercise.

Consistently wrong since 2002

A consequence of cucumbers

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

… among the most cringeworthy communications in the history of the alphabet!

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

You are here: Home / Domestic Terrorism / Late Night Open Thread: ‘Moms for Liberty’, a/k/a ‘Mary KayKayKay’

Late Night Open Thread: ‘Moms for Liberty’, a/k/a ‘Mary KayKayKay’

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But they’re concerned! And they’re mommies!

… Moms for Liberty, the far-right hate group that has pushed both book bans and their own anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric across the country while masquerading as a defender of “parental rights,” chose Philadelphia as the site of their annual “Joyful Warriors” summit this past week. And, with typical subtlety, they decided to hold their opening reception at the Museum of the American Revolution, in the heart of Old City, and booked the conference itself at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, just steps away from City Hall.

There was a certain logic behind choosing this particular city ahead of the Fourth of July holiday—we’re the birthplace of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, and all that jazz—but it was also a taunt, a challenge: This city, this country, belongs to us, not to you. So what are you going to do about it? …

Those appropriate measures started off on the morning of June 29 with a banner drop over I-95. Early birds were greeted with warnings that “Philly Protects Trans Kids” and “Bad Things Happen to Fascists in Philadelphia,” and that was only the beginning of a four-day-long protest that would bring hundreds, if not thousands, of people out into the streets. That evening, I watched as protesters encircled the Museum of the American Revolution. Armed with passionate speakers like ACT UP’s Jazmyn Henderson, a heavy-duty sound system, a fierce playlist, and hundreds of supporters, ACT UP and YCL members led the crowd in an hours-long queer dance party that doubled as an open roast of the Moms for Liberty attendees slinking in and out of the museum. “We lit out here. We not boring like these fucking people!” one speaker hollered as the sound system blared hip-hop. Another protester held up a sign reading, “Hey Moms for Liberty: if you’re scared of violent pornographic content near your kids, just wait until you read your Bible!” …

The dance party continued throughout the weekend. Protesters decamped to the Marriott for the next three days of the conference, where more barriers and an endless stream of bored-looking cops tried to insulate the attendees from the actual city. That didn’t always work, either. A delightful video began circulating on social media on Friday after a local encountered a few errant moms in Reading Terminal Market, and helpfully ushered them out with a few choice exhortations—“Racists have never been welcome here, ever! And you’re still not welcome here!” The moms in question seemed shocked that anyone would dare oppose them. That indignant air accompanied them whenever they were forced to actually interact with a Philadelphian that weekend. Perhaps simply not enough people have been telling them to their face that their hateful agenda was not welcome, so Philly was happy to oblige. While I was there on Friday afternoon, the cops forgot to barricade off an exit path between the Marriott and the parking garage across the street, forcing conference attendees to come face-to-face with the protesters. All of a sudden, panicked fascists were getting chased down the street and up into the parking garage, heckled and jeered at, and told in no uncertain terms how the city felt about them. The cops scrambled to regain control, and the dance party continued. Making fascists feel unsafe is as much a Philly specialty as a cheesesteak from John’s Roast Pork or Irish potatoes, and it felt awfully nice to indulge…

… ACT UP Philadelphia was adamant that the dance party and associated events remain peaceful, and they did; whenever things began to heat up, organizers would grab the mic and calm everyone down. The tagline, “They can’t stop trans and queer joy!” underpinned the dance party protest, and that joyful resistance was in full bloom. The kid-centered events were especially sweet, and the protests maintained a family-friendly vibe throughout, as long as your kid could handle a few (thousand) swear words…


One hand back-scratches the other:

… “Never apologize. Ever,” said Christian Ziegler, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party. “This is my view. Other people have different views on this. I think apologizing makes you weak.”…

Moms for Liberty, which says it is nonpartisan, has grown into a conservative powerhouse, boasting 120,000 members in 285 chapters across 44 states. The group started in Brevard County, Florida, in 2021, initially to fight Covid restrictions and mask mandates.

It has morphed into a sprawling organization that aims to fight for what it sees as parental rights but that critics, including the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center, label anti-government extremism. Its members have removed books they deem inappropriate from public school libraries and have pushed to end what they see as the “indoctrination” of children on such topics as race, gender and sexuality.

The group [held] its second annual national conference [in Philadelphia last] week, drawing the five GOP presidential candidates, including former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Ziegler conducted his training during a breakout session, giving more than 100 attendees a lesson in how to deal with the media as the activists attract more attention and scrutiny.

He is the husband of Bridget Ziegler, one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty, who later left the organization in an official capacity and was appointed by DeSantis to his Disney oversight board this spring. She introduced her husband at the session…

“They’re lazy,” Ziegler said of reporters. “They have no idea what’s going on at school board meetings. Oftentimes they don’t even know how local government works.”

[Okay… he’s not wrong, there…]

He also told attendees to give priority to local news interviews instead of going to national media.

“That’s where you reach the undecideds,” he said, adding that people who watch Fox News or MSNBC probably know how they’re going to vote but that consumers of local news may not.

Ziegler told attendees to look for opportunities to rattle their opponents, and he shared as an example a tactic to mess with a political opponent’s head. It involved printing out a direct mail piece that goes to 50 of the opponent’s friends and neighbors — but that the person will believe went to the whole town.

“They’re totally paranoid,” Ziegler said. “And they’ve burned three days of productivity” because they’re spending time worrying about a mailer that went out to only a few dozen people.

In an interview later, Ziegler described the mailer discussion as “an off-the-cuff example for campaigns that has nothing to do with the media training.”...

We prefer to do all our rat-fornicating in private, thankyouverymuch!

In some ways, Florida is uniquely suited to the sort of ‘Fascist Magic Kingdom’ politics that Ron DeSaster has so far succeeded so well by using; there’s a local tradition of self-sealed communities — from Disney World to The Villages — where people can cosplay their own little fiefdoms. Take the fan convention to a place with different traditions, well…

Joyful Warriors!

Credit where due:

Reader Interactions

67Comments

  2. 2.

    mrmoshpotato

    Minivan Taliban and Assholes with Casseroles

    Both are great, but Assholes with Casseroles is fucking inspired!

  5. 5.

    Martin

    You don’t go to Philly unless you want to get punched to turn it into a media narrative. That’s why Philly exists.

  6. 6.

    gwangung

    … “Never apologize. Ever,” said Christian Ziegler, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party. “This is my view. Other people have different views on this. I think apologizing makes you weak.”…

    Then you ARE AN ASSHOLE.

    And assholes are inherently weak people trying to make themselves look strong.

    Doesn’t fool me.

  8. 8.

    Redshift

    No one trying to dictate what everyone’s kids are allowed to see and learn is a “parental rights advocate.”

    They know they’re not, it’s just marketing, like calling themselves “Moms.” No one should take it at face value; in just trying to figure out the best way to make that happen. (Having actual community parents come out against them is best where that can happen, but there has to be a way to fight the meme more broadly.)

  9. 9.

    hitchhiker

    Do these women teach their kids not to apologize? That’s just bad parenting. And bad humaning.

  10. 10.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    “Never apologize. Ever,” said Christian Ziegler, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party. “This is my view. Other people have different views on this. I think apologizing makes you weak.”…

    I assume this group does a lot of head scratching over why so many young people are rejecting their religion.

    I don’t think fascists is really the appropriate word, after all, the Nazis in their twisted logic were convinced they were making a better world (for the right people). These clowns just want the shittist society possible.

  11. 11.

    Redshift

    It involved printing out a direct mail piece that goes to 50 of the opponent’s friends and neighbors — but that the person will believe went to the whole town.

    “The whole town,” bwahahah. Go ahead and spin fantasies of how you intimidate people by sending bulk mail, and pretend that the “victim” and their neighbors won’t just throw it in the trash without reading it.

    As fascist power fantasies go, it’s not even interesting.

  12. 12.

    different-church-lady

    They just want to protect their kids from ever learning how to be kind and decent. Is that so wrong?

  13. 13.

    cain

    @gwangung: ‘

    Bible:
    James 5:16 Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.
    Ziegler:  fuck that.

    I wonder if Ziegler also tells that to his kids not to apologize?

  17. 17.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: I suspect it’s more of a matter of the old zero-sum fallacy, in which benefits to Others must invariably be at the expense of Us.

    I like to make the analogy to the pizza pie: you have, say, a 12-inch pie cut into 8 slices. Now if you double the diameter of the pie, and double the number of slices to 16, one slice may no longer be an eighth of the pizza, but that 1/16 slice will have twice as much pizza in it as the old 1/8 slice.

    As to the complaints about people on the left not being nice, and not being tolerant of their intolerance, well, anything I have to say would have to be prefaced by an apology in advance to the horse they rode in on.

  18. 18.

    Baud

    @Bruce K in ATH-GR:

    you have, say, a 12-inch pie cut into 8 slices. Now if you double the diameter of the pie, and double the number of slices to 16, one slice may no longer be an eighth of the pizza, but that 1/16 slice will have twice as much pizza in it as the old 1/8 slice

     
    Mind. Blown.

  20. 20.

    lowtechcyclist

    @hitchhiker: ​
     

    Do these women teach their kids not to apologize? That’s just bad parenting. And bad humaning.

    Indeed.

    @different-church-lady: ​

    They just want to protect their kids from ever learning how to be kind and decent. Is that so wrong?

    Brilliant!​

  21. 21.

    JWR

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    I assume this group does a lot of head scratching over why so many young people are rejecting their religion.

    Exactly. Some enterprising journalist should ask these clowns why they think they have to trick reporters into doing positive stories about their work. Isn’t the plain, unadorned truth good enough? (Haha! Yeah, no. //)

  23. 23.

    lowtechcyclist

    Riffing off Al Capp once again:
    Suburban Women Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything (S.W.W.I.N.E.)

    (Context: back in the 1960s, Al Capp, in his L’il Abner comic strip, created a fictitious student protest org called Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything (S.W.I.N.E.) which, being the right-winger he was, expressed his opinion about 1960s student protesters in general.  Seems like the shoe’s on the other foot these days, and it’s the RWNJs who are ‘wildly indignant about nearly everything’. Might as well dust this one off and make use of it against them.)​

  24. 24.

    Nukular Biskits

    “They’re lazy,” Ziegler said of reporters. “They have no idea what’s going on at school board meetings. Oftentimes they don’t even know how local government works.”

    I disagree here.  The issue isn’t just local reporters not keeping tabs on local government. It’s citizens themselves.

    When my kids were in public school and when I ran for public office (twice), I can tell you that most board meetings (local ed board, county sups, utility districts, aldermen, etc) were poorly attended . The average Joe/Jane really had no clue as to what the issues were, what business was being discussed/planned or even who the elected officials were.

  27. 27.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Nukular Biskits: ​
     

    When my kids were in public school and when I ran for public office (twice), I can tell you that most board meetings (local ed board, county sups, utility districts, aldermen, etc) were poorly attended . The average Joe/Jane really had no clue as to what the issues were, what business was being discussed/planned or even who the elected officials were.

    Your list of board meetings there is part of the reason why. Same thing here: we’ve got county commissioners and board of ed, the town I live in has a town council, and my neighborhood has an HOA board (which I’m on). That’s four governmental or quasi-governmental orgs, all of which meet at least monthly.

    If there’s nobody reporting on them, you’d have to spend a good deal of your evenings going to meetings to follow the action. And of course counties aren’t exactly small, so attending county commissioner and board of ed meetings may involve a good bit of driving to get to the county seat in the first place. So there are reasons why the average Joe and Jane just throw up their hands and don’t bother.

    Attending these meetings on at least an occasional basis is one thing I plan to do with my well-deserved retirement next year. I just don’t have the time or energy now.

  28. 28.

    Baud

    The whole “don’t apologize” thing kind of reminds me of the Andrew Tate “alpha male” subculture.

  29. 29.

    Spanky

    @lowtechcyclist: BOCC meets 10 AM on Tuesdays, so working folks need to make a special effort

    Eta although i think the meetings are broadcast on cable tv. Don’t ask me where.

  31. 31.

    Matt McIrvin

    Bullies who dish out abuse and hate but act like offended fragile vessels the moment anyone objects never cease to amaze me. You expect to call a majority of the US population child molesters and expect kindness for this? But they do.

  32. 32.

    eclare

    @raven:

    The use of an algorithm to determine what you see rather than who you choose to follow killed Threads for me.  Also I’m not on Instagram, so I have no idea how that would even work.

    I only follow about a dozen people, and I don’t see a lot of the hatred that others mention.  And I def don’t read the comments on some tweets.

  34. 34.

    Baud

    @eclare:

    I don’t know why they did that, but I can’t imagine they won’t fix it if they want Threads to succeed.

    I learned that they plan to make Threads interoperable with Mastodon, which is kind of cool.

  35. 35.

    Princess

    I’m glad that the backlash against this Astroturf for Republicans group has been swift and emphatic. We were slow off the mark with the Tea Party etc. but those group weren’t actively seeking to harm our children like the “Moms” are. They deserve no quarter.

  37. 37.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: Except that you know Threads won’t control abusers to the degree that a decent Mastodon instance would require, so the big controversy if they actually do it is whether it’s possible to be too big to defederate. Erin Kissane has been taking about this on Mastodon.

  38. 38.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin:

    There’s no way to prevent a mastodon server from being successful in signing up a lot of people. The whole point is to let the market decide by giving people the tool to move to different servers.

  40. 40.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: Yeah, but part of the model is that if a bunch of Nazis or Klansmen decide to make their own Mastodon server and harass people from it, you can just wall them off from the rest of the fediverse, no harm done. (This happens all the time.)

    Now suppose the Nazi server is also the one that contains 95% of the people in the fediverse–can’t wall it off without getting a lot of pushback. They’ve just broken that whole model.

  41. 41.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin:

    If a Nazi server is 95% of the fediverse, there are bigger problems.

    Some people prefer a closed system.  I like Balloon Juice because its a tight community, as opposed to a public forum like Twitter or Reddit.  But that’s not what Mastodon was supposed to be, I thought. It was supposed to be an open system that allowed for greater user flexibility.

  45. 45.

    lowtechcyclist

    @eclare:

    The use of an algorithm to determine what you see rather than who you choose to follow killed Threads for me.

    I assume it would be just as bad as Facebook’s algorithm, which is why I avoid Facebook.

    A dozen or so years ago when I tried to get into Facebook after all my old LiveJournal buddies had moved there, Facebook’s algorithm (as I know now) actively worked at getting me into pissing matches with other people and keeping them going, by refusing to let their posts drop out of sight over time.

    If Threads isn’t any better on that score, then I won’t want to be there either.

  48. 48.

    lee

    “Perhaps simply not enough people have been telling them to their face that their hateful agenda was not welcome….”

    This is exactly it. My wife ran into something similar to this several times when the kids were young and would get invited to hang out with other moms (she was not often invited a second time).

    My favorite story is the moms started talking about making sure their daughters were virgins for their spouses (yeah this is suburban moms). According to my wife she practically laughed in their faces and asked if anyone there fit that description (not a single one). Then she pointed out she wanted our daughters to wait to get married and have a fulfilling sex life and the order of those two things should be up to them and not anyone else.

    Many of these moms get caught up in their group think (a.k.a. fascism).

  50. 50.

    lee

    @lowtechcyclist: I’m still on FB. You have to continually block/mute posts you don’t want to see. Usually things will be fine for a month or so then you’ll have to start blocking again for a few days until FB gets the message.

  51. 51.

    raven

    @lee: I only get that once-in-a-while and it’s worth it just for finding lost dogs in the neighborhood!

  52. 52.

    NotMax

    @Central Planning

    Venerable joke about ordering a pizza.

    “Do you want it cut into six or eight slices?”

    “Better make it six. I’m not hungry enough to eat eight.”

  53. 53.

    lee

    @raven: ​
    I was about to leave FB but once I joined my neighborhood group, it actually became somewhat useful.

    My wife uses it for fan groups.

    I still totally understand the hate for FB but it can be somewhat useful.

  56. 56.

    MinuteMan

    @Bruce K in ATH-GR: Your math is off a bit.  If you double the diameter of the pizza, it’s area will go up by a factor of 4 so doubling the number of slices will make each slice twice as big.

  58. 58.

    satby

    @Baud: I have a seldom used Instagram and FB, but I’m not going to go onto Threads unless there’s literally NO other option. And if mastodon is the last app standing I’ll rediscover IRL. Much as I enjoy them, they’re all just instant gratification infotainment and I waste too much time on them already.

  59. 59.

    NorthLeft

    I thought I heard that Trump promised that he would “allow” parents to vote for school principals.

    I can’t think of a worse idea for the education system than that. But the Hitler Moms ate it up.

  60. 60.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @lowtechcyclist:

    Pi are square? Nooooo!

    Pi are round. Corn pone are square!

    Junior Sample, on an old, old episode of Hee Haw. (I grew up in the world’s most populous R4 – Redneck Refugee Resettlement Region** – and my folks, who’d abandoned The Sticks for a good non-coal-mining job in 1940, never missed Hee Haw if they could help it – so they could laugh their butts off at the ones they’d left behind.)

    ** Dundalk, MD, just outside the SE city limits of Baltimore; 1950 population 82,000+. Largest unincorporated metropolitan area in the US at the time – incorporated, it would’ve been the second most populous city in MD.

  62. 62.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @NotMax: Often attributed to Yogi Berra. (Probably wrongly, as with so many other bons mots...)

    OK, obligatory :^p Yogi story:

    One afternoon, when he was managing the Mets, there was an afternoon rain delay, and that evening he told Mrs Berra about the streakers with bags over their heads who’d jumped out onto the field and were gamboling around the tarp until collared by the cops.

    She asked him whether they were boys or girls, and Yogi replied,

    “How should I know, they had bags over their heads!“

    (This story was related to a newspaper reporter during spring training in 1971 or ’72 by none other than Yogi’s son Dale, who was trying to make the Pirates as an infielder. He said his father wasn’t nearly as goofy as the stories made him sound – but then repeated this one [and one other] by way of contradiction.)

    Oh yeah, the other story: It’s 1964 or ’65, Yogi’s managing the Yanks, and their home game gets rained out. He calls Mrs Berra to tell her & says, “So I have the day off, whadda ya wanta do?”

    She replies, “I wanna go see Dr. Zhivago.”

    He says, “What’s wrong with you now??”

  65. 65.

    MisterDancer

    @lee: I still totally understand the hate for FB but it can be somewhat useful.

    The FB groups for sickly wee kitties absolutely gave us years for my beloved cat we’d not have had, otherwise. And when she was on her last they didn’t give up on us.

    I’ve not found forums like that, with the depth of knowledge on treating the aliments we dealt with, on Reddit or elsewhere — and trust, I looked hard and long with 30+ years of Internet skills.

    Every space has it’s benefits and downsides, is how I like to say it. I’d not turn to FB for finding deep computer/technical knowledge, for example.

  67. 67.

    MisterDancer

    It seems about every decade we get an utterly toxic group like this. Tipper Gore’s PMRC leaps to mind, as well as the women who used “morals” to push for Prohibition.

    Why? I mean, in this case it’s partially astroturfing, just like The Tea Party. But there’s real heat here, I fear, and it’s concerning that we can’t seem to cut these kinds of backlash efforts off at the knees. We know it’s coming — it often pops up with similar rhetoric, in American society, as a result of social Justice gains. It would be really useful to be able to mitigate that risk.

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