Former President Trump and four of his rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination will speak Friday and Saturday in Philadelphia at the national gathering of an increasing influential parental rights organization that’s stoked controversy.
Trump, the commanding front-runner in the GOP nomination race, will be joined by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former ambassador and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former congressman and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, and entrepreneur and political commentator Vivek Ramaswamy in addressing the second annual Moms for Liberty summit.
DeSantis, the first major speaker at the summit on Friday morning, pointed to the protests outside the venue and said “I see that Moms for Liberty is coming under attack by the left, attack by the corporate media, protests out here in the streets. Now you know how I feel everywhere I go. But I want to congratulate you for that because that is a sign we are winning this fight.”
And Haley, speaking later on Friday morning, showcased that “I’m a mom, so I can relate to what all these moms are feeling. I mean, we have one job and that’s to take care of our families.”
The appearances of some of the biggest names among the large field of Republican White House contenders is another sign of the growing clout for the conservative-leaning group, which says it has 285 chapters across 45 states.
“I think it says that parents are a very important part of the future of America and that the candidates care about the issues that parents care about, and they want to make sure that we know that,” Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice told Fox News Digital on Thursday during the first day of the confab, which the group calls the Joyous Warriors National Summit.
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Moms for Liberty was founded two years ago amid the coronavirus pandemic as a “social-welfare” nonprofit group, which means it can engage in political and policy activity without disclosing its donors. The group says its mission is to protect parental rights in education, which they describe as “God-given and fundamental.”
According to its website, the mission of the group is to “unify, educate and empower parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.” It has fought against mask mandates in schools and has targeted critical race theory.
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Justice charged that the fundamental rights of Americans “are under attack right now in America,” and that one of the biggest questions we have for these candidates is “how are you going to work to help us to protect our fundamental rights?”
Longtime Republican consultant Ryan Williams spotlighted that Moms for Liberty “has attracted so much attention and is influential given the focus on public school education and cultural issues that are dominating discussion in the Republican Party today.”
“There’s a real fear that schools are forcing an agenda on kids,” Ryan a veteran communicator and strategist, noted.
The group, which says that it is non-partisan, does have an aligned super PAC that Justice says makes endorsements in school board races, state board of education races and state elected superintendent contests. However, Justice said the PAC had no plans to endorse GOP presidential nomination showdown.
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Justice said that “we invited President Biden” to speak at their summit, but highlighted “we received no response from the White House.”
She also noted that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – who is challenging Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination – agreed to speak at their confab in Philadelphia but then canceled.
Moms for Liberty was back in the headlines three weeks ago when it was designed as an extremist organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
Moms for Liberty and 11 other groups were labeled by the SPLC as “anti-government extremist groups” in its annual 2022 Year In Hate and Extremism report. The report charged that Moms for Liberty can be “spotted at school board meetings across the country wearing shirts and carrying signs that declare, ‘We do NOT CO-PARENT with the GOVERNMENT.’”
Justice told Fox News at the time that the SPLC’s “extremist” label was “absolutely absurd.”
A day later, Justice teamed up with Ramaswamy at a Moms for Liberty event in Brentwood, New Hampshire.
Ramaswamy told Fox News Digital that he was “proud to be the first GOP presidential candidate to sign the Moms for Liberty pledge” and that he was “privileged to join my favorite hate group and extremist group.”
Justice said the summit’s mission is to “unify, educate and empower parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.”
Activists and potential school board candidates from across the country will receive training over the weekend. According to the group’s website, some of the workshops cover topics such as “Protecting Kids from Gender Ideology,” and “Comprehensive Sex Education: Sex Ed or Sexualization.”
The Moms for Liberty summit in heavily blue Philadelphia triggered sparked weeks-long protests ahead of their gathering and drew plenty of criticism from elected officials.
As the summit got underway, the Democratic National Committee charged that “Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy are celebrating the Fourth of July weekend with one of the nation’s most notorious anti-freedom, history-erasing, book-banning groups.”
“While President Biden and Vice President Harris are running to safeguard Americans’ rights and freedoms, MAGA Republicans are more concerned with catering to right-wing extremists than addressing the real issues that working families face,” DNC spokesperson Ammar Moussa argued.
DeSantis, in his speech, pointed to his convincing double-digit gubernatorial re-election victory last November and touted that “in Florida, we have shown what winning looks like. We have beat the left on issue after issue after issue and we were able to deliver the greatest Republican electoral triumph in our state’s history in November of 2022. This can happen nationally. We will win these battles all across the nation and we will make sure this country, not just the free state of Florida, stands for the rights of parents and for the wellbeing of our children.”
The governor showcased his efforts in Florida, including a parental bill of rights, universal education savings accounts “so the money will follow the student and the parent,” and enacting curriculum transparency.
He highlighted that “we’ve launched an initiative to get American civics back in our schools in a very big way. We need to teach kids about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We need to teach them what it means to be an American….We’re going to do that nationwide to elevate civics as something that’s important in American society.”
And DeSantis vowed that if elected president, “we will pull the levers that we have available to us to be able to defend the rights of parents.”
Haley, in her speech, emphasized that Moms for Liberty are “about freedom.”
She argued that “they’re not about taking anything away from anyone. They’re not about saying that one group deserves something that others don’t. They’re asking for freedom. Freedom to choose where their children go to school, freedom to know what is being said and taught to their kids in the classroom, freedom to decide how they want to parent and not have school bureaucrats parent.”
Fox News James Levinson contributed to this report