Moms for Liberty co-founder slams Southern Poverty Law Center trends now
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice hit back at the Southern Poverty Law Center for labeling the parents' rights organization an 'extremist' group.
The Florida-based parental rights organization was added to the SPLC's 2022 list of 'hate and antigovernmental groups.'
Justice told 'Fox News Tonight' Wednesday the 'extremist' label is 'absolutely absurd.'
'We are a group of moms and dads and grandparents and aunts and uncles, community members that are very concerned about the direction of the country,' she said.
According to the SPLC, schools have been on the 'receiving end of ramped-up and coordinated hard-right attacks' that has included trying to get certain books removed from school libraries.
'At the forefront of this mobilization is Moms for Liberty, a Florida-based group with vast connections to the GOP that this year the SPLC designated as an extremist group,' read the group's report.
'Galvanizing supporters around supposed 'parental rights' and 'family values' is nothing new - similar rallying cries were adopted by those who opposed school desegregation during the civil rights movement and by the Moral Majority of the 1980s,' the report continued.
'These political slogans have been used repeatedly because they are effective, framing the organizing of far-right activists as something done solely out of real concern for children.'
Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice, left, and Tina Descovich, founded the group during the pandemic but was recently labeled a 'hate and antigovernmental group' by the Southern Poverty Law Center
The SPLC listed 1,225 hate groups in its 2023 list of 'hate and antigovernmental extremist groups'
The Southern Poverty Law Center added the organization, among others, to their 'Hate Map' as part of the release of their 'Year In Hate and Extremism 2022' report.
They wrote that members of the non-profit 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.''
The report said that the group 'hijacks meetings, preventing officials and parents from conducting their normal proceedings.'
They were called 'far-right' and an 'antigovernment' organization that engages in 'anti-student inclusion activities.'
In previous years, groups included on the list were comparable to neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. The addition of antigovernmental groups to the list has increased its length dramatically, shooting from 733 'hate groups' in 2021 to 1,225 'hate and antigovernmental extremist groups' in 2022.
Margaret Huang is the president and chief executive officer of the SPLC and the the organization said Moms for Liberty's 'galvanizing supporters around supposed 'parental rights' and 'family values' is nothing new'
Justice recently appeared on Fox News to call the SPLC's label 'absurd'
Moms for Liberty was founded in early 2021 by concerned mothers in Florida and has quickly expanded its
