On Tuesday, the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) added several prominent parental rights organizations to its list of “hate and anti-government groups,” creating a detailed map that shows where such groups are located throughout the U.S.
As reported by the New York Post, the SPLC’s “Year In Hate and Extremism 2022” report lists a total of 1,225 “hate and anti-government extremist groups” throughout the country, an increase from 733 in 2021. Many of the new additions to the list are groups dedicated to transparency in public education and greater rights for parents to determine their own children’s education.
“Schools, especially, have been on the receiving end of ramped-up and coordinated hard-right attacks, frequently through the guise of ‘parents’ rights’ groups,” the group claims. “These groups were, in part, spurred by the right-wing backlash to COVID-19 public safety measures in schools. But they have grown into an anti-student inclusion movement that targets any inclusive curriculum that contains discussions of race, discrimination and LGBTQ identities.”
One such group targeted by the SPLC is the group Moms for Liberty, which has 280 chapters across 45 states and over 115,000 members nationwide. The group focuses on holding schools accountable for trying to promote sexually explicit or racially divisive literature to students, in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
“They 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 SPLC says as it describes Moms for Liberty in its report, declaring it to be an “extremist group” that is “at the forefront of this mobilization.”
Other groups targeted by the SPLC include No Left Turn in Education, Parental Rights in Education, and Parents Involved in Education.
These groups emerged after the mass implementation of “remote learning” during the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic allowed many parents to see first-hand what their children were being taught, with many around the country objecting to lessons about Critical Race Theory, transgenderism, and other highly political topics meant to divide children along racial and gender lines. A grassroots movement began that saw school board meetings protested all across the country, with a number of groups waging successful campaigns to remove school board members from office and replace them with conservative parents and parents’ rights advocates.
In 2021, the Biden Administration briefly labeled such groups as “domestic terrorists” after Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice received a letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) demanding that they do so.