[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “They started with the DOJ issuing the threat tag. Then they moved to the FBI, who actually called some of our moms after they spoke at school board meetings with intimidating questions, trying to silence them.”
For years, Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich served as elected members of their respective local school boards.
“This is a very important local office. The decisions that your school board is making oftentimes affect your life a lot more than the president, perhaps,” says Ms. Justice.
But during the pandemic, they witnessed how teachers unions prioritized fear-based policies and activist messaging over the well-being of children.
“School districts do two things well: they protect themselves and they celebrate themselves. And they often celebrate themselves to protect themselves. That's how you end up with a 90 percent graduation rate, but only 14 percent or 25 percent of kids reading on eighth-grade level,” says Ms. Justice.
They’re the founders of Moms for Liberty, a grassroots organization empowering parents to defend their rights and advocate for their children’s education. In just over two years, they’ve grown to 300 chapters in 47 states.
“What they were doing to parents 2020–2021 was so destructive to public education, so destructive to our government system,” says Ms. Descovich.
“Elected officials abdicated their authority to bureaucrats. Our motto at Moms for Liberty is, ‘We do not co-parent with the government,’” says Ms. Justice.
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/the-wrong-moms-tiffany-justice-and-tina-descovich-on-parental-power-educational-failures-and-alphabet-soup-excuses-5503330
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Tiffany Justice, Tina Descovich, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Tiffany Justice: It's an honor to be here with you.
Tina Descovich: Thanks for having us.
Mr. Jekielek: It's amazing that we were able to get everyone together in one spot. You two are traveling all over the place these days, most recently in Montgomery County, Maryland, doing these town halls. The focus of Moms for Liberty is parental rights. What are these town halls all about?
Ms. Justice: The town halls are called Giving Parents a Voice, and that's truly what we're doing. We're putting the microphone into the hands of parents. Last night we had a parent panel and a policy panel, and we took questions from the audience. In Montgomery County, you're seeing a true violation of parental rights on so many different levels.
Ms. Descovich: We love bringing the community together for these important discussions that need to happen on issues that are facing each community. We do them all over the country, because the issues are different everywhere.
Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned something very serious happening in Montgomery County. What are the issues there?
Ms. Justice: Absolutely. They are the first county that tried to reissue the mask mandate on children, the 10-day mask mandate. I'm really proud to say that parents fought back and the district had to make the masks optional. That's a big win for parents. Their voices matter, and they're seeing that.
There's another issue happening in Montgomery County. Secrets are being kept from parents about children's gender identity. Private conversations are happening between children and adults in schools without the consent or knowledge of parents, leading them down a very dangerous path as far as gender transition is concerned.
Gender ideology and sexual orientation are being taught in the classroom. This isn't a book in the library that a child might just happen upon. This is a rainbow storybook collection where gender ideology is being introduced to children as young as five-years-old. In books like Pride Puppy, the children are asked to search for terms like leather, drag queen, and underwear. These are five-year-old children. I don't think a lot of moms are really looking for their children to learn about drag queens.
Mr. Jekielek: What is that problematic? I probably don't need to ask this question, but why don't you lay it out for me?
Ms. Descovich: It's not just problematic for a certain segment of society. We're finding that these issues cross religion and cross race. Last night at the town hall, we had the Jewish, Ethiopian, Muslim, and Christian population represented, all speaking out in one voice against what's happening there. Because once a parent loses the right to direct the upbringing of their children, once the government or the school is keeping secrets from parents and deceiving parents with some of these policies, you have lost your family.
Mr. Jekielek: How does this sexualization or early exposure to sexual ideas contribute to that process?
Ms. Justice: The least interesting thing about an elementary school student should be their sexual orientation. My child doesn't need a sexual, spirit guide at school. Parents send their children to school to learn; to read, to write, and to do math. There are amazing books that you can put in the hands of a child, and Pride Puppy isn't one of them.
Mr. Jekielek: Back in the early days or before Moms for Liberty began, you started to notice each other's work on school boards through the masking issue. Since the masking issue is coming up again, let’s discuss what parents should know right now about masks for children. Then we'll jump into a little history.
Ms. Descovich: Masking for children not only harms children, it's nonsense. Everybody knows that instinctively. Even in 2020 and 2021, when school districts were passing policies that forced masks on children, we had a parent coming to our school board meetings saying, "My child is deaf and is not going to be able to communicate. He's not going to be able to communicate if the teacher has a mask." At one of my school board meetings, I pulled out a plethora of complaints that had come to me about children that had MRSA [Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus] infection on their faces from having to wear masks.
There were children that had dental problems or their gums were already starting to be infected from having the bacteria closed in on their mouths. There was issue after issue after issue, but school districts did not care. On top of that, they just didn't work. They were wearing cloth masks. There were no rules in place of what type of mask it had to be. It was just, “Put something over your mouth.” They didn't care about the quality, they didn't care about the grade, and they didn't care if it was causing harm. The whole issue was nonsense.
Mr. Jekielek: In some cases, they were talking about putting N95 respirators on young children.
Ms. Justice: One of the things that was most concerning was the fact that we were telling children who maybe have compromised immune systems or teachers that had compromised immune systems, that the masks would somehow protect them. In schools, it's really important to take steps to make accommodations for students who have special needs. We were forcing something that wasn't really effective, wasn't source control, and wasn't going to stop transmission. Yet, we were saying, “This is going to protect you.” It was a lie.
The last thing that I ever wanted to do as a school board member was to lie to parents. I always want parents to have accurate information, so they can make the best choice for their own child. As a school board member, I felt that it was really unethical to provide masks as a solution, when it wasn't really helping the student in any way.
Mr. Jekielek: We have Anthony Fauci on record talking about the utility of masks,and then the policy suddenly changed.
Ms. Justice: This idea that people will feel safe if you wear a mask was a lie. It really wasn't what was best for kids. We saw that and we have evidence of that. There were the speech delays. My own son had a speech issue and he was getting speech therapy in school wearing a mask, while the teacher was wearing a mask. It was just absolutely preposterous. You have the American Academy of Pediatrics coming out telling moms and dads that babies don't need to see your face.
Any mom who has had a baby knows that your baby needs to see you. When you smile, your baby smiles. This has created a lack of trust in American medical institutions and the school districts and the CDC and our government. It really has had a horrible effect. It has left a lot of parents wondering, “Who do I listen to?” Parents have now come to understand that they are the best expert for their own child. We really work to empower moms and dads in America to know that and to understand that.
Ms. Descovich: We saw that these decisions and policies were being made from the federal government down to local school boards. We were in 12 and 14-hour school board meetings discussing and debating what policies to put in place around Covid that were all based on fear. It was never good to create a policy based on fear. Never. We shouldn't run this country on fear. We shouldn't make decisions based on fear. You shouldn't run your family based on fear.
Ms. Justice: A spirit of fear took over in America, and we saw that very clearly when we were on the school board.
Mr. Jekielek: We know now that there was a global campaign to foster that fear. Let's go back in history. Please tell me about your background and how you got into all this. You didn't start off in conservative circles.
Ms. Descovich: I started as a mom, like all of our moms. I was a volunteer in my children's elementary school. I volunteered 10,000 hours in my children's elementary school, and was volunteer of the year and PTO president. I was just your average mom doing all I could to improve their education and be involved in their school.
Mr. Jekielek: You were an average, highly motivated mom, but that’s a lot of hours.
Ms. Justice: I was just going to say, that's a lot of hours.
Ms. Descovich: Let's put it this way. I have worked since I was 15-years-old. After I gave birth to my now 15-year-old, I found that I wanted to be at home more. I started working part-time from home and doing some consulting. But it left me with this hole, and I still had this time and this energy. There are so many needs in the public school system. Of course, I'm going to give my time and energy to where my children are. Why wouldn’t you?
That’s when you get to see what's happening in the public school system and you see all the problems. By nature, I'm someone that wants to solve and fix problems. As a problem came up, I would work through the school to fix it. As the problems became bigger, I would head to the district to try to fix it.
When my now 22-year-old was in seventh grade, he brought home an assignment that he got a 100 percent grade on. His teacher said, "Great job." Of course, I was so proud of him. I opened it up and it was a wanted poster for Christopher Columbus that said, "Wanted, Christopher Columbus, for crimes against humanity."
That brought me into a whole new phase of my life. I thought, “What is this? How could this be a 100 percent grade? I spent the next six months digging deep, researching, and reading everything I could on Christopher Columbus. Had I been deceived in my own education? What is the truth here? After Christopher Columbus, there was just one assignment after another coming home. My eyes were opened, and once your eyes are opened, you can't go back.
Mr. Jekielek: What year was this, roughly?
Ms. Justice: Maybe 2014 or 2015. Within a year or two I decided to run for school board.
Mr. Jekielek: Let's bring us up to the pandemic time, because that's when things changed a lot.
Ms. Descovich: Our school board got along really well. We had a Democrat on the board, an independent, and several Republicans. For most of my term, everybody really worked together for the betterment of our community. Everybody loved where we lived. When Covid happened, that just went away.
Everybody in the school district always tried to serve or protect the most underserved children; the ones that have an IEP [Individualized Education Program], and the ones that have special needs. When Covid happened, nobody seemed to care anymore. It was so bizarre to watch colleagues I had a lot of respect for just ignoring parents that were in tears, such as the mom that came in talking about her deaf child and asking, “How is she going to communicate? I need to be able to do something else for my child, other than having her masked and having her teacher masked, if she's really going to have an education.”
The board didn't want to allow any exceptions. They were too afraid of everything and said, “This is how it has to be.” It was very upsetting to watch that happen in my school district. I kept voting against the forced quarantine of healthy children and against the forced masking with no opt-out, but they kept bringing it. It was second-grade through 12th-grade for masks, and then they brought it down to kindergarten. I had to vote against it again. It was very unfortunate to watch. At the same time, Tiffany was in the school district just south of me.
Mr. Jekielek: Doing the same thing.
Ms. Descovich: Doing the exact same thing, and having the same experience.
Ms. Justice: A four-one vote.
Mr. Jekielek: Let's bring this up to date with you, Tiffany. How did you get involved in all this?
Ms. Justice: I started as a volunteer at my kids' school too. I saw that the hallways were flooding and the school was really in a state of disrepair. I got involved in trying to renovate the school, and we were successful in making that happen. Along that journey, I learned a lot. I learned a lot about the way that the school district prioritizes the funds that they have. Your budget really dictates your priorities in a school district. I saw that the priorities of the district were really out of sync with what was best for the kids.
Mr. Jekielek: What would be some examples of that?
Ms. Justice: I saw the kids eating lunch at 10:30 am, and then realized that the union bargaining contract was dictating that. Early release days were happening once a month which weren't good for the kids, weren't good for the parents, and the teachers didn't like them. The union didn't want to let it go out of the bargaining contract. There was a lot of covering up of educational failure. There were a lot of excuses being made, “If only we did this, and if only the children had this, then they would learn better in school.”
There was not a lot of focus on really ensuring that academic achievement was improving in the schools. I've said this before, and I will say it again: school districts do two things well. They protect themselves and they celebrate themselves. They often celebrate themselves in order to protect themselves. That's how you end up with a 90 percent graduation rate, but only 14 percent or 25 percent of kids are reading at an eighth-grade level.
There isn't a lot of reading remediation happening between eighth and 12th grade, so something is amiss. We have graduation inflation, and I got to see that very clearly. Then Covid happened, and Tina is right. There was complete disregard for parents and their concerns about what was best for their kids. It was all about the school board’s liability and protecting themselves. No one was willing to take a stand. Elected officials abdicated their authority to bureaucrats.
Our motto at Moms for Liberty is that we do not co-parent with the government. I was on a school board and I said that to the superintendent when he wanted to have a medical committee. He wanted to invite the hospital and the health department in. Then he said that he was going to choose some doctors in the community to come in and start helping them make decisions for the kids in school.
I said, "Excuse me, sir, but you don't get to do that." When I take my child to their pediatrician, I get a recommendation. As a parent, I still get to choose whether or not I'm going to go through with that recommendation. They were going to pick a doctor to come in and make decisions for my child.
Parents have the fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children, which includes their education, their medical care, their morality, and their religion. I looked at them and said, "We do not co-parent with the government." That was that moment where I drew a line in the sand. I just said, “No more. This overreach has to stop.”
Mr. Jekielek: I agree with you 100 percent. But we've been told in recent years that maybe there are some exceptions to that.
Ms. Justice: There is somebody who knows better than you. Maybe there's some expert who just knows more, and you don't have to make the decisions. You can abdicate that authority to somebody else to make a decision. The bottom line is, when you're a parent, the buck stops with you. You have your rights, but you also have your responsibilities. You can delegate the education of your children to a local public school system, but that doesn't mean that you're delegating your responsibilities or your rights to them.
Mr. Jekielek: When you were first on the school board, you seemed to be in agreement with most things, because you all were actually trying to help the schools do better. Then when Covid hit, somehow four out of five decided to take a different line. Do you have a sense of how that happened?
Ms. Descovich: I do. Forced masking and these Covid policies were polling at 80 percent approval ratings, even in a red county where I lived. Politicians and school board members read the polls and they know what's happening. They caved to the loudest voice in the room. At that time, the loudest voice in the room was the teacher's union, pedaling fear with their red shirts, and making demands about not wanting to go back into the classroom and being too fearful to go back.
Ms. Justice: They were suing to keep the schools closed.
Ms. Descovich: They were doing a lot of things that were against what parents wanted. What led to the building and the launch of Moms for Liberty is that you had the teachers' union members in there, literally heckling parents who had no organization. They had just themselves. They didn't know other parents and they had never been at a school board meeting. They didn't even understand the structure of how things worked. I'll never forget a mom showing up and saying, "I'm going to call the county commissioners and tell them what you guys are doing over here." I thought to myself, "In Florida, the county commissioners have zero authority over a school board."
She doesn't know that and she's frustrated. She wants someone to help solve these problems and she has no idea how to do it. In 2020, we saw that all across America with microphones getting shut off, doors getting locked, meetings being switched to Zoom, and links being lost and not sent to parents so that they couldn’t even join the meeting. Public comment went from three minutes to one minute. What they were doing to parents in 2020 and 2021 was so destructive to public education, and so destructive to our system of government. We saw an opportunity to help unify, organize, and educate these parents, and then empower them to stand up and defend their parental rights.
Ms. Justice: We also had evidence to show. We had day-cares that were open in Florida, and the boys and girls' clubs were open. We got to see that kids really weren't getting sick like other people. There were some people in America who knew that something was really, really wrong when it came to the Covid lockdowns and mandates. We just started to rally those people.
Ms. Descovich: Let’s go back to the school board members, the actions they were taking, and why that was happening, because I have some thoughts on that. In all the states across the country, school board members have been trained by the school board associations to believe they have no authority and they have no power. You are swept up as soon as you get elected, and you get a packet in the mail.
In Florida, it's the Florida School Board Association. You get sent to their training and they literally teach you to depend on your superintendent, who is actually your employee, but this is part of the education culture. They teach you that you have no individual power, and that you can only work together as a board. You shouldn't use your own voice. It's very insidious in the way that it works.
As school board members, we're sitting up on the dais. As these meetings were happening, the education establishment was saying, “This is how it's going to go, because the teacher's union is saying, ‘This is how it's going to go.’” The school board members were caving in left and right. They didn't understand their authority. They had never been trained in a way to understand what school board members were meant to do and what they were there for.
On my own school board, there was a time when we were concerned that we wouldn't be able to meet in person any longer, or that some people might be too sick that we wouldn't be able to even convene a quorum to make the important decisions that only school boards are supposed to make. I'll never forget this meeting because we were going to pick one person that could make decisions on an $8 million purchase on whatever needed to be done for the entire school district.
I'm from the 47th-largest school district in the country. It's a billion-dollar budget. Who would be this one person? We were having a debate about this. I'll never forget what my Republican conservative friend on the board said, because it brought me out of my seat. First, I said, "Our chair, who's been elected by our county, and then elected by us, should be the person making these major decisions for our district if a crisis happens." My friend said, "Our superintendent needs to do it. I would trust our superintendent over an elected politician anytime."
The authority doesn't lie there. A superintendent should not be making those decisions. A person elected by the people, who has also been elected by representatives of the people is the way our government was set up. She had gone to all of those school board training sessions at the Florida School Board Association, and that was her mindset. The superintendent should be doing everything. That has been the demise of our education system.
Mr. Jekielek: This fits into a broader theme discussed on this show. This theme keeps coming up again and again about this safety culture. The other theme is deference to experts on decision-making. What is associated with both of those is the abdication of the actual responsibility that you get when you're elected in the first place.
Ms. Justice: Being a school board member is a big job, and I remember taking the oath of office. You swear an oath that you're going to uphold the Constitution, and that you're going to represent your constituents. I remember putting my hand up and taking the oath. At the end it says, "So help me God." I remember saying, “So help me God.” We'll see how this goes. It's a big responsibility and you have to make decisions that affect your local community.
That's one of the things that we really impart to our moms, our dads, and our community members who are running for school board. This is a very important local office. The decisions that your school board makes oftentimes affect your life a lot more than the President or Congress. Your day-to-day life is affected by the decisions of the school board. It's very important that you run for office. You make sure you know who is serving in office, and you build relationships with those people.
Mr. Jekielek: There's a lot of information circulating about Moms for Liberty. There are a bunch of slurs out there, and there are a lot of opinions. What is Moms for Liberty all about?
Ms. Descovich: Our purpose is to fight for the survival of America. We unify, we educate, and we empower parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government. That is what we do. We organize in chapters around the country. We fight at the local level to defend parental rights and to improve public education.
Mr. Jekielek: That seems pretty simple.
Ms. Justice: We're disrupting the balance of power in American public education. There are a lot of people that rely on public education for money and for votes and for support. Kids are oftentimes left out of the equation when decision-making is happening. There's a lot of pandering to adult needs, but not the needs of children. We put the needs of children at the forefront of decision-making. There's some people that don't like that.
Mr. Jekielek: The pandemic exposed an inordinate disregard for the actual needs of children.
Ms. Justice: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: Would you agree with that?
Ms. Descovich: Yes.
Ms. Justice: Yes. The burden of the world was placed on children's shoulders. At what point in American history have we ever relied on children to keep adults safe?
Ms. Descovich: There was the shutting down of schools in places like Los Angeles where the teachers union said they would not allow the districts to reopen until they had defunded the police. What does that have to do with public education? Those children that were in first grade lost two years of school. If you can't read by third grade, and everybody agrees on this across the board, your future path is looking very bleak. Your chances of graduating from high school drop, and your chances of ending up in prison increase.
Ms. Justice: That was condemning third-graders to a life of struggle. When you look at California and Gavin Newsom, schools closed in San Francisco for 18 months. They didn't get that time back. Kids didn't start kindergarten and work their way through. They just went right to second grade. For moms and dads, you know that there's a lot of development that happens in kindergarten and first grade. In America, we were treating adults like children and children like adults, and it was shocking.
Mr. Jekielek: How effective is virtual learning?
Ms. Descovich: Every child learns differently, and there are some children that can learn virtually. None of my kids could learn virtually. The quality of education through virtual learning has been a nightmare, especially when it was flipped on a dime. Those teachers had not been trained on how to teach virtually. Our poor school district and other school districts were struggling to make it work.
I'll never forget, I was visiting a kindergarten classroom and a teacher was teaching to about 20 students. Then she kept ducking down the hall to talk to the kids at home through a laptop on a stool. They were looking at the side of her body. Sometimes they could hear a little bit and sometimes not. Kids could turn their screen black and play video games and pretend like they were in school. We know that virtual learning didn't work because we have the lowest reading scores in America right now since the 1980s.
Ms. Justice: Then you have Randi Weingarten and others making excuses after excuses. Then there is the alphabet soup of CRT, DEI, and SEL. The bottom line is, children get a lot of confidence from mastery of skills. You've got 3 out of 10 children, only a third of children, who are grade-level proficient in reading in fourth grade across America. People wonder, “Why is there mental illness? Why are children suffering?”
Can you imagine if you went into your job every day and you were being asked to do things that you had never been taught how to do or equipped to do. Imagine what shame you would feel, the embarrassment you would feel, and the frustration of failing constantly. That's what we've set our kids up for. We've set our kids up for failure and there's no reason for it. Between state and federal and local funding we will spend $850 billion on public education in America in 2023, and only a third of all kids are reading at grade level.
If you had a business, and I'm not saying that schools are a business, but if you had a business with those outcomes, what would happen? Would more money be invested if only a third of the seat belts that you made were working? There would be an entire overhaul.
We're trying to really shine a light on the failure in American public schools and say, “We need to reclaim these schools because they've been captured.” We need to do a lot of work reforming the schools and put the focus back on basics; reading and writing and math. Why are the teachers' unions so interested in forcing all this ideology into the schools instead of ensuring that the kids are learning to read?
Mr. Jekielek: There are two things happening here. One is that there is a zeal around injecting this ideology. There are some very active, loud people that have been taught in the teachers colleges that the right way to educate is critical theory practice. Another viewpoint is that all these failures are for some other external reason like systemic racism. It's not actually that the teacher is doing a really bad job. Which of these is dominant? Are they both working at the same time? How do you view this?
Ms. Justice: We've seen a lot of problems with teacher preparation. I don't want to put the blame on all of the teachers. A couple of things are happening. You have the unions who are bargaining for the people at the table. They're not bargaining for the teachers in the classroom. Even when I was on the school board and my kids were in public schools, their teachers were members of the union.
I remember saying to one of the teachers, "Do you know what the union is bargaining for? I'm going to the bargaining meeting this afternoon." She had no idea. She said, "No, I just pay my dues. I try to stay out of it." A lot of times in America, teachers really don't know what is being bargained for and that the unions really aren't out for their best interest in the classrooms, but a lot of times are just for the leadership.
Ms. Descovich: 100 percent. You can look at what the teachers' unions say in their summer conferences about what they value and what they put forward. Last summer and the year before when we looked at their agenda, there was nothing on there about education and nothing about reading.
Ms. Justice: Nothing.
Ms. Descovich: They take stands on abortion. They get involved in foreign policy. They were talking about Israel and the Ukraine conflict.
Ms. Justice: Ukraine.
Ms. Descovich: They were talking about all of these things, but nothing about education or education failure or how they're going to help their teachers become better teachers. They've completely lost their way and they have been captured. I remember our district sitting at the negotiating table with the union at one point. The union proposed that raises only went to the top 10 percent tier and that none of the other teachers got a raise. I thought, “What in the world is happening here?” We are careful not to blame everyday ordinary teachers for what's going on right now, but I will place clear blame on the head of the teachers' union.
Ms. Justice: Randi Weingarten and the teachers' unions are the foot soldiers of the progressive far-Left, and 99 percent of the donations that teachers' unions make go to Democrats. Joe Biden and Jill Biden invited Randi Weingarten and other people in the first days of the White House. During Covid we saw the cozy relationship that they had with the teachers' unions. We've seen now in emails that have been discovered that you've got Weingarten talking to Rochelle Walensky at the CDC.
Parents were saying, “My kids aren't doing well. They're suffering with this virtual learning.” As a school board member I was saying, “There's no real accountability for the quality of the learning. We graduated kids who had never even turned on a computer that year from March and April onward. It didn't even matter. Tina and I say all the time that we got to see behind the education curtain when we were on the school board, and then Covid happened. Then all of America got to see behind the education curtain, and it's really messy back there.
Mr. Jekielek: Moms for Liberty is for parental rights, but also for educational reform.
Ms. Justice: That is a huge issue.
Mr. Jekielek: That's another key aspect of what you're doing. What kind of future can there be with a public school system that functions the way it does now? Do you think there's a way to reform it? Do you think that's what has to happen? There are other people that are saying, “Get your kids out of public school. There's no other way because it's unreformable.” Where do you stand on that?
Ms. Descovich: I feel passionate about this. The conservative movement in general for the past few decades has been solely focused on school choice. We support school choice. Parents should have the right to direct the education of their children and to choose where they want them to go to school. Every kid is different, and we totally support that.
We have completely neglected public education for decades. We've ceded that ground, and we've given it to the radicals. Then we want to know why there's riots in the streets. We want to know why Americans that are 18 to 30-years-old right now don't even know there are three branches of government. Why? Because we have neglected public education.
We cannot cede that ground, and we cannot ignore those children. All of those children, which is 80 percent of American children, by the way, are going to graduate from public school with the indoctrination they've been taught, or the lack of what they've been taught for 12 years. They are going to be the future voters of America. Where have we left ourselves?
Ms. Justice: We understand that it's going to take everyone, all of us, to move this country. I don't want any child in a classroom thinking that because of the color of their skin or their sexual orientation or their biological sex, that somehow they're up against an unfair advantage. We've had amazing examples of people across the United States who have risen to leadership and power and success from all different walks of life. That is America.
America is a beacon of light for the world. We did an interview with some gentlemen from Hong Kong that had seen the change. He had been here, then had left, and then came back. He said to us, "America used to be a very bright light, but we feel like that light is dimming." American parents feel it. There is no future for America with generations of children who are illiterate.
Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about the book you're holding there.
Ms. Justice: This is a very special book. It's called, Child Abuse in the Classroom. I came across this book early on in Moms for Liberty. In 1984, the United States Department of Education visited seven different cities around the country in the month of March. They heard testimony from parents about what was happening in the classrooms, and parents were very, very concerned.
There was something called the Women's Equity Act. It was really the first time we saw thought formation coming from the federal government into the schools. Marlo Thomas and Carol Channing were commissioned to write a song. There was a lot of talk in classrooms about the role of men and women.
In fact, there were cutouts of men and women with clothes, like paper-doll style clothes. There weren't any skirts or dresses for the women. All of a sudden, you were seeing this shift. There was a clarification of values happening, and education as therapy happening in the classrooms. There was a lot of magic circle time and questions. Even today, we're seeing them.
There was a question, “You have people in a boat and who should survive? Who's the least worthy in the boat? Who should be thrown off if there's someone who's less worthy of being saved?” That started happening at that time, and parents were very, very alarmed. Fast-forward to Montgomery County where we had the town hall. You have a parent saying, "I feel like my child is being rebaptized into another religion."
That truly has been happening for over 40 years. Parents were upset and concerned then, and it has only gotten worse. The federal government took steps to try to protect rights, the Protection of People Rights Amendment, FERPA, that was supposed to protect student safety and privacy. Now, we have secrets being kept in schools where parents can't get their children's educational records.
This has just been a fascinating journey to read the stories of the parents from all over the country. Now, Tina and I are working really hard to give parents a voice, because Secretary Cardona and President Biden don't care what parents think. We have Joe Biden standing at the White House telling teachers, "When they are in your classroom, when the kids are in your classroom, they are your children."
President Biden: They're all our children. The reason you're the Teachers of the Year is because you recognize that. They're not somebody else's children. They're like yours when they're in the classroom.
Ms. Justice: No, sir. They are not your children. These are our children. Secretary Cardona was saying that parents were misbehaving at school board meetings. He doesn't have a lot of respect for these parents that think they know what's best for their kids.
Secretary Cardona: I don't have too much respect for people that are misbehaving in public and then acting as if they know what's right for kids.
Ms. Justice: That is the audacity of some of the statements that are happening now. Now is the time to create some accountability measures and to put the power back into the hands of parents across America.
Mr. Jekielek: Let's talk about some of the lawsuits that you're involved in. You've written some amicus briefs around the secrecy issue that you just mentioned. Please tell me about that.
Ms. Descovich: For sure.
Ms. Justice: There are shocking things that are happening. In Leon County, Florida, and up in Massachusetts, there are two court cases about children who were brought behind closed doors without the consent or knowledge of their parents. There were six pages of forms filled out where the child was being asked, “What name do you want to use at school? What name should we use when we're talking to your parents? Do your siblings know? Can we use your real name with them? Where do you want to sleep when you go on overnight field trips?” In both of these cases, parents found out about this betrayal. It's really a betrayal of the trust of the parents, and they were very upset. They filed court cases and they've both lost.
This is now going through an appeal process, and we've been lucky enough to be able to file these amicus briefs, and to have help from Advancing American Freedom and the Institute for Free Speech, these amazing nonprofit conservative law firms that are coming and helping so that we can take a stand. Moms for Liberty has 130,000 members in 47 states.
All of these parents coming together and saying, “Who does the government think they are to keep secrets about our children? In the original rulings, the court said that it did not shock the conscience of the court that this had happened in these schools. It certainly shocked the conscience of parents across America, and so now we're fighting back.
Ms. Descovich: We also have some First Amendment cases that our parents are stepping forward on because their First Amendment rights have been violated. They go up to the microphone to speak and their mics get shut off. They get taken off the list to speak because somebody on the school board thinks that they know what they're going to say. We're moving forward in a lot of areas for that too.
Mr. Jekielek: When these things were moved to Zoom, there were tons of examples where they just shut off the video feed.
Ms. Descovich: I've got a better one for you. We had a dad that was a school board member from California, and he was the one lone conservative member on the school board. The school district and the other board members stopped sending him the link to participate in the meeting. He had no recourse. The last time I talked to him, he was filing a lawsuit. He couldn't even participate as an elected member of a school board because his fellow counterparts wouldn't send him the link.
Ms. Justice: Let's talk about California if we could for a second, because this is really important. My personal opinion is we're seeing Gavin Newsom ramp up for a run for president. There is not a governor in the United States of America that has done more to violate parental rights.
Mr. Jekielek: He did veto some legislation which was clearly against the parental rights assembly.
Ms. Justice: There's a super majority in California, so his veto means nothing. That law will pass, he knows it, and that's him trying to steer to the middle. American parents are not stupid. We have been watching, and we have paid attention. What happens in California does not stay in California.
I'm telling you right now, American parents are not going to let Gavin Newsom become President of the United States. They've become a refuge state. If your child runs away to California, they'll put them with a glitter family, and then your parental rights will be totally negated in that state. What kind of a governor, what kind of a man, and what kind of a father would allow that to happen?
American parents are paying attention. People talk about the age of information a lot and ask, “Is social media really good?” What I've seen is that we have brought out the best of social media. Our moms connect on so many different platforms and share so much information. We are so aware of what is happening across the country. Now. we're working to make sure that those horrible laws that Gavin Newsom is passing in his state are not spreading across the country.
Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned that you have 130,000 members. How old is Moms for Liberty?
Ms. Descovich: Two-and-a-half-years-old.
Mr. Jekielek: That's a sizable roster. What qualifies for membership here?
Ms. Descovich: We started with two chapters in Florida in each of our counties. In two-and-a-half years, we've grown to 300 chapters in 47 states and 130,000 moms on the ground.
Ms. Justice: Three states to go.
Ms. Descovich: At this point, we haven't done a whole lot of recruiting and marketing yet. We're just moving into that phase. Everything has come to us organically. People go to our website, click the button, ask to start a chapter, and they go through the process. We have a vetting process, an interview process, a background check, and things of that nature. You have to have 10 people to start a chapter, and you need a secretary and a treasurer. After you're approved, you are off to the races.
Ms. Justice: Yes, it's great.
Mr. Jekielek: That is astonishing growth.
Ms. Justice: The Biden administration and the governors have messed with the wrong moms. I don't care what letter you have after your name, Republican or Democrat. I've never been a political person. I wasn't registered as a Republican until 2016 when I wanted to vote in the Republican primary. But I've always been very issues-focused. That's the way our moms are.
They don't care if you have an R or a D after your name. Are you going to defend parental rights? Are you going to respect me as a parent? Those are the questions that we're asking. Finally we're seeing that people are waking up. Elected officials are waking up to these threats to our liberty.
Ms. Descovich: Let's talk about that for a minute. You mentioned the Biden administration coming after us. They have thrown everything at our organization, and yet we still grow and just get stronger. They started with the DOJ issuing the threat tag. Then they moved to the FBI, who actually called some of our moms after they spoke at school board meetings with intimidating questions and tried to silence them.
When that didn't work, we kept moving forward and we exposed them through Congress. Tiffany went and spoke in a committee hearing exposing what they were doing. They moved on to the private sector and to nonprofits. We have proof that they met six times with the SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center]. The Southern Poverty Law Center met six times with the Biden administration before they announced to all of America that Moms for Liberty is an anti-government extremist group. They now have labeled us as that, and are trying to take us down again.
We took that news and raised several hundred thousand dollars off of that. They are unleashing everything they have on us. Just the other day, a liberal organization that is backed by one of Hillary's foundations announced they're going to dump $10 million into school board races against Moms for Liberty candidates. That is because we won 275 school board seats last year.
Ms. Justice: With no money, by the way.
Ms. Descovich: With no money.
Ms. Justice: We just started a PAC, because we're done with the disregard that our government has shown for the American people. You could be speaking at a school board meeting and the next morning making peanut butter and jelly for your kids, and the FBI is calling you and asking you, "Do you have any guns in your home? Do you have any history of mental health illness?" These are the questions that the FBI was asking parents. It's just shocking to us. We say, “No more. We won't stand for it anymore. We, the people, we, the parents, are taking back this country.”
We are working with the Heritage Foundation, who's been wonderful helping us to understand how the federal government works, and how to get information out. They have actually been helping us to FOIA the federal government; the DOJ, the DOE, the FBI, and the Biden administration. We have had absolutely no response. Actually, the Heritage Foundation is suing the Biden administration on our behalf now.
That lawsuit is launching today. Because we want to know if they are talking about us. Are they talking about our moms and our organization? How are they using someone like the SPLC who gets millions and millions and millions of dollars that they keep in offshore accounts to target the American people?
Mr. Jekielek: There is one criticism that you've gotten, which is just simply that you're into banning books.
Ms. Descovich: The definition of banning books means you cannot get the book. We say this all the time, “Write the book, print the book, and sell the book. Put the book in the public library down the street, so that it's free and accessible, if you would like.” A public-school library is a very specific place that should have a curated library for education. We just talked about how public education is failing, and how children can't even read historical books and traditional books. They absolutely don't need to be exposed to pornography.
Ms. Justice: I would like for someone to tell me at what age it is appropriate for a strap-on dildo to be in a book in a public-school library. How is that helping children to learn to read? The entire conversation around the books has been disingenuous. I know that because I watched Biden's campaign video when he talks about book banning.
I just saw Gavin Newsom talk about the moms who are burning books. No one is burning books. Curating the content of a children's library is appropriate. You wouldn't have the same books that you would have in a seminary as you would in a medical college. We're talking about K-12 public education. Let's teach the kids how to read and let's put good quality books in their hands to help them to do that.
Mr. Jekielek: What's next for Moms for Liberty?
Ms. Descovich: We've launched our PAC. Last year, our chapters endorsed 500 candidates and 275 of them won without any money. That's just by word of mouth, by moms putting it out on their social media, and maybe getting involved in the local campaign. Ultimately, we want a Moms for Liberty chapter in all 3000 counties in the country. We want a mom and a mom celebrity shirt at every school board meeting, overseeing them, being the watchdogs, and making sure we get back public education.
You talked about public education being infiltrated. We talked about the concerns in public education. Can it be fixed? Should we scrap the whole thing? It's our belief that it absolutely needs to be fixed, and it needs to be saved. The only people that can do that right now are parents.
Mr. Jekielek: A final thought, Tiffany?
Ms. Justice: Tina just said it very well. It's just a blessing to be a part of Moms for Liberty. It's an honor, honestly. Every day, we're just amazed by how strong American moms and dads are, and we’re amazed by the strength of the American people. I have a lot of faith that we're going to turn this country around.
Mr. Jekielek: Tina Descovich, Tiffany Justice, such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Ms. Descovich: Thank you so much.
Ms. Justice: Thanks.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.
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