How Are Some of the Right-Wing Groups Powering MAGA Doing? An Update
How Are Some of the Right-Wing Groups Powering MAGA Doing? An Update
Moms for Liberty is sinking and the Bull Moose Project is soaring
Dear Readers:
Right-wing populist rage is not a spontaneous force that has organically emerged from the ground up. To a great extent, it has been manufactured and then mobilized by conservative organizations and activists constantly stirring up anger against domestic political enemies and out-groups. Moms for Liberty is an activist group that seeks to install Republicans in school districts and elsewhere in order to win the culture war and align school policy with social conservative ideals. The Bull Moose Project is committed to creating the next generation of right-wing populist leaders and supporters.
We asked Robert Tracinski, who had previously written a profile of Moms for Liberty for us, and Jason Hart, whom we interviewed about the Bull Moose Project last year, to give us an update on how these groups are doing. The news is mixed: Moms for Liberty is in meltdown mode, partly because of its own salacious leadership, and facing pushback. But the Bull Moose Project has made real inroads into one of most influential conservative think tanks, the Heritage Foundation, which is working tirelessly to elect Trump and then populate his administration.
Read on.
Berny Belvedere
Senior Editor
Robert Tracinski
Moms for Liberty is an activist organization founded and led by conservative women to fight for “parental rights” against alleged leftist indoctrination in public schools. When I wrote an overview of it in The UnPopulist late last year, it had grown explosively since its beginnings in 2021, becoming a national movement with significant political influence in conservative states. Its rise seemed unstoppable. But a lot has happened since then.
At the time of my overview, Gabrielle Hanson, a Moms for Liberty-associated candidate for mayor of Franklin, Tennessee, had just been resoundingly defeated—partly due to her association with a local neo-Nazi group.
Soon afterwards, elections in Virginia sent another big signal that Moms for Liberty was in trouble. Virginia’s odd-year state elections often serve as a bellwether of changing political trends. In 2021, Governor Glenn Youngkin was elected on an “anti-woke” platform that resonated with voters. In 2023, he asked voters to give him a legislative majority and hinted he would emulate the agenda of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Instead, Virginians denied Republicans a majority in both houses. While voters may have reservations about aspects of the “woke” agenda, they don’t seem too fond of the conservatives’ answer to it, either.
This was echoed elsewhere. Almost two-thirds of school board candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty lost their elections. A Brookings Institution analysis indicates that the win rates in 2023 were down from 2022.
On one hand, local school board elections tend to have low turnout, so persuading just a few like-minded people to vote can sway an election in the candidate’s favor. On the other hand, M4L has become such a polarizing brand … that some candidates might find being associated with M4L brings out more votes for the opposing candidate than for themselves.
Because few people show up for school board elections, a determined faction can make big gains—at first. But by drawing attention to the school board, they inadvertently mobilize higher numbers to turn out in opposition. All of this has since been overshadowed by a much bigger and more salacious story.
Ask yourself how a third-rate Hollywood screenwriter would try to wrap up this whole story line. Having built up a censorious campaign by puritanical, holier-than-thou villains, he would then reach for the lazy, clichéd ending: a sordid sex scandal in which the holy rollers are exposed as hypocrites.
It turns out reality has a third-rate screenwriter, because that’s exactly what happened. At the beginning of December, news broke that Christian Ziegler, chairman of the Florida Republican Party and the husband of Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, had been accused of rape. He was not prosecuted on that charge, but only after the investigation revealed that his accuser had previously had a consensual “three-way sexual encounter” with both of the Zieglers.
Bridget Ziegler is not just one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty. She has also been a prominent advocate of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, an extremely broad ban on discussion of sexual orientation in public schools. So the woman leading the charge in the latest social conservative gay panic was having sex with another woman.
This story has helped fuel growing resistance to the core agenda of Moms for Liberty—that and a stream of examples of heavy-handed censorship of children’s books, such as one Florida school district bowdlerizing beloved books like Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen by drawing extra clothes onto the characters.
A recent Washington Post analysis shows that attempts to ban books in school libraries are being generated by a very small number of cranks.
The majority of the 1,000-plus book challenges analyzed by The Post were filed by just 11 people. Each of these people brought 10 or more challenges against books in their school district; one man filed 92 challenges. Together, these serial filers constituted 6% of all book challengers—but were responsible for 60% of all filings.
This is part of the design of regulations which deputize private citizens to file complaints. But now even Gov. DeSantis is admitting that there is problem with “bad-faith” objectors who “just show up and object to every single book under the sun.”
A recent Brevard County school board meeting to discuss whether to ban The Kite Runner and Slaughterhouse-Five reportedly only had a single Moms for Liberty member show up to protest allowing the books. According to a write-up in The New Republic:
All the other attendees spoke in favor of keeping the books on the shelves—and heavily criticized the parental rights organization. One attendee compared “the growth of the Taliban and its repressive autocracy in the name of religious nationalism” in The Kite Runner to “the rise of parental rights groups that want to limit what students learn.” The Moms for Liberty member did not speak and eventually snuck out of the room. The books were not banned.
Many of us have been concerned that organizations like Moms for Liberty and states like Florida will set an illiberal precedent. But the backlash against them—particularly in local elections and in the courts—is beginning to set a precedent for the reassertion of liberal values.
Jason Hart
When I was interviewed by The UnPopulist last fall about the Bull Moose Project, an organization committed to ensuring Trumpian populism and Nick Fuentes-style white ethnonationalism are the Republican Party’s future, I was worried the group would keep flying under the radar and avoid major scrutiny. I may not have been worried enough.
Not only has the Bull Moose Project avoided scrutiny, it has been welcomed into the populist right’s institutional channels. The Heritage Foundation, the renowned conservative think tank whose Project 2025 initiative would reshape the presidency along Trumpian lines, has deepened its ties to the Bull Moose Project since sponsoring an event of theirs last spring. Here’s the story.
David Carlson, a leader of the American Populist Union (APU) and author of a white nationalist screed claiming America was built by “our blood and soil,” an unmistakable invocation of an infamous Nazi slogan, hosted an APU livestream in early 2022 in which he browbeat congressional candidate Joe Kent for disavowing Fuentes.
But APU’s ties to Fuentes were too obvious, sinking the group’s dream of taking Fuentes’ views mainstream. So APU was absorbed by the Bull Moose Project and relaunched as “American Virtue,” a program of the Bull Moose Project’s tax-exempt 501(c)(3) foundation, in mid-2022. As part of the merger, Carlson became the Bull Moose Project’s operations director—one of the group’s three executives.
When populist Republicans were widely rejected in the 2022 midterm elections, American Virtue raged, “The forces on the right currently trying to undo the Trump revolution are treacherous scum and should be viewed even lower than leftists.” The Bull Moose Project’s endorsees had a 19% success rate, with only five of 26 winning their races.
In early 2023, the Bull Moose Project, which had just merged with a group whose views were too noxious for nationalist firebrand Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, announced that Heritage would sponsor its leadership summit in April. Bear in mind that this was hardly a year after Gosar backed out of an APU event due to its ties with Fuentes. My attempts to privately warn Heritage against backing the Bull Moose Project went unheeded, despite providing them incontrovertible evidence that they had promoted repellent nativism.
But I’m not the only one that the Heritage Foundation has ignored. When a reporter for The Dispatch, a major conservative outlet, asked Heritage about its support for the Bull Moose Project, Heritage still declined to comment. Mike Howell, one of two Heritage staffers who spoke at the leadership summit, indirectly confirmed the think tank was aware of proof of Bull Moose Project’s bigotry since he posted on X, “very excited to speak at this most prestigious of conferences @BullMooseProj and even more excited that it has drawn the ire of all the right people.”
In October, the Bull Moose Project announced that American Virtue (the rebranded American Populist Union) was shutting down. Carlson was removed from the organization’s “About Us” page without the Bull Moose Project explaining his departure or answering for why he was appointed one of its executives in the first place.
The Bull Moose Project Foundation announced in January it was adding two members to its advisory board: Heritage President Kevin Roberts’ Chief of Staff Wesley Coopersmith and Roberts’ friend, Saurabh Sharma, who told Politico his overriding ambition is to create "a new class of Beltway elites who are steeped in an explicitly reactionary worldview.” A month later, the Bull Moose Project joined the advisory board of Heritage’s Project 2025.
There is no evidence that the Bull Moose Project has abandoned the populist, racially-motivated nationalist agenda that was always at the heart of its mission. More likely, the group has made some surface changes to become less radioactive for Heritage should more people connect the dots from Nick Fuentes’ ideology to the Bull Moose Project’s populist agenda.
As I expressed in my earlier interview with The UnPopulist, this is worrisome given that the Bull Moose Project is one of several populist groups that will be supplying staffers to the next Trump administration in the event of a Trump victory in November.
© The UnPopulist 2024
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I don’t understand how her sex life is relevant. Aren’t there a lot of gays who believe it’s up to parents, not schools, to decide how and when to expose young children to sexual matters?
As to “book bans,” I live in Florida. When you say the state is imposing “book bans,” what are you referring to? Are you defining a “book ban“ as a system that does not give school librarians the final say on the books they keep in their libraries? Or are you referring to laws that prohibit the distribution books that advance certain ideas (the way the left seeks to ban books that criticize hormone therapy for children)?
In the past, I have subscribed to Robert Tracinski's work. I stopped doing so for a number of reasons but continued to receive free samples of his work. In one of those he put forward the concept that those of us interested in Ayn Rand's work should, to stop the 'threat' of Donald Trump, ally ourselves with the left. I find this suggestion to be at the very least shockingly evasive of the nature and purpose of the left which in my view is to establish a socialist police in America and around the world. I observe that to advance that cause, the left carries out two hallmarks of all of the vicious tyrannical movements of the 20th century. That is, before they gained 'life or death' power in their respective countries, the Nazis, the communists, the fascists, all did both. They virulently attacked freedom of speech and they mangled the law to both use it a s a weapon against their political opponents while giving their followers a free pass to commit any crime. In America now, we see the left attacking freedom of speech and prosecuting Donald Trump, while their own violent followers can loot, burn, destroy entire cities and law enforcement does nothing. For the record, I think Trump can be legitimately criticized in a number of ways, but to subject him to what are plainly 'two tier legal' 'lawfare' prosecutions is to me clearly the mark of vicious left wing 'wanna be' tyrants who, mostly unchallenged, especially by so called 'Republicans' and 'liberals', thirst for and use raw power against anyone who talks back. While I think those who ran Moms for Liberty clearly 'stumbled and fell', and perhaps their organization should take the fall with them, I really wonder why Mr. Tracinski is so harshly critical of a movement which seems to me to be legitimately pursuing improvement in education for children, while at the same time he is so forgiving of the left which in my view is desperately trying to enslave us and has made significant inroads in the schools, colleges, universities, in their attempt to do so.