FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The parental rights group Moms for Liberty’s revenue has grown by more than 500% in its second year, according to the Form 990 it filed with the IRS.
According to the Form 990, exclusively provided first to The Daily Signal, Moms for Liberty brought in $2.14 million in total revenue in 2022, while it brought in $370,029 in total revenue the year before. A significant majority of that money (92.3%) came from donations—contributions and grants. Expenses for 2021 totaled a mere $163,647, while in 2022 they rose to $1.7 million.
This represents a 579% growth in revenue and a 1,040% growth in expenses, a massive expansion.
The parental rights group held its first Joyful Warrior Summit in Tampa, Florida, in 2022. It also formally adopted governance and financial policies, conducting its first audit. The group began a coordinated fundraising campaign, increasing its charitable solicitation filings to more than 30 states.
Moms for Liberty lists three officers on payroll: Tina Descovich, the executive director and co-founder, who made $50,140; Marie Rogerson, executive director of program development, who made $50,251; and Tiffany Justice, the director and co-founder, who made $44,250.
According to the form, Moms for Liberty’s mission is “to empower members through education, support, outreach, and advocacy to defend parental and constitutionally protected rights within their communities and throughout all levels of government.”
The mission statement continues, saying Moms for Liberty aims to “raise awareness of parental rights in the community and provide its members with the data and tools to protect their rights as parents to make important decisions and take actions on behalf of their children.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, as schools started teaching kids remotely, parents could watch over the shoulders of their children, seeing what they were learning in school. This access, along with disagreements over COVID-19 restrictions such as the use of face masks, spurred parents to engage with local school boards, demanding answers about COVID-19 restrictions, critical race theory, and lessons with sexual or gender themes.
When parents raised their voices, teachers unions and school boards dismissed them, even occasionally demonizing them as equivalent to domestic terrorists.
Descovich and Justice founded Moms for Liberty to advocate for parents who felt disenfranchised in this way and to empower them to effect change.
Moms for Liberty trains parents to run for school board, and in the 2022 and 2023 elections, 365 of the candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed won their races.
“Moms for Liberty didn’t exist three years ago,” Justice told The Daily Signal last week. “For us to have now been able to elect in 2022 and 2023 365 school board members who are liberty-minded individuals standing up for parental rights, putting the focus back on the basics in American public education, stopping this woke indoctrination that we’ve been seeing—it’s very exciting.”
Critics have accused Moms for Liberty of aiming to ban books, when the group only opposes sexually explicit materials in school libraries. Similarly, some critics have accused Moms for Liberty leaders of harassment, though a Daily Signal analysis found the claims it reviewed were baseless.
In June, the Southern Poverty Law Center put Moms for Liberty, along with other parental rights groups such as Parents Defending Education, on its “hate map,” placing them alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC claims that Moms for Liberty is part of an “anti-student inclusion” movement, which it compares to “uptown Klans” of white southerners who supported segregation after the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education said that racial segregation of schools was unconstitutional.
As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC took the program it has used to bankrupt organizations associated with the Klan and weaponized it against conservative groups, partially to scare its donors into ponying up cash and partially to silence ideological opponents.
In 2019, amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal that led the SPLC to fire its co-founder, a former employee came forward to call the organization’s “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”
Seven years earlier, in 2012, a terrorist with a gun used the “hate map” to target a Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C. Although the SPLC condemned the attack, it kept the organization targeted by the gunman on its map.
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