The group responsible for training Massachusetts police officers listed a prominent parental rights group alongside Antifa and neo-Nazis on its list of “hate groups.”
The Massachusetts Municipal Police Training Committee, which trains more than 20,000 police officers across the commonwealth, listed Moms for Liberty under “Hate Groups” active in Massachusetts in training materials, which were shared exclusively with The Daily Wire.
Moms for Liberty obtained the training materials through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The training materials cited the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, which labels Moms for Liberty an “anti-government extremist” group.
(MPTC training materials)
Moms for Liberty, a grassroots group that fights for parental rights in schools across the country, was formed in 2021 while parents were fighting to reopen schools after the coronavirus pandemic, and while they were being exposed firsthand to inappropriate and often sexually explicit material being taught in their children’s classrooms.
The Massachusetts police training materials said Moms for Liberty targets “books that reference race and gender identity” and uses “parents’ rights as a vehicle to attack public education and make schools less welcoming for minority and LGBTQ students.”
Moms for Liberty cofounder Tina Descovich strongly disputed that definition, saying her group simply fights for parents to have a say in their child’s school experience.
“Moms for Liberty is here to show up at school board meetings, speak out against curriculum, failing schools, inappropriate books maybe in your public school library,” Descovich told The Daily Wire. “Antifa is burning down whole cities and parts of cities and rioting in the streets. These two are not equivalent.”
(MPTC training materials)
“We want parents to have the ability to opt out of sexualized books or curriculum, things that don’t align with their religious beliefs as the Supreme Court just affirmed in their most recent ruling in the Montgomery County, Maryland case,” she said.
“We have to ask what is going on here in Massachusetts with these trainings to police officers,” Descovich said. “We are not conducting ourselves in a way that police ever need to be concerned about the way we act. As a matter of fact, our chapter chair there in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, who is the one that brought all this to my attention, said she has local members of their police force come up to her all the time and say, ‘Please keep going. We can’t talk about it publicly, but I have kids. I appreciate you guys speaking out. So thank you for your courage and your bravery.'”
Antifa — a left-wing political movement that has used criminal violence, threats, and vandalism to oppose conservatives — was the “hate group” listed right before Moms for Liberty, and the training linked to an article calling it a “relatively small” threat across the country.
Meanwhile, the training linked to a PBS article saying Moms for Liberty is a “well-connected extremist group that attacks inclusion in schools,” according to “anti-hate researchers.”
(MPTC training materials)
“PBS is anything but fair and balanced,” Descovich said. “And now the state of Massachusetts is using those PBS articles to target us, to put a target on our back and tell police in that state that we are a threat. All we are is moms and dads that are concerned about our children, that are speaking up in a public forum, which we have the constitutional right to do.”
The training also noted that Moms for Liberty works to elect right-wing candidates to local school boards.
“You know, we have parental rights that were given to us by God,” she said. “We just want parents to be the driving factor in a child’s education.”