Earlier this month, I spent the weekend at the Moms for Liberty “Joyful Warrior” summit in Philadelphia, which made national news by attracting a gaggle of leading GOP presidential contenders as speakers, including Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump. No mean feat for an organization that didn’t even exist during the last presidential campaign.

Emerging out of Florida in 2021, M4L is the undisputed face of a burgeoning “parents rights” movement; they claim 120,000 members and 300 chapters in 45 U.S. states , capturing seats on school boards across the country and galvanizing parents upset with critical race theory, gender ideology, and what they perceive as overt political “indoctrination” in schools.

On social media, critics of the group have one-upped each other with clever, dismissive nicknames for Moms for Liberty, mostly unprintable, including the “Minivan Taliban” and “Klanned Karenhood.” Go ahead and mock, but my biggest takeaway from attending their conference is that “Karen” is playing for keeps. Underestimate her resolve at your peril.

The weekend’s best-attended breakout was an oversubscribed session on protecting kids from gender ideology, which drew a standing-room only crowd of at least 200. Megan Brock, a mother who has been sued repeatedly by Bucks County, Pennsylvania to prevent the release of documents she requested under the state’s right-to-know law, started her presentation by asking how many in the audience had ever filed public records requests to ferret out information from their school districts, probably expecting a small show of hands. But from where I stood in the back of the room, it appeared that 80% of the attendees had their hands in the air, maybe more. A woman standing next to me gasped audibly.

Critics of the group have been arguing over whether or not Moms for Liberty is a “grassroots” or “astroturf” phenomenon. It hardly matters. The uncommon levels of focus and activist energy on display in Philly would be very hard to drive and sustain from the top down, regardless of the group’s origins or funding sources. It’s also humbling to the education reform movement of the last several decades, which has pined for an effective parent movement—a counterweight to teachers union influence, and to combat the complacency, and sometimes arrogance, of K–12 education. And now they have it, only not in a form congenial to ed reform’s deep-pocketed philanthropists, technocrats, and equity-obsessed social justice warriors.

None of them saw it coming, but education’s Tea Party is here.

“Who remembers BAEO?” (Black Alliance for Educational Options, which folded in 2017) one veteran ed reform figure said to me. “Who remembers Hispanic CREO?” (The Council for Reform and Educational Options which disappeared from radar nearly a decade ago.). Those groups never caught fire in the way Moms for Liberty has. They disappeared altogether when their philanthropic support waned.

Like any populist movement, the greatest risk to the growth and influence of Moms for Liberty comes from within the group itself. As I noted in a report for The Free Press, the group has attracted and abides something of a lunatic fringe, and not just among the local chapters that have spread like wildfire, drawn to the rallying cry, “We don’t co-parent with the government.” There was an observable tendency among speakers at the M4L summit to promote the least likely explanations for public education’s shortcomings, seeing malign forces, even conspiracies, where a more dispassionate analysis might see incompetence, administrative bloat, and opportunism.

K–12 education is congenitally fad-driven, unable to resist shiny new objects from education technology and 21st Century Skills, to “trauma-informed” pedagogy and social and emotional learning. If there’s a conspiracy in American education, it’s among vendors, consultants, and assorted camp followers conspiring to gorge themselves on a reliable source of public dollars, while providing schools with plausible excuses for their inability to meet minimal standards in reading and math.

“I tend to think of this as the life cycle of popular movements: they start with vigor, then as they grow they attract some weird elements. In the end stage it’s just grifting, but hopefully they’ve accomplished something before then,” Inez Stepman of the Independent Women’s Forum, told me. She traces her own career in conservative politics to the Tea Party. “I’m a ‘small-d’ democrat but that doesn’t mean bottom-up movements don’t need to be seized by leaders who have a good idea of how to convert their general impulses into concrete and sophisticated W’s,” she said.

Her take strikes me as exactly the challenge Moms for Liberty faces, now that they’ve suddenly become what the Washington Post calls “GOP Kingmakers.” Activists are seldom guilty of making nuanced arguments, but the open question is whether Moms for Liberty unapologetic brand of advocacy will attract more adherents than it repels.

I wouldn’t bet against them.

This article originally appeared in the AEIdeas blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the American Enterprise Institute.