Moms for Liberty has been on a campaign to refute allegations that it is a hate group. These accusations ramped up after the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) recently added Moms for Liberty to its list of anti-government entities.
One chapter of Moms for Liberty isn’t helping the organization sanitize its public image. The Hamilton County, Indiana chapter recently published its first newsletter. A text box on the top right featured a quote from Adolf Hitler. The group didn’t merely include the quote accidentally, it attributed it to Hitler. So there’s no way to claim that they didn’t know the source.
The Indianapolis Star first reported that the newsletter contained the Hitler quote, “He alone, who owns the children, gains the future.”
Questions about whether it’s appropriate to claim one “owns” children aside, most people would probably agree that it is never a good idea to uncritically quote the dictator responsible for the Holocaust and WW II.
Especially not as, what could appear to be, a stated ethos for your group.
In the newsletter, the group complained about the “perversion” of a school getting a $10,000 grant to host Pride events and celebrated separate pieces of legislation, one to ban books in Indiana schools and the other to require schools to out their transgender or nonbinary children to their parents.
The Hitler quote overshadowed everything else.
A former school board member from Florida tweeted, “I have no words for this,” along with a screenshot of the newsletter with the Hitler quote circled.
The liberal Twitter account Chuds of TikTok wrote ironically, “To prove to the SPLC that they aren’t a hate group, Moms for Liberty decided to use a quote from Adolf Hitler in one of its newsletters.”
After the Indianapolis Star reported on the Hitler quote, the chapter updated the newsletter to provide “context.”
They wrote that the quote “from a horrific leader should put parents on alert” and claimed the government controls children and, hence, the nation’s future, implying that Biden and the “woke” mob allegedly is the true Nazi party.
As the uproar intensified on Thursday, they apologized. “We condemn Adolf Hitler’s actions and his dark place in human history. We should not have quoted him in our newsletter and express our deepest apology,” the Hamilton, County Indiana chapter chair wrote in a statement.
They also removed both the quote and the “context” from the electronic document.
The national group addressed the incident in a tweet. “Everyone knows Hitler is bad,” it wrote, going on to accuse the Indianapolis Star of “intentional dishonesty.” The organization did not point to any specific inaccuracy in the story.
Right below the Hitler quote, the newsletter issued a rallying cry from the founders of the national organization: “Moms for Liberty will not be intimidated by hate groups!”
“They should not have quoted Hitler. Period. Parents are passionate about protecting future generations from tyranny, but Hitler did not need to be quoted to make that point,” co-founders Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice said via email.
This post has been updated with comment from Moms from Liberty.
