The Country’s Most Unpleasant Moms Will Not Be Cowed By People Pointing Out The Big Hitler Quote On Their Newsletter

You know how it is. You are one of the 20 or so most unpleasant and aggrieved individuals in Hamilton County, Ind. As such, you have found yourself laying out the newsletter for your local chapter of Moms For Liberty, the fast-growing reactionary astroturf organization that grew to prominence by harnessing the power of screaming the word "groomer" at school board meetings and to which you, as an elite 0.01 percent unpleasant/aggrieved person, were naturally and perhaps inevitably drawn. Moms For Liberty claims 300 chapters in 45 states, and all around the country those chapters are doing something like the same mom-coded political actions, all of which proceed from the belief that, as a Moms For Liberty presentation once put it, "globalists, utopians, socialists, totalitarians and the UN are using public schools to undermine freedom and Christianity."

That work takes various forms, none of which will be surprising to someone who follows the news or has met an upper-tier unpleasant suburban person. It has been, at different times, agitating against COVID-19 mask and vaccine mandates in schools, demanding that moms' voices be heard on The Bathroom Issue, organizing against both overcrowded bookshelves in school libraries and the teachers' unions dead-set on filling them, making sure that academic curricula do not contain a harmful quantum of uncomfortable stuff pertaining to the realities of American life or history, and challenging both the existence of trans kids and the woke depravities of The Walt Disney Co. This work plays out in school board meetings and local elections and Facebook threads in which activists talk about how prepared they are to "do a 1776 to" their chosen political enemies. Moms For Liberty is outwardly a grassroots organization of moms dedicated to ensuring that their children grow up to have precisely the same opinions that they do, but is associated with precisely the sort of impossibly rich, impenetrably secretive conservative political enterprises that these organizations are always associated with, and also the Florida Republican Party, and also in some instances the Proud Boys. Earlier this month, the Southern Poverty Law Center designated Moms For Liberty an extremist group.

Anyway, the newsletter that you will post on the Facebook page for the Hamilton County, Ind. chapter of Moms For Liberty is a part of that important work. But it isn't finished yet. It is visually busy, but then your chapter has been busy as well; the issue contains news about "A class in Biblical Citizenship" and "Carmel Pride Festival funding" and a rundown of "Parent WINS," and a message from the organization's founders headlined "Moms For Liberty will not be intimidated by hate groups!" But there is some blank space above that, right next to the In This Issue bit. It doesn't look right, and so you plug it with what is either a motivational quote or a cautionary one—"He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future"—and then you attribute it to its author, and then you publish it to Facebook, on Wednesday afternoon. Which might have been it, had the bloodthirsty click-chasing media types at The Indianapolis Star not noticed that the quote, which is commonly attributed to Adolf Hitler, was also in this instance attributed to Adolf Hitler, right there at the top of your Moms For Liberty newsletter. And then, of course, they make a big deal out of it.

And then they keep going on about it, even after you add a lovely yellow box under the quote later in the day on Wednesday that reads "Context - The quote from a horrific leader should put parents on alert. If the government has control over our children today, they control our country's future. We The People must be vigilant and protect children from an overreaching government." And then after you take it down entirely, and put up a quote from your chapter's chairwoman saying "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," they just go on writing about it. It feels like no one has your back, which is honestly ridiculous because this quote gets cited kind of a lot by people on your side of things. Another Moms For Liberty chapter did it a couple years ago, but were they crucified in the Indianapolis Star? They were not. Illinois Rep. Mary Miller once paraphrased it in a speech she gave on January 5, 2021, prefacing it with "Hitler was right about one thing," for instance, and she never really got in any kind of trouble for that. She's still in Congress, and the maddest anyone ever got at her was when she catered a LIV Golf congressional meet-and-greet with Jimmy John's.

But you, who were just trying to fill a dead spot in your newsletter with a nice anti-woke sentiment, are suddenly the antichrist. Even the head of the local Republican party puts out a statement where he's like, "I think Adolf Hitler is terrible, and I would never quote Adolf Hitler or the Nazis in any shape or form other than saying they are bad or terrible. That was a terrible page in our world history and I don't think that we as a society can say enough about the atrocities that the poor Jewish people had to go through." As if you somehow weren't thinking about any of that, and also as if that is relevant to the merit of the statement itself. It feels, in that moment of abandonment, like everyone is working together to stop you from being who you are, as if they're trying to pretend you don't even exist. It feels, actually, like your being one of The 1776 People, and prayerfully putting on your armor as a Joyful Warrior Mom In The Arena, is worth nothing at all, like your God-given freedom of speech is just another thing that Soros and the government can make illegal simply by convening an emergency meeting of the cabal tha—

But then ... hoofbeats, and the cavalry rides over the horizon. It is the national organization, speaking in clarion voice—many thousands united in the voice of one mom, a voice raised in defiance and demanding that the newspaper that reported on all this "do better."

And that's when you know—not just that you're not alone, but that there are let's say millions of moms just like you. And those moms will not just stand with you but work with you to either OWN the youth and GAIN the future or prevent the wrong people from OWNING the youth and GAINING the future. They will fill that space with you, and when you quote Adolf Hitler to explain either what you are trying to do or what you are trying to stop, they will understand exactly what you mean.