Here is one of the dumbest arguments we run across?

The Southern Poverty Law Center lists XXX as a hate or extremist group

The latest example of such an argument is the SPLC declaring Mom's for Liberty as an extremist hate group. Now the Mom's for Liberty is a group that has led the charge of flipping school boards across the country and has been successfully working local elections to bring on politicians willing to listen to actual parents when it comes to their children. The success that they have is based on the fact that their issues have overwhelming support with everyone that is not far left or part of the teacher's union.

For the SPLC to declare this a hate group is akin to declaring a vast majority of all parents in the United States as the largest hate group ever assembled. Doing some quick math, about 40% of Americans live in households with children. Depending on the issues involved, the stances held by Mom's for Liberty range in popularity with these Americans by wide margins. In fact, there is not a single issue that the group supports that does not have Majority support. In cases such as teaching and promoting transgender issues, the percentage of parents opposed reaches well over 80%. That would suggest that the SPLC believes that as many as 70-80 million parent are all part of a large "hate group". Not to mention the millions of other Americans without school aged children who are also against children being "groomed" by teachers. Teachers who apparently do not want to teach their actual subjects.

So what makes these millions and millions a giant hate group?

The Southern Poverty Law Center lists Moms for Liberty as an extremist group in its Year in Hate and Extremism report for 2022 for what it calls the group’s opposition to an inclusive public school environment. They specifically describe Moms for Liberty as an anti-government organization.

Keep in mind that Mom's for Liberty are promoting candidates in elections and are winning. They are winning because those candidates are pushing popular stances with Americans. How is winning elections "anti-Government"? Well I would argue that they are upending the underlying concept of a local "deep state" by actually electing people who will stand up to it.

Around 15 years ago our local school board in Farmington was nothing more than a sounding board for the Superintendent and teachers unions and were often at odds with our local city counsel. There was a fairly significant fight between the two entities after the city passed a significant tax levy to build a new high school. At one point our school board threatened to take our city tax dollars and build a new high school in a neighboring city over a pissing match between where the school board wanted the school and where the city had zoning. Eventually the school board got their way and the citizens of Farmington faced another round of tax levies to pay for all the extras it would take to build where they wanted instead of where it was zoned to be built. That levy was rejected and we ended up with a shell of what we were originally promised with the first levy. We paid for things like a athletic center with two sheets of ice and an Olympic sized pool and we got a new overflow gravel parking lot for the old hockey rink. If not for this high profile issue, many parents would not have realized how in bed our school board was with the teachers union and how little they cared about the citizens.

It took replacing the school board with one that was willing to fire the Superintendent, rather than "work for him" to move past things and see a positive change. The School board candidates who won did little than suggest that they would work "for" parents rather than "for" the school district.

This is a similar argument being used by the Mom's for Liberty. They simply want school boards that represent the people who voted them in. They want the Superintendents and teachers to answer to those school board (who answer to the citizens) rather than the other way around. That (according to liberals) is anti-Government, which should not be confused with anti-Democracy. Liberals would much prefer that the Teachers union (not parents) have the final say in education and that school boards are there to support the teachers (not the parents).

Obviously this is a fairly new deal. For most of my life, you could not imagine a more supported job than teachers. They were seen as selfless public servants who did one of the most important jobs in our society. They were trusted. No more. That trust has been lost and it without significant change to their attitudes about children, they will not regain that trust with most people.

If you ask me, the extremist hate group is now Teachers who demand that they know better than parents as to how to parent other people's children. It is not the parents who changed the partnership between parents and teachers. It was the teachers who decided to start hiding their curriculum from parents and deciding that such a partnership was no longer in their best interests. We could also include those people represented by the author of this article, who suggests that school boards accountable to parents has caused "damage" to our country and calls on people without children to ban together to oppose Mom's for Liberty.