2024 GOP Nominees Are Speaking at Moms for Liberty Summit, in Open Embrace of Far Right

Presidential hopefuls Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis have taken their “war on woke” to the extreme, with featured speaking spots at the second annual Moms for Liberty summit.

Moms for Liberty is a far-right organization that claims it supports parental rights. In reality, it supports erasing any mention of race, racism, and LGBTQ people from school curriculums. The group is hosting a conference in July, and the speaking lineup will feature both 2024 nominees, in a sign of where the party is headed.

“We need elected officials at every level of government to respect that parents should always be involved in the decisions that affect their children—especially while they are at school,” group co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich said in a press release about Ramaswamy’s addition to the lineup Tuesday.

Ramaswamy and DeSantis certainly fit that bill. Ramaswamy has hinged his entire campaign on fighting “wokeism,” railing against multiculturalism and gender ideology. DeSantis, meanwhile, has rampaged through Florida’s public school system, banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, prohibiting discussion of sexual identity, and removing books from schools.

Moms for Liberty wields a newfound power in the Republican Party, as politicians try to tap into the group’s supporter base. The group has backed bills banning transgender women and girls from playing womens’ sports, encouraged book bans, and featured other extremist speakers.

Ramaswamy and DeSantis embracing Moms for Liberty shows that they aren’t just fighting “wokeness.” The two men are ready to stamp out entire communities.

Donald Trump announced Tuesday that if he is elected president, he will end birthright citizenship as part of an attempt to stop undocumented immigration to the United States.

Undoing the Fourteenth Amendment would be a lengthy and complicated process, which the former president does not seem to understand.

“As part of my plan to secure the border, on day one of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship,” Trump said in a video posted on his Truth Social platform.

The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 to help guarantee rights to Black Americans after the end of slavery. The measure grants citizenship to anyone “born or naturalized in the United States” and guarantees them “equal protection under the laws.”

Trump had initially suggested ending birthright citizenship in 2018, telling Axios he was under the (false) impression that it was possible to do so via executive order, instead of by constitutional amendment. If he were to issue an executive order, it would most likely be immediately challenged in court.

The president does not have the power to unilaterally overturn a constitutional amendment, legal experts warned at the time. While some conservative scholars argue that the Fourteenth Amendment only refers to children born in the U.S. to lawful permanent residents, the general consensus is that you can’t just stop applying that part of the law.

Trump-appointed Judge James C. Ho argued at the time that the U.S. legal system has to follow its own laws, which means applying them equally to foreign visitors (except diplomats) and immigrants. “Opponents of illegal immigration cannot claim to champion the rule of law and then, in the same breath, propose policies that violate our Constitution,” he wrote in a 2011 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, the actual process to amend the constitution is lengthy and complicated. One of the many steps requires a two-thirds vote from both the House and Senate—an unlikely event, given how divided Congress has become. So Trump’s proposal is just another empty promise.

A Twitter account pretending to be Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a big fan of Elon Musk—and it seems the attraction is mutual.

The real Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Tuesday that an account pretending to be her press office was sharing fake information and going viral.

“The Twitter CEO has engaged it, boosting visibility,” she said. “I am assessing with my team how to move forward. In the meantime, be careful of what you see.”

The fake account, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Press Release, identifies itself as a parody account, but that hasn’t stopped everything it posts from going viral. (Part of that may be because the account has a blue check and pays for Twitter Blue, the Musk-pushed subscription plan that provides perks such as increased visibility.)

All of the recent tweets have mentioned popular right-wing talking points, like transphobia and gas stoves, and mocked Ocasio-Cortez. But the account has also posted multiple favorable tweets about Musk.

“This might be the wine talking, but I’ve got a crush on @elonmusk,” the account said on Sunday.

The Twitter CEO responded a day later, replying with a fire emoji.

As Ocasio-Cortez pointed out herself, Musk engaging with the fake account both legitimizes it and helps boost its visibility on the platform. But Musk’s joking is also indicative of the right wing’s weird obsession with the New York representative.

Republicans hate Ocasio-Cortez and are quick to blame her for just about anything. But they also all seem to find her attractive, creating a bizarre dynamic that leaves the rest of us baffled.

One Republican congressman outright admitted his frustration that, if the debt ceiling gets resolved, the Republican presidential nominee won’t be able to run in 2024 on the chaos that would come if the country defaults.

“And what does the device of two years do?” North Carolina Representative Dan Bishop posed incredulously on Tuesday, flanked by far-right colleagues like Lauren Boebert and Byron Donalds. “It removes the issue from the national conversation during the presidential election to come. How could you more successfully kneecap any Republican president than to take that issue out of his or her hands?”

As Congress approaches a Wednesday vote to avoid the nation defaulting on its debt, far-right House Republicans have complained that a bill making the IRS more ineffective, imposing work requirements on more people, and ensuring military spending remains high is not enough.

Their intransigence apparently was not just about cutting as much as they could but also about carrying water for the eventual nominee—which, for most far-right members like Bishop, means Donald Trump. Republicans voted three times to raise the debt ceiling under the twice-impeached, criminally indicted, and liable-for-sexual-abuse former president.

The admission by Bishop follows Matt Gaetz’s acknowledgment last week that the debt limit talks were just about holding the government (and America) “hostage.”

All this to say, if there is any guiding principle or through line between Republicans threatening economic disaster, then complaining about America avoiding it, all while having voted to avoid such disasters in the past—it’s simply: Live and die at Trump’s beck and call.

Bud Light apparently went too far after influencer Dylan Mulvaney, who is transgender, posted an Instagram video promoting a March Madness contest. Target apparently went too far by selling shirts with rainbows. And now, conservatives are setting their brain-poisoned sights on … Chick-fil-A, for the crime of having an H.R. department.

Italian American political commentator Joey Mannarino—who says his pronouns are “Shut/Up”—was at the forefront of whipping up the outrage on Monday:

“It’s only a matter of time until they start putting tranny semen in the frosted lemonade at this point,” Mannarino continued, making up a very odd scenario. Mannarino tweeted his fears while linking to Chick-fil-A’s diversity, equity, and inclusion page, where the company highlights its efforts to create a culture of belonging, invest in scholarship funds, and fight hunger.

Mannarino later posted a video—sporting sunglasses on a nice-looking balcony in Miami—insisting that he is “not mad.” (After all, he says, “I’m chilling, drinking a glass of wine on a nice afternoon.”) But he went on to claim that DEI programs are the real racism and that it’s not crazy for him to say Chick-fil-A will put “tranny semen in the frosted lemonade” because Bud Light is already apparently doing that.

Mannarino’s posts have incited an uproar among far-right online users, from noted conspiracy-peddler Stew Peters to self-proclaimed “moderate” Tim Pool.

A basic fact-check first: The company has not “just hired a VP of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” The current vice president has in fact served in the role since November 2021.

The real humor, of course, is the idea of conservatives boycotting one of the more historically culturally conservative chains in America. As of 2012, Chick-fil-A had donated over $5 million to viciously anti-LGTBQ groups. At the time, as the company faced backlash for the revelations, Republicans like Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee even led vapid counterprotesting efforts, like “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, to reward the company for not supporting same-sex marriage.

And even while the company eventually promised in 2019 to stop donating to anti-LGBTQ groups, its owner, Dan Cathy, hasn’t. Cathy is a major donor to a far-right organization that bankrolled efforts to kill the Equality Act, which would have banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Despite all that, online conservatives have whipped themselves up into a frenzy at the idea of a company embracing the notion of different kinds of people feeling equal and included.

The asymmetry of what people care about would be all the more funny—if it weren’t so depressing. Different factions of the left in America are boycotting deep-seated systems of power: anti-LGBTQ companies, the war machine, toxic fossil fuel interests, Israel and its treatment of Palestine. The far right, meanwhile, is attacking pretty much any entity that even expresses support or affirmation for diversity or queer people.

And they seem to have bountiful gratitude toward one individual in particular—who has platformed much of this conspiratorial brain-melting sludge, if not expressed support for it himself.

“@ElonMusk giving us back Twitter has allowed us to effectively organize and boycott companies where we can do genuine financial damage,” Mannarino proclaimed Monday.