Last week in Philadelphia Moms for Liberty held a cattle call for presidential candidates at their “Joyful Warriors” conference and they got all the big names to show up. This was quite a get for a group that only started in 2021 by Sarasota Florida school board members Tiffany Justice, Tina Descovich and Bridget Ziegler to protest masking and vaccine mandates in public schools during COVID-19. They are big players now in Republican politics with big donors and major politicians competing for their favor. And like so many others in the GOP they also have ties with the Proud Boys, a far-right hate group and have been designated antigovernment extremists by the Southern Poverty Law Center which they are wearing it with pride, as right wing groups tend to do: Florida GOP Chairman Christian Ziegler, quoted above, also happens to be married to Bridget Ziegler, one of the founders of Mom’s for Liberty so for all its claims to being a grassroots organization, let’s just say they had friends in high places from the very beginning. (Their very first conference was sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA.) It’s not at all surprising that it very quickly grew into a national “parents rights” movement protesting the teaching of America’s racial history and LGBTQ issues, banning books, abridging free speech, ending tenure for teachers, militant anti-transgender activism and fervent opposition to the teachers unions among other things. They are soldiers in the culture war, fighting what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would…