An Indiana chapter of the right-wing group Moms for Liberty is walking back its decision to quote Adolf Hitler at the top of its first-ever newsletter.
Founded in 2021, Moms for Liberty is a well-funded nonprofit that has been at the forefront of campaigns to curtail education about race, gender, and LGBT issues in schools, as well as efforts to promote charter and private schools over public classrooms. The group has a national leadership team as well as local chapters, which have launched pressure campaigns and school board bids at a local level. The group’s anti-LGBT work recently earned it a hate group designation from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Though Moms for Liberty disputes the hate group label, copy-pasting the Führer probably isn’t helping.
In its inaugural newsletter, “The Parent Brigade,” the Moms for Liberty chapter of Hamilton County, Indiana, included a Hitler quote at the top of the page.
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“He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINs the future,” read the quote, first reported by the Indianapolis Star. (The capitalization was Moms for Liberty’s stylistic choice, not the Nazi kingpin’s.)
Late on Wednesday, after the Star reached out, Moms for Liberty updated its Hitler blurb to add “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.”
On Thursday morning, the group updated its Facebook post about the newsletter to clarify that Hitler is bad.
“We condemn Adolf Hitler’s actions and his dark place in human history. We should not have quoted him in our newsletter and we express our deepest apology,” reads a quote from the Hamilton County group's chair.
Moms for Liberty has worked with Republican politicians in support of a sweeping slate of anti-LGBTQ legislation, according to documents reviewed by Media Matters.
The quote ran alongside the newsletter’s table of contents, including “Liberty Lesson - A class in Biblical Citizenship” and “Parent WINS!” The latter described a successful campaign to remove “roughly half of the books in the teen section” of the local library and move them to an “adult section.”
The newsletter also targeted local LGBTQ programs, calling an area Pride festival “perversion” and warning that an area high school had received a $10,000 grant from the “It Gets Better Project,” a nonprofit that supports LGBTQ youth.
