Moms For Liberty and Its Media Apologists

Moms For Liberty and Its Media Apologists

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Chris Lehmann discusses how bigots get legitimized.

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Trump’s Global Culture War w/ Stephen Wertheim | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer
byThe Nation Magazine

The Trump administration has released a new National Security Strategy that is a marked shift

not only from earlier administrations but also Trump’s first term in office. While the new policy

statement eschews the goal of global hegemony, it promotes culture war in Europe by

promising support of anti-immigration political parties, economic rivalry in Asia with China, and

a renewal of US military hegemony in the Western hemisphere. To survey this document and

Trump’s often contradictory foreign policy, I spoke to frequent guest of the show Stephen

Wertheim who is American Statecraft senior fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International

Peace.

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Although only formed in 2021, Moms for Liberty, a group agitating for reactionary policies in schools, is already a major player in national politics. Republican presidential hopefuls like Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump are eager to speak at the group’s convention. Moms for Liberty is also receiving generous profiles in major media outlets like The New York Times.

As my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann notes in a recent column, such profiles tend to whitewash Moms for Liberty, falsely portraying it as a grassroots organization and ignoring its bigoted agenda and ties to the institutional right. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, we talk about the true nature of Moms for Liberty, as well as the way anti-trans agitation is remaking politics. In the discussion, we reference this earlier conversation I had with the historian Rick Perlstein about the deep roots of right-wing agitation over education.

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