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You may have heard about the organization Moms for Liberty.
It was founded in early 2021 with the initial purpose of advocating against COVID-era protections in schools, like vaccines and mask mandates. Over the past two years, the group has become far more infamous for their support of book bans, censoring any mention of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and LGBTQ identities in textbooks, and calling for the segregation of LGBTQ students into special classes.
The org has ties to the Proud Boys and Three Percenters, both of which, as I’m sure y’all know, are extremist, anti-government groups. This year, the Southern Poverty Law Center designated Moms for Liberty an “extremist” group itself, laying out its active presence within the far-right movement since its launch.
The latest round of controversy involving Moms for Liberty is in how they’ve taken to quoting Hitler, Stalin, and Mao during their events — almost always in the context of pointing out the evils of indoctrinating youth.
Moms for Liberty and their defenders will claim that this is being taken out-of-context and that quoting violent dictators isn’t meant to defend those dictators but merely implying that their ideology aligns with the far-left, particularly on issues of LGBTQ equality.
I don’t believe that Moms for Liberty is lionizing Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. I also don’t believe that the group has read much into the history of these tyrants, either.
Before we get to the meat of all this, let’s point out the obvious: reconciling Stalin’s role in helping defeat Nazi Germany—and thus, helping to save the Western hemisphere—with his legacy as a mass-murdering piece-of-shit.
I imagine that the following conversation has taken place many times in these conservative homes that so heavily rely on information shortcuts and not so much the depth that history deserves:
Teenager: Dad, this Hitler guy seems pretty evil.
Dad: He sure was. Your great-grandfather served in the Army. He was part of the Normandy landings. It’s because of men like your great-grandfather that we’re free.
Teenager: That’s really cool. I’m proud of him. It was a coalition of countries, right?
Dad: That’s right. We were part of the Allies. A number of countries worked together to defeat Germany, Japan, and Italy.
Teenager: Russia was our ally, right? Stalin?
Dad: Well… yes, in that particular war, Russia was our ally.
Teenager: So, Stalin helped keep the world free, too.
Dad: It’s more complicated than that. Yes, Russia helped, but Stalin was evil, too.
Teenager: I read that the U.S.S.R. lost 11 million people during WWII, more than 22 times the fatalities of the United States. It sounds like they did a lot more than help.
Dad: Look, just shut up, and eat your dinner.
Because, it turns out, history is often complicated! We would have lost World War II without the U.S.S.R. and its evil dictator. Stalin was absolutely a mass-murdering piece-of-shit, and yet, somehow, white Christian nationalists would have their children believe that the U.S. singlehandedly defeated Hitler.
We live in an era that has become calcified by information shortcuts following the larger part of a century’s worth of relentless propaganda about American exceptionalism and the evils of anything remotely adjacent to Nazi Germany and the Communist movement.
There is no room for nuance.
If you bring up that the single-day most devastating wartime acts of murdering civilians were carried out by the United States in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you are a traitor to the brave heroes in uniform who sacrificed everything for our country.
If you bring up that Nazi Germany’s horrific laws and policies took significant inspiration from U.S. white supremacist laws and policies, you are claiming that the U.S. has a history comparable to what Nazi Germany did — which, given the millions of Black people enslaved and tortured and raped and murdered in our country and the white supremacist laws thereafter via Jim Crow, is fairly accurate.
Groups like Moms for Liberty don’t want our country’s history to be told. They want fairy tales that help them sleep at night, free from the enduring burden carried by the countless millions of descendants-of-enslaved-people in our country.
I’m not trying to make anyone uncomfortable here — though, if you’ll allow me to say so, discomfort is often a gift because it means we have learning left to do. I wish Moms for Liberty were inclined to examine their own discomfort and take the cue that they have learning left to do, as well.
If they did, they would realize that Hitler and Stalin and Mao would absolutely support their indoctrination of children against LGBTQ rights. All three dictators were viciously anti-LGBTQ. Let’s take a tour!
Hitler
LGBTQ people—primarily homosexual and bisexual men—were persecuted by Nazi Germany as soon as Hitler came to power. Thousands of queer people would be murdered in concentration camps and public streets and detainment centers. LGBTQ people who were imprisoned were forced to wear an inverted pink triangle to identity them as “sexually immoral” and thus at odds with Hitler’s vision — you may recognize this as the logo of ACT UP, the LGBTQ advocacy group most prominent during the HIV and AIDS crisis. The Institute for Sex Research—the world’s first sexology institute, based in Berlin—was raided in the early days of the Third Reich and was an early prominent target of book burnings, its entire archives destroyed by the Nazis.
Stalin
In 1917, following the Bolshevik Revolution, under Vladimir Lenin, homosexuality was decriminalized by the Soviet government, but under Stalin, it was re-criminalized in 1933, carrying up to five years of hard labor for relations between gay and bisexual men. Interestingly, Soviet propaganda linked homosexuality to Nazi Germany at the same time that Hitler was sending queer people into camps. It’s been estimated that up to 1,000 gay men in Soviet Russia were imprisoned annually for their sexual orientation under Stalin’s leadership. It was later revealed in declassified documents that he personally ordered an anti-gay law to be implemented.
Mao
Although I haven’t found definitive confirmation, there’s substantial evidence that LGBTQ people—particularly gay and bisexual men—were persecuted under the rule of Mao Zedong after the Chinese Communist Revolution. Mao supposedly believed queer men should be castrated for their “deviancy,” and in addition to the thousands of gay and bisexual Chinese men who reported systemic discrimination while seeking asylum, there are confirmed reports of gay and bisexual men being forced to undergo electric shock therapy as a treatment for their sexual orientation.
There you have it. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—the triumvirate of conservative boogeyman bedtime story hour—have a lot in common with the Republican Party when it comes to LGBTQ rights.
So, while far-right extremists like Moms for Liberty openly quote these dictators in an attempt to fear-monger over the belief that LGBTQ people are trying to indoctrinate kids (never mind that I barely have time to pick up my dry cleaning this week), those same dictators were essentially making the same claims about LGBTQ people in their own time.
Can I close with a point that should be painfully obvious to anyone with common sense?
Folks like those in Moms for Liberty fall back on some of the most extremist literature written by some of history’s most evil people, openly quoting it to their kids, and then pretend that their children are somehow unprepared to read a picture book about a woodland creature with two moms.
The entire conservative blogosphere melted down when there was even just acknowledgement of gay anteaters or koalas or whatever the hell in the PBS children's show “Arthur,” but sure, do go on reading whole passages from the Little Red Book or Mein Kampf to your children.
By the way, for the millionth time, this has never been about the kids. This is about adults who can't negotiate their own internal discomfort about the world around them or be open to the 8 billion other experiences on this planet and have now put that labor on their children.
Your kid is going to learn at some point that some of their peers have two moms or that some of their peers are trans or that they, themselves, are LGBTQ, and that it used to be a lot harder to simply exist as such in most spaces and they're gonna struggle to reconcile the current, positive visibility of LGBTQ people with your hateful propaganda.
I say with all sincerity that I pray for your children’s health and happiness, that they may find an open heart in you when that times comes — that last bit being for your own sake.
Hi, I’m Charlotte Clymer, and this is Charlotte’s Web Thoughts, my Substack. It’s completely free to access and read, but it’s also how my bills! So, please do kindly consider upgrading to a paid subscription: just $7/month or save money with the $70/annual sub. You can also go way above and beyond by becoming a Lifetime Member at $250.
Please Read About Hitler Before Quoting Him