July 28, 2023 01:15 PM UTC

Heidi Ganahl Is Starting Up A "Moms For Liberty" Posse

• 24 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

We took note earlier this week of defeated 2022 GOP gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl’s latest venture, peddling “woke free” household products from a MAGA-themed multilevel marketing organization (MLM) known as “Patriot Switch.” Patriot Switch features the usual Amway-style network marketing hype about someday replacing the traditional retail economy with reliance on “home businesses” hard-selling overpriced household products to their friends. The gimmick of signing up to be a “patriot” caters to a whole new audience of suckers who might not otherwise take the plunge.

But if you thought that Ganahl’s aspirations had turned entirely to fleecing the Republican faithful on consumer goods, don’t worry–the candidate who made stamping out the menace of “furries” in our public schools the single-minded focus of her campaign as she went down in flames last November is putting a toe back in the political arena–organizing a new chapter of the notorious right-wing “concerned parents” group Moms for Liberty:

Moms for Liberty’s influence within the Republican Party has grown rapidly in the last year as party activists became fixated on a shared goal of stamping out “woke ideology” in public schools, which has come to mean any acknowledgment whatsoever of topics ranging from racism to the existence of LGBTQ+ people. In Florida where MFL was founded, the organization lavished praise on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ controversial “Don’t Say Gay” law. MFL has gained notoriety in 2023 across the country by aggressively organizing to influence school boards over books and policies, frequently exaggerated or fictional, said to be “grooming” kids for their deviant Qanon horror-story lifestyles.

That brings us to the issue that helped seal Ganahl’s 19-point humiliation at the polls last year, the “furry panic” of 2022:

In Colorado, GOP gubernatorial nominee Heidi Ganahl insisted in several [2022] interviews that students were dressing and identifying as cats, disrupting class, and the state’s schools were tolerating it. Some children, she alleged, would only communicate in barks and hisses. Her campaign declined to answer questions about Ganahl’s claims, but in one interview with a local Fox affiliate, she suggested “there’s a lot of this going on” in Jefferson County.

The Jefferson County school district disputed Ganahl’s claims and said its dress code prohibits costumes at school. The district — where Columbine High School is located — has been stocking classrooms with small amounts of cat litter since 2017, but as part of “go buckets” that contain emergency supplies in case students are locked in a classroom during a shooting. The buckets also contain candy for diabetic students, a map of the school, flashlights, wet wipes and first aid items.

As NBC News reported last fall and we covered in this space, the “litterboxes in schools” rumor spread like wildfire among conservative parent groups on social media that have since consolidated into Moms for Liberty. One of the original sources of these unfounded rumors went on to found her own MFL chapter:

In December 2021, conservative activist Lisa Hansen claimed at a school board meeting in Midland, Michigan, that an unnamed school in the district had placed “a litter box for the kids that identify as cats” in a unisex bathroom as “part of the agenda that’s being pushed.” Hansen, who later started a local chapter of Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group, did not respond to requests for comment…

As the video circulated, the Midland superintendent issued a statement to clarify Hansen’s claim was false.

It quickly emerged that “litterboxes in schools” had nothing whatsoever to do with “furries,” but were rather a part of emergency preparations for a mass shooting. But Ganahl never acknowledged that her campaign against the “furries” was a particularly cruel fiction, and today the Moms For Liberty have moved on to new moral panics.

Most recently, the organization has had trouble–and let’s face it, who hasn’t–with quoting Adolf Hitler in a sympathetic light. AP reported last month:

An Indiana chapter of Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit that advocates for “ parental rights ” in education and was recently labeled as “extremist” by an anti-hate watchdog, is apologizing and condemning Adolf Hitler after using a quote attributed to the Nazi leader in its inaugural newsletter…

“We condemn Adolf Hitler’s actions and his dark place in human history,” read a statement from chapter chair Paige Miller on the cover of the revised newsletter. “We should not have quoted him in our newsletter and express our deepest apology.”

And then just a few days later in early July, the folly escalated into (pardon us) multilevel Hitlering:

While speaking to the crowd gathered for Moms for Liberty’s “Blessings of the Liberty Breakfast” event on Sunday, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R) said it’s time to “start reading” some of the quotes from homicidal dictators like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin rather than automatically criticize Moms for Liberty having quoted Hitler in their June newsletter…

“Here’s the thing,” Robinson said. “Whether you’re talking about Adolf Hitler, whether you’re talking about Chairman Mao, whether you’re talking about Stalin, whether you’re talking about Pol Pot, whether you’re talking about Castro in Cuba, or whether you’re talking about a dozen other despots all around the globe, it is time for us to get back and start reading some of those quotes.”

Although North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson did right after this call these dictators “communist and socialist despots” who did “dirty, despicable, awful things,” coming on the heels of the group quoting Hitler positively it was an egregious violation of the first rule of holes. When you’re under fire for quoting Hitler, stop talking about quoting Hitler.

If you read this brief history and thought to yourself “what a PERFECT fit for Heidi Ganahl,” whose losing campaign for governor became a circus of far-right conspiracy theorizing from election denial to the furries, you’re not alone. All you have to keep in mind is that, much like Ganahl’s campaign for governor, winning was never the point.