The Media Research Center totally loves Moms for Liberty for its right-wing attacks on schools — even as it censors its history of extremism, such as quoting Hitler. The MRC’s chief defender, Tim Graham, played cleanup for the group after a “60 Minutes” profile in a March 5 post:
Scott Pelley is most notorious in recent years as the willing facilitator of Joe Biden interviews. He gently guides the president through an interview like an usher takes to your seat. But that’s not what conservative activists get from Pelley. They get trashed as “extremists” hurting people with “hate speech.”
The subject on Sunday night was “book bans” in public schools, and the enemy du jour was Moms for Liberty, who threatens the ideological objectives of public-school teachers and librarians. As usual, the leftists are presented as non-ideological champions of knowledge, and the right-wingers are bumbling, evasive villains.
[…]Pelley trashed any protests: “A few activists, agitated by conspiracy theories, threatened librarians and board members, calling them “groomers,” extreme right-wing hate speech meant to brand opponents as molesters grooming children for sex.”
Later, Pelley underlined his point: “Critics of the book ban said they knew what “groomer” meant. And they saw it as a threat to people of color and the LGBTQ community.”
Pelley described Moms for Liberty with the usual C-word: “Conservative, anti-teachers unions, Moms for Liberty is part of the pushback against the diversity and inclusion movement. ‘Moms’ supports new Florida laws that limit lessons on race and forbid lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity though high school.”
The political battleground is conservative vs. the “diversity and inclusion movement.” The hilarity is that the Left can’t handle diversity of opinions and hate any inclusion of a conservative counterpoint. But Pelley made it even worse: “Ultimately, Beaufort confronted fear and ignorance with civility and knowledge.”
Graham is doing his usual whataboutism here — he has yet to prove anything in the report to be false, he’s just mad it was said and he’s trying to deflect from it.
Interestingly, Graham quoted nothing that was said by the Moms for Liberty official being interviewed, instead complaining that Pelley called out her dishonesty:
As usual, CBS avoided any actual exploration of what content might be objectionable. Here’s how Pelley dismissed Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, as she tried to show him Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe:
Tiffany Justice read from sexually explicit books written for older teens, but found in a few lower schools. Most people wouldn’t want them in a lower school. But in a tactic of outrage politics, Moms for Liberty takes a kernel of truth and concludes these examples are not rare mistakes, but a plot to sexualize children.
It’s easier to mock a supposedly unfounded plot to sexualize children if you avoid discussing the graphic sexual images Justice is trying to show to CBS.
Again, Graham didn’t prove Pelley’s viewpoint to be factually inaccurate. He concluded with more whataboutism:
In the end, Pelley concludes with a quote from a “banned” book, which implies that it’s wrong to challenge librarians: “There are no wrong books. What`s wrong is the fear of them.” As usual, no one explored which books the librarians don’t select, like maybe “anti-trans” books of Mark Levin trashing the Democrats for hating America. That kind of “book ban” is just the natural order of things.
Graham didn’t explain why a right-wing polemic aimed at adults that is so shoddily researched that it can’t even get the name of the Democratic Party correct has a place in a school library.
Of course, there’s a reason Graham didn’t directly quote Justice: Her interview was a disaster — she ranted about children allegedly being “indoctrinated into ideology” but couldn’t identify the ideology they were supposedly being “indoctrinated” into, and also refused to answer why her group smears its critics as “groomers” — and right-wingers performed damage control on the group’s behalf, and Justice herself went on far-right podcaster Steve Bannon’s show after the botched interview.
Graham made a further contribution to the damage-control campaign in his March 8 podcast:
On Sunday night, the long-running CBS News program 60 Minutes aired a hatchet job by Scott Pelley on the conservative group Moms for Liberty and their advocacy for “book bans” — keeping pornography out of the public school libraries.
Pelley attacked the Moms for evasive answers, but the CBS edits were incredibly evasive…especially refusing to delve into the graphically sexual content at issue. Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice explains to us what happened during the taping last October. She read parts of six extremely disturbing books that you wouldn’t want your children to absorb at a young age.
The central hypocrisy of the libertine leftist media is they will not actually engage on the content. When you try and read it to the public, they portray you as the pervert, not the author! How can anyone decide whether a book is appropriate if you refuse to read it and debate it?
For his part, Pelley only showed Tiffany’s attempt to read from a book called Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, dismissing it all: “In a tactic of outrage politics, Moms for Liberty takes a kernel of truth and concludes these examples are not rare mistakes, but a plot to sexualize children.” Pelley and his producers apparently think school libraries should include depictions of Kobabe envisioning having her imaginary penis in mid-fellatio, as well as talk of masturbation and blow jobs.
Pelley also presented the Moms as “conservative,” but their opponents were “the diversity and inclusion movement.” They pretend the Left isn’t ideological, only the conservatives are. At another point, Pelley claimed the people sticking up for porny books in Beaufort, South Carolina “confronted fear and ignorance with civility and knowledge.” Once again, Pelley was keeping the audience ignorant by refusing to let the books be read.
Tiffany and her co-founder Tina Descovich insisted on recording the full interview, so they could preserve what actually happened in the larger interview. Overall, they felt that it was worth the risk to get their message out, and they received a lot of supportive messages after it aired.
Again, Graham censored how Justice couldn’t answer a simple question about purported indoctrination and refused to answer why she smears her critics as “groomers.” Instead, he had Justice on the podcast to help her whine about,and play cleanup over, the segment. in an echo of his gushy treatment of Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany — and in defiance of the MRC’s usual outrage when interviewers aren’t sufficiently tough in interviews with non-conservatives — Graham served up only softball questions to her, refusing to call her out on her evasive answers and letting her spin by claiming that “we just weren’t giving them the answers they wanted to hear.” Graham responded by gushing to Justice that “you have shown courage in going into these interviews.”
Graham also whined that Pelley “went on this whole bender about the G-word, and called it extreme right-wing hate speech.” Despite bizarrely refusing to say “groomer” (which he didn’t explain, and despite his employer’s enthusiasm for tossing the word around), he defended the smear: “This whole idea that there is a plot to sexualize children, and it’s sorta like, well, nobody’s saying that this is happening in every public school, the question is which schools is it happening in.” Graham offered no evidence that Moms for Liberty offers anything but broad smears in hurling the word around at critics, and he eventually declared: “This is happening, and they want to pretend it’s not.”