Earlier this year, the Southern Poverty Law Center named Moms for Liberty an extremist hate group. This is after Moms for Liberty endorsed 275 winning school board candidates nationwide in 2022. They continue to target thousands of school board seats and are calling for books bans and censorship of history lessons. They also use their platforms to harass teachers and school administrators and advocate for the dismantlement of the Department of Education.

On WORT 89.9FM Madison, Margaret Susan Thompson, associate professor of history and political science, discusses the legacy of far-right women's groups in the U.S.

"There have been women involved for a long, long time. For example, there was a very active women’s branch of the Klu Klux Klan in the 1920s. And many of those women, but not all, had been members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy," Thompson says. 

"One of the main organizers of the Klan in the 1910s was a woman and she was a very popular speaker and writer. And women were very attracted, again, the same kind of language we see now was being used then. That the Klan was there to protect American’s values, to protect the kind of America that people remembered. …That language was current even a century ago," says Thompson.