Just days after the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled the parental rights organization Moms for Liberty an “extremist group” on its new hate map, the group’s co-founder, Tiffany Justice, took to the stage with Vivek Ramaswamy in a New Hampshire church.
“That’s how this game is played. It’s this merger of state power and private power together to do what neither could do on its own. But the greasing of the wheels takes place by these invisible nonprofits,” Ramaswamy said during the June 8 event, which took place at Grace Ministries International.
Moms for Liberty and Ramaswamy
It’s the candidate’s second event at the house of worship in rural Brentwood, a town set in rolling, forested country about 15 miles east of the Atlantic Ocean.“We are a nation that prides [itself] on diversity of faith. And I think he [Vivek] is so knowledgeable, not just about Hinduism, but in Christianity,” said the church’s pastor, Allen Cook, in an interview with The Epoch Times.
Justice told The Epoch Times that her appearance with Ramaswamy was scheduled before the June 6 report from the SPLC. (That’s consistent with a press release from the campaign dated June 5.)
“I have no reason to reach out to them. They’re an absurd organization,” Justice told The Epoch Times.
“We aren’t going to stop. We’re going to continue focusing on our mission,” she added.
According to the SPLC, though, Moms for Liberty are the radical ones. More specifically, the new SPLC report tags them as an “antigovernment movement.”
“What an amazing opportunity to reengage the American public in our civic process,” she told The Epoch Times.
Onstage with Ramaswamy, Justice said it was strange that “the family is seen as such a threat,” judging by many responses from federal and local authorities to parent activism.
“Karl Marx actually viewed the nuclear family structure as a threat to the communist order because that’s a different ordering of society than centrally doing it from the state,” Ramaswamy said.
Sounding a now-familiar theme to close observers, Ramaswamy stressed how troubled he was by Americans’ apparent fear of speaking their minds rather than constantly self-censoring.
“There’s something about showing up in public. Maybe it’s because [of] the Southern Poverty Law Center,” he said, drawing laughs from the audience.
Gaining Ground in the Granite State
The biotech entrepreneur and anti-woke activist investor is making a name for himself in the second state on the Republican primary season calendar.Tricia McLaughlin, Ramaswamy’s senior adviser, told The Epoch Times at the June 8 New Hampshire event that her candidate wants a second-place finish or even a win in the state.
Cook told The Epoch Times that DeSantis and Trump are still the biggest names in the Granite State.
“I do think Vivek doing these kinds of small meetings is gaining some momentum,” he said.
Cook said Ramaswamy is “the only one” calling for what he characterized as a restoration of the Constitution by eliminating the Department of Education and other agencies.
Speaking from his church in a land once guided by Puritan divines, the Christian minister alluded to earlier spiritual revivals in America.
“Call it a Great Awakening,” he said.
This one, he added, would involve not just Christianity but “an awakening to the idea of what America was.”
A Ramaswamy victory might take a miracle, but after 2016, spectacular upsets seem a little more mundane.