"spelling out the attack": PragerU at the Moms For Liberty National Summit

Marissa Streit's ridiculous speech about the Ten Commandments and the war on America's children

Thanks for visiting Narrative Nation! Some of the material I post in this column will be incorporated into the book I’m developing with the working title “Loads of Heresy”: Far Right Revisions of the American Narrative.

This story begins a series about my experience at the “Joyful Warriors” Summit, held in Washington, DC from August 29-September 1. This was Moms for Liberty’s third national convention since the group was founded in 2021. Attending ostensibly as one of the “moms,” I spent four days inside this disturbing gathering of fundamentally dishonest people trying to coordinate a Christian nationalist takeover under the false banners of family, love, education, and freedom. You can read more about this Trump-supporting extremist organization here if you haven’t had the pleasure.

I’m thankful for the institutional research support I received to make the trip and for the friends and family who put me up and made the time to visit and unwind on my way back home.

Narrative Nation is free to read, though paid subscribers are deeply appreciated and enable me to spend more time on research and writing and a little less time teaching. Restacks also help me grow my readership. Thank you for being here!

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The Joyful Warriors Summit was an avalanche of offenses. Moms for Liberty founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovitch, along with a long list of speakers including some elected officials, lied and plotted for days about the imagined war on children, war on freedom, war on heterosexual marriage and the family, war on the founders’ intentions, and war on Christianity. Much of what I heard was battle strategy to weaken the post-1960s progressive state which is depicted as something so foreign to the nation’s original identity that it has no legitimacy whatsoever. Weaken the teachers unions, decimate or shut down the Department of Education, write so-called “parental rights” laws “with teeth” and stack the school boards to overturn curriculum and remove books from schools, pretend to have press credentials and flood the system with FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests to create a backlog, find loopholes to take children off campus for Bible instruction during the public school day, and roll back Title IX protections.

As I’ve been watching Moms for Liberty over the last couple of years, I still encounter a good number of people—even in Florida where they started—who have not heard of them. Some others think they are largely harmless because their ideas are too extreme and transparently unconstitutional to get much traction. But the ideologies and plans hawked by the coalition of bad actors populating a Moms For Liberty summit are being advanced through so many channels in an increasing number of municipalities and states that they need our attention.

There is much to say, but in this series I’ll focus most of my attention on topics that coordinate with the far right’s manipulation of texts to prop up a distorted vision of American history and society—starting in this story with the Bible.

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MARCH FOR KIDS Listen for Christian Nationalism

The third day of the summit was supposed to be the inaugural “March for Kids” down the National Mall. A few days beforehand, the march was converted into an indoor event at Constitution Hall, the Daughters of the American Revolution building. I somehow missed that email but managed to catch up with them before it got started—a woman in the bathroom said they couldn’t afford enough security for an outdoor event.

Balloons and tunes created some hype, but mainly it felt like way too many speakers slated for other parts of the weekend cobbled together delivering impromptu talks, recycling commentary, and trying to “relate” by talking about their families. The video below shows two things: the lame crowd size (no, there were not 800+ people at the summit like the organization’s website wants to suggest) and their ironic use of Bob Marley’s “Could You Be Loved.”

In other stories, I’ll share the world premier of a super shitty anthem that also happened inside this building that day, as well as an awkward pairing of speakers who weren’t on the same page about whether it’s okay to be gay.

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Interpreting the Ten Commandments with PragerU’s Marissa Streit

About halfway through the morning drag, CEO of PragerU Marissa Streit took the stage. PragerU is a right-wing organization that provides animated video lessons and other instructional materials to schools. They propose to counteract the liberal indoctrination of students by restoring a patriotic vision of “the world’s greatest experiment.” They are not affiliated with any kind of “U,” and their materials are not widely accepted, but their Moms for Liberty ties are solid.

The State of Florida, which spawned the Moms in 2021, was the first to approve PragerU materials. Once the materials become authorized supplemental classroom resources, parents must submit paperwork to opt their own children out of viewing them; the Florida Freedom to Read Project has provided templates to help parents take this step.

In response to PragerU’s new partnership with Arizona, Education Association President Marisol Garcia recently said the “materials are hyperpartisan to the point of propaganda, inaccurate and incredibly substandard.” These descriptors track with the ideas I heard coming out of the CEO’s mouth at the summit.

Streit rolled out a wild series of ideas held together with the sort of Trumpean looseness this audience is happy to follow. The general goal was to connect the public education system to sinfulness and the destruction of the American way of life.

After taking a couple of minutes to humanize herself by personal anecdote (broken toe, changed flights, sick staff, kids growing up so fast, website taken down), this unclean spirit went right into Joyful Warrior pose:

“We are fighting evil. We are fighting evil. And we said, the entire staff agreed, nothing, nothing is going to stop us from protecting our kids. Definitely not a broken toe, definitely not a broken toe.”

So the coven swept in on a gust of apocalyptic wind from California—where, she reports, “every single day . . . I fight out of the belly of the beast in Los Angeles”—to deliver a seriously terrible speech.

The argument was prefaced with a warning about children threatened by war:

“And if we don't lean in now, if we don't protect them now when our nation is under attack, that window of time is just becoming shorter and shorter for us. Do you feel that way too, when you look at your kids? Do you realize how important this moment is in our history?”

Streit described a multi-step “attack” being carried out by an anti-education, anti-religion, anti-child fifth column (otherwise known as most of the people in the country).

“How do you attack a nation?

I'll tell you what you do: you make the nation illiterate, you take away the Bible, and you attack the children, right?”

The CEO of an organization hawking fake “educational” materials will pretend to care about performance data, so next Streit bemoaned general literacy rates:

“Do you know that 69% of 8th graders in the United States cannot pass a basic literacy test? . . . Even those who can read . . . think they're reading, but they don't comprehend.

Our nation, this great nation, was founded on Judeo-Christian values.

A Bible was in every single classroom. The Ten Commandments were on institution walls. The government took them down. They took the Bibles out of our classrooms.”

It was not immediately clear, and it did not become clear, how reading comprehension rates were impacted by enforcing the Constitutional separation of church and state in schools. So why did the entire auditorium seem to murmur and nod along?

I’m sure there’s a name for this in the annals of propaganda, but the mechanism is something like this. One statement, factual or otherwise, is made. Then another statement, a magnetic statement the audience agrees with and loves to hear, is delivered—in this case, ”Our nation, this great nation, was founded on Judeo-Christian values.” People nod and make approving noises over the magnetic statement. In this receptive moment, she says the next unrelated thing. Some people might not see the connection, but their neighbors are still nodding, so they follow along or at least keep quiet. The logical connection isn’t needed because the magnetic statement holds the unrelated ideas together.

From there, with a willing audience, Streit jumped to another kind of supposed illiteracy—American ignorance of the Ten Commandments:

“We did a survey at PragerU. You will be astonished to know that over 60% of Americans cannot name five of the Ten Commandments. That's astonishing.”

I was not astonished by that, but I don’t live inside a bubble where everyone around me is an observant Christian. That word really makes her sound stupid, but it galvanized her audience around the impending crisis.

The remainder of the talk mapped the Commandments onto various far-right grievances related to education, LGBTQ identity, Marxism, and reproductive rights. Some connections were tenuous; some were absurd. It’s distressing to see what passes for evidence and explanation when the CEO of PragerU gives a speech, considering that their instructional materials are now being provided to many K-12 schools free of charge.

Her thesis was that the Commandments can be our guide to how progressive DEI and WOKE initiatives are destroying the nation through its children. Even for someone who shared her regressive social politics, I think the ties to the Commandments were too faulty for the argument to succeed.

First and Second Commandments:

“Look at the Ten Commandments: you see exactly how our kids are under attack, right?

I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other God. Our institutions of higher learning are teaching children to mock those who believe in God. Remember the coach who kneeled? Our institutions of higher learning are teaching our kids that environmentalism, Mother Earth is God. BLM is God. Remember the politicians kneeling to that god, right?

You shall not make idols? How many parents do you know idolize colleges and universities that actually teach Marxism and anti-Americanism, and I'm sure you know are funded by foreign monies.”

Zero points for 1 and 2.  

Her first reference—”remember the coach who kneeled?”—recalls the 2022 Kennedy v Bremerton case that was started when a high school football coach refused his district’s instructions to stop forming prayer circles on the field before games. Though Kennedy was placed on leave for his refusal to stop making Christianity the center of a school activity—a clear violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause—eventually the conservative Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in his favor. This article from Slate’s Joseph Stern explains the concerning implications for American religious freedom, noting that Justice Gorush’s opinion “embraces a false narrative of faith-based persecution.” So this case is a “win” for the vision Streit is painting.

Streit’s comments on the First and Second Commandments accuse mainstream education of replacing Christian faith with worship of other “gods.” The competing topics she identifies align with what figures like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have done to delegitimize climate science while the South is hit with hurricane after hurricane; to restrict curriculum that might teach students that historical and institutional systematic racism are real; and to suppress critical thinking about this country’s gross class inequality by making “Marxism” and “Socialism” into dirty words. And of course her extra dig about colleges being “funded by foreign monies” is calculated to trigger the general xenophobia and racism of the America First crowd.

Third Commandment:

For the Third Commandment, she turned to recent events and the debunked assumption shared by many Americans—not just those with a far-right agenda—that the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics satirized Da Vinci’s Last Supper and Christianity overall:

You shall not carry the lord's name in vain. Never forget what we watched at the Paris Olympics. Never forget that opening scene. Any society that is okay with naked men who claim to be part of the transgender cult can run around in front of young kids half naked—again, half naked--it's sick, it's sick, right?

By the time this speech was delivered on August 31st, plenty of explainers had been published to bring down the nation’s temperature about this. But a Moms for Liberty conversation isn’t affected by the facts, and they don’t let go of a talking point if it’s working—see J.D. Vance brag that he’s happy to tell a racist lie about immigrants eating pets in Ohio if it gets people talking.

Art historians, scholars of religious history, and journalists had already clarified that the opening ceremony’s bacchanalian imagery was not based on the well-known Christian Last Supper painting, but Streit and others don’t want to dial back their outrage, so information isn’t helpful. The first part of Streit’s complaint is directly about the Commandment: God’s name used “in vain” by allegedly mocking a painting of Christ. The rest of her words focus on “naked men” who run around “half naked” (okay?) in front of children. A big part of her agenda is fear-mongering about the dangers to children of a society that allows the existence of trans men, an identity she so ironically has the *balls* to label a cult!

This is really more about social politics than true religious sentiment. Professor Dorothy Collins’ study of social media responses to the Paris ceremony showed that being a Trump supporter tracked with moral outrage more than any other identity factor:

“Social media postings from these individuals, while discussing the inappropriateness of what they saw as making a mockery of Christianity, did so regardless of whether they held a strong sense of identity connected to Christianity. Much like their rhetoric in other aspects of life, these individuals [self-identified Trump supporters] displayed outrage at the existence of anything that does not honor or depict their perception of traditional American values and norms.”

(1) image from the opening ceremony courtesy of Hindustani Times (2) found footage of Marissa Streit watching the Olympics

Streit’s response to the Third Commandment willfully ignored the facts. But her next comments were essentially irrelevant to the text.

Fourth Commandment:

“Here's another one, a very, very important one. Remember the Sabbath day, keep it holy. The Sabbath is the seventh day of creation. God created order out of chaos. Our institutions are in absolute chaos. Our educational institutions are not only teaching bad things; we have no idea what they're teaching, we have no idea where the money is going. Look at some of our classrooms. You know that in classrooms across America it's okay to sit on bean bags during instruction times? In California where I come from, if a child identifies as a cat or a furry, they can sit under a desk. I'm not making the stuff up. Absolute chaos top to bottom.”

There is plenty of room to complain about the way some classrooms are managed. But this part of the screed is doubly stupid. Most obviously, the complaint has nothing to do with the Fourth Commandment to keep the Sabbath. She must know that public school classes aren’t held on the weekends, but nothing matters except the series of distortions that continually roll from her forked tongue.

To create a segué from the Sabbath to the schools, she gave a general description of the process of creation from Genesis: “God created order out of chaos.” It’s another one of those magnetic statements—the audience likes this and believes this and will allow her to use it as a bridge to hold on to the next idea without caring that it does not suit the purpose. It’s only a way to pull the word “chaos” from the creation narrative so she can bring in the hobbyhorse of undisciplined schools (which opens the door to charters and vouchers).

Streit’s examples of “chaos” in the schools are laughable. Children sitting on beanbag chairs demonstrates an “attack” on the nation? Even kids sitting under desks is hardly the biggest classroom challenge—and qualified educators understand how to address that kind of thing anyway (starting by knowing which days school is open). I wore comfortable shoes and a loose cotton jumpsuit that day because I thought we were going to be out there “fighting evil.” I was fully prepared to kick in some teeth for the kids! Instead we were seated in a freezing half-full auditorium.

Fifth and and Sixth Commandments

For the next two, Streit was less “off topic,” but she grossly misrepresented the issues by claiming babies are legally killed after birth.

“Honor your father and your mother. How many of you are hearing from your kids that the kids are taught the institution or the experts are the child's ally, right? Don't tell your parents, but you can get on hormones without parental consent. Look at Minnesota, right?

Remember the next one: you shall not murder. You shall not murder. Do you know that in eight states in America you can terminate a baby's life on the birthing table? Think about that. This is what we're teaching kids in school: that the word reproductive is the same thing as termination. Think about literacy there: how is ‘Reproductive Rights’ ‘termination’?”

Her reminder “Look at Minnesota, right?” is a dig at the policy passed by Democratic Governor and VP candidate Tim Walz—but this is a disingenuous claim about the Minnesota law that’s also part of the misinformation campaign pushed by J.D. Vance the next week when he spoke in Mesa, Arizona. Even one of the founders of Moms for Liberty admitted shortly after the summit was over that babies are not being killed “on the birthing table” or anywhere else in any hospital. Tiffany Justice told CNN that she was “thankful” that Donald Trump spread the same lie the night before at the keynote speech.

This is a confederation of liars determined to spread misinformation, prepared to take a little heat when they get caught, and planning to keep it up. They do not give a fuck. Once the shit is out there, the MAGA-Mom Army will spread it.

Seventh Commandment

With the Seventh Commandment, the connection to Streit’s complaint was really a stretch.

“You shall not commit adultery. Adultery? Our institutions of higher learning are telling kids that getting married is like a prison. If you send your daughter to college these days, she's more likely going to come home with a marriage proposal from corporate America or the government, not a spouse, right?”

Streit’s complaint about the supposedly negative effects of attending college (which are . . . women having options!) has nothing to do with adultery. Maybe in her mind a sin is committed against the sacrament of marriage because it is discouraged by going to college (as she pretends to believe)? Maybe that’s why she said “Adultery?” Like, “how could they commit adultery these days if they never even get married?” I do remember some alarmist “studies” not long ago about the opportunity to start a career right out of college delaying marriage for some, but Streit’s association of this cultural phenomenon with adultery is obviously too stupid.

Her comments about why and how women go to college are in keeping with the far right’s fixation on traditional gender roles for young women. “If you send your daughter to college . . .” she said. Where is the young woman’s agency? What if she took herself to college? Would she still be expected to “come home with . . . a spouse”? This way of talking doesn’t consider the way so many Americans engage with college today and relies instead on an old-fashioned image of the nuclear family sending young unmarried children to college.

Eighth Commandment

Streit’s commentary about the Eighth Commandment was short, but it has everything:

“You remember the next one? You should not steal. Well, except if you're a white male, and in that case, if you are a white male, then you should apologize to the thief for your whiteness, right?”

It has the grammatical disjunction. It has the racist assumption that crime against whites is committed by non-whites. And it has the whining about white “guilt” and “shame” that underpins the kind of legislation passed in Florida to whitewash American history curriculum so white students don’t hear about anything their ancestors ever did wrong.

Ninth Commandment

Here’s another irony we can’t ignore. Streit recounts this Commandment as “You shall not bear false witness”—but the full text includes “against your neighbor.” In order to force a point about gender identity, she has falsely represented the Commandment about false representation.

“You shall not bear false witness. This is really, this is really something. If he says that he is a she, then we should believe him and therefore let him go into a YMCA shower with young girls--not to mention what the forced lying that we are experiencing right now is doing to women's sports.”

The Ninth Commandment simply doesn’t address the right to gender expression, nor the society’s obligation to honor an individual’s self-identification. “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” is a warning against lying about other people and providing false testimony about others in order to gain something. We can easily see why Marissa Streit does not want to say that one out loud in its entirety!

Tenth Commandment

As her batteries ran down, Streit forgot to name the Tenth Commandment before explaining how it was being violated. Since I’m among the Astonishing Americans who can’t readily name them all, I looked it up: “you shall not covet your neighbor’s house.” Here’s what she said about it, immediately after the women’s sports comment:

And then finally, for those of you who have high school students in Econ class, you should probably know that the one lesson they're likely going to remember from Econ is that the rich don't pay their fair share. Classic Marxism: blame others for your misfortunes, right?

She argues that any criticism or even analysis of the corporate capitalism you might encounter in a survey of American economic policies—such as the failed Reaganomics trickledown—is a sign of Marxism.

This—or the dreaded socialism slur— is a common, thin-skinned response across the conservative spectrum, but in this context it’s even more insidious. Because Streit is the CEO of a company designed to replace school curriculum with materials that explicitly undermine liberal and progressive ideas, attaching conservative economic policy preferences to the Ten Commandments is opportunistic and vile.

The claim that expecting the rich to pay reasonable taxes is the same as coveting someone’s else’s property is a sick interpretation of this Commandment. Streit’s contention that Econ class might explain to students that the rich don’t pay a “fair share” is true, but wanting the rich to pay what they owe is not the same as coveting their “house,” which would be the property or wealth they legitimately own.

This kind of equivocation is the devil’s trade. And like the devil’s habit of announcing himself, Streit told us right away that she came straight from the belly of the beast.

She concluded with a return to her initial false frame:

“The Ten Commandments right there is spelling out the attack on our children. Guys, the problems are really overwhelming, and I get it, but the solutions are not new. They're 3,000 years old, and they are the basis of this great nation that we live in. They were the basis of the country that was founded in 1776. Here they are. Here they are. Here they are. You bring back literacy, you bring back the Bible, you keep the government the heck away from our children. We the parents can take care of them.”

There was some applause and cheering as she walked off stage, but the energy was fairly low. Some of these leaps were simply too hard to follow in spite of the encouraging “right?” here and there. So Streit, standing up to complain about student literacy, made an unsupportable mess of her own talk. But what mattered more in this moment was the false narrative that the United States is fundamentally a Judeo-Christian nation, combined with the Trojan Horse “we the parents.”

This is already too long for Substack, so I’m going to cut here and post a second part in a few days to take a broader look at the the summit’s focus on the Bible and how that connects to actions being taken to install not only Bibles, but Donald Trump’s very own value-added edition, in schools across the nation.

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Some of the t-shirts I saw that morning capture the spirit: