A 60 Minutes segment featuring Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich aired on Sunday, to much controversy. Titled "97 Books," correspondent Scott Pelley outlined the “growing trend of right-wing book bans.” 

No bias there, whatsoever.

Pelley grilled the co-founders of the organization about their campaign to remove books from school libraries that they deemed offensive, and why they insist on using the term "groomer" to describe people who insist children should have access to these books. The interview went as expected: Pelley produced the legacy media hit job with closed-ended questions and narrative massaging cuts and lead-ins. 

In a RedState interview on Monday with co-founder Tina Descovich, she said:

Scott Pelley opened up the piece in his own voice saying that the term, using the term, "groomer" was engaging in extreme right-wing hate speech. I mean, that was the tone he set for the whole conversation, about even what a groomer is. A groomer is an actual thing that is very harmful for children, and so to say that having a conversation about groomers discussing children is, "Extreme right-wing hate speech," you know, laid the tone for that whole interview,

However, Justice and Descovich did not allow the craftily engineered piece to stand without challenge. The team took to X and other outlets to debunk 60 Minutes' duplicitous reporting.

Corporate media’s attempt to malign Moms for Liberty after having “months to spin their narrative” was capsized by clarity when the group produced receipts.

Efforts against ideological indoctrination and for age-appropriate curriculum standards to be maintained in government-run schools have routinely been categorized as an extremist attempt to ban books by leftists and their PR pals. Such was the case Sunday night when CBS News aired Scott Pelley’s interview with Moms for Liberty.

Outlets like Radar Online ("WATCH: Moms for Liberty Co-founders Dodge Questions During Tense '60 Minutes' Interview About 'Grooming' and 'Indoctrination' in Schools"), Mother Jones ("Moms for Liberty had a chance to explain themselves. It didn't go well"), and The Advocate ("Watch Moms for Liberty flop on 60 Minutes") furthered the narrative that Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich were evasive, faltering, and downright dishonest.  

Pelley interviewed the co-founders of the far-right activist group, Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, who originally formed Moms for Liberty over Covid school restrictions. They soon pivoted to radical book bans that included content about racial diversity and sexual identity. Pelley confronted them on several points — but didn’t seem to get any actual answers.

But Descovich and Justice took to the Moms for Liberty X account to rip Pelley and the leftist outlets a new one. 

We sat down w/ @60Minutes about so-called “banned books” w/ @ScottPelley on 10/12/23. Tonight, the piece finally aired. The books we shared were censored. Why? Would they have caused @CBSNews to get a FCC fine for reading pornographic material on-air? Or was it just not on…

— Moms for Liberty (@Moms4Liberty) March 4, 2024

We sat down w/ @60Minutes about so-called “banned books” w/ @ScottPelley on 10/12/23. Tonight, the piece finally aired. The books we shared were censored. Why? Would they have caused @CBSNews to get a FCC fine for reading pornographic material on-air? Or was it just not on message about “extreme right wing hate speech?” You decide.

As told to RedState, Descovich further stated that CBS,

[G]ot a lot of things wrong. First of all, they didn't show the books. You know, when we arrived at the interview, the first thing I asked Scott Pelley was what was he looking to get out of the interview, because we were told it was going to be about Moms for Liberty. And he said, "This is about the books." And so, If that's true, and the interview was about the books, they should have showed the books we brought, the books that were of concern to parents. We read passages from the books. We showed photographs and pages of the books. We told them where the books could be found and in what schools. And they didn't show the books. You know, they censored the books, ultimately.

Moms for Liberty listed the books that they presented to CBS on the X post, and even included excerpts from these books showing the offensive portions. The four books were This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson, Let’s Talk About It by Erika Moen & Matthew Nolan, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, My Body is Growing - A Guide for 4 - to - 8 Year Olds by Dagmar Geisler, and All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson.

You can follow this thread on X if you wish to read these horrors and see images of genitalia, same-sex sexual action, foul language, and detailed explanations of oral and anal sex. We will not re-post them here. Suffice it to say, CBS could not air this without a huge warning or without incurring a fine for FCC violations. 

Yet, Pelley looked down his nose at Justice and Descovich and almost sounded resentful that they were successful in removing these books from the elementary school systems.

Would exposing minor children to these sexual images & texts by someone who is not their parent be grooming? It certainly is not educational. So, why did @60Minutes censor this material from tonight’s piece?

— Moms for Liberty (@Moms4Liberty) March 4, 2024

Would exposing minor children to these sexual images & texts by someone who is not their parent be grooming? It certainly is not educational. So, why did @60Minutes censor this material from tonight’s piece?

WATCH:

Scott Pelley asks the founders of a conservative group calling for book banning: “What ideology are the children being indoctrinated into? What is your fear?” https://t.co/6dUGXXacjT pic.twitter.com/mE7YiO1gfk

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 4, 2024

Descovich also included the actual transcript of the exchange, debunking CBS' selective editing:

@ScottPelley I'll ask this as simply as I can. What ideologies do you find troubling? 

Tina Descovich: I was just saying that your question was about fear. And if this is a fear based movement?  I feel like that's a misnomer.  

This is a fact based movement. Parents are joining us in droves because they open the backpacks, they see the lessons, the light bulb goes off and they say "what in the world is happening?"  

I thought my child was being taught to read. I thought my child was learning this or that. And then they have a lesson in, in kindergarten or first grade that tells them they can choose their gender. They can be a boy or a girl.  

And when did that happen? I wasn't taught that in school, guessing you weren’t taught that in school. So at what year did that change?  

And what year was that interjected? And so parents are now awake and so they take time out of their busy lives, raising their kids, going to work, attending soccer games, doing all the things parents do. They don't wanna be at school board meetings, they don't wanna be filing public records requests, but they're very concerned. 

You can call it ideology, you can call it whatever you wanna call it. But what got interjected and when, why, why would someone want to teach my five year old that he could be a boy or a girl, neither or both and they can change.  

That's not something I believe is true.  Let's stick to the facts. Let's stick to what everyone agrees is the facts.

Descovich called what Pelley did, "Journalism without any integrity. From the get-go, the piece was just set to show one viewpoint." 

Depending upon who you talk to, Moms for Liberty is either the salvation of children and education or the devil incarnate ushering in Nazi-era book bans. Although it is a gigantic stretch to say a book is "banned" when you can order it on Amazon.com, this is a deceptive campaign by the Left, to paint protecting children and parent's rights as LGBTQ+ hatred and censorship. 

Moms for Liberty has not been the only group advocating for the removal of these books from elementary schools and the children's section of the library. Groups like Mass Resistance, The Florida Citizens Alliance (FLCA), Concerned Parents of the Ozarks, and others identified by a PEN America study have been instrumental in scaling back children's access to these overly sexualized and questionable learning materials.

But Moms for Liberty appears to be the group that is taking hits, as well as getting the press. Descovich had some thoughts on why Moms for Liberty has become the champion and the scapegoat for this so-called book banning.

I think a couple reasons. One, we take the interviews, we're not afraid, but we don't care if we are attacked or called names. We knew going into this that there was a really good chance that they were going to work hard to make us look bad, but we did it anyway, because we think it's so important to get the message out. If five people, 10 people, 20 people, 1000 people see through the baloney that 60 Minutes did, the baloney that 60 Minutes produced, and hacked up, and cut out. If just a handful of people or a thousand people saw that, and their eyes are now open to what's going on in schools, then it's important to us to do the interview.

Descovich's other reason? She feels other organizations are fearful, and understandably so.

I think most organizations honestly are afraid to go sit in that situation, [to be put] under that kind of microscope. You can just go on Twitter [X] today. We've been trending for, I think, 24 hours, some good, some bad. But, you know, it's a lot to put yourself out under that microscope, and I don't think very many people want to do that.

As for CBS and 60 Minutes, it is business as usual for its corporate agenda. Remember that 2020 Trump interview with Lesley Stahl? The Trump campaign released their unedited video ahead of the news organization's selective editing and narrative bending to show just how fake the fake news could be. Not much has changed. CBS taped the Moms for Liberty segment in October 2023 but waited until March 2024 to air. When we asked Desovich if they planned to pull a Trump and release the unedited video. 

"We are consulting attorneys on what is legally allowed," she said.