Moms For Liberty and the Salvador Gulag

We're all suddenly painfully aware of Nayib Bukele, the El Salvador dictator who has been subcontracted to run a gulag for housing whatever people the MAFA regime wants to offshore this week. But you know who was already buddies with Bukele? Catalina Stubbe, Moms for Liberty's head of Hispanic Outreach.

Stubbe was born in Colombia and is a former Miss World Colombia. She earned a sociology degree from the Sorbonne, and moved to the US about 16 years ago. She operates the Stubbe Ranch, and lists herself as a National Media Commentator, and has appeared on things like Lindell-TV, OAN, Newsmax, Telemundo, and Fox and Friends.

She lives, of course, in Florida, with four children and her husband Dr. Hermann Johan Stubbe. Dr. Stubbe practices family medicine, and he appears to be good at it. He graduated from med school in Puerto Rico in 1999. The couple appear to have filed for a business called Metaboliclife back in 2015. For what it's worth, the four children are mentioned far more often in her press than her husband is.

Stubbe was brought into the M4L fold in 2022, but she has been plenty busy since. She does plenty of speaking, like an appearance at the right wing Pennsylvania Leadership Conference, who praised her because "The pulse behind all her work is her profound love for her family and her Savior, Jesus Christ."

The Economist reported that at the 2023 M4L conference, well...

According to Catalina Stubbe, under the guise of sex education Florida schools are teaching boys to masturbate. This may be the result of demonic forces she saw at work in her own child’s classroom. When her seven-year-old’s maths homework repeatedly featured the number 666 (interpreted by some to signal the devil) she knew there were leftists behind it.

She hung out with Heritage Foundation for their 50th anniversary. She went on the Matt Gaetz Show to argue for the end of the Ed Department. She went to the UN to talk about parental rights (of course, not if the parents are parents of LGBTQ kids, or if the parents are themselves some unfavored minority). She stumped for Dear Leader in 2024, and then posted this on the gram--

Our @POTUS is hands-down the greatest in history and let’s be real, the most handsome too! At 78, he’s defying time with a jaw-dropping glow and an energy that’s straight-up electric. Charismatic doesn’t even cover it, he’s got that magnetic charm that lights up every room, a sharp wit that keeps us all hooked, and a vigor that puts people half his age to shame. The way he commands attention with that dazzling smile and unstoppable drive? Absolute perfection. We’re witnessing a legend who’s rewriting what it means to lead with style and grace!

In March pf 2024, she was at CPAC. So was Nayib Bukele, who at the time was mostly known for A) the kind of conservative dictatorship that has become popular on the right and B) his attempt to convert El Salvador's currency base to bitcoin, a bold idea that has turned into a demonstration of why that's a bad idea. (I'll let someone else see if there are dots to be connected between the failure of a grand cryptocurrency grift and the launch of a gulag-for-profit grift.)

While Bukele was at CPAC, Catalina Stubbe connected with him for some interview time.

The results were reported by FSSPX News (that's the Society of Saint Pius X, a canonically irregular traditionalist Catholic outfit):

From February 21 to 24, 2024, the Salvadoran president attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) which was held in the United States. During the event, he was questioned by Ms. Catalina Stubbe, member of the Moms for Liberty organization – responsible for dissemination in the Hispanic community.

He explained that he thought it was “important that the curriculum does not carry this gender ideology and those types of things,” and assured that “parents should be informed and have a say in what their children will learn.”

He added: “I think it is important that God be reintroduced into schools, that morality and civics are reintroduced, that traditional elements – like mathematics and history – are taught. … Nobody is against modernization: what we are opposed to is the introduction of unnatural, anti-god, anti-family ideologies which have no place in our schools.”

The Minister of Education, José Mauricio Pineda, confirmed on social networks that “all traces of gender ideology have been removed from public schools.”

So while you're managing your anger over a third world dictator who throws around accusations while running a gulag for the US's unconstitutional rendering of whatever brown people they don't like this week, remember that this is yet another appalling ally for the "cheerful warriors" of Moms for Liberty. It is possible that in all my reading I missed the Bible passage in which Jesus said that we should round up people who bother us and stick them in some torturous prison. And M4L love for only certain parents is old news by now.

Meanwhile, Moms for Liberty's website still features their bullshit origin fable about how a couple of moms just took $500 and a t-shirt design to launch their group, and not the actual story of how some experienced political operators got backing to launch their next attempt to mobilize GOP women. Along the way they've allied themselves with some pretty awful people, but cozying up with a dictator who hopes to get rich torturing political prisoners is an even worse look.