Who’s Behind Pro-COVID, Anti-Trans Dark Money Group Promoted By Moms for Liberty?

New York-based Restore Childhood is flush with big money allies.

This piece has been updated from its original email version.

The recent Moms for Liberty Summit in Washington D.C. featured the premiere of a trailer for the documentary “15 Days,” which claims to tell “the real story of school closures told by families, doctors & everyone who fought back.” What it really promises is a rundown of the alleged harms to children caused by government policy throughout the COVID-19 pandemic – in line with right-wing political messaging.

Featured in the film’s “sizzle reel,” posted to YouTube eight months ago, were familiar faces: Great Barrington Declaration author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and attorney Jenin Younes of the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

Neither Bhattacharya nor Younes have any expertise in child development or mental health—the former, a Stanford University health economist, was even called out by a federal district court judge for weighing in on “the pediatric effects of masks on children,” which was, as the judge wrote in his opinion, “a discipline on which he admitted he was not qualified to speak.”

What the pair do have in common, however, is that they are both affiliated with right-wing dark money groups that represent the interests of big business. Younes works for a litigation outfit called the New Civil Liberties Alliance that fights government regulations. The group received early funding from the foundation of billionaire industrialist Charles Koch. Bhattacharya, meanwhile, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank housed at his university, and is affiliated with several similar groups. 

Over the past four years, these groups and others like them have been waging a war against public health efforts to control the spread of COVID-19 because of their disruptive economic impacts. In that war, school closures, and later mask and vaccine mandates, became wedges to radicalize parents, giving rise to opaque parents’ rights groups with ties to larger conservative organizations. Moms for Liberty, for example, received $25,000 from the Heritage Foundation in 2022. Since the public health crisis has ended, and the schools reopened without new safety protocols in place, the focus of right-wing groups has shifted to rewriting the history of the pandemic—and sowing division over other issues as well. 

From its website, “15 Days,” reportedly set for release this fall, promises to be an extension of that fight. The site sells merchandise with the phrase “stop blaming stuff on COVID that was actually caused by government.”  

Behind the documentary is a 501(c)(3) public charity called Restore Childhood. The group’s website boasts “we believe parents are the best advocates for their own children” and “we protect children from governmental overreach in health and education.”

According to its latest IRS Form 990, which is for the group’s 2022 fiscal year, running April 2022 to March 2023, Restore Childhood is a smaller operation than Moms for Liberty. The group brought in just over $238,000 from undisclosed funding sources in undisclosed amounts. Important Context has previously reported on other self-described mom groups, including Moms for Liberty as well as Parents Defending Education, and revealed that much of their funding came from a handful of large donations. Restore Childhood, however, does not list their donation amounts on their tax filings and is not required to do so, making this kind of work impossible. The group did not respond to a request for clarification.

Like those other right-wing parents’ groups, Restore Childhood is politically useful in the longstanding right-wing efforts to undermine public education and organized labor. The group was formed at the height of the pandemic in opposition to COVID-19 mitigation measures in schools like closures and vaccine and mask requirements. To gin up parental anger, it has promoted a discredited narrative about the pandemic that the SARS-CoV-2 virus represented such a minimal risk to young people that efforts to curb its spread were unnecessary.

To wit, the group’s official Twitter/X account has made statements that are contrary to the mainstream science and recommendations of public health officials like asserting that masks did not work to stop the spread of the virus and were developmentally harmful to children. It has also claimed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention overstated the risk of COVID to children and suggested that young people need not get vaccinated against the virus despite CDC recommendations.

Like Moms for Liberty, Restore Childhood’s advocacy has also extended into anti-transgender hate. This past June, Restore Childhood launched their “gender toolkit” titled “An Urgent Conversation: What to Know about Children, Gender, & School Policy” which alleges there is a “school to clinic pipeline.” Donald Trump, who also appeared at the Moms for Liberty summit, has echoed this narrative, falsely claiming that children are returning home from school having undergone gender reassignment surgeries. In New York, public school students do not need parental consent to socially transition, meaning using their preferred name and pronouns.

In July, Restore Childhood published an open letter to leadership at the Health and Human Services, calling on them to “revise the HHS guidance on gender-affirming care.”

The group has frequently gone after teachers unions—namely The American Federation of Teachers and its president Randi Weingarten. In a post on X, the Restore Childhood account accused AFT of meddling with the CDC guidance on school closures. In another post, it wrote that “Between the COVID lockdowns & the transitioning of children behind their parents’ backs, our institutions have proven themselves to be incapable of keeping our children safe.”

Restore Childhood is the brainchild of New York City moms Natalya Murakhver and Dana Hensley. 

Prior to the pandemic, Murakhver ran a “family wellness consultancy” called Apples to Zucchini and published a couple articles about raising a daughter with food allergies in Allergic Living Magazine. Beginning in 2018, Murakhver wrote the blog for a parent advocacy group called NYC Healthy School Food Alliance. 

In 2020, Murakhver’s advocacy shifted to organizing against COVID-19 school closures and mask mandates. She was part of a group of parents who sued then-NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio to reopen schools. The following year, she launched #MaskLikeAKid, a campaign to encourage masking not for protection from the novel virus, but to increase awareness of the plight of school children forced to mask. Schools have been shown to have been major sources of community spread of the virus.

In February of 2022, Murakhver published her first of many opinion pieces in the New York Post calling on Governor Kathy Hochul to drop mask mandates for children. The following month she launched the Substack for Restore Childhood. According to her bio on the Restore Childhood website, that year she was also involved in crafting the so-called Urgency of Normal toolkit, a packet aimed at helping parents push back  against COVID mitigation measures in schools. The packet was criticized for containing incorrect information and for downplaying the medical harm posed to children by the COVID-19 virus. 

While there is no mention of Murakhver on the Urgency of Normal website, one of the doctors involved in the group, pediatric emergency physician Dr. Ram Duriseti, is listed as a member of Restore Childhood. The “15 Days” website quotes the Urgency of Normal’s Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, a California sports medicine physician who has advised Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s department of health. In 2023, Høeg testified as a majority expert to the GOP-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic for a hearing on the impact of COVID-19 school closures. Høeg has been sharply criticized by the epidemiology community for her COVID-19 publications. 

As the promotion of “15 Days” at the Moms for Liberty conference suggests, Murakhver has found a home on the political right and medical fringes. Despite previously describing herself as a “pro-choice Democrat” and claiming to have voted for President Biden in 2020, she has called AFT’s Weingarten “a danger to our children” and has stated that she will be voting for Donald Trump. 

Murakhver has also been amplified by the Koch-funded, deeply conservative Independent Women’s Forum on multiple occasions, including an appearance on their “Bespoke Parenting” podcast to discuss her documentary. Last month, she was a featured speaker at an event hosted by a global anti-trans group, Genspect, for a so-called “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria Awareness Day.” 

Co-founder Hensley appears to have kept a lower profile than Murakhver, although she has appeared in right-wing media. According to her profile on Restore Childhood’s website, she “served as legal coordinator and as a plaintiff in a parent lawsuit in 2021 against then Governor Cuomo, Health Commissioner Howard Zucker and local school districts to allow all children to attend school five days a week, in person, regardless of Covid transmission rates.” The site adds that “This lawsuit was successful and schools reopened for her district five days a week for all students in May 2021.” Hensley has also waded into anti-trans advocacy and dabbled in anti-immigrant sentiment. In a 2023 op-ed for New York Post attacking gender-affirming care for young people, she wrote, “Not only is the city in the business of warehousing migrants in school gymnasiums, it’s now a haven where minors can be rushed through elective, irreversible medical procedures even before their brains reach maturity.”

Restore Childhood has been embraced by others involved in the “parents rights movement” as well. Last year, Restore Childhood interviewed writer David Zweig, a fellow New York parent and prolific opponent of school closures and COVID mitigation efforts. Zweig was personally invited to report on the signing of the 2020 pro-herd immunity Great Barrington Declaration and even called to testify to Congress alongside Høeg about the impact of school closures. 

Another New York parent and school closure opponent, Maud Maron, published on the Restore Childhood Substack this summer about being an “inconvenient mom.” Bhattacharya is an advisor to Maron’s Third Rail consultancy company and has hosted Murakhver on his “Illusion of Consensus” podcast. 

UPDATE 9/20/24: An earlier version of this piece said Donald Trump baselessly claimed schools were transitioning children without parental consent. Trump’s false claim was specific to surgical transitioning. Some schools do allow students to use their preferred names and pronouns.