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      Storm Expected to Bring Snow to Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, Again

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      Two to four inches of snow were possible in New York City overnight Friday through early Saturday, forecasters said.A fast-moving storm system was expected to bring several inches of snow to parts of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions for the second time this week, with two to four inches predicted for New York City overnight Friday into Saturday morning and up to 10 inches in portions of West Virginia and Maryland.Dominic Ramunni, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in New York, described the system that was expected to move through as a “quick hitter.”“It’ll be in and out before folks may even wake up tomorrow morning,” Mr. Ramunni said.The greatest snowfall totals were expected across parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, where a winter storm warning was issued for late Friday through Saturday morning, according to the National Weather Service.In parts of Maryland and West Virginia, up to 10 inches of snow were possible, with snowfall rates of up to two inches per hour at times, the Weather Service said.Austin Mansfield, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Sterling, Va., said the snow could make travel difficult at times and reduce visibility.“Anytime you have a significant accumulation like that, you certainly start to see road impacts across those areas,” he said.Philadelphia could record four to six inches of snow, and Washington could see snowfall totals ranging from two to five inches, forecasters said.In New York City, where snow from a storm on Tuesday was still melting on Friday afternoon in parts of the area, there could be snowfall totals from two to four inches, Mr. Ramunni said.The storm system is expected to bring snow to some Northeast cities for the second time this week.A storm that moved through the region on Tuesday dropped 3.2 inches in Central Park and more than eight inches of snow in parts of Maryland, according to the Weather Service.Ahead of the expected weekend snowfall, the New York City Emergency Management Department issued a citywide travel advisory, warning that slippery roadways and reduced visibility were possible late Friday through early Saturday.Temperatures overnight Friday into Saturday were expected to be lower than during Tuesday’s storm, indicating that New York City could get a more powdery snow.“We’re not expecting that really heavy wet snow that we saw with this last event,” Mr. Ramunni said. “You’re not shoveling bricks of cement, so to speak, tomorrow morning.”Snow has been something of a rarity in New York City over the past couple of years. After 701 days without meaningful accumulation, a total of 1.7 inches fell in Central Park on Jan. 15 and Jan. 16.If more than 3.2 inches are recorded in Central Park on Saturday, it would be the city’s highest snowfall in two years, Mr. Ramunni said.“As a snow lover,” he said, “my tail’s wagging.” More

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      Providence Officials Approve Overdose Prevention Center

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      The facility, also known as a safe injection center, will be the first in Rhode Island and the only one in the U.S. outside New York City to operate openly.More than two years ago, Rhode Island became the first state in the nation to authorize overdose prevention centers, facilities where people would be allowed to use illicit drugs under professional supervision. On Thursday, the Providence City Council approved the establishment of what will be the state’s first so-called safe injection site.Minnesota is the only other state to approve these sites, also known as supervised injection centers and harm reduction centers, but no facility has yet opened there. While several states and cities across the country have taken steps toward approving these centers, the concept has faced resistance even in more liberal-leaning states, where officials have wrestled with the legal and moral implications. The only two sites operating openly in the country are in New York City, where Bill de Blasio, who was then mayor, announced the opening of the first center in 2021.The centers employ medical and social workers who guard against overdoses by supplying oxygen and naloxone, the overdose-reversing drug, as well as by distributing clean needles, hygiene products and tests for viruses.Supporters say these centers prevent deaths and connect people with resources. Brandon Marshall, a professor and the chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health, said studies from other countries “show that overdose prevention centers save lives, increase access to treatment, and reduce public drug use and crime in the communities in which they’re located.”Opponents of the centers, including law enforcement groups, say that the sites encourage a culture of permissiveness around illegal drugs, fail to require users to seek treatment and bring drug use into neighborhoods that are already struggling with high overdose rates.Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, said that while supervised drug consumption sites “reduce risks while people use drugs inside them,” they reach only a few people and “don’t alter the severity or character of a neighborhood’s drug problem.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Amid a Fraught Process, Penn Museum Entombs Remains of 19 Black People

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      Skulls from a collection used to further racist science have been laid to rest. Questions surrounding the interment have not.There was very little that could be said about the 19 people who were eulogized on Saturday morning in a service at the University of Pennsylvania. Their names were lost, and not much about their lives was known beyond the barest facts: an old age spent in the poorhouse, a problem with cavities. They were Black people who had died in obscurity over a century ago, now known almost entirely by the skulls they left behind. Even some of these scant facts have been contested.Much more could be said about what led to the service. “This moment,” said the Rev. Jesse Wendell Mapson, a local pastor involved in planning the commemoration and interment of the 19, “has not come without some pain, discomfort and tension.”On this everyone could agree.The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, like cultural and research institutions worldwide, has been grappling with a legacy of plunder, trying to decide what to do about artifacts and even human bones that were collected from people and communities against their will and often without their knowledge.Human remains, which are in the repositories of institutions all across the country, present a particularly delicate challenge. The Samuel G. Morton Cranial Collection, which has been at the Penn Museum since 1966, is an especially notorious example, with more than a thousand skulls gathered in furtherance of vile ideas about race.Drummers at the start of the commemoration service at the Penn Museum on Saturday.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesThe museum plans to repatriate hundreds of craniums from all over the world, but the process has been fraught from the beginning. Its first step — the entombment at a nearby cemetery of the skulls of Black Philadelphians found in the collection — has drawn heavy criticism, charged by activists and some experts with being rushed and opaque.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In School Board Elections, Parental Rights Movement Is Dealt Setbacks

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      Culture battles on gender and race did not seem to move many voters.Conservative activists for parental rights in education were dealt several high-profile losses in state and school board elections on Tuesday.The results suggest limits to what Republicans have hoped would be a potent issue for them leading into the 2024 presidential race — how public schools address gender, sexuality and race.The Campaign for Our Shared Future, a progressive group founded in 2021 to push back on conservative education activism, said on Wednesday that 19 of its 23 endorsed school board candidates in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia had won.The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest educators’ union and a key Democratic power player, said that in 250 races it had tracked — a mix of state, local and school board elections — 80 percent of its preferred candidates won.On the right, Moms for Liberty, the leading parental-rights group, said 44 percent of its candidates were elected.The modest results for conservatives show that after several years in which the right tried to leverage anger over how schools handled the Covid-19 pandemic and issues of race and gender in the curriculum, “parents like being back to some sense of normalcy,” said Jeanne Allen, chief executive of the Center for Education Reform, a right-leaning group in Washington.She suggested Republicans might have performed better if they had talked more about expanding access to school choice, such as vouchers and charter schools, noting that academic achievement remains depressed.In the suburbs of Philadelphia, an important swing region, Democrats won new school board majorities in several closely watched districts.In the Pennridge School District, Democrats swept five school board seats. The previous Republican majority had asked teachers to consult a social studies curriculum created by Hillsdale College, a conservative, Christian institution. The board also restricted access to library books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes and banned transgender students from using bathrooms or playing on sports teams that correspond to their gender identity.Democrats in nearby Bucks Central School District also won all five open seats. That district had been convulsed by debates over Republican policies restricting books and banning pride flags.The region was a hotbed of education activism during the pandemic, when many suburban parents organized to fight school closures, often coming together across partisan divides to resist the influence of teachers’ unions.But that era of education politics is, increasingly, in the rearview mirror.Beyond Pennsylvania, the unions and other progressive groups celebrated school board wins in Iowa, Connecticut and Virginia, as well as the new Democratic control of the Virginia state legislature.That state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, has been a standard-bearer for parental rights, pushing for open schools during the pandemic and restricting how race is discussed in classrooms.Supporters of school vouchers had hoped that a Republican sweep in the state would allow for progress on that issue.For the parental rights movement, there were some scattered bright spots. Moms for Liberty candidates found success in Colorado, Alaska and several Pennsylvania counties.Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of the group, said she was not deterred by Tuesday’s results. She rejected calls for conservatives to back away from talking about divisive gender and race issues in education.Progressive ideology on those issues, she said, was “destroying the lives of children and families.”Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said culture battles had distracted from post-pandemic recovery efforts on literacy and mental health.Notably, both the A.F.T. and Moms for Liberty have argued for more effective early reading instruction, including a focus on foundational phonics skills.But the conservative push to restrict books and to ideologically shape the history curriculum is a “strategy to create fear and division,” Ms. Weingarten said. The winning message, she added, was one of “freedom of speech and freedom to learn,” as well as returning local schools to their core business of fostering “consistency and stability” for children. More

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      Cherelle Parker Elected Mayor of Philadelphia

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      Cherelle Parker, a longtime state and local elected official who promised Philadelphia residents that she would aggressively tackle the city’s crime woes, was elected mayor Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, making her the first woman voted into the city’s highest office. Viewed as more moderate than the other candidates in the Democratic primary in May, Ms. Parker, 51, pledged to hire hundreds more police officers and bring back what she called “constitutional” stop-and-frisk tactics. With registered Democrats vastly outnumbering Republicans in the city — the nation’s sixth most populous, with 1.6 million residents — Ms. Parker’s primary win gave her a significant advantage over the Republican nominee, David Oh, a former colleague of hers on the City Council.No Republican has been elected mayor in Philadelphia since 1947, and recent nominees have typically received less than 20 percent of the vote. Ms. Parker, a lifelong Philadelphian, will be the city’s 100th mayor. She is a former English teacher, state legislator and member of the City Council. In talking about how to address the city’s high levels of illegal drug use and violent crime, she has been open to the idea of asking the National Guard to help tackle the open-air drug market in the Kensington neighborhood. More than 500 people were killed in each of the past two years in Philadelphia, the highest number on record, though homicides, shootings and violent crimes have fallen this year.Still, two-thirds of residents say the city is going in the wrong direction. Much of the violent crime has been concentrated in Black neighborhoods, and Ms. Parker said that as a Black woman and the mother of a Black son, she could identity with the struggles that many Philadelphians face.Ms. Parker will succeed Mayor Jim Kenney, who was limited to two terms in office. He has become increasingly unpopular, and has been criticized for being less engaged and less visible than he was when he first took office. More

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      ‘I’m Not Superwoman’: Philadelphia’s Likely Mayor Urges Teamwork

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      Cherelle Parker, a former City Council member, is poised to become the first woman to lead of America’s sixth-biggest city. Her to-do list is daunting.As one urban gardener after another beseeched Cherelle Parker to prevent the green spaces that they had spent years nurturing from being gobbled up by developers, she furiously took notes in her trademark spiral notebook and barely said a word.Eventually, Ms. Parker, the Democratic nominee for mayor, did address the neighborhood groups that had gathered on a chilly afternoon at Las Parcelas garden in north central Philadelphia. Yes, she would convene as many stakeholders as possible to come up with a solution. But a savior she was not.“I’m not Superwoman — I can’t fix everything up by myself,” she said as nearby construction clanged in the background. “I want to manage expectations.”Ms. Parker was talking about Philadelphia’s 450 community gardens, but she might as well have been referring to her 142-square-mile hometown.On Tuesday, Ms. Parker, a 51-year-old former state representative and City Council member, is favored to be elected mayor of Philadelphia and to be the first woman to lead the city and its 1.6 million residents.Should she win, she would have four years — or more likely eight, given that each of the last five mayors, all Democrats, won two terms — to grapple with the challenges bedeviling the nation’s poorest big city, headlined by gun violence, opioid overdoses and crumbling and chronically underfunded public schools.As a Black woman who was the daughter of a teenage mother and is now the mother of a Black son, Ms. Parker has said that she can relate to the everyday struggles faced by many of her neighbors.She has pledged to hire hundreds more police officers and bring back what she called “constitutional” stop-and-frisk, and she has been open in asking for help from the National Guard to tackle the open-air drug market that has made shootings common in the Kensington neighborhood.But with two-thirds of Philadelphians saying that the city is on the wrong track, what many residents say they want from their next leader, as much as any policy blueprint to navigate the city’s ills, is optimism and energy.Symbolism, after all, has always suffused a city whose history as a cornerstone of American democracy is so central to its identity. And Ms. Parker, as Philadelphia’s 100th mayor, would be the face of the city in 2026, when the country celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.“She’s very charming, she’s very charismatic — a calming presence,” said Cait Allen, president of the Queen Village Neighbors Association, which represents a historic and affluent area not far from Independence Hall. Citing Ms. Parker’s winning pitch in the intensely fought Democratic primary to make Philadelphia the “safest, cleanest, greenest city” in the country, Ms. Allen, 37, said, “She was the candidate who seemed to prioritize reality over philosophy.”Jim Kenney, current mayor of Philadelphia, is leaving office after two terms.Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesMs. Parker would succeed Mayor Jim Kenney, who is leaving office after two terms. Early in his tenure, Mr. Kenney shepherded in a soda tax to help fund pre-K education. More recently, the city’s finances have stabilized, and its bond rating has been upgraded.But against the wearying backdrop of the pandemic, Mr. Kenney’s second term has been overshadowed by the civil unrest following the killing of George Floyd and by the proliferation of gun violence, such as a mass shooting in July that was exacerbated by a botched police response.In an interview, Mr. Kenney, 65, said that “there’s a cultural shift that needs to be made.”He added, “Not that I’m not progressive or that I’m not understanding of people of color’s struggles, but I’m still a white man.”Ms. Parker is a former English teacher from northwest Philadelphia who has a strong working relationship with Gov. Josh Shapiro, a fellow Democrat. She will no doubt be integral to her party’s efforts to bolster turnout for President Biden, Senator Bob Casey and other Democrats in 2024, when Pennsylvania could affect the balance of power in the White House and Congress.Asked in an interview which mayors she hoped to emulate, she mentioned three: Maynard Jackson of Atlanta, for his stressing of economic opportunities; Sharon Weston Broome of Baton Rouge, who told Ms. Parker not to abandon “chemistry for credentials”; and Eric Adams of New York, for prioritizing “emotional intelligence” among members of his staff.“I do not like to see folks engaging in what I call ‘I know what’s best for you people’ policymaking,” she said. “Change is not supposed to happen to a community. Change happens in partnership with a community.”Her Republican opponent, David Oh, a former colleague on the City Council, would also make history if he pulled off an upset, becoming the city’s first Asian American mayor.David Oh, center, who has sought to woo immigrant voters, was at a City Hall ceremony celebrating the 100th anniversary of Turkey.Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesA lifelong Philadelphian like Ms. Parker, Mr. Oh, 63, a former prosecutor, has mounted a spirited and unorthodox campaign, aimed at wooing immigrants, to overcome the daunting math in which registered Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans.In an interview outside City Hall, after a flag-raising ceremony commemorating the 100th anniversary of Turkey as a republic, Mr. Oh noted his embracing of some positions to the left of Ms. Parker, such as limiting the use of stop-and-frisk. And unlike Ms. Parker, who counts the powerful building trade unions as a strong supporter, Mr. Oh opposes a proposed new basketball arena for the 76ers in downtown Philadelphia that local activists say would devastate Chinatown.He was disappointed, though, that Ms. Parker had only agreed to one debate.“It’s not about winning the election,” he said. “It’s about communicating to the voters. We must engage them in order to lift their spirits and put them behind a vision and a solution.”At a stylish coffee shop in a gentrifying part of West Kensington, Al Boyer, 24, and Alex Pepper, 38, both baristas, cited the opioid crisis and gun violence as top priorities for the next mayor.One man with a needle hanging out of his neck had recently died from an overdose across the street from the coffee shop. Just a few blocks away, groups of homeless people lay sleeping under blankets on the sidewalk along Kensington Avenue.Mr. Pepper said he supports establishing drug consumption sites supervised by medical and social workers — something Ms. Parker opposes. Still, Mr. Pepper said he would vote for her.“The lesser of two evils,” he said.Joel Wolfram More

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      Election Day Guide: Governor Races, Abortion Access and More

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      Two governorships are at stake in the South, while Ohio voters will decide whether to enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution.Election Day is nearly here, and while off-year political races receive a fraction of the attention compared with presidential elections, some of Tuesday’s contests will be intensely watched.At stake are two southern governorships, control of the Virginia General Assembly and abortion access in Ohio. National Democrats and Republicans, seeking to build momentum moving toward next November, will be eyeing those results for signals about 2024.Here are the major contests voters will decide on Tuesday and a key ballot question:Governor of KentuckyGov. Andy Beshear, left, a Democrat, is facing Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s Republican attorney general, in his campaign for re-election as governor.Pool photo by Kentucky Educational TelevisionGov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, is seeking to again defy convention in deep-red Kentucky, a state carried handily by Donald J. Trump in 2020.He is facing Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s attorney general, who was propelled to victory by an early endorsement from Mr. Trump in a competitive Republican primary in May.In 2019, Mr. Cameron became the first Black person to be elected as Kentucky’s attorney general, an office previously held by Mr. Beshear. He drew attention in 2020 when he announced that a grand jury did not indict two Louisville officers who shot Breonna Taylor.In the 2019 governor’s race, Mr. Beshear ousted Matt Bevin, a Trump-backed Republican, by fewer than 6,000 votes. This year, he enters the race with a strong job approval rating. He is seeking to replicate a political feat of his father, Steve Beshear, who was also Kentucky governor and was elected to two terms.Governor of Mississippi Brandon Presley, a public service commissioner who is related to Elvis Presley, wants to be the state’s first Democratic governor in two decades.Emily Kask for The New York TimesGov. Tate Reeves, a Republican in his first term, has some of the lowest job approval numbers of the nation’s governors.Rogelio V. Solis/Associated PressIt has been two decades since Mississippi had a Democrat as governor. Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican in his first term, is seeking to avoid becoming the one who ends that streak.But his job approval numbers are among the lowest of the nation’s governors, which has emboldened his Democratic challenger, Brandon Presley, a public service commissioner with a famous last name: His second cousin, once removed, was Elvis Presley.Mr. Presley has attacked Mr. Reeves over a welfare scandal exposed last year by Mississippi Today, which found that millions in federal funds were misspent. Mr. Reeves, who was the lieutenant governor during the years the scandal unfolded, has denied any wrongdoing, but the issue has been a focal point of the contest.Abortion access in OhioAs states continue to reckon with the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court last year, Ohio has become the latest front in the fight over access to abortion.Reproductive rights advocates succeeded in placing a proposed amendment on the November ballot that would enshrine the right to abortion access into the state constitution. Its supporters have sought to fill the void that was created by the Roe decision.Anti-abortion groups have mounted a sweeping campaign to stop the measure. One effort, a proposal to raise the threshold required for passing a constitutional amendment, was rejected by voters this summer.Virginia legislatureIn just two states won by President Biden in 2020, Republicans have a power monopoly — and in Virginia, they are aiming to secure a third. The others are Georgia and New Hampshire.Democrats narrowly control the Virginia Senate, where all 40 seats are up for grabs in the election. Republicans hold a slim majority in the House of Delegates, which is also being contested.The outcome of the election is being viewed as a potential reflection of the clout of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican with national ambitions.Philadelphia mayorAn open-seat race for mayor in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s foremost Democratic bastion, is down to two former City Council members: Cherelle Parker, a Democrat, and David Oh, a Republican.The advantage for Ms. Parker appears to be an overwhelming one in the city, which has not elected a Republican as mayor since 1947.It has also been two decades since Philadelphia, the nation’s sixth most populous city, had a somewhat competitive mayoral race. More

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      Trump, Crossing Paths With DeSantis, Tries to Outflank Him

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      At a gathering of right-wing activists, Donald Trump vowed to target federal diversity programs and to use the Justice Department to investigate schools and corporations over supposed racial discrimination.Former President Donald J. Trump moved on Friday to outflank Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as they wrestled for conservative loyalties at a gathering of right-wing activists in Philadelphia, pushing a shared agenda of forcing the federal government to the right, restricting transgender rights and limiting how race and L.G.B.T.Q. issues are taught.Speaking hours after Mr. DeSantis’s address, Mr. Trump aimed to one-up his top rival by vowing to target federal diversity programs and to wield the power of the Justice Department against schools and corporations that are supposedly engaged in “unlawful racial discrimination.”Mr. Trump said that, to “rigorously enforce” the Supreme Court’s ruling a day earlier rejecting affirmative action at the nation’s colleges and universities, he would “eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the entire federal government.”He added that he would direct the Justice Department “to pursue civil rights claims against any school, corporation, or university that engages in unlawful racial discrimination.”A representative for Mr. Trump declined to directly answer a question about which races the former president thought were being subjected to discrimination.Since entering the race just over a month ago, Mr. DeSantis has repeatedly sought to position himself to the right of Mr. Trump, hitting his record on crime, the coronavirus and immigration. Nevertheless, the former president leads Mr. DeSantis by a wide margin in the polls.The rare convergence of the two leading Republicans on the campaign trail came at a convention of the newest powerhouse in social conservative politics, Moms for Liberty, which began as a small group of far-right suburban mothers but has quickly gained national influence.A third presidential contender, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, also spoke on Friday, with two others, Vivek Ramaswamy and Asa Hutchinson, slated to appear on Saturday.Mr. DeSantis went first, headlining the opening breakfast event in a nod to the group’s founding in his home state in 2021. Its national rise — it says it now has 275 chapters in 45 states — has coincided with the Florida governor’s ascension in right-wing circles as he has pushed legislation to restrict discussions of so-called critical race theory, sexuality and gender in public schools.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said at the event that “what we’ve seen across this country in recent years has awakened the most powerful political force in this country: mama bears.” Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times“What we’ve seen across this country in recent years has awakened the most powerful political force in this country: mama bears,” Mr. DeSantis told the crowd of hundreds, to roars of applause. “We’ve done so much on these issues in Florida, and I will do all this as the next president.”Shortly after he spoke, the Supreme Court gave the conservative movement more victories with two rulings, one striking down President Biden’s program to relieve student loan debt and the other backing a web designer who refused to provide services for same-sex marriages.Mr. DeSantis’s pitch to social conservatives centers on the idea that he, not Mr. Trump, is the most likely to turn their priorities into legislation. In his 20-minute speech, Mr. DeSantis highlighted legislation he championed in Florida banning gender transition care for minors, preventing teachers from asking students for their preferred pronouns and prohibiting transgender girls from competing in girls’ sports.Not all attendees were persuaded. Alexis Spiegelman, who leads the Moms for Liberty chapter in Sarasota, Fla., and is backing Mr. Trump for president, said she had not seen her governor’s policies translate into change at schools near her. She was critical of his presidential bid.“I just don’t know why we would want a knockoff when we have the real, authentic Trump,” she said.Pro-L.G.B.T.Q. demonstrators gathered on Thursday outside the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, where some of the Moms for Liberty events were being held.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesMs. Haley, who served as United Nations ambassador in Mr. Trump’s administration, struck a different tone later Friday morning. Lacking the kind of recent legislative record that Mr. DeSantis can point to, she instead drew on her experiences as a mother: She directly called herself a “mom for liberty” and often invoked her children.“Moms care about a lot of things — it’s not just schools,” Ms. Haley said. “We care about the debt, we care about crime, we care about national security, we care about the border. Moms care about everything.”Calling itself a “parental rights group,” Moms for Liberty has built its platform on a host of contentious issues centering on children — a focus that many on the right believe could help unite the Republican Party’s split factions in 2024.The group has railed against public health mandates related to the coronavirus and against school materials on L.G.B.T.Q. and race-related subjects. Its members regularly protest at meetings of school boards and have sought to take them over. Along the way, Moms for Liberty has drawn a backlash. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-leaning civil rights organization, calls it an extremist group, saying that it “commonly propagates conspiracy theories about public schools attempting to indoctrinate and sexualize children with a progressive Marxist curriculum.” Moms for Liberty leaders rejected the label in remarks on Friday.Tina Descovich, left, and Tiffany Justice, two of the founders of Moms for Liberty, which was created in 2021. Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesBefore the group’s conference in Philadelphia, a half-dozen scholarly groups criticized the Museum of the American Revolution for allowing Moms for Liberty to hold some of its events there, including the opening reception.Mayor Jim Kenney of Philadelphia, a Democrat, said on Thursday that “as a welcoming and inclusive city, we find this group’s beliefs and values problematic.”Protesters gathered outside the conference venues beginning Thursday night, and demonstrations stretched into Friday evening.The schedule for Saturday included a session led by KrisAnne Hall, a former prosecutor and conservative public speaker with past ties to the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia that helped orchestrate the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021.Sessions at the event bridged a wide range of subjects, including exploration of “dark money’s infiltration in education” and discussions about the Federalist Papers. But the presidential candidates were the main draw.Tina Descovich, one of the organization’s founders, said in an interview that Moms for Liberty had invited every presidential candidate — including Mr. Biden — to speak at the event.“Our issue of parental rights and our concerns about public education in America are rising to the level of presidential candidates,” Ms. Descovich said, “which means for the 2024 election, that we are working to make this the No. 1 domestic policy issue.” More