An Open Editorial to MC Caro and TeddyRide
JOURNALRAGE EDITORIAL BOARD · MONROVIA, LIBERIA · JUNE 2026
We have spent weeks documenting what is coming to Monrovia on June 19. We have traced the money from Salt Lake City to the EJS Ministerial Complex. We have published the doctrine that defines Liberian single mothers as deficient. We have documented the pipeline that turned Uganda’s conference into life imprisonment and Ghana’s conference into three-year prison sentences. We have named the Foreign Minister who flew to Utah and came back inspired.
We did not expect, in the middle of all of that, to also have to write this.
MC Caro and TeddyRide — two of the most beloved artists in Liberia’s music scene — have agreed to perform at the 8th Strengthening Families Conference.
We are not angry. We are profoundly disappointed. And we believe the Liberian public deserves to know exactly what that decision means.
WHO YOU ARE — AND WHY THAT MAKES THIS WORSE
Caroline Moore, known as MC Caro, grew up in New Kru Town, Monrovia. She broke into the Liberian music industry in 2018 with a viral freestyle called “Pro Poor” — and the name of that song tells you everything about where she came from and who she chose to speak for.
She received a lot of negativity as a result of stereotyping, and her work was mostly underground because of it. It wasn’t until 2018 that MC Caro received recognition from the Liberian music industry. Following her debut, she took a stance on Liberia’s issue of corruption through the release of her song ‘Bring Back Our Moni.’ At the Liberian Music Awards, she chose to wear a suit with African traditional fabrics woven into it, demonstrating her commitment to her culture and her dedication to sending a message.
MC Caro won Best Female Rapper of the Year at the 2020 MTN Liberia Music Awards. She is, by any fair assessment, one of the first female artists to dominate Liberia’s urban music scene on her own terms — a woman who clawed her way up from New Kru Town, refused to be silenced by stereotyping and cultural restriction, and used her platform to speak for the people at the bottom.
TeddyRide — born and raised in Liberia — has used his platform to elevate the Liberian music scene, collaborating with fellow artists and aiming to inspire and mentor the next generation of Liberian artists. He has built a dedicated fanbase across West Africa and is regarded as a significant force in Liberian Afropop.
Both of these artists built their names on authenticity. On community. On representing Liberia from the ground up, not from the top down.
Which is exactly why performing at this conference is such a profound betrayal of everything that made them.
WHAT YOU HAVE AGREED TO ENTERTAIN
Let us be specific about what this conference is because it appears that either MC Caro and TeddyRide do not know, or they have decided not to care.
The 8th Strengthening Families Conference is organized, funded, and directed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. This institution formally barred Black men and women from its temples and priesthood for 126 years from 1852 to 1978. It justified that exclusion with a theology that taught that Black people were cursed, less valiant in their premortal existence, spiritually inferior to white members of the same faith. It only repudiated that theology in 2013. It has never formally apologized.
This is the institution whose conference you have agreed to perform at.
But it gets more specific than that.
The conference promotes a definition of family that states fathers must preside and mothers are primarily responsible for nurturing. It has no theological framework for the single mother. No space for the widow raising her children alone. No recognition of the women-led household as a valid family structure. Under the framework this conference promotes, the families of hundreds of thousands of Liberian women — women from New Kru Town, women from West Point, women who look exactly like the people who made MC Caro famous with ‘Pro Poor’ — are deficient. Incomplete. In need of correction.
And it goes further still.
This conference is the advance party of a legislative pipeline that has produced prison sentences for people who are just being humans across the continent. . Liberia’s bill is already on the floor of the House. The documented pattern — conference, then cash to legislators, then bill — is playing out in Monrovia right now, in real time. The community that will be most immediately and violently affected by that bill is a community of Liberians. People who grew up on the same streets as MC Caro. People who danced to TeddyRide’s music. People who cannot now safely come to the EJS Exhibition Complex to confront the institution that organized their persecution because they will be arrested.
And you will be on the stage. Providing the entertainment.
THE GIFT YOU ARE GIVING THEM
Here is what your performance does for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:
It gives them legitimacy. It gives them cultural cover. It allows the organizers of this conference to say, to the Liberian public and to the international community, that this event is not a foreign imposition. That Liberians themselves chose to show up, chose to perform, chose to celebrate. That Liberia’s own artists stood on that stage and made the audience feel good about what they were attending.
Your music will be used to soften the room before the doctrine lands. Your performance will be the moment people forget, for a few minutes, what the conference is actually about. You will make it easier for people to stay. You will make it harder for people to leave. You will provide the emotional warmth that makes the ideological message go down smoother.
MC Caro rapped about the missing containers. She rapped about corruption. She built her name on calling out the people who exploit Liberia for their own benefit.
And now she will perform at a conference run by an institution from Utah that is here to write Liberia’s laws, define Liberia’s families, and deploy 17 new missionaries across Africa twelve days after the curtain comes down.
The irony is so painful it is almost beyond words.
WHAT WE ARE ASKING
journalRAGE is not calling for MC Caro and TeddyRide to be cancelled. We are not interested in ending their careers. We are interested in their conscience.
We are asking both artists, plainly and publicly, to reconsider.
We are asking them to spend one hour reading the documentation that journalRAGE has published over the past weeks. One hour learning about the 126-year racial exclusion. One hour reading the LDS Family Proclamation and understanding what it says about the single mothers in New Kru Town. One hour looking at what happened in Uganda after their conference, and in Ghana after theirs.
And then we are asking them to make a decision, not about their career, not about the fee, but about who they are and who they represent.
Because the communities that will be targeted by the legislation this conference generates are the same communities that made both of them. The underground crowd that lifted ‘Pro Poor’ into a viral anthem. The young people who played TeddyRide’s music in the streets. The women and the sexual minorities and the single parents and the people at the margins of Liberian society who have always been the true audience for Liberian music — not the elders in conference halls, not the foreign church officials on the front row, but the people outside, the people who cannot afford to be in that room, the people whose existence this conference is designed to restrict.
Those people deserve to know that their artists see them. That their artists have not been hired by the institution that wants to legislate them out of existence to make the event feel like home.
A FINAL WORD
MC Caro is regarded by most as the foremost female hip hop star in current times in Liberia. According to the artist, music is a gift God gave her.
If that is true — if music is a gift from God — then the question is what that gift is for.
Is it for entertaining an institution that spent 126 years telling people who look like you that God considered them inferior?
Is it for providing cultural legitimacy to a conference that will be followed by cash to legislators and a bill that criminalizes the existence of your own fans?
Or is it for the people it has always been for — the ones at the bottom, the ones at the margins, the ones who heard ‘Pro Poor’ and felt seen for the first time?
You built your name in New Kru Town. You built it for the streets, not the conference halls. You built it by speaking truth to power, not by performing for it.
You still have a choice. Make it.
journalRAGE will be at the EJS Exhibition Complex on June 19. We will be watching and reporting — everything that happens on that stage and everything that happens because of it.
We hope, when we write about that day, we are not writing about you.
This is an editorial representing the position of journalRAGE. Founded in 2019. Liberia’s independent platform for human rights journalism. contact@journalrage.org · journalrage.org. Both MC Caro and TeddyRide were not contacted for comment before publication of this draft. journalRAGE extends a standing offer to publish any response from either artist in full, unedited, on our platform.