Meet The Zieglers-- Just Don't Invite Them Over For Dinner
Rick Wilson can be a real hoot— and how else can anyone process the latest Moms For Liberty/Florida GOP scandal than as a gut-wrenching comedy? It’s insane. And yesterday, Wilson, a 5th generation Floridian noted that The only way he’d “be more Florida is if you saw helicopter news footage of me buck naked, except for a pair of Crocs running down the center of a highway median carrying my pet alligator over one shoulder as I fled the explosion that wrecked the meth lab where I lived with my common-law 5th wife, who is both a first cousin, a Santeria priestess and my parole officer.” Honestly, that sounds more like the Panhandle and central Florida than South Florida but… who knows; I haven’t been to Florida in decades.
Wilson dubbed the new Moms For Liberty/Florida GOP scandal “one of those perfect apotheoses of Republican moral hypocrisy. Christian Ziegler, the Chairman of the Republican Party of Florida— he was handpicked for the job by Ryan Tyson, a powerful DeSantis insider and lead pollster to Ron’s campaign— and his wife, Bridget Ziegler, the founder of the infamous blue-stocking group Moms for Liberty, were involved in a long-running threesome with another woman. The Zieglers are Florida GOP royalty, close friends, and allies of King Ron and Queen Casey DeSantis (R-Amnesia), present at every possible event in the GOP firmament.”
“If,” he reminded whomever needed reminding— no one I know— “the head of the Florida Democratic Party were accused of rape and sexual battery stemming from a long-running polyamorous relationship, Republicans would be screaming it from the rooftops, Fox would go to live 24/7 coverage, and Twitter would melt down. They would associate every Democrat who failed to condemn it and assert they were guilty of the same crime.”
But Wilson takes this fabulous story in directions no one would guess— and way beyond just “So far, Ziegler has refused to step down, even though Ron and Casey DeSantis moved— just as they did with Matt Gaetz— to cauterize and control the damage by calling on Ziegler to step down as RPOF chairman. Interestingly, DeSantis appointed Bridget Ziegler to his Vichy Disney Reedy Creek board earlier this year and has yet to ask her to be removed. Bridget’s Moms For Liberty could get a meeting with any Republican member of the Florida House of Senate at the drop of a hat. They were feted in this town like they were the second coming. (Pun intended.) Their battle cry was ‘parents’ rights,’ but their reality was a thinly veiled rollback of gay rights and the broad imposition of a Christian conservative curriculum in Florida’s public schools. Bridget Ziegler was the poster girl for Moms for Liberty. Pretty, poised, and poisonous, she was a blonde tornado of action and activity. She helped elect dozens of like-minded MFL types to school boards, none of whom cared about education. Instead, they were passionately committed to injecting their flavor of social conservatism into the curriculum and the libraries.”
As Zac Anderson of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported, “The Republican power couple have emerged as leading advocates in Florida for a new wave of conservative moral crusading largely centered around LGBTQ issues, especially in schools.” Think of every anti-LGBT trope, and they peddled it with gusto.
…It’s always the Republicans who displayed the most outrageous, exaggerated social conservative play-acting outrage on gay rights, gay marriage, divorce (yes, it was still a stigma with some socons even into the early 1990s), adultery, and out-of-wedlock pregnancy who ended up having dirty little secrets of their own. It’s always projection.
But Florida has a peculiar relationship with power, sex, and social conservatism. Florida’s senior mega-community, The Villages, is notoriously home to more swingers and STDs per capita than anywhere in the known universe.
We have the highest density of strip clubs and “massage parlors” (really, thinly disguised sex trafficking brothels) in the country. One of the first pieces I wrote was a warning to my Republican friends at the 2012 GOP convention to avoid the perils of Tampa’s famously video-camera-rich strip clubs on Dale Mabry Highway. The 2001, Thee Doll House, and others were given the roman-a-clef treatment as “Kitty McTitty’s Boom Boom Room.”
This is a state where Matt Gaetz somehow escaped charges in a case where he and his running-buddy Joel Greenburg Venmoed teenage hookers they allegedly shared. (Ew.) Gaetz and Greenberg are pictured below with some other guy:
Of course, if you lived in Tallahassee in the last decade, you knew about “The Game.”
What’s “The Game”? Matt and a cohort of young Republican legislators were in a running competition to fuck their way through Tallahassee’s lobbying corps, staff, and fellow legislators. I’ll let Business Insider’s summary suffice: Matt Gaetz's Florida sex game included a 'Harry Potter' challenge and 'extra points' for sleeping in sorority houses, a female Republican tells Insider.
Tallahassee is a town where people with vast sums of money and the best-quality drugs in the world swim in a sea of hypocritical social conservatism. Things like the DeSantis “Don’t Say Gay” bill and the endless attacks on Disney have marked the last three legislative sessions with a roaring hostility to LGBT Floridians. It’s excellent odds some of the same people eager to call every drag queen a pedophile on the floor of the Florida House left the Governor’s Club to have their asses professionally beaten by a dominatrix or to sleep with an escort.
I’m a profound believer in personal liberty, writ large and small. I do not give a rat’s ass who you sleep with, what you do in your bedroom, or what makes you aroused, as long it’s not kids, pets, or non-consensual. “Don’t break the law or scare the livestock."
My problem with the Zieglers threefold; first, if the police reports are to be believed, it is alleged to have escalated into violence and rape. Even the suspicion of that is way outside the lines.
Sadly, as much as the broader story reflects on all their shallow personal and political hypocrisy, I think it also speaks to the broader culture of the abuse of power in my state; when you can easily abuse political power and personal power, the abuse of physical power becomes almost inevitable.
Second, these two were both eagerly and passionately interested in using the power of the state to control, marginalize, or criminalize how other consenting adults express their sexuality, either in words or in bed. Hell, I’m not gay, and I was offended by it.
Finally, it’s their fucking smug, shitty hypocrisy. Both of them were egregious trolls, smugly playing the nuclear Christian missionary position family values image and stoking a fake moral panic over “predatory gays.” I was looking for the right words about Bridget Ziegler today when a fantastic opinion piece by Fabiola Santiago asked the perfect question: If Moms for Liberty co-founder had sex with a woman, why is she targeting Florida’s gays?
I wish to God this story was just about Republican social conservative hypocrisy. I wish it were about a jackass and his wife getting busted in a basic-bitch sex scandal. Sadly, it also appears to be about violence and rape.
Both Zieglers must resign their posts.
A final note
As I was completing this article, news broke that a 911 tape from a friend of the woman who alleges Ziegler raped her was released. It’s not easy listening, as the friend relates the charges and outlines the woman’s deteriorating mental health in the wake of the alleged events. The Florida Center for Government Accountability, which has led the charge on this story, released the 911 call tape in its (properly) redacted form:
Awesome that the Ziegler scumbags have been exposed for what they are. Let’s hope people spit at them in the streets wherever they go until they beg forgiveness of everyone whose lives they’ve hurt. Other anti-work culture warriors in Ohio also seem to be getting a bit of a comeuppance right now. This time it was an attempt by a gaggle of far right Republicans in the legislature to prevent the free teaching of climate science in colleges. Senate Bill 83 doesn’t have the support it needs to proceed. The bill would also ban most diversity training and forces new requirements that alternative (meaning false) viewpoints on such topics as climate policies, immigration and abortion are discussed. Its main sponsor, Sen. Jerry Cirino, a Republican, said he was taking on the “woke fiefdom” of higher education. Cirino was first elected in 2020 and represents part of Lake County, which I noted, voted overwhelmingly pro-Choice and pro-pot in the last election (59%-41%) so perhaps Cirino and his moronic crusade will be short-lived.
Dan Gearino reported that “The bill faced intense opposition from faculty, students, environmental groups and unions, leading to hours-long hearings over several months. Supporters of the bill made many changes to attempt to find a version that could pass, including the removal of language that banned strikes by higher education unions, but it wasn’t enough. A provision dealing with ‘controversial beliefs or policies’ remained in the bill, which helped to inspire resistance from people who teach and study science; they warned that Ohio’s public colleges and universities would be impaired in their ability to teach climate science.
Ohio Rep. Casey Weinstein, a Democrat, said he is not surprised to see the bill has failed to pass based on his conversations with Republican colleagues who were uncomfortable with various parts of it. Republicans hold large majorities in both chambers of the Ohio General Assembly.
“In Ohio, we love our universities, so the fact that they’re attacking and potentially striking blows against our beloved public universities that are so critical to our workforce and our economy, that was a tough hill to climb,” he said.
Cirino, the lead sponsor, testified before a House committee in May and faced questions from Weinstein, who asked how the measure would affect the teaching of the Holocaust. While Cirino didn’t endorse inaccurate views of how the Holocaust should be taught, Weinstein said he is troubled that the bill seems to open the door to treating Holocaust denial as just another point of view.
“I don’t think he did himself any favors by, unfortunately, being honest about his bill and saying that he was trying to ‘both sides’ slavery, 9-11 and the Holocaust,” Weinstein said.
Cirino did not respond to a request for an interview.
The bill says “faculty and staff shall allow and encourage students to reach their own conclusions about all controversial beliefs or policies and shall not seek to inculcate any social, political, or religious point of view.”
The bill then lists examples of controversial topics, including “climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.”
A previous version of the bill referred to “climate change” instead of “climate policies.” Cirino changed it in response to concerns that the measure would regulate the teaching of climate science, but opponents said the bill would continue to impair teaching about climate change even with the new wording.
Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, has been monitoring the Ohio legislation and is pleased to see that it doesn’t appear likely to pass. His organization, based in California, opposes threats to the accuracy of science education in K-12 schools and higher education.
The Ohio bill is “trying to sweep up higher education into the culture wars that Cirino and his supporters want to pursue,” he said. “Climate change is a fairly minor battlefield for them in the culture wars, but it is, indeed, part of what they want to fight about.”
He said attacks on science education at public universities are much less common than what he sees happening in K-12 schools.
Conservatives and reactionaries have always given science a hard time— long before the Zieglers and Cirino registered as Republicans. All through history, conservatives have fear that scientific advancements would erode traditional values, morals and whatever the existing power balance was. Churches have usually been at the core of the tension between conservatism and Science. The first case that might pop into your mind goes back into the 1600s— Geocentrism vs. Heliocentrism, when the Catholic Church condemned Galileo's heliocentric model as heresy, fearing it contradicted religious teachings about Earth's place in the universe. Obviously, battles over the flat earth and between creationism and evolution followed.
As scientific evidence for evolution grew, religious zealots saw it as contradicting their creation stories. They still do— ergo, the ciurrent Speaker Of the House. This fueled resistance to teaching evolution in schools, a battle that continues even today. All through recorded history conservatives have been wary of scientific authority, viewing it as elitist and claiming, absurdly that it is out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people. Conservatives almost always prefer simpler explanations and usually prioritize personal experience over scientific consensus.