Bridget Ziegler celebrates her victory for school board at a GOP party on Tuesday August, 23, 2022 Photo: THOMAS BENDER/HERALD-TRIBUNE / USA TODAY NETWORK/IMAGN
As the 2024 election cycle heats up, the scowls at Moms for Liberty (M4L) are leveraging their outsized right-wing influence to finger-point and scold their way into what they hope will be mainstream relevance — with the help of more than $3 million dollars from online true believers and shadowy far-right organizations.
The group made a name for themselves as a close ally of failed Republican presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, promoting “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, and hunting down LGBTQ+ content in local school libraries when they weren’t busy hijacking local school board meetings.
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Freed, they think, from the libertine scandals of their co-founder Bridget Ziegler —whose bisexual contretemps last year saw her husband fired from his job as Florida GOP chair after rape allegations and her own influence on Sarasota’s school board evaporate like a puddle of hypocrisy under a Florida noonday sun — the angry Moms are now plotting a comeback directed at two targets.
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First, according to Tina Descovich, one of the surviving M4L co-founders, the group is aiming resources at members — 20% of whom are not registered to vote — to “wake them up and activate them to take action, not just in these local elections that we endorse in, but at all levels of government,” she said in an interview with the Associated Press.
Second, Descovich says she wants to go national with the help of “investors” who approached the group to “grow in specific states.”
Those include four battleground states where the group plans a major TV ad buy to rile up the conservative base over culture war issues, including Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin. Plans to expand that campaign into Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania are also underway.
While declining to identify its far-right funders, Federal Election Commission records show the group’s affiliated PAC, Moms for Liberty Action, has taken $161,000 from Restoration PAC, which is funded by the conservative billionaire Richard Uihlein, since October.
Descovich’s AP outreach is part of a coordinated effort to clean up the Moms’ sullied reputation. In addition to the ongoing Ziegler scandal, local M4L chapters and their leaders have been spinning out of control around the country.
Leadership removed two Kentucky chapter chairs last fall when the women posed with members of the Proud Boys in a frightening demonstration of far-right fraternity. Last summer, an Indiana chapter of the group was forced to apologize and condemn Adolf Hitler after quoting the Nazi leader with enthusiasm in their inaugural newsletter.
And in January, a Moms for Liberty school board member was caught red-handed shoplifting from a notorious M4L boycott target — wait for it — Target.
Newly released documents from Christian Ziegler’s rape investigation reveal the couple went “on the prowl” in Sarasota bars to find women to have sex with.
A Sarasota Police Department memo quotes text messages from Bridget Ziegler to her husband directing him to send photos of possible three-way partners. According to the memo, Ziegler told her husband to pretend to take pictures of the beer he was drinking to help cover his photographing of the women.
Said the Moms for Liberty co-founder in one text quoted in the memo, “Don’t come home until your dick is wet.”
