The ugly news broke in the last week of November. A Florida woman has claimed that the chairwoman of her state's Republican Party raped her in her own home. According to police, her assault occurred after he and his wife had planned to meet her for a three-way sexual encounter, as they had done before.
This was a surprising claim, considering the power couple involved. Republican Chairman Christian Ziegler, who has denied assault and said the encounter was consensual, is a prominent national political consultant. His Republican activist wife Bridget Ziegler is the founder of Moms for Liberty. Members of the group have been turning school board meetings across the U.S. into partisan battlegrounds for the past two years.
The claims have sparked criticism, complaints of hypocrisy and “Moms for Libertines” jokes. But the situation also provided a window into the machinations of the movement that helped make Ziegler so important in Republican politics. This is especially true thanks to the rapid growth of Mothers for Freedom into a national organization.
Bridget Ziegler launched Moms for Liberty with Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice in January 2021, but was soon courted. Within a few months, she was hired by the Leadership Institute, an influential nonprofit organization, to help run school board campaign training, although her name was unknown.
The institute was founded in 1979 by Morton Blackwell, a longtime Republican activist. So long that he became the youngest member of Congress to win the Republican nomination in 1964, behind Barry Goldwater. Blackwell became an important figure in the Reagan Revolution through his involvement in the emerging New Right, Richard Meagher, a political science professor at Randolph-Macon College, told me. Blackwell, now 84, remains president of the Leadership Institute and national committee member of the Virginia Republican Party.
The Blackwell Institute's mission is to recruit and train conservative activists for influential positions in politics and media. The website features dozens of classes on voting strategies, digital campaigns and fundraising tips, but Meagher said the real value of the website lies in the connections. “The Leadership Institute trains people and then connects them to a variety of networks: think tanks, congresses, nonprofits and advocacy groups,” he said.
The institute claims to have mentored more than 250,000 conservative operatives over the past 50 years, including Senate Majority Leader Karl Rove, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and former Vice President Mike Pence. Newly elected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson also credited Blackwell with his career in Congress. And few people in Florida were as connected as Ziegler. But many of the institute's graduates are relatively unknown political activists, experts said. These actors may be technical experts for campaigns and nonprofits, senatorial staffers, or policy drafters.
As the coronavirus pandemic forced school administrators to keep children home, the institute developed a new program to train suburban women to open schools and campaign for school boards to eliminate mask wearing. The blonde face of the conservative movement's new public arena. (Ziegler did not respond to her request for comment for this story.)
The Leadership Institute exists alongside dozens of similar but better-known groups, such as the think tank Heritage Foundation. Turning Point USA, youth organization; And then there's the Family Research Council, a social conservative group. Many of these organizations and their leaders are members of a conservative umbrella organization called the National Policy Council, of which Blackwell was a founding member. The CNP is a secretive, invitation-only group that brings together conservative activists to coordinate political strategy. shadow network, told me. Consider the Conservative Political Action Conference. But performance drops.
CNP's purpose is to “bring together fellow travelers” to coordinate strategy and messaging, Meagher said. Hillary Clinton popularized the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy,” but “it’s not a conspiracy.” Everything is out in the open,” Meagher said. “They are very well connected, and there is a lot of crossover between the different institutions.” Of course, the Democratic Party has similar resources to train progressive candidates and advance their policy goals. But Meagher said the groups supporting the Democratic Party are not as ideologically consistent or disciplined as the groups that make up the CNP. “Nothing compares to the left.”
This interlocking structure of funding, training, and chatter is key to understanding the rapid success of Moms for Freedom in American politics.
According to Ziegler and her colleagues, the organization initially started to address parents' concerns about school closures and mask policies during the pandemic. But Moms for Liberty was quickly absorbed into the broader network of the conservative movement. Within days of its creation, Moms for Liberty was featured on Rush Limbaugh's radio show. By June 2021, the group hosted political commentator Megyn Kelly for a “fireside chat” in Cape Canaveral, Florida. This early success and financial strength suggests that the group “has many resources that are not available to other grassroots groups,” said Maurice T. Cunningham, chair of the political science department at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. me.
Now, just two years after its founding, this organization has become a vital campaign stoppage for Republican political candidates. At this year's Moms for Freedom Summit in Philadelphia (the second national gathering), every major presidential candidate stopped by to address the crowd, including Donald Trump.
“It might have taken moms five minutes to sell T-shirts and bake bread,” said Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. “But within a matter of months, they scaled up into today’s right-wing avatar.” Recently, the group's focus has shifted to opposing the teaching of gender, sexual orientation and race in school curricula and banning certain books that mention these topics from school libraries. This new front in the group's campaign has thrown the allegations of sexual impropriety against Ziegler into stark relief. (“Never apologize,” Christian Ziegler said in a presentation on media response at this year’s Mom’s for Liberty summit. “It makes you look weak.”)
The Leadership Institute has been an integral sponsor of Moms for Liberty's annual summit (donating at least $50,000 in 2022 and serving as a major sponsor of the event again in 2023) and providing educational sessions for members. Simply put, Cunningham said, “Without the Leadership Institute, there is no Mother for Freedom.” Each year, the group awards the ‘Sword of Liberty’ for advocacy of parental rights. This year in Philadelphia, Blackwell received his sword.
Now it appears that that recognition was not reciprocated. Over the past three weeks, Bridget Ziegler has seemingly been expelled from the Leadership Institute, Soviet style. Her name disappeared from her online employee directory. (As of Friday morning, the Leadership Institute had not responded to a request for comment.) Ziegler has also been asked to resign from the Sarasota school board.
There is no doubt that her reputation in conservative politics has taken a hit. Given some of the failures in recent school board elections, Moms for Freedom's influence may also have peaked by now. But “what doesn’t go away is the influence of the group behind them,” Cowen said.