Moms for Liberty, the extremist “parental rights group,” was supposed to help the Republican Party regain the White House. In July, former president Donald Trump called the anti-LGBTQ group with 300 active chapters across the county a “grassroots juggernaut.” They are credited with forcing schools to lift mask mandates, banning books featuring LGBTQ characters, and supporting anti-trans laws and policies across the country. The group was on track to be instrumental to the GOP in the 2024 election.
But, over the course of the past five months, the group has begun to unravel.
Experts have questioned the claims about the size of the group’s membership, and individual members have been exposed as sex offenders and acolytes of the Proud Boys. Then, last month, Moms for Liberty cofounder Bridget Ziegler admitted in a police interview to being in a relationship with her husband and another woman. The interview was conducted after the woman in question alleged that Ziegler’s husband, Florida GOP chair Christian Ziegler, had raped her.
Ziegler’s husband has denied the allegations and refused to resign from his position as GOP chair, despite calls from Florida governor Ron DeSantis and other state Republicans to do so. Ziegler is also a member of the Sarasota County School Board, and has been instrumental in ushering in Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill, pushing a Christian agenda in public schools, and banning the teaching of critical race theory. On Tuesday night, the board voted 4–1 in favor of a nonbinding resolution calling for her to resign, marking a rapid fall from grace for Ziegler and a potential fatal blow to Moms for Liberty.
Bridget ZieglerPhotograph: Zack Wittman/Bloomberg/Getty Images
“The impact of the Zeigler scandal has been enormous on the Moms for Liberty structure,” Liz Mikitarian, the founder of the activist group STOP Moms for Liberty, which closely tracks the group’s activities, tells WIRED. “We see chapters moving away or taking a break, chapter leadership questioning their roles and scrambling at the national level to save their ‘mom’ brand. The organization is trying to distance itself from the Zieglers, but this is impossible because the Zieglers are interwoven into the very fabric of Moms for Liberty.”
The group was founded in late 2020 by Ziegler, Tina Descovich, and Tiffany Justice. Ziegler’s close ties to the GOP establishment both locally and nationally helped the group get recognition, propelling their grassroots efforts quickly to the national stage. Initially founded to counter mask mandates during the Covid-19 pandemic, the group’s plans were straightforward: They wanted to support school board candidates who pushed their anti-LGBTQ agenda while advocating for the banning of books that feature people of color or members of the LGBTQ community. The group’s growth was extraordinary. In three years, Moms for Liberty claims to have established 300 chapters in 48 states, with a membership of 130,000 parents. While Ziegler resigned from the group in 2021, she has remained a close ally of the group, speaking at its annual conferences and pushing its agenda from her school board seat.
In a sign of just how coveted an endorsement from the group had become in GOP circles, Trump was joined at their convention this summer by GOP presidential candidates Ron DeSantis, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, and entrepreneur and great replacement conspiracy proponent Vivek Ramaswamy.
The group’s support from the GOP came despite widespread reports about the harassment and intimidation campaigns that Moms for Liberty members conducted against school board members, teachers, superintendents, and even other parents. These allegations led the Southern Poverty Law Center to label Moms for Liberty an extremist group earlier this year.
But in recent months, controversies and closer scrutiny of the group’s claims have significantly tarnished the group’s image.
Just days after the Moms for Liberty convention in Philadelphia, Heath Brown, a professor of public policy at the City University of New York, wrote on Medium that while Moms for Liberty claims to be a national movement, the vast majority of its membership is concentrated in just four states: South Carolina, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Florida.
“This suggests that the political power is considerable and expanding in some states, but nearly absent and even waning in others,” Brown wrote.
Research from the Brookings Institution published in October confirmed this, and found that while Moms for Liberty was attracting members in Democratic strongholds, it was winning school board elections only in staunchly conservative regions of the country.
While its rapid growth may have suggested that Moms for Liberty would sweep school board races nationwide in November, 70 percent of its endorsed candidates lost their races, according to an analysis from the American Federation of Teachers. Weeks after the embarrassing election losses, the group was forced to remove two Kentucky chapter chairs from leadership positions after the women posed for photos with members of the Proud Boys militia. The group has a long history of associating with members of the Proud Boys, and Ziegler herself had to deny links to the group after she posed with two members at a victory party after she was elected to the Sarasota County School Board.
Then, the group removed Phillip Fisher Jr., a pastor who coordinates faith-based outreach for Philadelphia’s Moms for Liberty chapter, after it was revealed he was a registered sex offender.
Then came the revelations about the Zieglers.
Initially, the Moms for Liberty groups circled the wagons and slammed the media attention on the story, claiming in a statement on X that the sexual assault allegation made against Christian Ziegler was ”another attempt to ruin the reputation of a strong woman fighting for America.”
But in early December, a chapter chair in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, who was also the state legislative lead for the group, announced she and the other members were splitting from the national group to form their own organization because of the leadership’s response to the scandal.
In the weeks since, those who are closely tracking the group’s activities say chapters have gone quiet. Some, including several chapters in Maryland, have been removed from the Moms for Liberty website and their online activity has slowed to a crawl.
“Moms for Liberty has been repeatedly exposed as hypocrites over the past months, but I believe these new issues will be insurmountable to them,” Karen Svoboda, cofounder of Defense of Democracy, a group created to counter Moms for Liberty’s actions, tells WIRED. “Moms for Liberty, the powerhouse that wreaked such havoc on our communities and schools, is becoming undone by their own hubris.”
Despite the vote against her on Tuesday night, Ziegler did not resign, and said the resolution “has no teeth” given that the only person who can remove a school board member is the governor. And given that DeSantis has not asked Ziegler to resign from her position on a Disney oversight board he appointed her to, it’s unlikely he will force her to resign from the Sarasota County School Board.
However, Ziegler has resigned from her position as vice president of School Board Leadership Programs at the Leadership Institute, the highly influential conservative group led by Morton Blackwell, who also cofounded the secretive Council for National Policy. The Leadership Institute has been a major funder of Moms for Liberty since its inception, and Blackwell’s apparent lack of faith in Ziegler could spell trouble for her and Moms for Liberty.
“There are a lot of signs that Blackwell holds the ultimate power over Moms for Liberty,” Maurice Cunningham, a former political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston who has tracked Moms for Liberty’s growth closely, tells WIRED. “He will decide Moms for Liberty’s future, and Moms for Liberty cannot continue if he pulls the plug.”
Moms for Liberty did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment about the impact the Ziegler scandal is having on the group or on their membership numbers. Instead, a spokesperson for the group pointed WIRED to a statement issued by Descovich and Justice in the days after the Ziegler scandal broke, distancing the group from Ziegler while also praising her for “remaining an avid warrior for parental rights across the country.”
