Bridget Ziegler
It’s gotten to where it’s almost axiomatic in American politics: Show me somebody who gets TV face-time railing against others’ sexual sins, and I’ll show you somebody hiding naughty secrets. The latest example is an amusing scandal involving “Moms for Liberty,” the Florida-based right-wing organization that made its name by publicizing what this column described as “queers under the bed and the preposterous idea that the nation’s public-school librarians and grade-school teachers are plotting the sexual subversion of small children.”
One correspondent framed it this way: “Newest children’s title approved for Florida school libraries: Bridget’sTotallyNon-Gay Three-Way.” Cruel, but funny. The Bridget in question being Bridget Ziegler, the Sarasota spokes-model and co-founder of Moms for Liberty and her husband Christian Ziegler. Among other things, the lovely Mrs. Ziegler is credited with helping inspire Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law forbidding teachers from mentioning the existence of homosexuality.
See, it turns out that husband Christian stands accused of raping the woman with whom he and Bridget had been sharing sexual liaisons of the two-women, one-man variety so popular with porn movie producers. Sarasota police released a heavily-redacted investigative report containing the words “raped” and “sexually-battered.” The allegation is that Christian Ziegler, the elected chairman of Florida’s Republican Party, showed up at the alleged victim’s place seeking a more traditional two-way adulterous encounter.
According to an affidavit obtained by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, and reported by Lucian K. Truscott IV, the woman demurred, explaining “sorry, I was mostly in it for her.”She says Ziegler proceeded to take her by force. His lawyer told the Washington Post that when all the evidence comes out, Ziegler will be “totally exonerated.” Criminally, perhaps. Politically, not a chance. You see, Ziegler told Sarasota police that the encounter was consensual, and offered as evidence a video he’d made. I expect that’s one selfie you won’t be seeing on Facebook. The cops have also taken possession of all Ziegler’s electronic devices. The accused also argues that he’s being persecuted for his political views. Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis has said Ziegler should resign from the GOP chairmanship. The governor hasn’t said anything about Bridget’s position on the Sarasota County school board or the special taxing district he created to punish the Disney Corporation, in which capacity the fair Bridget has in the past accused the company of making cartoons corrupting children. Almost needless to say, the Zieglers are also big Trump allies. Because nothing enhances one’s credibility with right-wing Christians like being strong with the old pussy-grabber. Bridget Ziegler has also admitted a sexual encounter involving her, her husband, and his accuser, but says it only happened the one time. A cynic might suspect she knows that the woman can prove it. It would appear unlikely that there’s just the one video. Politically, Moms for Liberty has done the Republicans more harm than good anyway. Banning books, attacking teachers and librarians, and picking on vulnerable LGBTQ students has turned out to be less popular among voters than many imagined it would. Recent school board and state legislative elections in Pennsylvania and Virginia in particular resulted in candidates associated with the group losing pretty much across the board. It appears that voters aren’t happy about being told their local schools are run by perverts and subversives. Perhaps in consequence, pious frauds in general are a little more cautious about accusing everybody else of sexual libertinism of late. Erin Burnett had a fascinating segment on her CNN program last week about a book called The Revivalist Manifesto for which GOP House Speaker wrote a laudatory foreword in 2022. Basically, it was one of those deals where a political crony back home in Shreveport produced an extreme-right screed that played very differently in the nation’s capital. The author, one Scott McKay, a Louisiana blogger, is all about the so-called Gay Agenda. He’s particularly exercised by Biden administration Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, variously described as “openly and obnoxiously gay,” and as displaying what the author calls “queer sanctimony,” whatever that is. He describes him as a complete nonentity with no qualifications for public office apart from his sexual identity. Never mind that Buttigieg is a former Rhodes Scholar, an Afghanistan war veteran and former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. The insinuation is that no sanctimonious queer could possibly know anything about harbors, railroads, and trucks. In the real world, the secretary is widely credited with solving the post-Covid supply-chain problems that contributed so much to monetary inflation. McKay also spends a lot of time on the QAnon-endorsed “Pizzagate” fantasy, accusing name-brand Democrats of child sexual abuse orgies conducted in the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant that has no basement. But why go on? Speaker Johnson, who has an extensive history of denouncing the “homosexual agenda,” now says he never actually read the manifesto he promoted, and disagrees with its slurs. I wonder who’s next. Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President. |
Trump’s Latest Speech Is a Doozy: Proposes Alliance With Putin And Ideology Test For Immigrants
Published with permission from AlterNet
Billed as a major foreign policy speech, the Republican presidential candidate devoted most of it to fear-mongering.
In a speech billed as a major foreign policy address, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump offered little actual foreign policy, other than to claim that in a Trump presidency, “the era of nation-building” will have ended. Instead, he criticized and often misrepresented the policies of President Barack Obama and his Democratic rival, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Introducing Trump was former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who seemed to forget that the attacks of September 11, 2001, took place during the Bush administration when he claimed that there hadn’t been “any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the U.S.” in the eight years before Obama became president.
Instead of policymaking, Trump devoted a chunk of his speech to emphasizing his promise to subject immigrants to the United States to “an ideological screening test.”
“We should only admit those who share our values,” he told a crowd of supporters gathered at Ohio State University in Youngstown. “I call it extreme vetting.”
He never spelled out just which of “our values” he would test for. By “our values,” did he mean constitutional values? Free-market values? Christian values? Individualist values? Would it be a test that those who are already American citizens could pass, or more like the so-called literacy tests of the Jim Crow days? He never said. He did however, give one clue: It would be like the ideology test given to immigrants during the Cold War, which was designed to screen out communists.
Trump made the pledge toward the end of his speech, after reading off a list of mass shootings and terrorist attacks committed both in Europe and the United States that were committed by Muslims. All of the shootings in the U.S. he mentioned—Fort Hood, San Bernardino and Orlando—had one thing in common, he said: “They have involved immigrants or the children of immigrants.”
Apparently, in a Trump administration, the legal immigrant parents of adults who commit illegal acts would be on the hook for the actions of their grown children. (This would require a novel interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.)
No mention was made, of course, of the many mass shootings in the U.S. by Christians and other non-Muslims. Trump is nurturing that all-important endorsement he received from the National Rifle Association, which famously went silent after Adam Lanza’s rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., left 20 children and six educators dead. (Perhaps noteworthy is the fact that Steve Feinberg, CEO of the firm that owns Remington Arms—maker of the Bushmaster rifle used by Lanza—is on Trump’s economic team.)
“Those who do not believe in our Constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred, will not be admitted for immigration into the country,” Trump said, issuing a standard that Trump himself would be unlikely to meet.
The point of Trump’s address was obviously to foment fear, and to offer his authoritarian remedy, a test to determine who among immigrants believe differently than he or his followers do.
In a blatant appeal to right-wing Christian evangelical voters, Trump characterized the terrorism waged by ISIS against the West as a war against Christendom. In truth, ISIS conducts horrific violence on people of every faith—including Muslims—who are not on its team. But that didn’t stop him from claiming that ISIS “is rounding up what it calls the Nation of the Cross… for genocide.”
He reiterated his plan to halt immigration from some of the “most volatile nations in the world,” but did not name them, leaving his plan a bit elastic and arbitrary.
The Republican standard-bearer reversed course on his July declaration of NATO as an “obsolete” organization to which U.S. commitments were dispensable, taking credit for NATO’s announcement of its counter-terrorism effort, which actually appears to have been undertaken in June with the treaty organization’s appointment of an intelligence chief.
He did offer this bit of foreign policy, though, regarding his good friend, Vladimir Putin: “I also believe that we could find common ground with Russia in the fight against ISIS,” Trump said. “They, too, have much at stake in the outcome in Syria, and have had their own battles with Islamic terrorism.”
News reports from Syria say that Russian airstrikes on behalf of the murderous Assad regime are killing countless civilians—the very refugees that Trump would bar from entry to the U.S.
In the end, you could say that Trump is proposing a new foreign policy, after all—one that would ally the United States with the Russian dictator.
Photo: Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio August 15, 2016. REUTERS/Eric Thayer