The Real Moms For Liberty Origin Story
Where did M4: come from, really? This excerpt is from a piece I wrote for the Bucks County Beacon last summer, but I think this part of the story is worth boosting again as we head through election season. This is who they really are.
Perhaps you’ve heard the version they prefer to push out, as regurgitated by Steve Ulrich for Politics PA:
It was January, 2021. COVID-19 was entering its second calendar year and the country had yet to re-open.
A pair of former Florida school board members, Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, had reached a boiling point. They were outraged by pandemic restrictions and mask mandates and sought for a way to rally like-minded women and others to oppose them.
And Moms For Liberty was born.
It’s a pretty story, but not quite right. This version scrubs away a third co-founder, Bridget Ziegler. She disappeared from the story pretty quickly, perhaps because her links to Florida’s GOP establishment are so clearly visible. She’s married to Christian Ziegler, a political operative with a PR firm. He pulled in $300K from a Trump-related PAC. He was once a Heritage Foundation Fellow. He’s buddies with Corey Lewandowski. He appears to be behind the Protect Wyoming Values PAC (a Trump anti-Liz Cheney proxy). He was at Trump’s January 6 rally. And in February, after had been “effectively… campaigning for the job for years,” Christian Ziegler was elected Florida’s GOP party chair.
And, more to the point, Christian Ziegler told the Washington Post that he has been “trying for 20- and 30-year old females involved with the Republican Party, and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic. But now Moms for Liberty has done it for me.” That was in October of 2021, when his wife’s involvement had already been shoved down the memory hole.
But even if we put Bridget Ziegler back at the kitchen table in January of 2021, that’s not yet the complete origin of Moms for Liberty.
For that, we have to go back to the beginning of 2015. Four Florida school board members were unhappy with the Florida School Board Association, particularly its lawsuit filed in opposition of the state’s new school voucher program, so they formed a new group —t he Florida Coalition of School Board Members. ExcelInEd, Jeb Bush’s pro-school choice advocacy group greeted them with glowing praise.
The founding members included Erika Donalds, a former New York investment banker turned Florida Tea Partier, now a high-powered choice advocate in Florida who is CEO of her own charter school company and married to a state legislator. Also in on the ground floor was Shawn Frost, who has worked hard to become an education politics power player in Florida.
Other folks passed through the organization in the years ahead, including Anne Corcoran, wife of Florida’s pro-privatization legislator-turned-Education Commissioner-turned chief of New College; Rebecca Negron, the wife of the state senator who helped write the tax credit scholarship voucher bill; and Eric Robinson, former GOP party chair and sometimes called “The Prince of Dark Money.”
In other words, a group of people well connected in the world of pro-privatization politics in Florida.
In that group from Day One: Bridget Ziegler. Joining her soon after was Tina Descovich, who was elected to Brevard County School Board with a signature issue of her opposition to Common Core. Descovich ran on two decades in business and a degree in Communications, as well as serving on the executive staff of a US Army Commanding General. Soon after joining the group, Descovich was its president.
READ: Pulling Back The Curtain On The Leadership Institute’s Dominion Over Moms For Liberty
FCSBM operated for a few years, giving out awards and working legislative connections as it ”consistently fought above its weight” to win “key battles on school choice, charters and other hot-button education issues.” But the group ran out of steam, and in May of 2020, Descovich and Ziegler filed for voluntary dissolution of FCSBM.
Within a few months, they were ready with a new operation. On December 10, Descovich and new MFL founder Tiffany Justice were posting about the launch of the new group; Descovich even had a picture of thirteen women already wearing the group’s t-shirt and displaying their logo.
It’s not just that Moms for liberty was founded by women with political connections and savvy, but that they had been working at conservative anti-public education advocacy for years. Those connections and prior experience make it less puzzling that the group somehow had money up front for t-shirts and logo design.
The speed with which the group launched was impressive. They claimed fundraising by selling t-shirts on Facebook, but that would not begin to account for receipts of a half a million dollars in their first year. And they benefited from more than just anonymous donors writing $100K checks.
As Maurice Cunningham, author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, has noted, by the end of the January, they had appeared on the Rush Limbaugh Show; soon they moved on to score appearances or shout outs from Breitbart, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, Fox News, and Steve Bannon’s War Room. In just six months they had achieved the kind of media presence that most plucky t-shirt moms wouldn’t dream of, and which many like-minded groups that have existed for much longer have never commanded.
Maybe they were just the right group at the right time, but it’s also worth noting the story of one of Christian Ziegler’s other clients. You may remember Andrew Pollack, the Parkland parent who came out against gun control and in favor of hardening the target, getting an invite to Trump’s White House among other places. How did he get such big exposure so quickly? Let Pollack explain himself:
Just days after the Parkland shooting, Christian with Microtargeted Media reached out and offered to help guide me with my communications, press relations and he launched my social media outreach channels, giving me vital distribution channels to get my message out. Christian also helped connect me with his network of elected leaders, so that I could advocate for and eventually pass school safety legislation. This was all done pro-bono and simply because he had a passion to help.
After launching as anti-masking, M4L pivoted swiftly to the parental rights and cultural warfare position they’re best known for. They tried to sell themselves as non-partisan at first, but the mask didn’t stay on long. In 2021, they briefly hired Quisha King, a PR consultant who worked as a “regional engagement coordinator” with Black Voices for Trump in 2020, but was often billed as “just a mom” (she is one of the few non-white faces to ever appear with M4L, but she no longer seems to be working with them). It was King who, speaking for M4L, called for a “mass exodus from the public school system.”
They hosted a big money fund raiser with Fox News host Megyn Kelly headlining. They gave Ron DeSantis a sword as an award for his work to promote “freedom.” They’ve worked with DeSantis in his crusade to win conservative majorities on local school boards in Florida.
Their ties to MAGA politics remain constantly in play. Ziegler is chair of the Sarasota school board, a “laboratory for far-right education policies.” She also works as Vice President of School Board Leadership Programs for the Leadership Institute, an organization that specializes in getting right wing candidates elected to office.
Descovich friend Marie Rogerson stepped into Ziegler’s shoes on the M4L board; she’s an experienced political strategist who had previously managed the 2018 campaign of Florida State Rep. Randy Fine, a Republican. Fine, in turn, is the state rep who publicized the phone number of Jennifer Jenkins, the woman who ousted Descovich from the Brevard County school board and who consequently was targeted for harassment by the Brevard County Moms for Liberty and their allies.
That’s where they really came from.
The rest of the piece, which addresses their well-known activities and expansion, is here.