The campaign ad begins with creepy piano music and scenes from Trump rallies and the Jan. 6 insurrection. “The far right has brought their brand of violent chaos and bigotry into our schools,” a narrator says, before members of the Proud Boys flash on screen.
Proud Boys—who belong to a male-dominated extremist group—are also pictured at the election night party of Bridget Ziegler, the Florida school board member whose three-way sex scandal has spotlighted the hypocrisy of her anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.
“Enough is enough,” the video concludes. “It’s time to bring sanity back to our schools.”
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The School Sanity Project launched this advertisement on Tuesday ahead of yet another board meeting that attracted protests against Ziegler, a Moms for Liberty co-founder, and demands for her resignation.
Organizers of this new political action committee told The Daily Beast that they’re coming forward to battle not only Ziegler, whose term ends in 2026, but her colleagues’ extremist ties. Her ally Karen Rose is up for re-election this fall, as is the board’s lone liberal member Tom Edwards, who is openly gay and faced hate speech from right-wing residents.
For some parents, Ziegler’s scandal served as a tipping point against the conservative board’s policies, including a redistricting and near approval of a district contractor associated with a private Christian college. On Tuesday, the board green-lit a new for-profit charter school in a 4-1 vote despite public opposition, saying they didn’t want to risk legal fees and their hands were tied since the company met criteria for approval.
Kay Mathers, a Sarasota mom and volunteer organizer, said she and other parents contacted political strategists behind another group, Agenda PAC, which helped to defeat Moms for Liberty-backed candidates last fall in Pennsylvania.
“We’re up against a massive professional machine,” Mathers told The Daily Beast. “And you’ve just got a bunch of moms running around with their hair on fire, because they don’t know what to do.”
“We thought if they could do it,” she added of Agenda, “we could do it here.”
This led Mathers to political consultant Samantha Pollara, who helped form the Project. The group’s incorporation records also list officers as Democratic strategist and Agenda PAC adviser Ted Bordelon and Fort Lauderdale lawyer Jason Blank. (Bordelon, who has helped set up PACs across the country, has no other involvement, and Agenda PAC is a separate organization from the Project.)
“People are just fed up, and particularly with Bridget Ziegler,” Pollara told The Daily Beast. “The hypocrisy just became overwhelming.”
Pollara expects the PAC to fund a “full-fledged campaign” north of six figures to clobber right-wing candidates. “The Proud Boys and Michael Flynn have become a huge presence in the community,” she said. “In some ways, [Sarasota] is the nexus of Republican politics.”
“We want to put power back in the hands of Sarasota parents and to some degree fight fire with fire.”
So far, one of the Project’s tactics includes parking a billboard truck outside school board headquarters with Ziegler’s face and the words “Stop the school board scandal.”
Pollara says the far right did something similar in 2022, when someone rented a billboard truck calling the opponent of conservative board member Robyn Marinelli a “baby killer” because she once worked for Planned Parenthood.
Marinelli ran on a right-leaning ticket that year with Ziegler and Tom Enos, leading supporters to dub them “ZEM.” The candidates, who were supported by Gov. Ron DeSantis, flipped the ideology of the once-liberal board. (Rose was elected in 2020.)
Soon after ZEM took office, Rose began the process of firing the district’s superintendent Brennan Asplen, who was in some residents’ crosshairs over mask mandates. At a public meeting on his termination, he warned, “I’m telling you right now, whether I’m here or not, you have to get the politics out of this school district.”
Meanwhile, Ziegler pushed the board to hire consulting firm Vermillion Education, whose founder worked for Hillsdale College, a private conservative Christian campus in Michigan that inspired DeSantis in his takeover of New College.
“We all know this proposed Vermilion contract is part of a long-planned, political, profit-driven effort to undermine and destroy public education at tax-payer expense,” one Sarasota resident fumed last year at a tense board meeting over the proposed contract.
Rose and Ziegler, whose children do not attend public schools, were the only members who voted in favor of it.
“When you get to this point of extremism, you need all hands on deck,” said mom and longtime activist Paulina Testerman, who is helping the School Sanity Project.
“We need ideas to figure out how to play this election back to the center because that pendulum swung really hard and fast to the right,” Testerman told The Daily Beast.
Testerman points to Rose and Marinelli’s 2021 appearance at the Hollow 2A, a stomping ground for far-right groups and Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, where they hobnobbed with local Proud Boy James Hoel.
“It’s not like we’re saying, ‘I don’t like that candidate. They voted for pencils and I wanted pens.’ These are people who want to destroy public education and they’re just saying the quiet part out loud now,” Testerman told The Daily Beast.
During the Hollow 2A event, which Hoel emceed, Rose told the crowd she wanted to abolish the U.S. Department of Education.
“As far as I’m concerned, and have been this way for a long time, totally and completely highlight and delete the federal Department of Education, it has no place… and it’s against the constitution,” said Rose, who was an educator in Sarasota for 28 years.
Video from the gathering shows that when an audience member asked Rose whether she supported the “Marxist agenda,” she replied, “I’m a freedom fighter, I’m a rebel, and I’m an independent, and I don’t want anybody to tell me what to do or what to say.”
This persona is perhaps why, since December, Rose has resisted cries from residents during the board’s public comment period to take action on Ziegler.
In late November, a local watchdog revealed that police were investigating Bridget’s husband, ex-state GOP chair Christian Ziegler, for the alleged rape of their female threesome partner. Cops didn’t pursue sexual assault charges but referred a video voyeurism case to the state attorney, who has declined to prosecute.
The news upended the MAGA couple’s “family values” image and especially plagued Bridget, who is credited with paving the way for Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.
While Rose introduced a resolution asking Ziegler to resign, she and fellow members refused Edwards’ request to contact DeSantis and demand her removal.
“As long as Bridget sits on that board, we’re saying it’s OK she’s a bigot, and it’s not OK,” said Mathers, a former Republican who left the party after Trump’s election. “She ruined lives, and it’s just not OK. And we can’t just move on.”
Other groups entering the fray are the nonprofit Support Our Schools and youth-led SEE Alliance, which stands for Social Equity through Education.
Before Tuesday’s board meeting, the SEE Alliance and its executive director Zander Moricz held a “We Deserve Better Rally” with a coalition of LGBTQ and public education advocates.
Moricz told The Daily Beast the Ziegler scandal has “unified the Sarasota community,” bringing together both Democrats and Republicans and people who haven’t been politically engaged. “That’s also what we need to recognize about extremism within our school boards,” Moricz said. “That is not what people want.”
“The response you’re seeing here in Sarasota is directed at Bridget Ziegler, but it’s representative of the way communities feel about the entire model of putting politics before students in our schools,” Moricz said. “Communities everywhere across the country are starting to turn out against their Moms for Liberty candidates.”
During the meeting’s public comments, dozens of speakers bashed Ziegler over her refusal to step down and turned their ire on her colleagues too. They played up Marinelli’s remarks at a prior February meeting, when she suggested critics were trying “to change the narrative” in the district and asked whether teachers didn’t feel supported by “this board.”
Liz Ballard, an eighth-grade history teacher who received applause, said, “I am here to tell you that I, as a member of the instructional staff, do not feel supported by a majority of this current board.”
“Bridget, you have lied about what is going on in our classrooms and how teachers are groomers and indoctrinating students,” Ballard added. “Support is not going on Fox News to insinuate you pulled your child from the Sarasota County Public Schools because she got in your car and asked you what white privilege was. Never happened.”
Several speakers brought up Nex Benedict, a bullied 16-year-old non-binary student in Oklahoma who died after classmates beat them in a girl’s bathroom. Jason Champion told Ziegler, “We find ourselves mourning another young life lost: Nex Benedict. We now live in a society that you have helped curate that is hateful and intolerant.”
When it was her turn, Ziegler sounded off about her detractors, saying they’d mischaracterized her policies including the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation. She singled out LGBTQ rights organization Equality Florida for creating “unnecessary fear.”
“There is a lot of intentional fearmongering,” Ziegler said, “and there was something talked about profiting off of—this is where people are able to raise money off of that. That’s just how it works. It is totally political. There’s no question about it.”
“But if you want to talk about fear, it is because there is [sic] a lot of headlines out there that are filled with false narratives.”
