Ziegler, Media and Morality
By Sam Stone
There’s a tape. For two days, the media has known that Christian Ziegler, the Florida GOP chair under fire over accusations of sexual assault by a former partner who reportedly maintained a long-term relationship with Ziegler and his Mom’s for Liberty wife Bridget, had turned over to police a video tape of the alleged encounter that appears to largely refute the accusations made against him. In any reasonable media landscape, this should be big news: a prominent official is accused of rape, then produces video evidence of his innocence. It’s juicy. It’s timely. It is most certainly news.
But since the new revelation didn’t meet the media’s primary objective – trashing Republicans – they sat on it. If this report is accurate, and there’s little reason to believe it’s not, it’s extremely unlikely that Christian Ziegler will be prosecuted. Nor should he be. But, regardless, his life in politics – and his wife’s – are likely over.
A simple Google search and checking the Miami Herald this morning revealed there has been no coverage, despite their extensive past reporting on the topic. Florida daily news stations refuse to cover the existence of the tape that significantly alters their narrative.
Ziegler and his wife are fools. If you want to be a moral crusader, you have to live a moral life. And you don’t need to be a moral crusader in the GOP anymore. It’s not like Donald Trump is a paragon of fidelity and traditional values. Skip the morality lectures and live the life you want. Or engage in them, but then you need to live the life you preach.
Of course, as much as the Ziegler’s poor choices, this is yet another case that highlights the perfidy of the mainstream media, and the horrific damage our universities are doing to this country. When Talking Points Memo finally became the first national outlet to report on the existence of the tape, they were sure to include this line: “his anti-gay, anti-trans crusading wife has been revealed as someone who has sex with other women”.
Here’s the thing: perhaps a more thorough search would turn up something, but I can’t find anything Bridget Ziegler said that is anti-gay. She has certainly been a crusader against the trans indoctrination and sexualization of children, but there’s a huge distance between being against sexualizing and mutilating children and being “anti-gay”. Plenty of lesbian feminists have come out against trans-ideology. So why the anti-gay attack? Because, lack of evidence be damned, it fits the narrative, and Christian Ziegler being innocent of a crime does not. So, once again, journalism takes a back seat to “messaging”.
As far as crimes against this country, the media is doing far worse than Christian and Bridget Ziegler ever could. The entire industry is a wreck. And it’s a wreck tied to the same disaster we saw on display this week in Congress: our universities. The Rotten Ivy Meltdown by the Presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT highlighted something those of us have been paying attention to have known for years: somewhere along the way, American universities stopped being institutions of learning, and remade themselves into ideological indoctrination centers that Joseph Stalin would be jealous of.
Since then, every facet of American institutional life has been damaged – some perhaps beyond repair – by the hateful, racist, envious ideology of DEI. The “leaders” our universities are producing (as most clearly evidenced by the vacuous, morally and intellectually bereft Presidents of the Rotten Ivy’s) are no such thing, and the cultural rot they’re spreading is far more invasive and morally corrupt than the salacious bedroom activities of couple in Florida who like threesomes but think mutilating children in the name of politics is a bad idea.
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Sam Stone only and not his co-host Chuck Warren or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.