Sex, Policy, and Spiritual War

Corruption isn’t a side issue in this race. It touches everything, from the price of groceries to who gets to run for office and how. This piece covers three things, and they’re more connected than they first appear. Sex is one of the oldest tools of leverage in politics, used to compromise people and then control them. Policy is what gets bent, blocked, or bought once that leverage exists, whether it’s a land use vote to continue overdeveloping or the cost of your grocery bill. And spiritual war is the only framework I’ve found that actually explains why the pattern keeps repeating: not a conspiracy with a single mastermind, but the slow spoiling of good people, one compromise at a time. Below, I’ll walk through all three

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Calling out corruption and presenting a positive vision are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they go hand in hand. One is what’s blocking the other. Fix the corruption, and the economy has a fighting chance. This isn’t a binary choice, despite what some politicians would have you believe.

Corruption affects every part of our economic lives. Every inflated grocery bill, every unaffordable mortgage, and every dollar wasted in Washington traces back to a system rigged by the same network of special interests, consultants, and developers who have controlled this party and this government for decades. You cannot fix the cost of living without first fixing who controls the levers of power.

But I’m not just calling things out. I’m calling for real economic revitalization:

Break up the Big Tech monopolies the way we broke up Ma Bell, and watch innovation and competition drive prices down again.

Ban omnibus spending bills so every dollar has to justify itself in public through single-item bills.

Reform H-1B visas so American workers stop getting undercut by companies importing cheaper labor.

Cut the size of government and let American enterprise breathe again.

These and other productive policies are blocked by special interests that profit from the continued corruption. Sydney Gruters wants to run as though she stands alone, as if her candidacy has nothing to do with her husband. But look at the actual resume, the actual connections, the actual money behind this campaign, and none of it is hers. It’s his. So his corruption is critical to educate and inform voters about her candidacy.

Joe Gruters has spent years building favor and leverage through means we’ll document in detail below. Sydney’s campaign is what that leverage buys: a seat of power, purchased not with her own record but with her husband’s network, and protected because protecting her protects the grift underneath it.

They’re good at this. Joe’s own business partner has already stood up roughly 80 dark money PACs, vehicles built to funnel developer money to favored candidates, first around the state and now nationally. The purpose is simple: sell off public resources to whoever bids highest, and hand the tab to taxpayers who never got a vote on the deal.

What follows is a documented pattern, drawn from named reporters, named outlets, and on-the-record sources, showing how sexual misconduct has been used as both a tool of control and a liability managed and buried by party leadership. Where I’m speculating rather than reporting something sourced, I say so directly.

A scandalous affair with another man didn’t stop Joe Gruters’ political career. It launched it. This is how corruption and the swamp work.

Jacob Engels, an insider and whistleblower in the Republican Party’s grifting ecosystem, describes the mechanism this way: “If they can’t compromise you with drugs, if they can’t compromise you with greed and get you into some weird contract, if they can’t compromise you with fame and power, they will compromise you sexually.” That’s the swamp’s playbook.

For Gruters, that moment traces to April 23, 2015, when activity between Gruters and a male friend was removed from Craigslist. As reported at the time: “Gruters refused to disclose the names of those who blackmailed him to this reporter, or did little to help get Normile and Zimmerman elected after he was viciously attacked on social media. According to Normile, during a conversation with Gruters and his close political associate, Jamie Miller, Miller stated that he believed Eric Robinson was responsible for the Craigslist items blackmailing Gruters in 2015.”

The original story was reported by Jon Susce in “Trump Endorses Gruters, an Anti-Trump, Neal-Establishment Flunky for Florida’s...” Susce wrote that Gruters “sold out to become a member of the Pat Neal/Carlos Beruff-led corrupt local political establishment machine that has turned Sarasota and Manatee into a cesspool of political corruption.” The reporter went on to write, “Gruters Florida Conservatives United PAC is supplemented by another Gruters PAC called, Friends of Joe Gruters. One of Gruters friends is PatNeal, who deposited a $50,000 check in Gruters PAC.” Susce also noted that both the LGBTQ movement and the white donor establishment in Sarasota became major political forces for Gruters to cultivate, part of the same uniparty machine he aligned with in 2015.

As Susce tells it, this is the point where Gruters switched sides, becoming the developer establishment’s favored candidate. The Sarasota Phoenix covered the same turn in “Switzerland: Joe Gruters Has Crossed the Line and Sold His Soul” (sarasotaphoenix.com).

Gruters was reportedly at a late-night bar after heavy drinking in Tallahassee, a known legislator hangout, when he allegedly attempted a salacious act with a male staffer on the ride back to his apartment.

Politico’s Matt Dixon reported on July 20, 2021: “the Republican Party of Florida investigated its own chair, Joe Gruters, over a sexual harassment allegation involving a legislative staffer, amid complaints from top party officials that the accusation had been covered up.” That cover-up involved the RPOF leadership at the time, including Christian Ziegler.

Joe Gruters and Christian Ziegler were inseparable in the early days of Vern Buchanan’s campaign, and they launched their political careers together. That history matters here, because Christian and Bridget Ziegler were later tied to a separate sexual scandal (their involvement in a threesome) that helped end Christian’s career.

That’s the point worth sitting with: this isn’t just about what someone does behind closed doors. It’s about leverage, and how private conduct gets turned into a tool of control. Many people believe Evan Power and others in the party pulled the strings to remove Christian once he’d become a liability. Ziegler’s own actions were immoral and hypocritical on their own terms, and they compromised his ability to represent the party and left him exposed to control by the same machine. Character matters. If someone has earned the public’s trust, they need to maintain it, and that means avoiding conduct that compromises their integrity through greed or moral failure.

Why did Gruters survive when Ziegler didn’t? Because Gruters could be trusted to do whatever the machine told him to do, under the threat of exposure. The unspoken deal reads something like this: you are only standing because we protected you, and we both know it. We’ll let you continue, but you’ll do our bidding. (See also: steveedwardfarley.substack.com)

I wasn’t sure what this was when I first heard about it. For anyone else who doesn’t know, OnlyFans is a subscription platform where users sell explicit content and personalized content directly to paying subscribers.

The reaction to this part of the story has mostly been a shrug: “we know, and we’re not shocked.” People are trying to hold onto some trust in their government officials, and it’s easier to look away than to face how normalized this kind of behavior has become

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The Daily Mail reported that, in addition to amateur adult-content accounts, Gruters was also connected to accounts offering dating advice. His conduct in this area does not appear to be an isolated incident.

In three separate alleged groping incidents, in Milwaukee, Charlotte, and Nashville, Jacob Engels, a confidant of the Gruters campaign, reportedly alerted the parties involved to what the alleged victims were facing, including the threat of being blackballed politically. Engels later received an unsolicited payment, which he describes as hush money. It’s also possible it was a thank-you payment for flagging the issue. The reason for the payment is not confirmed, and I’m presenting this part as speculation because it fits a broader pattern I believe is worth documenting, not because I can verify the payment’s purpose. (Read the full piece)

Myranda, a progressive journalist, compared notes and evidence with Engels and wrote about the broader pattern: “Along the way, controversies that might have ended a career in a more scrutinized environment are forgotten, minimized, or absorbed into the background noise of partisan politics.” (Read the full piece)

I have my own account from a witness regarding Anthony Pedicini, a political consultant who worked with Joe Gruters and Christian Ziegler on Vern Buchanan’s campaigns. When Gruters and Evan Power shut down the Manatee County Republican Party for refusing to support developer-backed candidates, they sent in Jordan Hoffman as a turnaround consultant. We worked with Jordan, got to know him, and built a friendship as we tried to set our differences aside for the general election.

During that time, Jordan told me about an alleged incident involving Pedicini: unwanted advances that Jordan said he immediately rebuffed, ending the matter there. I encouraged him to go public. He told me doing so would end his political career, and that he had children to support and couldn’t risk it. He never asked me to keep it private, and he has since passed away.

Gruters’ most recent scandal remains speculative, but it fits a documented pattern. Voters in FL-16 deserve straight talk, not a sanitized narrative. At a time when the media has largely lost the public’s trust, candidates owe voters the truth directly. I’m comfortable putting all of this on the table and letting voters decide for themselves. That’s why real debate and a fully informed electorate matter so much. As Jefferson put it: “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”

Separately, Max Goodman reportedly paid an unusual sum, allegedly to keep sexually harassed male RNC staffers quiet, or to make them go away, when all they wanted was assurance they wouldn’t be blacklisted.

Personal associations are part of how we vet people for office. Given how close the Gruters and Ziegler families were during their formative political years, it’s a fair question to ask how much overlap there was in judgment and conduct, though I want to be clear that’s a question, not a claim I can back with direct evidence.

This is how the political machine operates. Ask yourself: have you ever seen this many high-profile endorsements handed out with so little visible merit behind them? Those endorsements exist because the person receiving them can be trusted, not by We the People, but by the machine. There’s a reason for that trust. Sydney Gruters appears fully aligned with everything Joe has built. That alignment is, in a word, compromising.

What you’re looking at is more of the same brand of trusted corruption the Gruters name has come to represent, one that developers and the D.C. establishment know they can count on. The endorsements and the money behind them send a clear message: this is a family voters should think twice about trusting.

That pattern, of compromise built up slowly until it becomes leverage, is what I want to turn to now, because I think there’s a deeper explanation for it than politics alone.

When I say we’re in a spiritual war, I want to be clear about what that means and what it doesn’t. This isn’t a call to violence, and it isn’t a claim that people I disagree with are my enemies. Scripture is clear on that too: “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age” (Ephesians 6:12). The fight is against the patterns of corruption, deceit, and compromise that take hold of systems and the people inside them, not against any individual.

This kind of language has a long history in American public life. Faith has always shaped how leaders talk about justice, corruption, and reform, from the abolitionist movement to the civil rights movement to plenty of statehouse floors today. Naming something a spiritual battle isn’t a threat. It’s a way of saying the stakes are moral, not just political, and that the solution has to be more than a policy fix. It has to be a change of heart, starting with our own.

Some will hear religious language from a politician and assume it crosses a constitutional line, but that’s a common misreading of what separation of church and state actually means. That phrase isn’t in the Constitution. It comes from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote reassuring the Danbury Baptists that government would not establish a state church or interfere with their free exercise of faith. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from establishing a religion and protects the free exercise of it. It says nothing about elected officials setting aside their convictions when they speak, govern, or explain why they believe what they believe. Every lawmaker who has ever invoked justice, human dignity, or the common good has been drawing on some moral framework. Mine happens to be my faith. That’s not a violation of the Constitution. That’s exactly the free exercise it protects.

With that said, I’d like to share a biblical concept that illuminates much of the corruption laid out above.

The Bible describes Babylon as a spiritual city, one God warns us to leave: “Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues. For her sins have reached to heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities” (Revelation 18:4b-5).

How do we come out of a city we can’t see with our eyes? Scripture gives us a list of characteristics that help us recognize, with spiritual eyes, the city that seeks to encompass all of us.

There’s a lot to learn from Babylon’s history in Daniel and elsewhere in the Bible, but for brevity, I’ll focus on Revelation 18:11-13: “And the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her, for no one buys their merchandise anymore: merchandise of gold and silver, precious stones and pearls... and bodies and souls of men.” This spiritual city doesn’t just participate in the world’s commerce. It dominates it. And that commerce includes the bodies and souls of men. Bodies means slavery in all its forms. Souls of men means mankind’s compromise: the decision to look the other way, to turn a blind eye. That’s how leverage grows into deeper compromise of integrity.

Politics appears to be the epicenter of it. Greed, blackmail, intimidation, and extortion touch other industries, but in politics they are the equation. Candidates are groomed for years until they become “trusted.”

Evil isn’t an equal and opposite force against good. It isn’t a yin-yang situation. Evil is the spoiling of what is good. Saying “love is love” spoils the conditions God has set for love. God is love, and that love has conditions. The enemy masquerades as an angel of light to deceive, offering a false imitation of what is good.

The enemy of our souls comes to kill, steal, and destroy. He spoils love. He spoils what is good and calls it evil, and he calls evil good.

Yet God can heal and forgive what has been spoiled. So when I see people who have been bruised, beaten down, and abused by the enemy make the decision to come out of Babylon, I applaud their efforts. Those who have the guts to change, to call out the evil and the compromising attempts made against their souls, deserve support even though they shouldn’t feel embarrassed. This is where we need a “me too” movement: one that calls out the corruptors of our souls and helps people come out of Babylon. I want to be clear: I am for, and I will support, anyone I see genuinely coming out of that corruption and darkness. That support isn’t conditional on politics. It’s for anyone with the courage to leave Babylon behind.

I applaud the efforts of Jason Bearden and Jacob Engels in coming out of Babylon.

Jason Bearden wrapped himself in a Bible and then voted against his constituents on the wetland buffers, doing the bidding of developers instead of the people who elected him. Later, he reversed that vote. That reversal is him coming out of Babylon, in my opinion. I’d like to see him go further and come forward publicly about who groomed him and how the pressure was applied to get that first vote. I understand why that’s hard. Admitting you were manipulated is embarrassing, especially when you’re still untangling how it happened. But we already know the shape of it. Political consultants, the ones hired to “consult,” aren’t just running campaigns. They’re managing candidates, and managing a candidate means knowing exactly which vote to move and when.

Jacob Engels battled drugs, lies, and a host of other issues. He was an insider in this system, close enough to see how it operates from within, and he’s chosen to become a whistleblower instead of staying silent, calling out what he sees within the Gruters orbit. That shift, from participant to someone willing to expose what he saw, is its own kind of coming out of Babylon.

None of this is to say the system is made up of purely evil people. There are plenty of decent people caught up in it, through ambition, through arrogance, through the pull of power itself. Mike Rahn, Amanda Ballard, Tara Poulton, and Sydney Gruters are, I’m sure, decent people. But decent people are exactly what Babylon spoils. It doesn’t need to manufacture evil from nothing. It just takes what’s good in someone and corrupts it a little at a time, compromise by compromise, until they no longer recognize how far they’ve come from where they started. That’s the whole pattern this piece describes: evil isn’t a separate force standing against good. It’s good, spoiled. And that’s what’s happened, in various degrees, to people who probably started out wanting to serve well.

Empires rise and fall on this same corruption, over and over, going back to Babylon itself. That part isn’t new, and it isn’t going away. What changes is whether any one person decides they’re done participating in it, and done funding, voting for, or defending the ones who won’t. “Come out of her, my people” isn’t a plural instruction waiting on everyone else to move first. It’s addressed to each of us, individually, right now.

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Thank you for your support.

Eddie Speir

Candidate for U.S. Congress, Florida’s 16th District

Founder & Superintendent, Inspiration Academy

If you’re gonna take down a RINO you’re gonna need a Speir. Vote Eddie Speir in the Republican primary on August 18th.