Angie Nixon, the Democratic Socialist who upset a $16.3 million primary opponent to win Florida's Democratic Senate nomination, is now defending drag performances for children, and says she has taken her own kids to them.
Nixon made the remarks during an August interview on the "Legal AF" podcast, days after a federal appeals court upheld a Florida law restricting minors' access to drag shows. Asked by host Melba Pearson how the ruling would shape her policy agenda in Washington, the state representative from Jacksonville dismissed the law as an attack on marginalized communities and insisted drag performances pose no risk to children.
Fox News Digital reported Nixon's full exchange with Pearson, in which the candidate framed the court-backed restrictions as ideological overreach rather than child protection.
Nixon told Pearson:
"I don't understand, like, there's no sexualization at a drag show! It's just people dressing up and singing and performing! I've taken my children to drag shows, and it's fun! It's entertainment. It's wholesome entertainment and it's nothing wrong. It's just like, I don't get it."
She went further, casting the Florida law as part of a broader cultural campaign. "What that is telling me is that there's an attack on an 'othering' of people who don't look like Donald Trump," Nixon said. "They want to create this country that looks a certain way, that acts a certain way, that believes a certain way. And it's frustrating."
Nixon's comments carry extra weight because of how she arrived on the Senate ballot. The Democratic Socialist and DSA member defeated Alexander Vindman, the retired Air Force officer and establishment-backed candidate, by more than 10 percentage points in the Democratic primary, despite Vindman's $16.3 million campaign war chest dwarfing Nixon's roughly $1 million.
The upset was part of a broader DSA surge in Florida primaries that tested the reach of the party's socialist wing against its more traditional candidates.
Nixon now faces Trump-backed Sen. Ashley Moody in November for the right to serve the remaining two years of Marco Rubio's Senate term. Her comments about drag shows and children offer Florida voters a clear preview of the ideological distance between the two candidates.
The sharpest pushback came from Jaimee Michell, founder of Gays Against Groomers, who told Fox News Digital that Nixon's framing contradicts widely available footage of drag performances involving children.
"There is no shortage of video of drag performers in pasties, thongs, or barely-there costumes grinding, twerking, and simulating sex in front of children, including babies and toddlers, while those kids are encouraged to stuff dollar bills into their outfits. That is not 'people dressing up and singing.' That is adult sexual performance. Calling it 'wholesome entertainment' is gaslighting."
Michell did not hold back about Nixon's personal decision to bring her own children. "Nixon taking her own children to these shows does not make it wholesome. It makes her judgment a warning," Michell said.
She also pointed directly to the legal rationale behind the Florida statute Nixon was criticizing. "Florida passed a law to keep minors out of lewd live performances for a reason," Michell said. "This is not about banning adults from performing. It is about whether we are going to keep pretending that exposing kids to nearly nude adults collecting tips is just 'fun.' It isn't."
The DSA-aligned faction's growing influence in Democratic primaries has put candidates like Nixon on the national stage, and her drag-show remarks illustrate how far left that faction is willing to push on cultural issues that most parents view through a protective lens.
Theo Wold, a former assistant attorney general who served as White House deputy assistant for domestic policy under President Donald Trump, connected Nixon's position to what he described as a deliberate ideological project.
"Drag has always been sexualized entertainment, that's why it originated in bars and nightclubs in front of adult audiences. On one hand, DSA candidates like Rashida Tlaib endorsed Angie Nixon, want to Islamify America by opening our borders, and electing radical Muslim clerics to high office, especially our courts; on the other hand, they want to bring drag performers to kids."
Wold added: "It doesn't make sense until you understand their larger project, which is to destabilize Western civilization, whether by undermining our legal regime or by destabilizing the nuclear family."
Curtis Houck, managing editor of the NewsBusters division of the Media Research Center, predicted the major networks would bury Nixon's remarks. "Needless to say, it's doubtful this will be a comment that's played on the regular across the liberal, elitist networks like ABC or CNN in the months to come as proof she's outside the mainstream," Houck said.
He went further, calling Nixon's characterization of drag shows flatly false: "It's a completely cockamamie claim that, if the so-called fact-checkers like Politifact were honest brokers, they would have already penned an item with a pants-on-fire rating."
Nixon's comments arrived against a specific legal backdrop. Florida's Protection of Children Act restricts minors' access to drag shows. A federal appeals court recently upheld the law, a ruling Pearson herself referenced at the top of the podcast interview when she noted the court had cleared the way for enforcement.
Pearson appeared to mix up two separate Florida statutes during the interview, describing the appeals court ruling as upholding the Parental Rights in Education law, commonly called "Don't Say Gay" by its critics, rather than the Protection of Children Act. The Parental Rights in Education law concerns children's education, not drag performances. Nixon did not correct the conflation and responded as though the two laws were the same issue.
The distinction matters. The court ruling Pearson referenced dealt specifically with whether the state can bar minors from sexually explicit live performances. Nixon's answer treated that restriction as cultural bigotry rather than child protection, a framing that puts her at odds not only with the appeals court but with the Florida legislature that passed the law.
That kind of gap between progressive orthodoxy and mainstream voter sentiment has surfaced in Democratic primaries across the country, where establishment and progressive factions increasingly disagree on how far left the party can go without losing general-election voters.
Nixon's general-election opponent, Sen. Ashley Moody, carries Trump's endorsement and represents the kind of traditional-values candidacy that Florida has rewarded in recent cycles. Nixon, by contrast, is running as an unapologetic DSA-aligned progressive who just told a podcast audience that taking children to drag shows is fun, wholesome, and nothing to worry about.
The broader national trajectory of DSA-aligned progressives suggests that positions popular in deep-blue primaries do not always translate well to statewide races. Nixon's primary upset proved the DSA's grassroots strength. Her drag-show remarks will test whether that strength survives contact with a general electorate that includes millions of parents.
Michell, the Gays Against Groomers founder, offered a blunt closing assessment: "Nixon is wrong, the footage proves it, and Florida voters already know it."
When a Senate candidate calls sexually charged adult entertainment "wholesome" for children, and a federal appeals court has already ruled the other way, voters do not need a fact-checker to tell them where the mainstream is.
