Surely you find chilling and stomach-turning the rants of the likes of New York City Mayor Zoran Momdani and Democratic Socialist candidates Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier.

Valdez touts the “Medicare for all” slogans; federal funding for all abortions and transgender surgeries; abolish ICE; free federal funding for all college education, including living expenses; “unions for all”; “housing for all”; a federal jobs guarantee; and ensuring “everyone has a right to living wages and paid time off.” Chevalier has said on X she wants to “seize the means of production”; abolish police, prisons and borders. Essentially, she mirrors and aligns with Valdez: eliminate entrepreneurial capitalism; convert to tyrannical collectivism; and hate all Jews and Israel.

It’s incomprehensible and tragic how completely ignorant and pathetic all of these Democratic Party communists and socialists are. Whom do they think will pay for all of this?

What’s more, do you think Mr. “Warmth of Collectivism” Momdani or any of his associates has a clue that when the Pilgrims tried collectivism on Plymouth Colony they nearly starved themselves out of existence? It was only after Gov. William Bradford converted the colonists to owning private property and capitalism that the colonists produced surpluses of food and began to flourish.

Or do you think they have any idea that another infamous collectivist, Mao Zedong, was responsible over his three decade reign for the deaths of between 30 million and 45 million Chinese people? Deaths from starvation brought on by Zedong’s complete collectivization of “the means of production”?

Or what about that great Soviet, Joseph Stalin, who clocked in at 9 million deaths — 3 million from executions and imprisonments and another 6.5 million during the great famine in 1932 and 1933?

And yet this communist utopia thinking has spread like COVID among so many “college educated” young Americans.

Mind boggling. And scary.

It feels somewhat like the previous scariest political time during the turmoil-ridden, anti-Vietnam era of the 1960s. The dope-smoking, acid-dropping, gun-toting radicals of the Students for a Democratic Society rocked the country with their anti-establishment, anti-capitalism bombings and killings. But back then, those reprobates did not try to infiltrate elected offices.

Electing and giving power to today’s idiots would be horrific.

Do not dismiss the possibility.

Indeed, to that end, it would be a worthwhile warning to all of us — here and everywhere in the U.S. — to heed and understand one of the most insightful essays of the late Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. In his 1944 classic book, “A Road to Serfdom,” he devotes an entire chapter to: “Why the Worst Get on Top.”

We are living it.

Conditions for the worst

Hayek describes stages that result in the worst getting on top. You certainly can apply them to some of our elections today.

He first describes the conditions preceding “the suppression of democratic institutions and the creation of a totalitarian regime.”

“In this stage, it is the general demand for quick and determined government action that is the dominating element in the situation, dissatisfaction with the slow and cumbersome course of democratic procedure which makes action for action’s sake the goal.”

You can hear that in the rhetoric of so many candidates today no matter the party. They’re constantly spouting their disappointment in and the inaction of the incumbents. “It’s time for change” the call goes. You remember “Hope and change.” They all chant promises of how they’re going to make our lives better. Blah, blah, blah.

Hayek: “It is then the (candidate) or the party who seems strong and resolute enough ‘to get things done’ who exercises the greatest appeal.” Sound like Trump? In New York City, it was the flowery demagoguery of Momdani versus the washed-up Andrew Cuomo.

Hayek: “‘Strong’ in this sense means not merely a numerical majority — it is the ineffectiveness of parliamentary majorities with which people are dissatisfied.” He has that right — e.g. Congress, no matter the party.

Hayek: “What they will seek is somebody with such solid support as to inspire confidence that he can carry out whatever he wants.”

That somebody, Hayek says, must also do this: It “depends on the leader first collecting round him a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that totalitarian discipline which they are to impose by force upon the rest.”

What’s more, Hayek says, it doesn’t take a majority; it takes “the largest single group whose members agree sufficiently to make unified direction of all affairs …”

In forming this “fairly homogenous group,” Hayek says, there are three main reasons this group will come “from the worst elements of any society. … The principles on which such a group would be selected will be almost entirely negative.”

Three Negative Principles

ν Principle #1: “First, the higher the education and intelligence of individuals become, the more their tastes and views are differentiated and the less likely they are to agree on a particular hierarchy of values.

“If we wish to find a high degree of uniformity in outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive and ‘common’ instincts and tastes prevail,” Hayek wrote.

“This does not mean that the majority of people have low moral standards; it merely means that the largest group of people whose values are very similar are the people with low standards.

“It is, as it were, the lowest common denominator which unites the largest number of people. … It will be those who form the ‘mass’ in the derogatory sense of the term, the least original and independent, who will be able to put the weight of their numbers behind their particular ideals.”

ν Principle #2: Because the first group will not be large enough “to give sufficient weight to the leader’s endeavors,” he will have to convert more people to his or her creed.

The candidate must gain “the support of the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions but are ready to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.

“It will be those whose vague and imperfectly formed ideas are easily swayed and whose passions and emotions are readily aroused who will thus swell the ranks of the totalitarian party.”

ν Principle #3: Hayek says this one is the most important. “It is easier for people to agree on a negative program — on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off — than on any positive task.”

We hear it daily: Hatred of Jews, Israel, billionaires, corporations and, locally, developers.

Ginning up this hatred and envy, Hayek wrote, is “always employed by those who seek … the unreserved allegiance of huge masses.”

Be an informed voter

How can we counter this?

It starts with education. In this 250th year of our nation’s founding, it’s a reminder that we must repeat and repeat with our family members — young and old — that nowhere else in the world is a nation rooted in the principles that “all men are created equal” and that we have “unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We are in charge of our own destiny. Government is to be our servant.

Likewise, as the 2026 elections draw near, be an informed voter. Remember that the Revolutionary War was about liberty, and the Constitution was about limiting government. Here’s a litmus test to pose to every candidate: What takes a higher precedence — individual liberty or the collective community?

When James Madison wrote in the Federalist papers, Madison envisioned those serving in office as “enlightened leaders” who “would demonstrate their wisdom and virtue more by what they did not do than by what they did,” wrote Isaac Kramnick in “James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay — The Federalist Papers.”

“They would not pass unjust laws that interfered with private rights. They would respect liberty, justice and property and run a limited government.” In Federalist 62, Madison warned that “excess of lawmaking” and “voluminous laws” would be the “diseases” most likely to occur.

And then there was John Adams. He believed for our republic to succeed, Americans needed to be virtuous — to do the right thing, the right way, for the right reason.

So look for the virtuous candidates who embrace individual liberty over the collective mob — so the worst will not get on top.

They both stink.

Nevertheless, when the choice was Trump versus Harris, we sided with closing the borders; banning men from girls’ sports; no electric-car mandates; less regulation; lower taxation; no DEI military; and emptying the federal swamp.

Few paid much attention to Donald Trump’s tariff talk. Eyes glaze over quickly when candidates start talking about “balance of payment deficits,” and “reserve currency exchange rates.”

But Trump buttressed his support when he talked about those things in terms that resonate with the average American: “China has been ripping us off for decades. No more!” … “We’re going put America first and bring back all those beautiful manufacturing jobs.” … “No more unfair trade.”

Oo-rah!

But in a repeat of the Obama and Biden elections — of the feckless national media not investigating Obama’s anti-American beliefs; or Biden’s open-border plans — the press did nothing to goad Trump into explaining how his tariff plans were going to affect our lives. All we heard were the standard Trump promises — more manufacturing jobs for us than ever before, than in the history of the world.

So now we are getting what we got the first time around — Trump’s chaos.

Liberation Day? Ha. No one is feeling liberated. Quite the opposite.

The stories of business disruption and chaos have become a tsunami of adverse consequences. Here are a few examples from local conversations in the past few days:

• Mark Rutledge, CEO of Sarasota-based World Precision Instruments, maker of sophisticated instruments that analyze human cells in the development of pharmaceuticals, told us WPI is shifting supply-chain strategies to minimize the cost impact of the tariffs.

His company has parts manufactured in Germany and China and distribution offices in a dozen countries. “We’re not only redirecting supply routes, we’re also looking at dual sourcing in countries other than China,” Rutledge told us. No doubt about it, he believes, WPI’s sales will decline.

• Despite Trump’s recent cherry-picking for automakers, a Longboat Key resident who has been a manufacturing engineer and executive for multiple companies in the automotive industry told us if Trump sticks with his mayhem, some automotive suppliers can easily fall into bankruptcy.

Consider: If automakers require suppliers — many of which import parts from Asia — to live with pre-tariff contractual pricing and not pass along the cost of the tariffs to the manufacturers, those higher costs will wipe out the suppliers’ already thin profit margins.

And if that occurs, parts availability will contract. Manufacturers ​in turn will be forced to curtail production, reducing the supply of new cars and, inevitably, ​result in raising the sale prices of all cars and loss of jobs throughout the chain — contrary to what Trump has promised.

• A personal story: Daughter Kate runs a 450-student ballet school in Colorado Springs, which includes a retail store that supplies students with ballet shoes and dancewear. For 2025, the plan was to open a second store.

Last week, suppliers notified her of growing disruptions to manufacturing and shipments. We put plans for the new store on hold.

Stories like this are everywhere. Everyone is adversely affected.

And yet, from what we’ve gleaned, there seems to be only seven people who think Trump’s reciprocal tariff plans make sense: Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Trade adviser Peter Navarro, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Steve Miran, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.

But now put those seven names next to 25 of the nation’s most noted conservative and libertarian economists and 1,700 more economics professors, fellows, scholars, policy experts and business leaders, all of whom came out April 18 against Trump’s tariffs. All of those noted economic experts authored and signed “The Anti-Tariff Declaration: Reaffirming America’s Prosperity and A Call to Reject Harmful Tariff Policies (Go to: anti-tariff.org/#declaration).

“For 250 years,” the declaration says, “the United States of America has demonstrated to the world that a people left free to innovate and produce for themselves, and for all who trade with them, will enjoy increasing abundance, higher standards of living, and greater security both economically and militarily.”

In one of the bullet points, the declaration says: “The administration’s protectionist policies repeat the catastrophic errors of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, which was opposed by 1,028 economists. These scholars understood that protectionist tariffs would provoke a retaliatory trade war, thereby exacerbating the very same Great Depression that it was intended to solve. Rates resembling Smoot-Hawley are being imposed upon a significantly more integrated global economy, risking a similarly devastating outcome for ordinary Americans.”

One of the 25 co-authors of the declaration is Florida State University’s eminent economist, Randall G. Holcombe. We asked Professor Holcombe to explain for our readers the concept and effects of “balance of payments deficits.”

Contrary to the president’s pronouncements of how horrible they are, Holcombe shows how trade deficits actually benefit Americans (see “In truth, our trade deficits benefit Americans” below).

Ever since Adam Smith penned “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776 — 250 years ago — economists the world over have never wavered over their support for free trade and the harm tariffs inflict on the masses.

But Donald Trump and his advisers apparently know better. Such hubris.

To be sure, there is much in the federal government that needs disruption and elimination. But the question on so many minds is this: Did Trump and his advisers not do what we all do when we’re about to make a big decision? We ask ourselves: What are the likely consequences of the decision?

Paraphrasing economist/philosopher Thomas Sowell: Worldwide trade wars have a devastating history. “All that happens is you get a great reduction in international trade.” What’s more, he notes, if Trump is constantly changing the rules, uncertainty will reign. “That is a formula for having people hang on to their money until they figure out what you’re going to do,” Sowell says. “And when a lot of people hang onto their money, you can get results such as you got during the Great Depression of the 1930s.”

Trump can’t help himself. But by this time in his long business career, he and his advisers should know this tried-and-true business maxim: Spend a little, learn a lot. Try a little, learn a lot. If it works, do more. If it doesn’t, stop.

And there is this one: When you make a mistake, admit it and fix it.

President Trump: On this, we’re not winning and won’t.

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Editor’s Note: The following appeared March 20 on YourObserver.com/Opinion and on Rescue.substack.com. A an abbreviated version appeared in the March 20 editions of the Sarasota Observer and Longboat Observer.

To their credit, the organizers of the Ringling College Town Hall Lecture Series over the decades have attracted as speakers some of the most powerful and influential world leaders in modern times.

That is quite extraordinary for a small arts college and its library association in the minor market of Sarasota, Fla.

As many long-time Town Hall attendees know, however, more often than not these world and national leaders seldom reveal, or have revealed, inner-circle details and never-been-told newsworthy information. For obvious reasons, to an extent.

What’s more, attendees also have witnessed speakers such as John Brennan and James Comey avoid addressing what the audiences really wanted to hear — the truth.

On April 14, the Town Hall audience should expect more of the same — more obfuscation and evasion — when Dr. Anthony Fauci takes the stage. He has been the master of dishonest discourse over the past five years.

Indeed, among the most accomplished doctors and scientists from around the world agree unequivocally that the following is true:

Dr. Anthony Fauci is the, or one of the, most deceptive and dishonest American public servants in modern history. The evidence is irrefutable.

HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. and a team of lawyers present documented evidence in their book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” which we urge you to read. Likewise, similar evidence is documented in “The Pfizer Papers,” by Naomi Wolf and Amy Kelly, another book worth reading.

Dr. Peter McCullough, the nation’s most published physician in the field of kidney-cardiac disease and a pioneer in creating effective non-vaccine, life-saving treatments for COVID-19, told us:

“Of the 1.2 million Americans who died with COVID-19, it’s my estimate 85% could’ve been saved by early treatment protocols that Dr. Anthony Fauci strongly suppressed.

“To make matters worse, Fauci was a relentless promoter of the disastrous COVID-19 vaccines … Sadly, we have between 550,000 to 600,000 Americans who have died as a result of COVID-19 vaccination. Fauci, in my view, is guilty of two crimes: fraud and mass negligent homicide.”

Dr. Tess Lawrie, CEO of the World Council for Health in the United Kingdom and often called “The Conscience of Medicine” for her research integrity, said of Fauci in an email to us:

“His reign at NIAID, marked by deep deception and an apparent anti-human ideology, has harmed the health of millions of Americans and of billions of people worldwide.

“However, he was not acting alone. Dr. Fauci and others complicit in this long-standing deception, must be held accountable for the damage done, as transparency, truth and justice must ultimately prevail.”

So, after Dr. Fauci delivers his lecture to the Town Hall audience April 14, rather than lob him the usual, non-confrontational questions during the Q&A session, we have composed 33 detailed questions to which Fauci owes answers to the world and American people.

We’re publishing 17 of the questions on this page. To read all 33, go to YourObserver.com/Opinion.

WUHAN & LOCKDOWNS

1) Why did you deny your/NIH’s role in the gain of function research associated with SARS-CoV-2?

2) Why did you so vehemently deny the Wuhan lab leak “theory” — now considered to be a fact — when all evidence showed it was most likely that COVID got introduced into the human population?

3) Why did you recommend universal masking when you knew it was ineffective for preventing transmission of viruses, especially since you had previously admitted that?

4) Why did you recommend social distancing when it had no scientific basis and was only based on a high school science experiment by a New Mexican teenager?

5) Why did you support closing schools, as well, downplay the mental and educational fallout to children, knowing the minuscule risk of COVID to that age group, as well as the extremely small risk of them transmitting it to other age groups?

6) Why didn’t you support targeted care for the most at risk groups instead of applying it to the general population who was at far less risk?

FAILURE OF HEALTH AGENCIES

7) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in “The Real Anthony Fauci,” wrote that not once in your press briefings from March to May 2020 did you ever instruct Americans how to bolster their immune response to COVID. Not once did you mention avoiding tobacco, to get plenty of sunlight, maintain adequate Vitamin D levels, lose weight or avoid sugar, soft drinks, processed foods and chemical residues, all of which amplify inflammation and compromise your immune responses.

Nor did you advise the use of zinc, which has been a widely peer-reviewed antidote to viral replication. Said Dr. Pierre Kory, a widely acclaimed critical care specialist: “It is absolutely shocking that he recommended no outpatient care, not even Vitamin D despite the fact he takes it himself and much of the country is Vitamin D deficient.”

Why did you not advise Americans of these steps?

8) By Sept. 30, 2021, the U.S., with 4% of the world’s population, suffered 14.5% of total COVID deaths worldwide — 2,107 per 1,000,000.

Now consider the following comments:

Dr. McCullough told Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: “Using repurposed drugs (e.g. ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine), we could have ended this pandemic by May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives.”

What’s more, Drs. Ryan Cole, David Brownstein, Harvey Risch, Kory and McCullough, all FLCCC front-line COVID specialists, “independently told me (RFK) the same thing. The relentless malpractice of deliberately withholding early effective COVID treatments, of forcing the use of toxic remdesivir, may have unnecessarily killed up to 500,000 Americans in hospitals.”

How do you respond to these statements?

9) Dr. Kory: “The outcome we should have been trying to prevent is hospitalizations. You don’t just sit around and wait for an infected patient to become ill. Dr. Fauci’s treatment strategies all began once all these under-medicated patients were hospitalized. By that time, it was too late for many of them. It was insane. It was perverse. It was unethical.”

Please comment on Dr. Kory’s statements.

10) Drs. McCullough and Kory told RFK our national public health leaders failed to perform the essential duty of a public health regulator during modern pandemics: “To publish the best early treatment protocols on NIH’s website and then establish communication lines call centers to foster consultation and information sharing; broadcast and update the latest remedies and continually escalate public knowledge about the most successful strategies.”

Why did you or the NIH not do that?

11) Did you ever disclose to the American public that NIH under your watch had invested $6 billion in taxpayer money into the Moderna vaccine and that your agency was a co-owner of the patents and stood to collect royalties?

If not, why not. If so, when did you disclose that?

12) Why did you not see this relationship as an obvious conflict of interest to be shared with the American people?

DISCREDITING HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE

13) How do you explain that after hydroxychloroquine had been used worldwide safely for 65 years, on June 15, 2020 — even after multiple studies in China, Finland, Canada and Saudi Arabia showed the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID — the FDA sent out an alert saying hydroxychloroquine is dangerous and that it required a level of monitoring only available at hospitals?

14) RFK reported how the World Health Organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation financed and were behind studies in which lethal doses of hydroxychloroquine were administered to people, rather than administered the standard treatment dose.

RFK reported that hydroxychloroquine was administered in these tests to subjects who already were critically ill with comorbidities instead of administering the drug in the early onset of Covid, which was the recommended protocol at the time.

What evidence do you have to refute that these studies were deliberately intended to show that hydroxychloroquine was ineffective?

15) In March 2020 HHS asked the nation’s large pharmaceutical companies to donate 63 million doses of hydroxychloroquine and 2 million of chloroquine — more than enough to supply virtually every gerontology ward patient in America — to the Strategic National Stockpile.

Why was this done — even though you and others knew the drug was safe?

16) On May 22, 2020, the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world, the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, published results of studies by an obscure Illinois company, Surgisphere Corp., proclaiming hydroxychloroquine ineffective.

Then, in a May 27, 2020, interview with CNN, you stated about hydroxychloroquine “the scientific data is really quite evident now about the lack of efficacy.”

Shortly thereafter, these studies were exposed as fraudulent and became regarded as “the most momentous fraud in the history of scientific publishing.”

But even after this scandal was exposed, and the journals retracted their articles, RFK says you let the lie stand that hydroxychlorquine was ineffective.

Instead of launching an investigation into this fraud and publicly apologizing, RFK says, “you and the medical establishment simply ignored the wrongful conduct and persevered in your plan to deny global population access to life-saving hydroxychloroquine.”

Why did you do that — even though you knew that hydroxychloroquine was effective when it was administered early in the onset of COVID?

17) Why did you persist in discrediting hydroxychloroquine? You kept declaring that no clinical trials indicated its efficacy, while at the same time you did not disclose that none of the trials used as the basis for that conclusion involved giving the medication in the first five to seven days after the onset of COVID, when the drug is most effective.

Instead all of the trials to which you referred targeted patients who were already sick enough to be hospitalized.

How do you explain this obvious deception?

18) The Philippines, Poland, Israel, Turkey, Spain, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Niger, Congo, Ivory Coast, Bangladesh, Senegal, Pakistan, Serbia, Nigeria and Ukraine, among other nations, all allowed access to hydroxychloroquine.

According to court filings by attorney Andrew Schlafly, who represented the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, “The mortality rate from COVID-19 in these countries that allowed access to hydroxychloroquine is only 1/10 the mortality rate in countries where there has been interference with this medication such as the United States.”

And yet you, the public health agencies and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation persisted in denying Americans access to this drug. Will you admit and acknowledge that with all of the worldwide data that existed in 2020, you, in fact, knew the drug was effective?

Furthermore, will you admit you, the HHS, FDA, the WHO, the Gates Foundation and major pharmaceutical companies all participated in an intentional campaign to discredit hydroxychloroquine, even though all of you knew that it was effective in treating the early onset of COVID in 2020?

If your answer is you will not admit that, how can you convince us that you are not lying?

19) On Page 34 of “The Real Anthony Fauci,” it says: In June 2020, “noting more than 50 hydroxychloroquine studies, Dr. Meryl Nass, who has extensively studied hydroxychloroquine, said, “If people were treated prophylactically with this drug using only two tablets weekly as is done in some areas and some occupational groups in India, there would probably be at least 50% fewer cases after exposure.”

What’s more, beginning June 27, 2020, Dr. Ness began a list of deceptive strategies that “the Fauci/Pharma/Gates cartel” used to control the narrative on hydroxychloroquine and deny Americans access to this effective remedy.

The list grew to 58 separate strategies. “It is remarkable,” she observed, how “a large series of events, taking place over the past months produced a unified message about hydroxychloroquine and produced similar policies about the drug in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Western Europe. The message is that generic, inexpensive, hydroxychloroquine (costing only $1 to produce a full course) is dangerous.”

You repeatedly insisted you would not allow hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 until its efficacy was proven in randomized, double blind placebo studies. And yet, you did not commission trials to study the early use of hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and Zithromax remedy. In fact, RFK reported that you canceled two sponsored trials of outpatient hydroxychloroquine before completion.

True? If so, why did you not commission hydroxychloroquine studies?

DISCREDITING IVERMECTIN

20) Throughout 2020, there were multiple legitimate studies confirming the effectiveness of ivermectin. In addition, countries all over the world were reporting how ivermectin was hugely successful in reducing the outbreak and deaths from COVID-19.

COVID-19 cases dropped 14-fold in regions of Peru where it was distributed. A Belgian physician in Miami began using it in March 2020 and saw an immediate increase in recoveries, one of the early signs that ivermectin alone could end the pandemic. He also published his astonishing success in the leading scientific journal for respiratory diseases — not exactly hidden knowledge.

In January 2021, well into the pandemic, three leading COVID physicians, Drs. Kory, Paul Marik and Andrew Hill presented data to the National Institutes of Health COVID-19 Treatment Guideline Panel, with Kory testifying that:

“IVM could reduce hospitalizations by almost 90% and deaths by almost 75%. If hydroxychloroquine and IVM had been widely used instead of systematically suppressed, we could have prevented at least 500,000 deaths and 4.8 million hospitalizations.”

And yet, in the face of persistent evidence of the effectiveness of IVM, the FDA, the European Medical Association and the WHO all issued statements advising against the use of ivermectin for COVID-19.

On Aug. 16, 2021, the CDC ordered doctors to stop prescribing ivermectin.

On Aug. 17, your organization, NIAID, recommended against ivermectin use to combat COVID-19.

In early September 2021, after the FDA, the CDC and NIAID all called for stopping the use of ivermectin, the American Medical Association, the American Pharmacist Association and the American Society of Health System Pharmacists called on doctors to immediately stop prescribing ivermectin for COVID outside of clinical trials.

Why did you, your NIAID, the FDA and the CDC all sabotage the use of ivermectin? The evidence is overwhelming that you did. How can you justify the decisions to do this?

21) In the face of ivermectin’s effectiveness, please explain to the American people the origin of the campaign to discredit the drug as a dangerous horse drug? Why did you — of all public health officials — not explain this misconception and instead let this false alarm spread?

22) Consider these statistics:

In more than 30 years, ivermectin has been associated with only 379 reported deaths — a death per dose reporting ratio of one to 10,584,408.

In contrast, over the 18 months after remdesivir received emergency use authorization, about 1.5 million patients received the drug, with a death per dose reporting ratio of 1 per 1,000.

Furthermore, among recipients of COVID vaccines in the U.S. during the 10 months after their rollout, 17,000 deaths occurred following vaccination — a reported death per dose ratio of 1 per 13,250.

Ivermectin, therefore, is thousands of times safer than Remdesivir and the vaccines.

But even as late as August 29, 2021, during a CNN interview you said: “There is no evidence whatsoever that ivermectin works … There is no clinical evidence that indicates that this works.”

When will you acknowledge to the American people that you lied to them, and that instead of promoting two effective drugs, you promoted drugs and vaccines that were thousand times less safe and less effective than hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin?

DEADLY REMDESIVIR

23) Why did you not disclose to the American people that seven members of the NIH treatment guidelines panel had financial relationships with Gilead, the manufacturer of remdesivir? How was this not a conflict of interest that should have been disclosed?

24) A Chinese study showed remdesivir ineffective at keeping hospitalized patients alive or reducing the duration of hospitalizations. The Chinese study also confirmed severe deadly toxicity.

The Chinese in turn shuttered its remdesivir trial because of its potentially lethal side effects.

This study was a randomized, double blind, placebo controlled, multi-center, peer reviewed study published in the world’s premier, scientific journal, the Lancet.

In contrast, RFK reported your remdesivir study was not peer reviewed.

What’s more, he reported that as you were sitting in the Oval Office one day, in spite of having knowledge of the Chinese abandonment of remdesivir, you declared that remdesivir had a clear cut, significant, positive effect.

RFK reported that you claimed your study had proven remdesivir so remarkably beneficial to Covid patients that you decided it would be unethical to deny Americans benefits of this “wonder drug.”

Will you admit that during that Oval Office pronouncement you were deceiving the American people? Or explain otherwise.

25) Please comment on the following, which is a quote from Vera Sharav, a long-time advocate for ethics in the clinical trial industry:

“Dr. Fauci had a vested interest in remdesivir. He sponsored the clinical trial whose detailed results were not subject to the peer review he demanded for the drugs he regarded as rivals, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

“Instead of showing transparent data and convincing results, he did science by fiat. He simply declared the disappointing results to be highly significant and pronounced remdesivir to be the new standard of care.”

Why did you not follow the same standards for remdesivir that you demanded for hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin?

26) So let’s summarize our questions, and ask once again:

In the early months of the pandemic, convincing and compelling data were flowing daily from around the world of the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. This is now irrefutable, as it was then.

You knew that multiple credible, nationally known and world renowned physicians were urging the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin along with the other protocols. They had convincing evidence that these drugs were effective.

Yet you, your agency, your colleagues, the FDA, the WHO, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the big pharmaceutical companies persistently discredited and discouraged the use of these drugs — drugs which would have saved hundreds of thousands of American lives.

Will you acknowledge tonight that you were wrong for doing that; apologize to the American people; and explain honestly what motivated you to do that?

And please don’t try to say your motivation was that there were not enough clinical trials. You know that would be a lie. Indeed, the esteemed Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch called that explanation “a transparent sham.”

KILLER VACCINES

27) Why didn’t you and NIH disclose all of the many known adverse events, including death, of the COVID mRNA vaccines, including those reported by clinicians in the clinical trial post-marketing documentation?

28) Why did you support COVID mRNA vaccinations for pregnant and lactating women when there was not evidence to support it being safe for those groups?

29) From the Pfizer Papers: “By the time Pfizer’s vaccine rolled out to the public, the pharmaceutical giant knew that it would be killing babies and significantly harming women and men’s reproduction. The material in the documents makes it clear that damaging human’s ability to reproduce and causing spontaneous abortions of babies is ‘not a bug, it is a feature.’”

Why were Americans not informed of this?

30) Why did you or public health officials not report to the American people that Pfizer knew within three months after rollout in December 2020 that its vaccines did not work to stop COVID, that, in fact, its vaccines were linked to a myriad of adverse events?

31) Why weren’t the American people informed that by

April 2021 Pfizer knew that its injections damaged the hearts of young people?

32) We could go on and on with questions about horrific stories of people who are suffering, have suffered and died from the mRNA vaccines. Here is the key question:

You and other federal officials, along with the pharmaceutical companies, knew about the risks and likely adverse effects of these vaccines. And yet you did not inform the public. Rather, you spent millions and millions of taxpayers’ dollars to shame every American into getting jabbed with these faulty drugs.

Why did you not tell the American people the truth?

33) Final question: In the March 4 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Scott W. Atlas, a COVID adviser to President Trump during the pandemic and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote:

“Failure to demand and issue official statements of truth about the pandemic management after the devastation endured by millions would eliminate all accountability. And accountability is just what we need to restore trust in institutions and among fellow citizens.

“What about setting the record straight, officially recognizing the truth, demanding accountability?”

Are you, Dr. Fauci, willing to apologize tonight to the American people that you purposefully misled them and were wrong about hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, remdesivir and the mRNA vaccines?

Postscript: Sadly, there has been no accountability and no one held accountable for what Naomi Wolf’s book, “The Pfizer Papers,” calls “Crimes against humanity.”

Dr. Kory is one of the courageous warriors and heroes who fought for the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and helped create life-saving protocols as a founding member of the FLCCC. He was severely ostracized from the medical establishment — and still is, as are Drs. McCullough, Marik and many others. Being on the front line of this worldwide tragedy and travesty, Kory told RFK that he has seen first-hand “some of the worst people in human history. They are responsible for the deaths of millions.”

Amy Kelly, one of the authors of “The Pfizer Papers,” contributed to this report.

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Article I, Section 1: All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Article II, Section 1: The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. Section 3: … he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed…

U.S. Constitution

By now, it goes without saying — but we’re going to say it anyway — anything Sarasota County School Board member Bridget Ziegler proposes is going to be vilified, tarred, spat upon. Just her name brings convulsions to her opposition.

But if you can be open-minded for several minutes, try to put aside the person who proposed what became a controversial resolution at the May 7 Sarasota County School Board meeting.

The resolution was titled: “A resolution … to commit that no policy or procedural changes shall take place or be considered in response to the April 19 Title IX rules changes.” The accompanying box spells out the specifics of that resolution.

This resolution came in response to the U.S. Department of Education issuing a 1,577-page amendment (essentially, new rules and regulations) to the Title IX law that Congress adopted and the president signed in 1972. That law, most of us know, says:

“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

That’s the law that essentially required all schools receiving federal funds to offer classes and sports in equal levels to boys and girls and men and women.

But as of April 19, the policy bureaucrats in Joe Biden’s Department of Education decided to change the law.

Did you get that? Bureaucrats decided they would make law. Congress did not.

Now before we get into the farce behind this rule change, the fact unelected Department of Education bureaucrats decided to make new law should make your blood boil. That is one of the most annoying aspects of Washington politics — how the unelected political, bureaucrat class floods us every day with wealth-sapping, liberty-killing rules and regulations.

Who do these people think they are?

Take special note above, for instance, of the first sentence in Article I of the U.S. Constitution: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress …”

Nowhere in the Constitution is there one letter giving law-making  authority to the hired help.

But alas, Congress is the guilty one. It has been and is indeed stupid enough and lazy enough to abdicate the details of new legislation to the unelected political class.

For more than 100 years, this is how it has worked. Our elected representatives have voted for thousands of supposedly magnanimous laws intended to improve our lives (Ha!) and then told their staffs to make the rules and enforce them.

The devil indeed is in the details.

There it is: “20 U.S. Code, 1682 - Federal administrative enforcement.” That federal code “empowers” and “authorizes” “each federal department and agency” “to effectuate” (enact) Title IX “by issuing, rules, regulations or orders of general applicability…” And whatever rules the D.C. wonks want, all they need is presidential approval. Congress’ approval is not required.

This is tyrannical fiat.

This is letting 3-year-olds run loose in a candy store. Every day is a play day — another day to suck up millions of Americans’ tax dollars, spending hours and weeks writing 1,577 pages of new rules and law to alter the social construct of this nation to reflect their view of the world. In this case, it means declaring that the word “sex” in the 1972 Title IX law does not mean biological sex. For them, a person’s biological sex now encompasses sexual orientation and gender identity.

It means, frankly, Biden’s DOE wonks have declared it is now legally acceptable for men who think they are women to participate in women’s sports and shower in women’s locker rooms. 

And it means so much more. The devil is indeed in the details.

A 15-year campaign

In a lawsuit attempting to stop implementation of the new rules, 15 attorneys general, including Florida’s Ashley Moody, have illuminated how the move to upend 40 years of accepted legal and social norms came about. It didn’t start with Biden. It started with Barack Obama’s promise to transform America.

This has been a relentless, 15-year campaign.

Starting in 2009, shortly after Obama’s inauguration, “Through guidance and aggressive investigations, that administration tried to expand Title IX to include gender identity, broaden the scope of actionable sexual harassment and relax procedural protections for the accused,” the AGs’ lawsuit states.

One of the administration’s legislative attempts occurred in 2013. A bill to extend Title IX’s sex-based provisions to gender identity came before the House of Representatives. The attorneys general lawsuit reports: “According to the ‘findings’ section of that proposed law, congressional action was necessary because ‘federal statutory protections expressly address discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, disability and national origin’ but ‘do not expressly include sexual orientation or gender identity.’” The bill failed.

A year later, the Department of Education’s civil rights division attempted a work-around toward its goal, proclaiming in a “guidance” document that “Title IX’s sex discrimination prohibition extends to claims of discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.”

The next year, in 2015, another bill came before Congress attempting to make official law what the civil rights division declared. “The bill was nearly identical to the one that failed in 2013,” the attorneys general lawsuit states. But “once again, Congress did not pass the legislation.”

Not once, but twice, Congress presumably expressed the will of the people: No.

Nevertheless, according to the AG lawsuit, “As the failed attempts to amend Title IX piled up, so did the pressure from outside groups demanding that the government change Title IX through unilateral executive action.”

In May 2016, nearing the end of the Obama administration, the Department of Education issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to schools taking federal funds. The letter said the department would “trea[t] a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for purposes of Title IX and its implementing regulations.”

It told school administrators “because a student who asserts a female gender identity must be treated identically to a biologically female student under Title IX, any attempt to restrict shower, bathroom or locker-room use according to biological sex would be unlawful. It also warned schools that failing to ‘use pronouns and names consistent with a student’s gender identity’ constituted unlawful harassment under Title IX.”

Once again, new law by presidential and bureaucrat fiat.

Thirteen states sued, alleging that the 2016 letter was unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act. A Texas court agreed and issued a temporary injunction.

In their current lawsuit, the attorneys general cite nine other lawsuits where the courts repeatedly have affirmed that the word “sex” in Title IX “was widely understood to refer to immutable, biological differences between males and females.”

As far back as 1982, an Arizona court warned, “[D]ue to average physiological differences, males [will] displace females to a substantial extent if they [are] allowed to compete” in women’s sports, and “athletic opportunities for women [will] be diminished.”

Three years after the adoption of Title IX, even the late liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then a college professor, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post “advocating for constitutional guarantees of the privacy rights recognized by Title IX,” the AG lawsuit says. Ginsburg: “Separate places to disrobe, sleep, perform personal bodily functions are permitted, in some situations required, by regard for individual privacy.”

Two years after that, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded “the personal privacy principle permits maintenance of separate sleeping and bathroom facilities” for males and females under Title IX.

And in a 2023 lawsuit challenging the Biden administration’s interpretation of Title IX, the court ruled: “[T]he government has repeatedly issued guidance to the public at odds with the interpretation it now asks us to adopt. And surely that counts as one more reason yet to question whether its current position represents the best view of the law.”

The sum of all these rulings is the courts have sided with the original view of Title IX — that sex discrimination is about biological sexes, males and females, and not gender identity.

The Trump administration held to that view as well. In May 2020, it rejected a request “to treat gender identity the same as biological sex and to subject students to formal discipline for failing to use a classmate’s preferred pronouns.”

Ignoring Congress

But after Biden started  in 2021, the efforts that started with Obama revved up again — this time more aggressively and ignoring Congress.

In June 2021, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and the Department of Education issued a fact sheet that declared it discriminatory under Title IX for schools to exclude transgender students (particularly transgender girls) from participating in school sports or excluding them from school bathrooms in line with their gender identities; and also said failure to use transgender students’ names and pronouns is discriminatory.

The fact sheet went even further. It removed innocent-until-proven-guilty protections for the accused in sexual harassment cases — the right to present witnesses; to inspect the evidence against them; and to a live hearing.

Once again, Republican state attorneys general sued, with the judge in the case eventually granting the AGs a temporary injunction against enforcement.

The Biden administration appealed; that suit is still ongoing.

But at the same time that “fact sheet” lawsuit was underway, the Department of Education was proceeding to write its new rules, including once again that sex discrimination encompasses gender identity and sexual orientation.

As per law, these new rules required a period for public comments. The public had a lot to say.

According to the AG lawsuit, the Department received more than 240,000 comments — “the vast majority of which were negative.” “[S]ignificant opposition [came] from concerned observers spanning both sides of the aisle, numerous major faith groups and generations old and new,” the AG suit says.

Despite the preponderance of court cases rejecting the deparment’s views and despite public opposition, on April 29, the Department of Education issued its “final rule” and declared the new regulations will go into effect Aug. 1. Any school that violates the rules will be subject to losing its federal funding. Clearly, billions of dollars are at stake around the country.

Meanwhile, the attorneys general lawsuit to stop the new rules is awaiting a July 1 hearing in U.S. District Court in Northern Alabama.

Shakedown organization

Everyone would agree discrimination of any sort is wrong. What’s more, common sense would tell us it’s not right or wise as a society to make a law requiring men wanting to be women be granted legal right to use female bathrooms and locker room showers.

It’s worse, however, when unelected Washington bureaucrats make such a law — and equally bad  that Congress is letting this unconstitutional activity occur.

All of which leads to what should be obvious: This Title IX dispute demonstrates the too-often overreach of the federal government.

Just what good does the Department of Education actually do?

If you think it through, the DoE is just an interventionist, wealth-transferring, shakedown organization that takes $80 billion a year from U.S. taxpayers; siphons about $2 billion a year in salaries for 4,400 employees (whose average salaries, by the way, are $112,725 a year); and then redistributes billions of dollars back to the states and congressional members’ and presidents’ special-interest schools and groups.

But there is a catch: To get the money, you have to follow the Department of Education’s rules — rules that cause taxpayers to waste  more millions in legal bills for our governments to fight each other.

None of this horrible waste — not to mention, local school board resolutions — would occur if our elected representatives had the courage to do what they did in 1868 — eliminate the Department of Education.

Education should be the sole domain of the private sector. Government intervention at every level of education, demonstrably, has produced the rotten fruit that has splattered across our country today.

Go ahead, dismiss the Sarasota School Board’s Title IX resolution as political grandstanding. But more people need to speak out against tyrannical fiat.

The School Board Resolution

WHEREAS, the United States Department of Education released a final rule, making significant changes to the regulations implementing Title IX, that run afoul of Federal and State Laws; and

WHEREAS, Title IX, enacted by Congress in 1972, provides that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex , be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” 20 U.S.C. §1681(a); and …

WHEREAS, the United States Department of Education’s unlawful attempt to redefine “Sex” to include “Gender Identity” would have disastrous impacts to girls and women’s safety in restrooms, locker rooms, and sports; and …

WHEREAS, The Commissioner of Education of the State of Florida, at the direction of the Governor of the State of Florida, has instructed that “no education institution should begin implementing any changes while legal challenges ensue”;

NOW THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED the School Board of Sarasota County, Florida, in a public meeting duly called and assembled:

1. Affirms that “sex”: is defined as biological male or biological female (only two sexes); is an immutable characteristic that cannot be changed, fluid or altered;

2. Affirms that inherent biological differences and abilities exist between the two sexes and commits to protecting female sports;

3. Commits to ensuring the safety, privacy and protection of all students, and

acknowledges the importance of single sex facilities;

4. Provides that no person shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity within Sarasota County Schools;

5. Supports Gov. DeSantis, on behalf of the State of Florida, legal challenge of the U.S. Secretary of Education and the U.S. Department of Education’s rule changes to Title IX;

6. Commits that no policy or procedural changes will be implemented or considered as legal challenges ensue, and hereby acknowledges the paramount duty of the District to make adequate provisions for the education of all children residing within its borders.  

A hell-hole of over-taxation and over-regulation to the point of killing the economy and driving people to leave.

Thankfully, that did not happen then and has not happened — yet. But the conversation is still as relevant today as it was in 1990 — perhaps even more so. In fact, one of the keynote speakers at the Florida Housing Summit last week in St. Petersburg entitled his talk: “How to Keep Florida from Turning into California (in all the wrong ways).”

M. Nolan Gray, research director for California YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard), began his remarks by indicating bluntly Florida is well on its way to California: “You have already adopted all the same rules as California.”

For home builders and prospective home buyers, it probably feels that way — Florida is increasingly California-izing. For sure, the cost of housing — while not at California’s insane levels — has risen dramatically in the past 20 years. So much so that Florida is no longer the low-cost, low-tax place it once was.

Even still without a state income tax, Florida has become expensive — and is becoming increasingly so by the day. Especially so for the poor and middle class.

As we’ve stated in this space many times before, it’s all about the housing.

The costs of homebuilding, home ownership, apartment rents, property insurance, property taxes and local development regulations are pushing Florida rapidly toward the California cost spectrum.

Making matters worse, of course, are the Biden inflation and high interest rates — both reminding many baby boomers of those horrible days in the early 1980s when many homeowners were paying 19% negative-amortization interest rates. That made housing unaffordable then.

Inflation and high interest rates are making housing even more unaffordable now. Indeed, housing affordability is a crisis everywhere in the United States. Everywhere.

But in truth, while Washington policies have fueled higher housing costs, at the root of the problem everywhere are local zoning laws.

DISASTROUS ZONING LAWS

Over time, the mountains of restrictive, property-rights-killing zoning codes have become unreasonable, unwieldy and far too complicated. They are an almost impenetrable Amazon jungle — agonizingly frustrating for property owners to cut through and for homebuilders to build homes fast enough to accommodate all the people moving to Florida.

The bureaucracies, ordinances and regulations are doing what government’s chief role has always been — to be a punishing agency that appropriates, compels and prohibits; an instrument that harms, restricts and halts free people.

Here’s one tiny example: Adrian Moore, vice president of the Reason Foundation, a member of the Florida Policy Project board and a resident of Sarasota, was one of the moderators at the summit. He shared how he and his wife are trying to sell their single-family home on Siesta Key.

Prospective buyers walked away after learning Sarasota County ordinances forbid converting Moore’s home to a duplex — even though duplexes surround Moore’s home on all four sides. They were built before the county changed the zoning rules. And even though owners and neighbors in the surrounding duplexes are coexisting just fine, Moore has no control over his property.

Experts at the Florida House Summit illustrated the wider and disastrous effects of local zoning laws with data that should make everyone realize: This is really bad. To wit:

Rosemarie Hepner, vice president of the Terwilliger Center for Housing at the Urban Land Institute, flashed a slide showing how many years it would take an individual or family earning 80% of Area Median Income to save to buy a home:

• Miami: 34 years

• Sarasota-Bradenton: 32

• Orlando: 31

• Cape Coral-Fort Myers: 30

• Tampa Bay: 28

• Jacksonville: 28

• Lakeland:27

Here was another one: the percentage of homes affordable to buy if you earned 80% of AMI:

• Tampa Bay: 41%

• Jacksonville: 40.4%

• Lakeland: 40.3%

• Cape Coral-Fort Myers: 34.5%

• Sarasota-Bradenton: 33.4%

• Orlando: 31.9%

• Miami: 31%

Every Florida market ULI measured is not producing enough homes and apartments to meet demand.

Look at the two Florida maps. They further illustrate the crisis. Lesley Deutch, managing principal of John Burns Consulting & Research, showed two other startling slides:

It takes an annual income of $118,000 to purchase a median priced, three-bedroom home in Tampa; but those homes are in Zephyrhills and Plant City, long commutes. It takes an annual income of $65,000 to rent a new apartment — one bedroom, one bath and 860 square feet.

“A lot of people are spending 60% of their incomes on housing,” Deutch says.

Now check out the table showing typical workforce incomes. None could qualify for the median home; only three of the two-income households could qualify for the apartment.

Deutch told the audience one other notable effect of the housing issue is that Tampa-Hillsborough County has experienced a net out-migration of population in the past 12 months, with people moving to Ocala, Lakeland and Citrus County, where housing costs are less.

BEST PRACTICE IDEAS

Employers, social service leaders, economists and homebuilders have been decrying these conditions for more than a decade, to little effect.

Sure, virtually every local jurisdiction has adopted density-bonus incentives for apartment builders to include a percentage of below-market rate units in their projects.

But they have made little difference. They are just more  government mandates and interventions that have no effect on housing prices.

So that is what the Florida Housing Summit wanted to address. The summit brought together 250 state legislators, municipal and county elected officials, county and city planners, homebuilders, insurers and nonprofit housing advocates to hear experts offer ideas and reforms to make housing more affordable for Floridians.

The summit was the brainchild of former state Sen. Jeff Brandes, founder of the Florida Policy Project, a research organization dedicated to bringing best practices to Florida in housing, insurance, transportation and criminal justice.

Brandes and the speakers delivered on the summit’s mission — presenting economically rational, practical and sensible ideas, many already being implemented elsewhere in the country. Every city and county elected official, every city and county manager and planner should watch the video of the conference and put the speakers’ ideas into practice.

Here are the summit’s overriding themes:

When Houston changed its minimum lot sizes from 5,000 square feet to 1,400 square feet, it fostered the construction of more than 80,000 new housing units, reducing costs for young couples. (Photo Credit: John Burns Research & Consulting)

• Allow for smaller lot and unit sizes at every level of housing.

After Houston reduced its minimum lot sizes from 5,000 to 1,400 square feet, that fostered construction of more than 80,000 new units, making housing more affordable for young people.

Deutch advocated “simplified,” built-to-rent single-family developments — clusters of homes on small lots with no garages and tiny yards.

Manatee County Commissioner George Kruse made the logical remark that mandated lot sizes are not needed if zoning codes already have setback and height limits.

• Upzone (increase densities) with “missing middle” housing.

This means allowing a wide mix of housing types in a neighborhood — duplexes and fourplexes side by side and stacked; courtyard buildings; townhouses, medium multiplexes and live-work apartments.

Three examples cited: Crescent Heights in St. Petersburg; parts of Hyde Park in Tampa; and Wellen Park in south Sarasota County.

• Legalize “by right” accessory dwelling units.

Allow a detached or attached additional unit on lots with single-family and multifamily lots. “By right” means it’s automatic; no planning hearings required.

California is at the forefront of this movement. After the state eliminated a long list of prohibitions and requirements in 2019, construction of ADUs increased from 5,852 in 2019 to 17,460 in 2022, up 198%.

• Eliminate minimum parking requirements.

Minneapolis cut in half parking requirements for large complexes and eliminated parking requirements altogether for projects with 50 or fewer units — as long as they were close to high-frequency transportation.

Rental rates dropped for studio apartments, and infill development with lower-cost units occurred outside of downtown.

• Light-touch density (see sidebar below).

• Broaden Florida’s Live Local Act to allow multiple types of residential units (including owned units), not just rental apartments.

A lot of hope is being placed on Florida’s Live Local Act legislation, which requires communities to allow mixed-use and multifamily rental development on under-utilized or dilapidated commercial sites.

But Ed Pinto, co-director of the American Enterprise Institute Housing Center and a foremost expert on market-based housing policies, sees unintended consequences. While he believes Live Local “is going to be big over the next five years,” he said it’s also likely to fuel more McMansions.

Pinto cited Raleigh, North Carolina. Developers turned a dead 35-acre mall into a vibrant retail, entertainment and multifamily housing project. In turn, single-family lots across the street shot up in value because of residents being able to walk to the redeveloped center. McMansions are now rising, there, pushing up home prices.

Pinto says Live Local should allow increased densities within an eighth-of-a-mile around the redevelopment to avoid McMansionization.

YOU GET YELLED AT

Will these ideas find their way into Florida?

It’s difficult to be optimistic. You know the drill. The constituencies to stop development are vocal and organized; they always want more restrictions and hate population growth — dismissing the fact that an under-supply of housing drives up the cost of everything.

Nonetheless, as soon as anyone files a plan to develop in Florida — no matter what it is — the NIMBYs start swarming, and the politicians take cover to avoid being stung.

Commissioner Kruse summarizes it this way: “Nobody really wants to do anything (dramatic), because you just get yelled at.” Plus, he says, they want to be reelected.

In other words, they lack the political will and courage to help the masses.

Gray countered that with his experiences, in California and elsewhere, he has built coalitions of employers, social-service advocates and a growing number of organized YIMBYs (typically young professionals) to make the case for the changes outlined above. That has worked.

Pinto says pro-housing advocates need to speak up; use California as the horror they don’t want; and say changes need to be made so their grandchildren will have a place to live.

Nolan told the summiteers: “Be the leader your community needs.”

Either that — or go the way of California.

ED PINTO’S SUCCESS SEQUENCE

Ed Pinto, a Sarasota resident, co-director of the American Enterprise Institute Housing Center and a foremost expert on market-based housing policies, is the leading advocate for “light-touch density.”

Pinto was one of the keynote speakers at the Florida Housing Summit. He presented his six-step Housing Abundance Success Sequence, based on light-touch density and which he says would “turbocharge” every community’s supply of housing.

Here are Pinto’s six steps:

1) Legalize by-right Light-Touch Density. In essence, Pinto urges jurisdictions to increase densities without hearings to allow, say, two single-family units to be built in cases where there was previously only one home on a large lot.

2) Set a minimum lot size in new developments of 5,000 square feet and 1,400 square feet for single-family detached and attached lots, respectively. Let property owners choose.

3) Set a minimum lot size of 1,400 square feet for infill development.

4) Expand the residential building code from two to four/six units.

5) Require cities and counties to ministerially approve (without public hearings) residential use in commercial, industrial and mixed-use core areas.

6) Require cities and counties to ministerially approve by-right light touch density in adjacent areas within an eighth-of-a-mile of core areas. This would avoid McMansionization.

Pinto says light-touch density is working in Austin and Charlotte.

Because of new Biden immigration rules giving preference to unaccompanied minors who crossed the southern border in 2014 and 2015, the Rev. Krzysztof “Chris” Frost of St. Martha Catholic Church in Sarasota is one of thousands of foreign-born clergy and religious workers in the U.S. being forced to return to their native homelands. Frost will return to Poland at the end of May.

Editor’s note: The following appeared in the Sarasota and Longboat Observer April 25.

The arrogance of the Biden administration and its unelected, authoritarian regulators and the fecklessness of Congress know no bounds. You might also say the Biden administration’s obvious assault against Christians is marching forward with punitive force.

We say all of that in the wake of an announcement in this week’s Sunday bulletin at St. Martha Catholic Church.

Pastor George Suszko announced that the Rev. Krzysztof “Chris” Frost is leaving St. Martha and the United States because of the Biden administration’s surprise change in green card rules in March 2023 — and because of Congress’ subsequent lack of will to act.

New rules — imposed by the Department of State and not legislated by Congress — are forcing Father Frost out of his job and back to his native country of Poland at the end of May. He must be out of the country before May 30; if not, he will be banned from entering the United States for 10 years.

Father Frost, 45, has been serving at St. Martha four-and-a-half years. Previously, he served parishes in Buffalo and Brooklyn. He started his ministry in the U.S. in 2012.

All the while, he has been working legally with an R-1 visa, with the intent to apply for a green card for permanent residency status.

The R-1 category is a religious worker visa that allows foreign-born religious workers — of all religions — to work 30 months in the U.S. Father Frost has extended his R-1 visa five times, legally.

After being settled at St. Martha for two years, in 2022, he qualified to begin the process to qualify to apply for a green card. He spent an entire year off and on gathering documentation about his health and history, proving he met immigration standards to apply for a green card.

In early March 2023, after exhaustive red tape, he finally completed the documentation and sent it to his lawyer in Buffalo. A week later, his lawyer called him with the bad news.  

The Department of State — without notice to anyone — changed the rules. The federal government stopped the process on all religious worker applications for green cards. The change meant his R-1 status would end, forcing him to leave the country.

“I missed the deadline by one month,” Frost said. “After so many years here and filing all the papers — it’s just unbelievable. It’s like being told you were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but they gave it to someone else.”

Thousands forced out

Frost is far from being alone. He is one of thousands of foreign-born priests, nuns, rabbis, imams and other religious workers all over the U.S. who are being forced to leave their jobs and go back to their places of origin. The Los Angeles diocese is losing 30 priests; Brooklyn is losing 30. The diocese of Venice here will lose two other priests in August.

Why did the State Department change the rules?

Of the five people interviewed, in a report in the National Law Review and in documents from the American Immigration Lawyers Association, no one understands why the Biden administration did what it did. Nor has the Biden administration explained explicitly why. But here is what it did:

State Department bureaucrats issued an immigration bulletin in March 2023 in which it said for the past seven years the green card applications for so-called neglected or abused minors from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were being placed in the wrong green-card category. So by fiat, they decided to put the minors in the same category as religious workers and declared that applicants who applied prior to March 2018 would have priority.

This essentially gave preference to 55,000 slots previously set for religious workers to the minors who came through the southern border by the thousands as asylum seekers in 2014 and 2015.

“For religious workers and the communities they currently serve as R-1 nonimmigrants, this means they will not be able to become lawful permanent residents before their nonimmigrant status expires,” according to a letter the American Immigration Lawyers Association sent to Secretary of State Andrew Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Majorkas. “For most, the only option is that they leave” the country.

For more than a year now, the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, the immigration lawyers association and other religious groups have written letters, lobbied the State Department and Congress.

The immigration lawyers provided Homeland Security with four detailed steps that could resolve the issue for religious workers. An assistant Homeland secretary responded last October in a one-page letter. Ultimately, she concluded: “… Only legislation can fully address the important concerns you raise.”

Frost gave us copies of responses to requests for help he sent to Rep. Greg Steube and Sen. Marco Rubio. As Frost interpreted them: “Blah, blah, blah.”

Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-California, filed a bill last June to fix the matter, but GovTrack, the legislative tracking site, gives the bill a 2% chance of it being enacted.

Frost is blunt about Washington not fixing the problem: “It’s a pure lack of will.”

Said Pastor Suszko: “It will have to be a new government. A new government can change it.”

Suszko himself is concerned. Unless the rules and law are changed, he too will lose his work visa and be forced to leave his pastorship at St. Martha and return in November 2026 to his home country of Poland. Suszko has been on his first assignment in the U.S. at St. Martha for the past two-and-a-half years.

Worsens clergy shortage

The adverse consequences of this ruling go beyond the clergy themselves. Suszko said St. Martha needs at least four priests to meet the demands of the parish, visiting the sick in hospitals and overseeing St. Martha Catholic School. Now it will be down to three.

What’s more, this brilliant regulatory decision-making comes when Catholic parishes around the country — as well as other Christian denominations — are already struggling because of a shortage of clergy. 

According to The National Catholic Reporter, a Catholic University of America study of priests indicated 24% of priests serving in the U.S. are foreign-born (8,900). And of those, 15% were ordained outside the U.S., said Brandon Vaidyanathan, chair of Catholic University’s Department of Sociology and the study’s lead researcher.

“If we assume, for instance, that foreign-ordained priests are largely on visas — that’s a large chunk of your 15%, given just the priest shortage, and the number of parish closures,” Vaidyanathan told The National Catholic Reporter. “A single priest is sometimes responsible for three to five parishes. So you can imagine with that situation, losing 10% to 15% of your priests, that becomes a serious crisis.”

For now, the Diocese of Venice says it does not have a shortage of priests. “Not yet,” said diocese Chancellor Volodymyr Smeryk. “But we could in the long term. It takes up to six years to finish in the seminary.”

Nonetheless, when you hear the Rev. Frost’s story and frustrations, you can multiply that by the thousands across the country.

“You have to deal with all your belongings,” Frost said. “I’ve already shipped two boxes (back to Poland). I have two more. I’m selling my bike, my computer. I have to close my bank accounts.

“I still can’t believe after almost 12 years, I cannot do what I love to do,” he said.

Frost will be returning to his hometown of Chelmno, an 18,000-population city in northern Poland. “My mother is counting the days,” Frost said. He hasn’t seen her or his brother or sister in more than three years. Traveling back to Poland during that time would have jeopardized his visa status.

Frost said he would like to come back to the United States and continue his ministry, but it’s not likely. To return, he would have to wait a year to apply for another R-1 visa, which then would take another six to eight months to obtain. A green card would likely take another five to 10 years.

“I see on YouTube thousands of illegal immigrants crossing the border and then get picked up by Uber and taken to a hotel,” Frost said. “I’m tired of the whole process and really discouraged.” 

Assault on Christians?

As we’ve often noted, the famed economist-philosopher Thomas Sowell said there are no solutions to problems, only tradeoffs. And in making the tradeoff — to give preference to unaccompanied (illegal) minors from Central America over religious workers serving millions of congregants, the federal government clearly demonstrated what the famous libertarian writer and newspaper columnist of the 1940s, Isabel Paterson, said about government:

“Government is solely an instrument or mechanism of appropriation, prohibition, compulsion and extinction; in the nature of things, it can be nothing else, and can operate to no other end.”

What’s more, she wrote: “It is a fundamental error to suppose that a law may do some good and cannot hurt anyone. Whether it does any good or not, a law enforced must hurt someone.”

As his administration has done throughout his term, Biden and his immigration bureaucrats are hurting thousands and thousands of clergy, their families and hundreds of thousands of Christian, Jewish, Muslim congregants throughout the United States.

Whatever government touches, it always makes matters worse. What’s more, it’s difficult not to suspect or see this deporting of mostly Christian clergy as another Biden administration assault on religion and Christianity.

Rather than become a warrior in Ron DeSantis’ angry culture wars, Passidomo instead decided to take on two of Florida’s most nagging, difficult and important issues — the shortage of affordable workforce housing last year; and an increasing shortage of health care practitioners (doctors, nurses, dentists, mental health specialists, etc.) in the current session.

The legislation she has shepherded and persuaded both houses to adopt — the Live Local Act in 2023 and this year’s Live Healthy Act, Senate Bill 7016 — at least on paper and in theory, has the ingredients to boost supply and allay the shortages.

Of course, with legislation, we know it’s always about the incentives — picking winners and losers and who pays and who receives. In five years, we’ll know: Passidomo will be either a goat or one of the Senate GOATs.

For now, she is the nonboisterous, nonattention-grabbing lawmaker who believes wholeheartedly her job is to serve Floridians, not pursue the next office up. She cried on the Senate dais last week when her colleagues named an amendment to her health care bill after her late father, an ophthalmologist. “He always taught us to give back,” she said.

As Senate president for the 2023 and 2024 sessions, Passidomo has had enormous power to give back — big or small. In her role in Senate leadership, she has seen how the workforce housing and health care practitioner shortages are two major issues affecting every Floridian. What’s more, since the pandemic, they have become increasingly menacing and acute conditions that, if not addressed, are sure to drag down Floridians’ quality of life and strain the state’s economy in coming years.

They already are.

You know it. You’ve lived it. Just about every employer has experienced hiring someone who wants to move to Florida, only to have the new employee turn down the job because housing was too costly. Throughout the state, in addition to Bidenomics’ inflation, the cost of housing is also pushing up the cost of labor and everything else.

And surely everyone has experienced trying to make a doctor’s appointment, only to be told the earliest you can be seen is three months from now. That wait time is going to get worse.

For one, state demographers expect Florida’s population to continue to grow more than 300,000 people a year for the next five years. What’s more, by 2030, Florida’s 65-and-over population — the biggest consumers of medical care — is expected to reach nearly 25% of the state’s population, up from 21.3%, an increase of nearly two million seniors.

In a January assessment of Florida’s physician shortage, Florida TaxWatch reported:

“In 2030, Florida’s supply of family medicine physicians, general internal medicine physicians and pediatric physicians is expected to meet only 62%, 65% and 76% of demand, respectively.” Similar shortages exist in the specialties.

You think seeing a doctor is bad now; TaxWatch says: “Florida will need to fill 22,000 vacant positions by 2030. Nationwide, this supply demand gap is second only to California.”

Just to emphasize the shortage, the accompanying map on page 19 shows what the federal government designates as Health Professional Shortage Areas. All 67 Florida counties have HPSAs. Nineteen counties are total HPSAs.

NO MONEY QUESTIONS ASKED

To counter this and at the same time take steps to make medical care more accessible to low-income Floridians, in spring 2023 and through the summer, Passidomo marshaled her Senate health care staff and recruited Sen. Colleen Burton, R-Lakeland, to craft a far-reaching bill. By the time SB 7016 made it to the Senate floor, it was 232 pages.

Sen. Gayle Harrell, R-Stuart, remarked on the Senate floor: “This is the most amazing piece of legislation I have seen in 22 years. It also happens to be the largest piece of legislation that I have read in many, many years.”

There are so many parts to the bill, when Burton was called on to introduce it in a Senate Fiscal Policy Committee hearing, it took her 22 minutes. She said, “That’s a thumbnail of the bill, Mr. Chairman.”

The bill covers so many facets of health care, and after seeing so little controversial debate in Senate committee hearings and on the floor, it brought to mind the famous Nancy Pelosi comment about Obamacare: “(Congress) has to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.”

Apparently, Florida’s 38 Republican and Senate Democrats took whatever was in the bill on good faith. In three Senate hearings, not one senator raised an objection to the amount of money the bill’s provisions will require.

Pricetag: $716 million. No questions asked about the money, the Senate adopted the bill unanimously.

And 15 minutes after that, it adopted a related bill called Healthcare Innovation, SB 7018. This one establishes a loan fund for Florida entrepreneurs who create money-saving, innovative or technology-driven health care products and services. Pricetag: Another $50 million (see SB 7018: Déjà vu all over again).

THE OBJECTIVES

From the beginning, Passidomo told everyone that expanding Medicaid was off the table. The three overarching objectives were persuasive and convincing. As Burton explained:

•1) “To grow Florida’s health care work force; renew opportunities for education, training and retention.”

• 2) “To remove regulatory barriers to increase work force mobility;

• 3)“To expand the availability of efficiency and quality of health care for all Floridians.”

In other words, the state (government) would intervene in the marketplace to effect certain results.

How does Florida — or any state, for that matter — increase its supply of doctors, dentists, nurses and mental health practitioners?

The simple answer is: Lower the costs and barriers to entry. Lower the education requirements and time to become a practitioner. Create a framework and climate that makes it easier and less expensive in Florida than elsewhere to become a doctor, dentist, physician assistant, nurse practitioner or nurse.

It’s always a matter of tradeoffs. As economist philosopher Thomas Sowell once said: “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.”

In this case, Florida lawmakers opted for spending taxpayer dollars and crafting favorable regulatory incentives.

To increase the supply of providers, they chose to have Florida taxpayers contribute $38 million to pay off portions of medical education loans in exchange for practicing in a medically underserved area.

Over four years, taxpayers would pay: Up to $150,000 each for medical or osteopathic doctors; up to $90,000 for autonomous APRNs (Advanced Practice Registered Nurses); up to $75,000 for APRNs and PAs (Physician Assistants); up to $75,000 for mental health professionals (clinical social workers, marriage and family therapists, mental health counselors and psychologists); and up to $45,000 for RNs (registered nurses) and LPNs (licensed practical nurses).

Dentists could be awarded up to $50,000 in loan repayment, provided the dentists serve Medicaid and low-income patients and locate in a medically underserved area. Dental hygienists would be eligible to receive up to $7,500 per year for four years.

All recipients would be required to provide 25 hours of volunteer health services.

In 2023, the state received 3,702 applications for loan reimbursements, with 2,774 accepted. The demand is there.

In addition, the Live Healthy bill appropriates $50 million to pay hospitals for 500 physicians to complete their residencies in Florida. It also expands residency programs beyond hospitals into other sanctioned clinical settings.

Heretofore, the federal Medicare and Medicaid programs paid for residencies. But that funding has fallen far short of what is needed in every state, thus limiting the number of practitioners who can become licensed. Studies have shown more residencies would pay off. The retention rate for medical students who graduate from Florida medical schools and do their residencies here is 75%.

 Perhaps the least costly provisions in the bill are reducing the steps for foreign-trained and accredited physicians and graduate assistant physicians to become licensed here. Similarly, the bill allows Florida to join interstate medical licensing compacts for physicians (37 states), audiologists and speech pathologists (29 states); and physical therapists (37 states). This allows those licensed practitioners in those states to practice here, eliminating an obstacle.

Altogether, the measures detailed above are likely to increase the supply of medical practitioners in Florida. But at the same time, in lawmakers’ compulsion to be altruistic, the Live Healthy bill includes a provision that is likely to fuel the demand side and cost to taxpayers for medical services: The bill increases the eligibility for free medical care at state sanctioned charitable and free clinics from 200% to 300% of the federal poverty level.

Absent from the bill is a specific appropriation for the increase in free care.

GIVE HER CREDIT

How will all of this play out? No one knows.

As of press time, the House was still considering its version of the Live Healthy Act. Instead of a pricetag of $716 million, the House has pared the cost to $548 million.

The final bill’s cost likely will fall in between, while the contents of the bill is expected to stay intact. Speaker Paul Renner previously expressed support for Passidomo’s efforts.

Either way, $716 million or $548 million seems like a lot of taxpayer money. It is, and it isn’t. Florida’s annual cost of Medicaid is $15.87 billion, with the federal government contributing another $19.8 billion — $35.7 billion altogether.

On top of that, another $10 billion in the state budget goes toward other human services. Altogether, that’s $46 billion taxpayer dollars, 40% of the state budget paying for Floridians’ medical care and other social services.

That makes Passidomo’s $716 million look like spritzing a big oak to make it grow more branches.

As noted above, making laws is all about incentives and tradeoffs. What we don’t know is how many more practitioners Live Healthy will attract or whether it will become another healthcare subsidy that grows and grows and grows. Passidomo’s bill essentially is adding more money to many existing subsidies.

Nonetheless, give the Senate president credit for attempting to increase the supply of practitioners and not expanding the demand side via the black hole of Medicaid. 

So it begins — a New Year.

We tell ourselves it’s time to start fresh. A new beginning, with new energy and a spirit and desire to be optimistic, hopeful and to believe — believe we can make this a good year for ourselves, our families and those around us.

Put 2023 in the rearview mirror. It was awful in so many respects. In fact, by the end of 2023, it was understandable if you had become so disgusted and disheartened with the swirl of the international wars, culture wars, open borders, inflation, crime, Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, congressional dysfunction, etc., etc. that you decided the best thing to do during the holidays was to block all of it out.

Which is what we did. We imposed a 10-day blackout on almost all local, regional, state, national and world news.

It’s remarkable how going news-less improves your state of mind.

To fill the void, we enjoyed family (a lot) and turned to four books:

• “Grant,” the definitive and extraordinary biography of Ulysses S. Grant by historian Ron Chernow.

• “Selected Essays on Political Economy,” by 1840s French writer Frederic Bastiat.

• “Letters of Ayn Rand,” edited by Michael S. Berliner.

• “Kabul, the Untold Story of Biden’s Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End,” by Jerry Dunleavy and James Hasson.

All four should go on your reading list. Each will expand your knowledge and enrich your thinking far beyond what you know and far beyond what you would read or hear in the popular modern press.

And while the subject matters and periods of these books are so different, the stories told are connected like cousins in an overarching way. In addition to the rich, historical details to which the authors regale readers, together the four books show how little has changed from Bastiat’s 1840s France to the United States’ disastrous evacuation from Afghanistan in 2021.

The connected lesson: From then up to now, the heredity and behavior of politicians are the same. They think they are gods. Power corrupts them. They lie. They use the law to plunder and pillage the ordinary people who elect them. They bestow favors on their greedy benefactors at the expense of the powerless. They care more about doing what’s good for themselves than what is just and right.

The one exceptional politician in these four books was Ulysses S. Grant. Chernow documented with incomparable reporting and research that Grant was knowingly none of what is described in the preceding paragraph.

When you take Grant’s life from pre-Civil War to his leadership during the war to his two-term presidency during Reconstruction, you should conclude without hesitation that Grant was one of the most honorable, effective and consequential presidents in our nation’s history.

Historians scoff at Grant for naively appointing cabinet members and aides who betrayed him with their crooked behavior, bribing and public theft. But what Grant faced during Reconstruction was far worse and greater than any domestic terror and challenges a president has faced during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Grant saw his job after the war as that of a peacemaker trying to re-unite the North and the South. But for eight years, he had to try to quell an unrelenting, vicious, pro-slavery Democratic Party of white racists and the Ku Klux Klan who wantonly massacred thousands of newly freed slaves throughout the South in the mid-1870s. Chernow’s descriptions of these rampages are so horrifying they bring to mind the carnage that Hamas terrorists inflicted on innocent Israelis last October.

As we said, little has changed: Evil has always been and is everywhere.

BASTIAT’S FRANCE

Ok, it’s not likely you can be persuaded to read something as dull sounding as “Selected Essays on Political Economy,” written no less by a Frenchman in the 1840s.

But here’s one reason why Frederic Bastiat’s essays are relevant to all of us today: Bastiat was one of France’s staunchest advocates for individual liberty and free-market capitalism when most of France’s national politicians were shifting and advocating for socialism.

When you read Bastiat’s essays, it’s remarkable how his arguments then could be overlayed on the national trends toward socialism and anti-liberty in the U.S. today.

Fans of Bastiat often note that for a guy writing about economics and the role of politics back in the 1840s, to this day few economists have been able to write with Bastiat’s clarity.

Two examples: See the excerpt below. And this one:

“I cannot forget that when I presented myself before the voters, I said to them: Would you approve a system of government which was based on the following arrangement: You would have the responsibility for your own existence. You would demand, in exchange for your labor, your effort and your industry, the means of feeding, clothing, lodging and enlightening yourselves, of attaining affluence, well-being and perhaps prosperity. The government would concern itself with you only to guarantee you against all disturbance and unjust aggression. For its part, it would ask of you only the very modest tax indispensable for accomplishing this task.

“And all cried out: ‘We ask nothing else of it.’”

But then, as now, elected French politicians exacted deception on the masses, just as all of our lawmakers do at every level. As Bastiat noted: 

“It is fundamentally impossible for [the State] to confer a particular advantage on some of the individuals who constitute the community without inflicting a greater damage on the entire community.

“… If it withholds the boon that is demanded of it, it is accused of impotence, of ill will, of incapacity. If it tries to meet the demand, it is reduced to levying increased taxes on the people, to doing more harm than good, and to incurring, on another account, general disaffection.

“Thus, we find two expectations on the part of the public, two promises on the part of the government: many benefits and no taxes. Such expectations and promises, being contradictory, are never fulfilled.”

INDIVIDUALS VS. MASSES

In the 673 pages of Ayn Rand’s letters — written a century after Bastiat’s essays — her overriding theme, remarkably, is the same as Bastiat’s: the virtues of individual liberty and capitalism versus the horrors of the State.

In a July 1934 letter to her literary agent, Jean Wick, Rand wrote that her first novel, “We the Living,” is “not a novel about Russia. It is a novel about the problem of the individual versus the mass, a problem which is the latest, the most vital, the most tremendous problem of the world today …”

Nine days later, she wrote to H.L. Menken. “I intend to be the first one in a new battle which the world needs as it has never needed before, the first to answer the many too many advocates of collectivism, and answer them in a manner which will not be forgotten.

“…I know that I am only a would-be David starting out against Goliath — and what a fearful, ugly Goliath! I say ‘single-handed,’ because I have heard so much from that other side, the collectivist side, and so little in defense of man against men, and yet so much has to be said. … I believe that man will always be an individualist, whether he knows it or not, and I want to make it my duty to make him know it.”

In a 1943 letter to Isabel Turner, a fan of Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” Rand wrote: “I was pleased to hear that you found many people who are in complete agreement with my ideas of individualism. That is encouraging and hopeful for the future of our country. I have always believed that Americans were individualists, but one can’t help doubting it occasionally when one sees the solid stream of collectivist books that have been dumped on us for the last 10 years.…”

KABUL: UNFORGIVABLE

The book jacket of “Kabul” accurately describes the contents: “The full story is worse than anyone imagined.”

While that horrendous tragedy fades in the nation’s memory, it should not. The complete incompetence, disregard for life and political lying by Joe Biden and everyone in his administration who touched that disaster are criminality on the highest order.

What Biden and his subordinates did to all of the Marines on the ground at the Kabul airport is forever unforgivable. Here is one excerpt of what his actions did to hundreds of Afghanis:

“Interpreters across the country were being executed by the Taliban … Sometimes the men were placed on top of street guardrails with nooses around their necks. In other instances, they were forced to stand in the back of Taliban pickup trucks with a noose connected to a crane above them.

“The outcome, however, was always the same: The men were frequently tortured, and their wives and daughters were raped in front of their eyes. Over after the Taliban castrated them to take the last ounce of their manhood were they finally hung and left in public view as a warning to others.”

We wanted to begin 2024 with renewed energy, optimism and hope. It was nice to take a break from current news. And while these four books filled us with knowledge, unfortunately, they reminded us how mankind has always been and is still in a fight for freedom versus the corruption of the state. And sadly, as we head into the 2024 elections, these books remind us, as we said, how little has changed. In the end, after the votes are counted, all we are doing is exchanging one set of tyrants for another.

But in the words of Churchill, we must “never give in.”

‘Away with the quacks and planners!’

The following is an excerpt from “Selected Essays on Political Economy,” by Frederic Bastiat:

It seems to me that reason is on my side; for whatever ques-tion I submit to theoretical consideration, whether it be religious, philosophical, political or economic; whether it has to do with well-being, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsi-bility, solidarity, property, labor, trade, capital, wages, taxes, popu-lation, credit or government; at whatever point on the scientific horizon I may begin my investigations, they invariably reach the same conclusion: The solution of the social problem lies in liberty.

And is not experience also on my side? Look at the condition of the world today.

Which nations are the happiest, most moral and most peaceful?

Those among which the law intervenes the least in private activity; where the government makes itself felt the least; where individuality has the most scope, and public opin-ion the greatest influence; where the administrative apparatus is the least ramified and the least complicated, the taxes the least heavy and the least unequal, popular discontent the least aroused and the least justifiable; where the responsibility of individuals and of classes is the most active, and where, consequently, if the prevailing morality is not perfect, it tends inevitably to be im-proved; where transactions, agreements and associations are the least restricted; where labor, capital, and population are least sub-ject to artificial displacement; where mankind follows most nearly its own inclinations; where the thought of God is most preva-lent; those, in a word, which approach most nearly this solution: Within the limits of equity, everything is to be accomplished through the free and perfectible initiative of man; nothing is to be achieved by law or by force save universal justice.

This must be said: There are too many “great” men in the world; there are too many legislators, planners, founders of societies, leaders of nations, fathers of their country, etc., etc. Too many people place themselves above mankind in order to guide its footsteps; too many people make a career of being concerned with mankind,

I shall be told: You yourself are certainly very much concerned with it.

That is true. But it must be admitted that I am concerned in an entirely different sense and with an altogether different object in view, and if I take my place among the reformers, it is only to make them take their hands off mankind.

I concern myself with mankind not as Vaucanson did with his automaton, but as a physiologist does with the human organism: in order to study it and marvel at it.

I am concerned with it in the spirit which animated a celebrated traveler.

He arrived in the midst of a savage tribe. A child had just been born, and a crowd of diviners, sorcerers and quacks armed with rings, hooks, and straps surrounded it.

One said: “This child will never smell the perfume of a pipe if I do not stretch his nostrils.” Another said: “He will be deprived of the sense of hearing if I do not make his ears come down to his shoulders.” A third: “He will not see the light of the sun if I do not give his eyes an oblique slant.” A fourth: “He will never stand erect if I do not bend his legs.” A fifth: “He will not be able to think if I do not flatten his skull.”

“Stop!” said the traveler. “What God does He does well. Don’t pretend to know more than He does; and since He has given or-gans to this frail creature, let the organs develop and be strength-ened by exercise, trial and error, experience and freedom.”

God has endowed mankind also with all that it needs to accom-plish its destiny. There is a providential social physiology, as there is a providential individual physiology. Social organs too are so constituted as to develop harmoniously in the open air of liberty.

Away, then, with the quacks and the planners! Away with their rings, their chains, their hooks, their pincers! Away with their artificial methods! Away with their social workshop, their phalan-stery, their statism, their centralization, their tariffs, their universi-ties, their state religion, their interest-free credit or bank monopo-lies, their regulations, their restrictions, their moralization and their equalization by taxation!

And after vainly inflicting so many systems on the body politic, let us end where we should have begun. Let us cast out all artificial systems and give freedom a chance-freedom, which is an act of faith in God and in His handiwork.

Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for Economic Education.

“There Is Nothing Worth Saving in America’s Public Schools.”

That was the headline on a June 23 online article in the American Spectator.

I’ve kept that article open in my Google tabs on my laptop for four months, with the intention in a future editorial of proving the authors of that article correct.

But that headline came to mind again the past two weeks as all of us have watched videos of our university students siding with the Hamas and Iranian terrorists — menacingly threatening and sometimes striking Jewish students as the mobs chanted and protested and carried signs that proclaimed:

• Down with settler-colonial, Zionist apartheid!

• Zionism is white supremacy!

• “Netanyahu, we charge you with genocide!”

• Decolonize Palestine!

• “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” — a slogan that calls for the destruction of Israel and the Jews.

Watching all of this was convincing: Indeed, there is nothing worth saving in America’s public schools.

Stay with me. Yes, it is going too far to pin our college students’ anti-Israel protests solely on public education. But what we have witnessed is indeed the inevitable, unavoidable result of State-run, public education — the brainwashing of generations of young Americans (and the world over) to an immoral ideology (“kill the Jews!”) and frighteningly widespread ignorance.

With these protests, we have witnessed how little these screamers know and how little they have been taught about world history. What they have learned — much of it in their college milieu, in and out classrooms — is emotional propaganda that foments these ignorant masses into violent rage and hatred.

H.L. Mencken, the great American essayist in the early and mid-20^th century, saw the truth of government-controlled education when he wrote in 1924: “The aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth.

“The aim … is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”

To put it more bluntly: to breed easily swayed sheep.

Former long-time teacher and author John Taylor Gatto has been a more explicit critic of public education than Mencken. Author of “Dumbing Us Down, the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling” and “Underground History of American Education, an Intimate Investigation into the Prison of Modern Schooling,” Gatto summed up his 30 years of teaching and concluded:

“[The] American education system has always been designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace ‘manageable.’”

Think about this: How do you explain why so many of these supposedly intelligent university students have been marching on the side of barbarians, of burning and beheading babies and of people who chant “Death to Israel”?

In the introduction in 2009 to “Our Enemy the State,” Albert Nock’s famous book exposing the true nature of the State, Butler Shaffer noted that “mass-minded men and women … lacked both the depth of character and the intellectual capacity to understand the principles underlying ‘the humane life.’

The “mass-minded,” Shaffer noted, “are easily manipulated and mobilized.” To wit: our college kids.

The famous Austrian economist and Nobel Prize winner, Friedrich Hayek, devoted a whole chapter of his seminal book, “The Road to Serfdom,” to “Why the Worst Get on Top.”

He wrote there are “three main reasons why such a numerous and strong group with fairly homogenous views is not likely to be formed by the best but rather by the worst elements of any society.

“If a numerous group is needed, strong enough to impose their views on the values of life on all the rest,” wrote Hayek, “it will never be those with highly differentiated developed tastes. It will be those who form the ‘mass’ in the derogatory sense of the term, the least original and independent … the lowest common denominator.”

That would be the poorly and under-educated, malleable, impressionable college students whose brains, we know now, have been filled with all of the “gender equity” and anti-Israel bilge coursing through classrooms and campuses at the high school and college levels.

Those students are easy marks for the propagandists. Hayek: “He [the brainwashing professoriat class and Students for Justice for Palestine] will be able to obtain the support of all the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are prepared to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.

“It will be those whose vague and imperfectly formed ideas are easily swayed and whose passions and emotions are readily aroused who will thus swell the ranks of the totalitarian party.”

And the third reason why the pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel crowds have swelled and turned the narrative against the Israelis is what Hayek called the “most important negative element.”

“It seems to be almost a law of human nature,” he wrote, “that is easier for people to agree on a negative program — on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off — than on any positive task.”

CONQUERORS? OPPRESSORS?

Down with settler colonial, Zionist apartheid!

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

Do they really know the meaning of what they’re saying? The “Why?”

Start from the beginning. Whose land is Israel anyway — Jews’ or Palestinians’? Who is the “oppressor”?

The debate over the strip of land has been festering for 4,000 years! — ever since Abraham settled in Canaan (Israel) in 1865 B.C.

While today’s pro-Hamas students and the other raging masses rail against the Jews, castigating them as evil conquerors who have raped the Palestinians of their homeland, it’s clearly a good bet most of these American students (as well as the others in the mobs) know little, if anything, about this land.

A good place to start would be the Book of Genesis in the Bible. But the likelihood of college students even knowing what the Book of Genesis is is not encouraging. According to the authors of that American Spectator article: “The rates of religiously unaffiliated [U.S.] youth, including atheists and agnostics, fresh from high school rose from 6.6% in 1966 to 29.6% in 2015 to 33.6% in 2019. 

But if those protesters were at all curious (as college students should be), they would find in the Book of Genesis the birth and birthplace of Israel — historical material that should trigger critical thinking.

It’s a plausible guess that most of our college students have heard of Moses, the Ten Commandments and the Israelites’ 40-year trek to the “Promised Land” (Israel).

But long before Moses — 500 years, God established the Jews’ homeland. In Genesis, God tells Abraham, son of a wandering Semite: “Leave your country (Haran/now Iraq), your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.”

(“Whoever curses you I will curse.” Memo to anti-Semites: You might think about that explicit warning.)

Abraham, then 75, did what God said: He packed up his many belongings, and with his wife, Sara, and nephew, Lot, traveled from southern Iraq to settle where God told him to go: Canaan (Israel).

Not long after the family had settled, God spoke to Abraham again about what was in store for him: “Lift up your eyes from where you are and look north and south, east and west. All the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever. … Go, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I am giving it to you.”

As it has turned out, however, we know it wasn’t as easy as that. Fourteen years later, a group of marauding anti-Hebrew kings and their forces invaded southern Canaan, ransacked it and kidnapped Abraham’s nephew, Lot, among other Hebrews.

As the Israelis of today, Abraham retaliated. He and 300 men pursued the invaders, routed them and rescued Lot, kinsmen, women and children.

Six years later, when Abraham was 95, God made his promise to Abraham a third time: “This is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations … I will make you very fruitful … I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants … to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. The whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you…”

You can just imagine the response if you walked on the Harvard, Cornell or New York University campuses and told that story — that at least three times God told Abraham Canaan/Israel would be the Jews’ “everlasting possession.”

Which brings us to the chant of the pro-Palestinian mobs today of Israel being apartheid colonizers, invading conquerors and oppressors.

Follow the historical timeline.

To the contrary, from Abraham until today, wherever they went, the history of the Jews has been consistent, almost uninterrupted anti-Semitic persecution — the anti-thesis of oppressors. (When the Torah was written, in fact, it specifically said: “A sojourner you are not to oppress: You yourselves know the feeling of the sojourner, for sojourners were you in the land of Egypt.”)

For 3,500 years — 1800s B.C. to the 1880s A.D., there have always been a people, armies, invaders and coalitions of nations who have wanted and still want the Jews eradicted and out of the land God gave them and promised them.

The Philistines came ashore from the sea in 1000s B.C. into Gaza from Greece and attacked the Israelites. The Babylonians destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 500 B.C. The Romans and Assyrians followed with their attacks through the Middle Ages.

Century after century, fearing for their survival, Jews left their homeland and dispersed to the Middle East, northern Africa and Europe, leaving but a small number of steadfast Jews rooted in Jerusalem and their homeland.

You know the story. It got much worse: Hitler. Auschwitz. Six million Jews in Europe barbarically exterminated. Genocide.

The oppressor Jews? The colonial settlers?

IT IS NOT “PALESTINE”

When World War II ended, thousands and thousands of Jews throughout Europe were homeless, outcast, starving, impoverished.

President Harry Truman wrote in his memoirs:

“The plight of the victims who had survived the mad genocide of Hitler’s Germany was a challenge to Western civilization, and as President, I undertook to do something about it. One of the solutions being proposed was a national Jewish home.

“The question of Palestine as a Jewish homeland goes back to the solemn promise that had been made to them by the British in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 … This promise, I felt, should be kept …”

The Arab states hated this. In a memo to Truman, one of his assistant secretaries of state wrote: “The Arabs … have made no secret of their hostility to Zionism, and their governments say that it would be impossible to restrain them from rallying with arms in defense of what they consider to be an Arab country.”

What to do became the matter of an Anglo-American Committee that Truman composed in 1946. When Philip Hitti, a distinguished Arab-American historian at Princeton University testified to the committee, he said: “There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely not.”

According to the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, a non-profit, non-partisan organization, “at no time ever was Palestine an exclusively Arab country. No independent Arab or Palestinian state ever existed in Palestine.”

“Palestine,” er, Israel-The Promised Land, became Palestine thanks to the Romans. They named it after the Philistines, people who sailed from Greece and invaded via Gaza in 1000s B.C.

How many of those protesters have a clue of this?

1948 WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

In 1947, at the conclusion of two years of world debates over what to do with displaced Jews and “Palestine,” the members of the United Nations in 1947 approved the establishment of a quasi-two-state solution between the Jews and Arabs.

The plan: Partition the land, setting up a state of Israel and a state of Palestine.

An Arab spokesman told the U.N. before the partition that Arabs would drench “the soil of our beloved country with the last drop of our blood.”

On May 14, 1948, Israel declared the new State of Israel. Violence and war immediately broke out.

Within days after Israel declared its state, five Arab armies invaded Israel. Assam Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League announced: “It will be a war of annihilation. It will be a momentous massacre in history that will be talked about like the massacres of the Mongols of the Crusades.”

The Israelis defended themselves from the invaders and won.

THE 1967 SIX-DAY WAR

Oct. 15, 1960: Egyptian President Gama Abdel Nasser tells the world Egypt would never recognize the existence of the Jewish State of Israel.

1963: The Arab League forms the Palestine Liberation Organization. Its charter calls for the destruction of Israel. PLO terrorists increasingly stormed into Israel and killed Israeli citizens  — 1965: 35 raids; 1966: 41 raids. In the first four months of 1967: 37 raids.

1966: With Syrian military bombings and terrorist attacks increasing on Israelis, President Nasser announced, “We aim the destruction of the state of Israel. The immediate aim: perfection of Arab military might. The national aim: the eradication of Israel.”

May 1967: The president of Iraq, Abdur Rahman Aref, joined a military alliance with Egypt, Jordan and Syria, with the statement: “The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear — to wipe Israel off the map.”

Apartheid colonizers? Invading conquerors? Zionist white supremacists?

How little truth the masses know.

It starts with education. Public education is one of the primary roots of what ails the U.S. today.

SIDEBAR:

BRAINWASHING AT WORK?

Cornell University has been one of the college campuses where anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian students have demonstrated.

The following is the course description for “Zionism and Its Discontents” at Cornell University.

You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can get a sense of what’s in store reading a book’s introduction. In this case, the introductory description of a class.

You be the judge. Balanced, slanted or brainwashing? Here is the course description:

“This course examines the history of Zionism as an idea and as a political movement in all its various forms, currents and transformations from its origins mid-19^th century Europe to the present.

“Despite its success in establishing the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism, which also sought to ‘normalize’ Jewish collective life and provide a safe haven from persecution for the Jews, has encountered multiple challenges from within and without.

“Some continue to think of it as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, while others regard it as a Western-inspired colonial project.

“Originating largely as a radical rejection of both traditional Jewish life and the Jews’ diaspora in favor of modern nationalism, since 1967 Zionism has witnessed religious-nationalist ferver and a Jewish diaspora increasingly interested in or disinterested with the State of Israel.

“The course also considers the phenomenon of post-Zionism in Israeli historiography as well as Zionism’s difficulty in coming to terms with the idea and reality that two peoples rather than one live in the land west of the Jordan.

“We’ll also consider the Palestinian response framed as ‘Zionism from the standpoint of its victims.’”

— Matt Walsh

And it took less than a week!

For those of you who know the history of the Jews, starting with the Israelites’ enslavement in Egypt (1300s B.C.) and up to now, you know you cannot find anywhere in the world archives where the Jews and Israelites were the evil, barbaric  murderers, torturers, occupiers and oppressors. It has always been the other way around.

And so it was stomach-turning — the muscles of your stomach tightening and a feeling almost of nausea — to watch the worldwide demonstrations on television and to hear the bile spewing from pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel Americans.

The physical, touchable, truthful evidence didn’t matter. Witnesses describing the Hamas militants’ savage slaughtering; the beheaded babies, butchered elderly; a dead mother and her cut umbilical cord of her unborn baby. The militants carried booklets instructing them how to kill and to kill as many Israelis as they could in their attacks.

It goes further. Even though most of the pro-Palestinian philistines would never see or believe it, for years there have been verified reports of Hamas taking millions and billions of dollars of foreign aid designated for food, water and other social necessities and using that money instead to manufacture of  weapons. They use hospitals and schools as shields for terrorism.

Even with all of this prima facie truth, it is disgusting, sickening and so sad for the United States to watch the hordes of indoctrinated American college kids and other imbecilic sheep siding with the terrorists.

Everywhere you turn, it’s incomprehensible. In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, columnist Allysia Finley quoted Starbucks union leaders: “The apartheid state of Israel is continuing to break international law and wage horrific crimes against humanity.” One of them referred to Israel’s retaliation as “ethnic cleansing” of Gazans. 

Apartheid? Crimes against humanity? Ethnic cleansing? Astonishingly, these people are serious.

They bring to mind the term “invincibly ignorant.” No matter the truth, no matter the evidence, they are impenetrable. Invincibly ignorant. 

And they are cowards. 

Surely you have seen that while they chant death to Israel, they hide their faces behind Fauci-like masks. 

All of this, sadly, is a historic low in America.

But we cannot despair. We must stay Churchillian: “Never give in.”

Fortunately, there are people of courage. Take Barbara and Ryan Ackerman, here locally in Sarasota and Longboat Key. It took great courage for them to stand up with unequivocal force and publish their full-page ad in the Observer — reproduced above: “We Stand with Israel.” 

They did not wear masks. They published their faces above the ad. 

Barbara and Ryan: The Observer Media Group stands with you. We Stand with Israel.

And last week, there was Ben Sasse, president of the University of Florida. Unlike the spineless, mealy melonheads that occupy so many of the presidencies of our universities, Sasse was one of the few — perhaps the only one of which we are aware — who condemned Hamas. 

He did it at a vigil on campus and in a letter to UF’s Jewish alumni and students. UF has 9,000 Jewish students — the largest number of Jewish students among all U.S. public universities. (For the full letter, go to: YourObserver.com/Opinion-Sasse.)

One excerpt: “I will not tiptoe around this simple fact: What Hamas did is evil, and there is no defense for terrorism. This shouldn’t be hard. Sadly, too many people in elite academia have been so weakened by their moral confusion that, when they see videos of raped women, hear of a beheaded baby or learn of a grandmother murdered in her home, the first reaction of some is to try ‘to provide context’ and try to blame the raped women, beheaded baby or the murdered grandmother. In other grotesque cases, they express simple support for the terrorists.

“This thinking isn’t just wrong, it’s sickening. It’s dehumanizing. It is beneath people called to educate our next generation of Americans.”

And therein is the root of the nation’s “moral confusion,” or rather immoral indoctrination — our universities and public schools. 

The baby boomer generation has allowed our Judeo-Christian foundation to wither and snuff out what should be obvious to the delusional pro-Palestinian marchers, but isn’t: What they cannot see and have not learned is the history of the world has shown that free people, entrepreneurial capitalism, families and the rules God gave to Moses are the essential ingredients to happiness, prosperity and human dignity.

That formula is seen in vivid contrast where this war for humanity is being waged. For the past 40 years, Israel has flourished with prosperity, economically and socially, because of its capitalistic economy, democratic government and God-rooted family traditions. 

The Palestinians, in contrast, have suffered punishing poverty and deprivation because of the iron manacles of its authoritarian fanatics, the inhumane Hamas savages who place a higher value on making bombs to kill Jews than on freeing their people to live peacefully and prosper.

No one knows how this war will turn out. But we will have faith that the “Remnants” will prevail.

In 1946, Albert J. Nock, the Charles Krauthammer of his time, wrote an essay entitled, “Isaiah’s Job.” It was the story of how God sent Isaiah out to warn the Israelites of the wrath to come if they didn’t  quit their errant behavior and follow God’s promises.

God also told Isaiah not to be surprised when the masses ignored him. But he told Isaiah not be discouraged. In Nock’s words, God told Isaiah when “everything has gone completely to the dogs,” the Remnants — “obscure and unorganized,” “rubbing along as best they can” — “will come back and build up a new society.”

But how many Remnants are there? Isaiah asked. God told Isaiah not to worry. “Take my word for it, they are there.”

You watch. In the coming days there will be world outrage from the anti-Semitic abettors over Israel’s retaliation to the sadistic, Satanic attacks of the Hamas-Hezbollah-Iranian terrorists.

But such outrage will be wrong. Totally, completely, indisputably wrong.

Israel is not responsible for any of the deaths of Hamas or Hezbollah militants, of the Hamas or Hezbollah sympathizers or of the Palestinian or Arab civilians in Gaza or Lebanon.

Every death in Gaza or Lebanon is on the hands of the terrorist leaders. Not Israel.

When the terrorists fired their first rockets and gunshots in Israel last weekend, the terrorist leaders had made a conscious decision. They were proclaiming they care far more about their irrational mysticism and fanaticism in “Allah” and far more about their delusions of victimhood (caused by their statist, authoritarian regimes) than they care about the lives and well-being of their own families, neighbors, women, elderly and children.

They made the conscious decision they are willing to and OK with bringing death upon their innocent countrymen and citizens.

In its self-defense, then, Israel has the moral right to defend itself and destroy its aggressors. 

Indeed, to be victorious in war and secure its freedom from annihilation and becoming slaves of its enemies, Israel has the right to use enough force to break the will of its enemies and destroy its enemies’ war machinery and infrastructure. And this, inevitably, leads to and necessitates the killing of civilians.

To obtain victory against an aggressor, the free nation often must cripple production of weapons, and in the process that takes the lives of civilians. “This is what the U.S. did in World War II when it dropped fire bombs on Dresden and Hamburg and atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” wrote Onkar Ghate at the Ayn Rand Institute in a commentary dubbed “Innocents at War?”

“These bombings were moral acts. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for instance, precipitated Japan’s surrender and so achieved victory with no further U.S. casualties. 

“In that context, to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers in a ground attack on Japan would have been morally monstrous.”

Hamas and Hezbollah’s bombings are immoral acts. Israel has every right to obliterate its enemies, regardless of the collateral damage. It has the moral right and responsibility to put its people’s lives ahead of any others.

When you hear outrage pointed at Israel, remember where the true evil lies.

— Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand had it right. Look at the recent record:

Obama: ISIS, Russia-Crimea

Trump: No wars

Biden: Ukraine, Hamas-Iran

Obama, Biden: Appeasers. Delusional.

Almost a decade ago, in October 2014, when the United States and Iraq were in the throes of trying to stop the barbaric, savage ISIS caliphate from taking over Iraq and beyond, Craig Biddle, founder and editor of The Objectivist Standard, a periodical that explains the world according to Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, penned a commentary on the five primary causes of war and five causes of peace.  

Relevant then, Biddle’s causes of war and peace are just as relevant today as Israel undertakes its retaliation against Hamas. 

Causes of War:

ν Statism

ν Collectivism

ν Altruism

ν Mysticism

ν Evasion

Causes of Peace:

ν Capitalism

ν Individualism

ν Egoism

ν Rationality

ν Honesty

With our chief appeaser in the White House today, Evasion is paramount.

Wrote Biddle: 

“The most fundamental psychological cause of war is Evasion — the refusal to face relevant facts, the act of pretending that reality is other than it is.

“[I]n the 1930s, European leaders evaded the explicitly stated intentions and clear advances of the Nazis. Rather than eliminate these avowedly racist murderers who openly sought world domination when the Europeans easily could have, they permitted the Nazis to strengthen and expand for years on end, thereby eventually necessitating a massive war to end the nightmare.

“Similarly, today, U.S. leaders evade the explicitly stated aims and clear advances of the Islamic regimes that sponsor terrorism … 

“U.S. leaders pretend that ‘Islam means peace,’ when in fact it means submission … They pretend that we can fruitfully negotiate with the Iranian regime, whose ultimate goal — as stated in its written constitution — is to force everyone on the planet to submit to Allah, and whose leaders call regularly for ‘Death to America’” … and the annihilation of Israel and the Jews. 

“When a nation evades such facts about its enemies, that nation eventually will either fight a larger and more costly war than it would have had to fight if it had faced reality from the beginning — or submit to its enemies. 

“It is either-or.”

In contrast to Evasion as a cause of war, Honesty is a cause of peace. Wrote Biddle:

“The most fundamental psychological cause of peace is Honesty: the refusal to pretend that facts are other than they are.

“[W]hen an enemy of America quotes his religious scripture to the effect that his ‘God’ commands him to convert or kill unbelievers; when that same enemy founds a nation with a constitution stating that it intends to make everyone on the planet submit to his God; when that same enemy issues textbooks to its grade-school students ‘teaching’ them that to be noble they must engage in jihad and kill infidels; when that same enemy materially and spiritually sponsors terrorist groups that murder many thousands of Americans [and now Israelis] in the name of this godly mission; when that same enemy pursues nuclear weapons while chanting ‘Death to America’ and on and on, honesty requires that Americans and their leaders acknowledge this enemy as an enemy that must be eliminated unequivocally and immediately.

“For the United States instead to ‘negotiate’ with the leaders of the enemy regimes and to sit with them at the U.N. and thus treat them as deserving of anything other than torture (for information) and death (for good riddance) is an act of dishonesty. It is an act of pretending that reality is other than it is.

“Insofar as a country and its leaders are honest about who their enemies are, what motivates them and what must be done to eliminate them, the country will be able to employ its resources in the best way possible toward achieving and maintaining peace.

“Insofar as a country and its leaders pretend that the facts of the matter are other than they are, they will pay the price for their evasions. Reality cannot be fooled.”

As Rand and Biddle have so aptly explained, Ukraine and Israel are under siege in large part because of our appeasing presidents and their ignorance of evasion versus honesty.

For this, the world is paying a costly, deadly price.

(For detailed explanations of Biddle’s causes of war and peace, go to: theobjectivestandard.com/2014/10/causes-war-peace/)

That was the closing statement last week in a letter to the editor in the Longboat Observer from Bob Gault, a Longboat Key resident, former CEO of Universal Studios and Sea World and diehard Constitutional patriot.

He nailed it. 

Ignorance of history is indeed one of the more destructive enemies of our time. And it runs far and wide among Americans. Perhaps worse, it evidently runs deep within the highest ranks of American government, including the occupants of all wings of the White House.  

We all know, of course, our president, Joe Biden, is senile. Even so, he should not get a pass for his historical ignorance; he is, after all, president of the United States. Nor, especially, should his behind-the-scenes Wizards of Doom be excused. Their apparent ignorance of history — or their willingness to ignore it and the truth — is ruining the United States.

Their out-of-touch arrogance blinds them to what has been so obvious: Practically every policy measure they have forced and inflicted upon Americans has proven what the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1951 in his analysis of the Socialist movements in Europe from the early 1900s, through and after World War II.

The editors at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama summed up perfectly von Mises’ 1951 book, “Socialism: An Economic & Sociological Analysis,” when in 2009 they published 83 pages of excerpts from von Mises’ book. They aptly entitled the booklet: “Planned Chaos.”

It is a marvelous play on words. 

As Mises revealed with historical fact and astute analysis 70 years ago, all the central planning that European Socialists, Fascists, Communists and Nazis imposed and dictated on the masses in Eastern Europe and Western Europe resulted in economic and social chaos — chaos that made their countrymen suffer and poor. 

Practically everything they did made conditions worse and chaotic.

Fast forward to the U.S. today. Take a look at the accompanying box. It is a list of the chaos that has followed as a result of the policies and mandates that Biden and his behind-the-scenes masters have inflicted on Americans. Sadly, this list will continue to grow. The end of the chaos is nowhere in sight.

But our Washington elites are oblivious.

When Joe Biden spoke to Americans on Sept. 1 in Philadelphia, for example, he said the “work of my presidency” is to “build an America that is more prosperous, free and just” — “a mission I believe in with my whole soul.”

But either Biden knew that was a brazen lie to try to fool Americans. Or, he is oblivious to reality. Or, a combination of both. 

Think back over the past 19 months. If you reflect and examine what has transpired in every facet of American life and in the U.S. economy, the evidence shows that practically everything Biden, his wizards and the Democratic Party Congress have done has had the opposite effect of that mission.

Americans are less prosperous — and growing poorer (see box). Americans are far less free. When the federal government continues to print money and spend and borrow at the rate it has under Biden, the resulting inflation and national debt are insidious taxes that sap Americans’ standard of living. And finally, everyone knows without a doubt, the United States, with its multi-tiered system of justice, is far less just than it was. Americans no longer believe there is equal justice under the law.

The cause of this misery, Mises wrote, begins with interventionism — when the government interferes with the market to effect the political elites’ quest for their imagined utopia. 

“The authority seeks to influence the market by the intervention of its coercive power, but it does not want to eliminate the market altogether. It desires that production and consumption should develop along lines different from those prescribed by the unhindered market, and it wants to achieve its aim by injecting into the working of the market orders, commands and prohibitions for whose enforcement the police power and its apparatus of coercion and compulsion stand ready.”

“[But] all the methods of interventionism are doomed to failure,” Mises wrote. To wit, wrote Mises: 

“Government spending cannot create additional jobs. If the government provides the funds required by taxing the citizens or by borrowing from the public, it abolishes on the one hand as many jobs as it creates on the other. 

“If government spending is financed by borrowing from the commercial banks, it means credit expansion and inflation. If in the course of such inflation the rise in commodity prices exceeds the rise in nominal wage rates, unemployment will drop. But what makes unemployment shrink is precisely the fact that real wage rates are falling.”

Sound familiar?

“No economist,” Mises stated unequivocally, “ever dared to assert that interventionism could result in anything other than in disaster and chaos.” And he wrote that after studying the disasters and chaos that led to wars and destruction in Europe over a half century.  

But here in the U.S., the political elites, academia and media have no clue of history or pay no attention to it. They keep spreading the coerciveness of government — shut down fossil fuel energy; force unaffordable EVs; take over the delivery of health services; socialize all education; forgive college loans; militarize the IRS; regulate business to the point of strangulation.

Nowhere in this chaos has any of them articulated what the end game of all this will look like. What will success look like?

There will be no success. Mises:

“What these people fail to realize is that the various measures they suggest are not capable of bringing about the beneficial results aimed at. On the contrary they produce a state of affairs which from the point of view of their advocates is worse than the previous state which they were designed to alter.”

As we all know, it’s a law of politics: When the first round of intervention fails or produces more unintended consequences, the politicians add more regulations and restrictions.

“Proceeding step by step on this way,” Mises concluded, “it finally reaches a point in which all economic freedom of individuals has disappeared. Then socialism emerges.”

How do we end this chaos? “What is needed,” Mises concluded, “… is common sense and moral courage.”

It will take more than that — a complete purge of the perpetrators, starting Nov. 15.

Matt Walsh is the founder, editor, CEO and co-owner with his wife, Lisa, of the Observer Media Group Inc., based in Sarasota, Fla. (mwalsh@YourObserver.com).

MASSES AREN’T ASKING FOR SOCIALISM

“It is not true that the masses are vehemently asking for socialism and that there is no means to resist them. The masses favor socialism because they trust the socialist propaganda of the intellectuals. The intellectuals, not the populace, are molding public opinion. 

“It is a lame excuse of the intellectuals that they must yield to the masses. They themselves have generated the socialist ideas and indoctrinated the masses with them. No proletarian or son of a proletarian has contributed to the elaboration of the interventionist and socialist programs … 

The intellectual leaders of the peoples have produced and propagated the fallacies which are on the point of destroying liberty and Western civilization. The intellectuals alone are responsible for the mass slaughters which are the characteristic mark of our century.”

— Ludwig von Mises,“Planned Chaos”

CHAOS FROM CENTRAL PLANNING

You remember 2019. The U.S. economy was rocking — across almost all sectors. 

But the consequences of two events brought rising prosperity to a halt. The events: The U.S. Center for Disease Control’s investment in and work with the Wuhan lab in China on coronavirus research and the election of Joe Biden.

Chaos ensued — all of it triggered because of government interventionism. With the spread of COVID-19 and the federal government’s mandates and interventions, Americans have been enduring 19 months of economic and social chaos. 

Just pick up the Wall Street Journal each day. The daily dose of negative economic headlines illustrates the chaos. A recent sampling:

• “Flat-declining household income (“Americans as a whole have experienced two years in a row of flat or declining household income, government data showed.”

• “S&P suffers worst day in over two years, as investors consider rate oulook”

• “Electric bills rise nationwide as natural-gas prices climb”

• “Mortgage rates jump past 6%, hit highest mark since 2008” 

• “Housing slowdown weighs on retailers”

• “Strike threat triggers supply concerns”

• “Supplier inflation remains elevated”

• “Health-plan premiums set to rise sharply”

• “FedEx sales drop below expectations”

• “Schools adopt four-day weeks to attract, keep staff”

• “Aviation crisis is now regional — staff shortages, capacity cuts strain sector”

CHAOTIC EFFECTS OF INTERVENTIONISM

Here are some of the obvious effects of policy actions and mandates since the spread of COVID and Biden’s election in 2020:

• Businesses forced to close because of shutdown mandates; 

• Labor shortages (People earning more from government checks than their jobs; quitting the work force)

• Goods shortages (toilet paper, cleaning supplies, foods)

• Restaurant food shortages — not enough truck drivers to deliver to restaurants

• 40-year inflation records

• Skyrocketing gasoline, energy and food prices

• Gasoline and energy shortages

• Rising interest rates

• Home sales coming to a halt

• FedEx CEO: Coming worldwide recession

• Baby formula shortage

• Mandated vaccines: people quit work, more labor shortages

• CDC COVID-19 vaccine mandates and policies: hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths (e.g. Remdesivir) and illnesses

• Hospital worker crises

• Censorship, ostracization and ruined lives of doctors who questioned CDC

• Recruitment shortage in military because of vaccine mandates and social engineering

• Oil and gas production employees out of work because of Biden policies to stop drilling and production

• Open border issues: Rising crime; strains on local communities; record drug overdose deaths

• Inflation effect: Rampant crime (car thefts at record levels)

CHAOS FROM FAILED IMMIGRATION POLICIES

Ha. The hullabaloo over Gov. Ron DeSantis sending illegal Venezuelan immigrtants to Martha’s Vineyard explicitly proves what economist Ludwig von Mises explained about “planned chaos” and interventionism and what the late Milton Friedman described as the law of laws.

When the consequences of Joe Biden’s reversal of Trump immigration policies (interventionism) resulted in the flood of illegal immigrants across our Southern border, what did Joe Biden expect was going to happen — that the hordes of illegal immigrants  would be welcomed with parades and Welcome Wagon barbecues? 

The results and consequences were blindingly predictable. 

Chaos would ensue. And it has for the past 19 months. 

It is no surprise whatsoever that we have witnessed states feeling the adverse effects of Biden’s policies becoming compelled to respond with their own intervention.  

Ths is the way it always goes. One bad law or intervention begets another intervention. And when the unintended consequences of that second intervention become apparent, they spawn more intervention and more laws. 

And on and on it goes. Chaos upon chaos.

One choice Biden had early on was to go back to the beginning — President Trump’s policies, which staunched the flow of illegal immigrants. 

Logic would say go back and do what worked. But no, politicians can never admit their opponents were right. They must always intervene, inevitably making things worse. 

— Matt Walsh

Editor’s Note: The following was published Sept. 15 in the Longboat Observer and Sarasota Observer and YourObserver.com.

Who are the “fascists”?

Who are the authoritarians?

Three weeks have passed since Joe Biden’s now infamous remark at a fundraising event, where, essentially, he labeled as fascists Americans who voted for Donald Trump and embrace or embraced Trump’s “Make America Great Again” philosophy.

Biden followed that jaw-dropping moment with a speech that repeatedly proclaimed in higher decibels and length how horrible and dangerous Trump voters are and how they’re destroying democracy.

But what is so amazing is how oblivious Biden and his puppet masters are to reality.  

If you take the time to read and analyze Biden’s speech and then place his accusations side by side with what has transpired during his administration, it is unavoidable to see that Biden, his White House maestros, Cabinet toadies and the Democratic Congress have done everything he accuses the Republicans of doing.

Who are the real fascists? They should look in the mirror. 

To begin, the Biden team clearly doesn’t know what know what Fascism is.

Merriam-Webster: Fascism — “a political philosophy, movement or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation and forcible suppression of opposition.”

Undeniably, that is the Biden “regime.” To wit:

Whenever Biden and the Democratic Party Congress push through $7 trillion in new federal spending, as they have in the past two years, they are expanding their powers over individual Americans and robbing them of freedom.

Through their “central planning,” they are confiscating taxpayers’ money (now and in the future) and spending it the way they want to spend it. What say, for instance, did you have in that ludicrous Budget Reduction Act? Where was the public support for that boondoggle?

When the Biden regime imposes regulations to thwart commerce that it doesn’t want (e.g. shutting down energy pipelines and drilling), it is using its centralized autocratic powers.

Dictatorial leader? Biden is not, but he is the doddering stooge and mouthpiece for the behind-the-scenes cabal of Ron Klain, Susan Rice and the other leftist Democratic Party schemers foisting their fascist agenda on Americans.

No one can deny that the Biden regime has imposed “severe economic regimentation.” Look what they have done to every Americans’ standard of living with their inflation and restrictions on the supply of energy.

They are doing everything they can to eliminate the use of affordable fossil fuels and force Americans to buy expensive electric vehicles. They are using their centralized powers to subsidize auto makers and affluent EV buyers — taking from the working class and poor and giving unearned benefits to others — all to force on Americans their fascist-socialist agenda.

“Severe social regimentation”? All we need say is: “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Look what that has done to the U.S. military, and how wokeness has destroyed the American values of being judged by merit and the content of character.

And then there is “forcible suppression of opposition.” The list is long and notorious: Raid on Mar-a-lago. Rampant big-tech censorship. FBI and White House staffs colluding with big-tech to suppress the Hunter Biden and Biden corruption stories. Don’t forget the dozens and dozens of physicians and scientists whom CDC officials and social media platforms discredited because they challenged Washington authorities’ handling of COVID. 

Who are the real authoritarian fascists?

In 1965, author Ayn Rand gave a lecture in New York, “The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus.”

She began this lecture describing three political terms — Socialism, Fascism and Statism, quoting the 1957 edition of the American College Dictionary ’s 1965 lecture:

“Socialism — A theory or system of social organization which advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production, capital, land, etc. in the community as a whole.

“Fascism — A governmental system with strong centralized power, permitting no opposition or criticism, controlling all affairs of the nation.

“Statism — The principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty.”

Rand pointed out that Socialism and Fascism are merely variants of Statism, and the difference between Socialism and Fascism involves property rights. “Socialism negates property rights altogether, vesting  the ownership and control of all property to the state. Fascism leaves ownership in the hands of individuals, but transfers control to the government.”

“In practice,” Rand said, “there is no difference between the two; both come from the same collectivist-statist principle; both negate individual rights and subordinate the individual to the collective; both deliver the livelihood and the lives of the citizens into the power of an omnipotent government.”

That is exactly what Biden and his leftist fascists are doing.

But here is the alarmingly scary part: The German people witnessed these tactics in the early 1930s when the new chancellor of Germany orchestrated the overthrow of the Germans’ democratic republic and replaced it with his utopian vision — the National Socialist Party of Germany, aka a Nazi dictatorship.

Author William L. Shirer recounted this chilling epoch in his 1960 masterpiece, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” The cunning, scheming and evil were chilling.

So are the parallels to today.

Shirer recounts, for example, that on Feb. 3, 1933, one month after Adolf Hitler and his sordid schemers came to power, Paul Joseph Goebbels, one of Hitler’s top lieutenants, wrote in his diary:

“Now it will be easy to carry on the fight, for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money.”

Sound familiar? Are we witnessing the same? Democrats control all of the “resources” of the federal government, and the mainstream media clearly serves as the principal propaganda mouthpiece for the leftist Democrats.

As Hitler took over all of Germany, Shirer quoted from Hitler’s own playbook, “Mein Kampf,” how Hitler would win over the German masses with the use of what Hitler called “spiritual and physical terror.”

Hitler: “I understood the infamous spiritual terror … [At] a given sign, it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down … This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty.”

Shirer wrote: “No more precise analysis of Nazi tactics … was ever written.”

We saw it in practice in Philadelphia.

There he was, Joe Biden, who had the gall to use as his backdrop  Independence Hall and U.S. Marines flanking him. Reading from the text on the teleprompters supplied to him by his masters, he spewed vile about his fellow Americans. Biden made derogatory statement after statement, vilifying Republicans. And typical of the politicians who use “spiritual terror,” he supplied no facts to back his statements (see box).

MAGA Republicans, he said, “spread fear and lies — lies told for profit and power.”

But who is the one spreading fear and lies?

Joe Biden and the schemers behind his curtain are the real fascists and authoritarians.

SIDEBAR: STATEMENTS OF FACT WITH NO FACTS

Everyone who paid attention in school learned one of the fundamentals of writing and speaking is when you make a statement of fact, you follow it with facts and examples that prove your point.

Here are seven paragraphs from Joe Biden’s Philadelphia speech castigating Republicans — but providing no supporting evidence.

Who is spreading fear and lies?  

• “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

 • “And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution.  They do not believe in the rule of law.  They do not recognize the will of the people.”

• “MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.”

• “They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.”

• “MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.”

• “MAGA Republicans … spread fear and lies — lies told for profit and power.”

• “The MAGA Republicans believe that for them to succeed, everyone else has to fail.”

— Matt Walsh

Matt Walsh is the founder, editor, CEO and co-owner with his wife, Lisa, of the Observer Media Group Inc., based in Sarasota, Fla. (YourObserver.com).