Unify to Restore Sanity & the American Dream

My election day hangover debrief

I recently spoke with Michele Tafoya about my history with Trump Derangement Syndrome, my shameful estrangement from my dad over politics, and the enlightenment period that followed after witnessing my children suffer at the hands of the government.

In 2021, I joined a ragtag group of angry parents to speak out against draconian Covid restrictions.

We spoke out against the harm to our children in the name of “public health.”

We became social pariahs, shunned for sharing facts that the government was working hard to keep out of public view.

I started speaking with media, giving interviews to a variety of outlets, and quickly realized that the media generally doesn’t seek to report news, but to frame narratives that further their objectives and provoke reactions and behaviors they want from the public.

Bari Weiss of The Free Press

This is not true of all media companies, and there are some very talented journalists in American media who are exceptions.

I witnessed government censorship efforts firsthand when I sued the County of Los Angeles Dept of Public Health (by the way, Adam Schiff, the worst offender was just elected to the US Senate).

After being labeled a racist, bigot, dangerous, evil, I could go on… All for the crime of advocating for kids and sharing facts and data about the incredibly low risk of serious illness and death in young children due to Covid, and experiencing the relentless attacks lobbed against me by the government and its henchmen for publicly criticizing their oppressive and authoritarian behavior, a light bulb finally went off.

I know I’m not racist, hateful, bigoted, evil, and all the things the government, the media, and Democrat activists called me.

Those labels were designed to discredit me.

They labeled me to scare people away. (No one wants to be associated with a racist)!

A group wanted to maintain power. They wanted people to believe I was evil and dangerous so that people wouldn’t listen to me, and people would instead continue to listen to them, vote for them, and follow their lead.

It was about control—not truth.

Then I started listening to the “racist, evil, dangerous” people that my government didn’t want me listening to, and I realized they were not the hateful bigoted monsters the media told me they were. It was all a political game to discredit others and maintain power.

Using this rhetoric is a way to shut down conversations so the left doesn’t listen to anything anyone has to say that might differ from their narrow perspective.

It also radicalizes people against their fellow citizens, who they’ve been led to believe are the radicals.

I was a big fan of Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis. When he dropped out of the presidential race, I was depressed but still not remotely interested in supporting the Democratic party, which stole years of childhood from my kids and the sick rhetoric that has divided families and friend groups and turned neighbor against neighbor.

Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) officially left my body when a would-be assassin shot Trump in Butler. I stopped feeling a burning sensation in my chest when I heard his voice or saw his face.

Eventually I even started finding Trump entertaining.

Suddenly he was human—not the evil psychotic dark monster I believed he was. Easier to understand when we’re face to face with others in a room, but equally easy to forget when making snarky comments on the internet.

I was nervous about this election but felt confident that the Republicans had reached the vast majority of American voters. With Elon Musk’s purchase of X, facts and reality are much more accessible and less filtered through partisan bias. Of course there are attempts to discredit and control narratives on X just as there are in traditional media, but it’s more difficult for traditional media to pretend something is not happening when millions of people are discussing it on X.

J.D. Vance pushed Trump over the line to victory with his flawless debate performance, where he articulated policy positions in an eloquent and empathetic way. The debate revealed a stark contrast between a positive vision for America versus the Harris/Walz’ “Orange Man Bad” policy with no solutions for or acknowledgement of struggling American families.

Still, I live in LA County, a deep blue stronghold in a state so blue that all the television networks immediately assigned 54 electoral votes to Harris before any precincts reported votes in California. Based on my brief dip into Instagram yesterday, many people in my community still believe Trump is a racist, misogynist, evil bigot.

These people are apparently unaware that Trump is actually the most moderate Republican president of our lifetime on social issues. They haven’t realized that Democrats assigned these labels to Trump and Vance to win elections, raise money and maintain control.

They don’t just do it to Trump.

They’ve done it to me, and they do it to everyone who threatens their narrative and their power.

I sincerely hope Harris voters can channel the outrage they feel about the election results into positive action!

I hope that they will choose different sources of media going forward.

I hope that they stop demonizing friends and family who support non-leftist policies, and work to reconnect with people they’ve cut off.

After all, life is more enjoyable when you don’t believe your friends and family are racist demons (I promise you they are not).

It is incredibly harmful and destructive to our society to label people as racist, hateful bigots who don’t deserve to be heard. Encouraging people to go “no contact” with friends and family members who vote differently or believe differently—something I see many Democrat activists doing—is fundamentally evil. Our bonds of friendship and family are the most important elements of human existence.

We should never encourage terminating relationships over politics—perceived or actual.

But I digress. Now that the results are mostly in, it’s time to start the work. Some of the things I hope to see in the first 100 days, which will be far easier to achieve with a Republican trifecta in the House (currently 203 D to 211 R and projected to go R), Senate (currently 52 R seats and projected to go 53 R) and White House, are as follows:

1.     Censorship

• Put J.D. Vance, Robert Kennedy Jr., Michael Shellenberger, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya in charge of a free speech task force.

  

• Penalize every instance of a government actor requesting or pressuring digital media outlets, traditional media, publishers, etc, to silence speech with which they disagree.

• Amend FOIA to apply to members of congress so that members of the public can see what their representatives are up to and how they work to censor dissent.

2.     Public Health Reform

• No government bureaucrat should have the authority to lock people in their homes or close schools and businesses based on junk science from “experts.”

• Any public health intervention must undergo a thorough cost benefit analysis before implementation.

• The government should receive absolutely no deference when it acts to deprive citizens of liberty in the name of “public health.”

• Many legal cases were lost over the last few years when courts said “the CDC recommended this (asinine, ineffective and harmful) intervention, and therefore it cannot be challenged in court.” That standard must be eradicated forever.

3.    Border

• Hire Bill Melugin as border czar/advisor. He knows more about the border than any policy wonk could ever pretend to know.

• Reimpose the executive orders repealed by Biden when he took office.

• Physically secure the border and defend it militarily from California through Florida. Barriers should not be made from materials that can be sawed through, easily moved aside, or are otherwise penetrable (as they currently are). Deploy technology from California through Florida to monitor every inch of the border and crack down on cartel activity. Deploy military to neutralize cartel.

• No more bogus asylum claims. Economic opportunity is not a valid asylum claim. No more touching American soil, claiming asylum and then getting released into the country.

• Reform the immigration system. The current laws are nonsensical, and the system is not adequately staffed. It will become more manageable once the border is physically secure.

• Mass deportation of those who’ve crossed illegally, prioritizing those with violent criminal history.

• No more “sanctuary” policies. All “sanctuary” cities and states must be deprived of federal funding. All law enforcement MUST cooperate with ICE.

• Withdraw from all litigation against border states attempting to defend their own borders.

• Pass legislation explicitly allowing states to protect their borders where federal government has failed to do so and defining “invasion” so that we don’t continue to see battles between border states and DOJ in the future when pendulum swings left.

4.    Improve Public Education

• I understand the call to abolish the DOE and recognize it is not as radical as it sounds. Since the Department was established in the 1970s, American education has declined. Decisions around curriculum and education should be localized. However, as a California resident, school board member and an attorney who has seen far too many radical policies implemented in blue state schools, I hope the federal government will at least attempt to save millions of children from radical indoctrination and ineffective education. It’s California’s only hope. Gavin Newsom apparently learned what federalism is on Tuesday, so my only remedy might be to move to a sane state.

• Legislate a right to good teachers. Prohibit automatic tenure for life, implement accountability measures so employers can discipline and terminate bad teachers instead of allowing unions to take that role. Delegation of oversight and accountability duties of public district to private unions is unconstitutional and should be prohibited.

• Enforce FERPA by cutting public funds to every district that has a policy or practice of withholding education records from parents regarding their children. This includes every district in California in light of AB 1955 and current practice and policies with respect to withholding records, which are completely at odds with FERPA.

• Repeal Biden’s Title IX regulations, which have been enjoined in multiple district courts throughout the country as unconstitutional and contrary to the plain text of Title IX.

• Enforce Title IX by withholding money from all schools that require females to share spaces, athletic teams, and scholarships with males. This includes all California schools due to Education Code section 231.5(f), and now New York with Proposition 1.

• Withhold funding from all schools that fail to protect students from terrorist support groups.

• Prohibit foreign funding of American schools (K-12 through higher education).

• Prohibit infusion of radical social justice activism in schools, including teaching children that people are inherently racist because of characteristics they were born with and cannot control. Prohibit gender ideology and critical theory taught as fact to young children.

• Revoke NEA federal charter.

• Student loan reform. Prohibit compounding interest, cap interest rates at reasonably low rate, prohibit collections agency penalties, and enable students to pay loans back instead of crippling them for life and destroying their economic opportunity.

• Cut red tape that slows and makes school facilities construction prohibitively expensive, including project labor agreements and prevailing wage requirements. Streamline permit and approval process.

• Generally, with some exceptions, Heritage Foundation’s policy suggestions are solid.

5.     Secure American Elections

• Require voter ID at every polling location.

• Implement systems like Florida’s, where ballots are counted rapidly and can be audited and verified.  

I have a lot more to say but I think this is a good start, and I’m optimistic that we can have rational discussions about these policy ideas without demonizing people who disagree.

Let’s Make Debate Great Again.