“Let’s Roll”—The Fascist Threat to Florida and What To Do About It

The author addresses the Democracy Under Siege forum in Naples, Fla., on Oct. 5, 2024.

Oct. 17, 2024 by David Silverberg

On Oct. 5, 2024 Southwest Floridians gathered for a forum titled “Democracy Under Siege: The Fascist Threat to Florida and What To Do About It.”

The forum, held at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Greater Naples in Naples, Fla., was sponsored by Floridians for Democracy, The Lincoln Project, Florida Veterans for Common Sense, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Greater Naples, Choose Democracy, and The Paradise Progressive.

Speakers were Rick Wilson, co-founder of The Lincoln Project, who joined the gathering remotely; Dale Anderson, a Sarasota-based pro-democracy activist and advisor to Choose Democracy Now; and David Silverberg, founder and author of The Paradise Progressive blog.

The full 2-hour program can be seen on YouTube.

The author’s 22-minute speech can be seen here.

It focuses on the threat to democracy in Collier County, Fla., the greater danger of “fasco-Trumpism,” ways individuals can defend democracy, and the importance of elections in general and this year’s election in particular.

Thank you very much for that. My name is David Silverberg and I want to talk about here in Collier County and what’s been going on.

First of all, I’m going to take a little quibble: We don’t have Fascism as it was defined in Europe; we do not have a Fascist Party by that name here in Florida. We don’t have a movement that’s Fascist with a capital “F.”

What we have is a lot of fascistic development both here in Florida and here in Collier County, I’m sorry to say, but I’m going to really draw that distinction.

And I’m also going to use a term called “fasco-Trumpism” because, you know, it’s fascistic and we know that when we say fascism we mean it in a generic sense: it’s authoritarian, it’s dictatorial, it’s oppressive, and, of course, we have Donald Trump who has unleashed all this in the world.

By the way, I googled “fasco-Trumpism” and it’s nowhere on Google so we’re hearing it here for the first time.

Here in Florida, we have “Trump-lite,” the man “where charisma goes to die” as Rick Wilson put it, Governor Ron DeSantis, who, by the way, as we all know is a total creature of Trump; he would not exist on the political stage if Trump had not endorsed him in his race for governor and got him through the primary and he is—as Dale very ably showed—is trying to coordinate across the state, its culture, its society, this anti-woke fasco-Trumpist culture.

But right here in Collier County we’ve had some disturbing trends and I’m sure you’ve all been following them and the chief evangelist for this is our very own Francis Alfred Oakes III, whom we all know as Alfie.

When you look at it the similarities between Alfie and Trump are really remarkable. They’re both businessmen, they’re both bombastic, they’re both mercurial, they’re both fanatical in their ways, they’re both fasco-Trumpists, MAGAs. Alfie once got a phone call from Trump and thinks he’s just about God.

And before I go further on Alfie—and it’s not entirely focused on Alfie—I want to make clear that I don’t hate this guy. I have met him. I did an article on him for a magazine called Mother Jones. He sat down with me, we had a two-hour interview, he was gracious, he was cordial, he was—I think—forthcoming and truthful where I think it was in his interest. If the guy stuck to food and groceries we all—and he—would be a whole lot better off.

But Alfie has his opinions and he is absolutely entitled to those opinions and he’s entitled to express those opinions. I support that. But we are entitled to respond and react to those opinions and to his actions—and it’s the actions that really count.

And one other thing, just to cover my backside—he is a public figure. Alfie is politically active, he is a state committeeman in the Collier County Republican Party, so his actions are subject to scrutiny, criticism and analysis.

Having said that, he has tried to impose a fasco-Trumpist ideology on Collier County and especially, on the Republican Party in Collier County.

He won as a state committeeman in 2020, he ousted a guy named Doug Rankin, he was riding on his defiance of COVID protocols in the midst of the panic and the pressures of the pandemic and he pretty much took control of the Republican Executive Committee here in Collier County, the REC, or, as I prefer to call it, the Wreck. And between the Wreck and his own political action committee, Citizens Awake Now, CANPAC, he succeeded in altering the political balance here in Collier County.

Now, in 2022 he put up three candidates for the school board and two candidates for the Collier County Commission and he won all his races, which was an achievement, if you want to use that word. But as a result, we have in Collier County a very fasco-Trumpist agenda and the Commission and the School Board have moved in that direction—although there are changes in the school board.

When you look at what our Board of Commissioners has passed, they passed a federal nullification law, the so-called Bill of Rights Sanctuary Ordinance, which says that Collier County has the right to nullify federal law, to not obey it if it considers it unconstitutional, which is really going to come back to bite this county, which I can go into detail later.

They’ve outlawed mask and public health mandates. They passed what was a very, very, very critical anti-public health resolution that got watered down but that anti-vaxx, anti-COVID, anti-mandate, anti-public health effort is very much promoted. Fortunately, the ordinance, the law, that has penalties that they passed, duplicated state law. State law says that you can’t have mask mandates anymore so this says the same thing so it doesn’t make that much of a difference.

Like Sarasota County, they withdrew the county from the American Library Association.

Then, last month, they passed an anti-Amendment 4 resolution. Now, that doesn’t have the force of law but it was a start, here in Collier County, of a movement to have counties come out against Amendment 4 and a woman’s right to choose and we saw it just passed again in Lee County, so it is moving along. I don’t know how many people it’s going to influence to go against Amendment 4 but they did that.

Then, weirdly—and I have to admit, I did not see this coming—they voted to end fluoridation in Collier County’s water. So now all the kids can get cavities and they can make more work for local dentists, and Alfie will protect his pineal gland, which he was worried about.

And, by the way, everybody who buys toothpaste has got to look for that fluoride because you’re not going to get it from the water in Collier County.

Let me also point out—and this came up in our interview—he says, Alfie, that he owns 3,000 guns, that he can arm every employee at Seed to Table and in 2022, he was addressing a group and he said, “I’m all in. We don’t want to talk about what that is”—meaning that if he didn’t like the way the 2022 elections came out he might launch an armed revolt, he said “but we have to be all in.”

Well, the ’22 elections came out very well for him so we all live under law and order.

Now, all this is very menacing and he was moving to further extend this in 2024 but something very, very interesting happened and it happened this past August on August 20.

There was a revolt! There was people who had enough of Alfie and Alfie fasco-Trumpism and MAGAism here in Collier County and the people who revolted were all the Republicans. The Republicans in their primary repudiated the Alfie-MAGAs for all the different offices that he was proposing.

Alfie didn’t care about anybody’s qualifications, in fact, I heard him once say in a speech, he said: “I don’t care what a person’s IQ is, or what their education is, all I need is some back and common sense.” So he’s looking for fellow fanatics and he had them up for two school board seats, he had them up for county commission—all three were incumbents but he really wanted to get rid of Burt Saunders in the 3rd District. And, of course, he wanted to get rid of Melissa Blazier as supervisor of elections; that was a very dangerous one, and the county assessor.

At that point he had reached a point where the Republicans said, “no!” Especially in the technical offices like Supervisor of Elections where expertise is really important and you have to know what you’re doing, even Republicans had had enough. And Collier County, and I hope you appreciate it, is a pretty well run county. This place functions and it functions very well. Maybe Steve Bannon will call it the “deep state” but I’ll call it the “deep county” and it works for us. And had he gotten these other people in, it would not have.

Now, there was one position that he did win, a lawyer, and she is now a committeeperson on the Wreck, and she was the one who drafted this anti-federal nullification law, which in 1821—1821!—in 2021 (it might as well be 1821!) when she did it in 2021, our own David Millstein characterized that law as “proposed by someone who doesn’t know constitutional law.”

But she won her election as state committeeperson.

So why is this revolt, this little revolt among the Wreck, so significant?

Well, I think it’s significant because it shows that there is a line, there is a point beyond which this kind of fasco-Trumpism becomes oppressive even to those people who adhere to these party principles—and these are the folks that Rick Wilson was talking about. These are people who still think, people who are thoughtful. They’re very conservative, I mean, have no doubt about that, but they know fascism when they see it and they didn’t want any part of it. And they responded with a fundamental American patriotism and belief in freedom and liberty and they expressed this at the voting booth and all those MAGA candidates lost.

And, by the way, Alfie got disqualified, of course, because he didn’t fill out his papers properly and so he is off the Wreck and Doug Rankin, who he deposed in 2020, is now going to be head of the Wreck. He’s a very conservative guy, he’s been a conservative Republican, I think, since the womb, but he is not Alfie’s Republican.

So, my hope is that the same kind of revulsion and the same kind of revolt and the same kind of discontent with this kind of fasco-Trumpism is abroad in the land. And Rick will get the percentage of Republicans who have had enough, they will vote for freedom and liberty but, you know, we have to remain vigilant.

Now I want to talk about the “what we do about it” part of this presentation.

Remember something: even after this election, as Rick Wilson pointed out, there are going to be attempts to negate what happens, to overturn the results, and Florida, Lord knows, has a record of passing constitutional amendments that the legislature and the governor then ignore. We’ve got to hold their feet to the fire.

But there are maybe three broad principles that we can follow.

One is vigilance. We’ve got to be on top over everything these people doing. As Dale mentioned, one effort that is truly fascist—and Fascist with a capital “F”—is the attempt to make this a one-party state. And there have been those attempts.

Christian Ziegler, who was chair of the Florida Republican Party before he got deposed in a sex scandal, once said that: “For the Republican Party of Florida the work continues as our job is not done until there are no more Democrats in Florida.”

This is not competition. This is extermination. And that is a very, very bad trend. There was one bill proposed last year that would have decertified the Democratic Party in Florida. It wasn’t serious. It didn’t advance but it shows a mentality and we have to be especially vigilant to that. We have to be a multiparty state because we’re a multiparty society.

Our media plays an essential role in this and I have to say that I have been disappointed by our local media, I don’t think they keep track of these people, they don’t emphasize the political threats that are out there to the degree I wish they would. This is why I started The Paradise Progressive blog, which I hope you’re familiar with, or will be familiar with afterwards. It’s trying to fill the gap that I see in our political reporting from our traditional media. We’ve got a good reporter in Dave Elias, who’s very active on NBC2 but he can’t do it alone. We all have to be our own monitors, own Minute-people to keep track of these kinds of loony ideas like getting rid of fluoride and do it when it’s coming up.

You know, they passed an anti-immigrant law last year. That law went through subcommittee, it went through committee, it went through the legislature in its entirety—and this is a statewide law—and then Ron DeSantis signed it into law and then suddenly the protests start.

I’m sorry, that’s not when you do it. You may be mad about the law but you’ve got to be active when it’s being formulated, when it’s on the table.

That brings us to the second pillar, which is response. You’ve got to respond. Be vigilant and when you see something bad you’ve got to respond.

Here in Collier County that means contacting our Board of Commissioners and even if they don’t listen, even if they vote against it, they need to know there are people who are watching what they do.

There have been statements in the Collier County Commission…[Commissioner] Chris Hall [R-District 2] once said, “something is out there,” he couldn’t understand why there was all this protest against it. It was because he put it out there! It was a loony law that he wanted to do and everybody saw what it was and they protested. And it does have effect. And that also applies to the congressional level and we can get into our congressman some other time.

But you’ve got to be vigilant, responsive and the third pillar is activism.

You’ve always got to be active, it doesn’t end with the election, it doesn’t start with the runup to the election; the day after the election we’re going to have to be active.

As Michelle Obama said to the Democratic National Convention: “Do something!”

Look, none of us are going to take up arms. I’m pretty sure that no matter what happens none of us are going to go out and shoot up a firehouse or something like that.

We all know what the traditional things are: making phone calls, canvassing—which, by the way, is a great exercise. It gets you to meet all your neighbors, talk to people. Writing postcards. All of these are democratic norms.

I want to add another challenge to everybody.

Since social media is now our preferred, most common use of communication, I want to challenge everybody here to reach out to ten people you have never met, never contacted, and don’t know and try to convince them to your point of view whatever that point of view is, if you think that’s important. Ten people you don’t know. You’ve got to get outside of your bubble. You’ve got to talk beyond your friends. Lord knows, there’s plenty of feeds and all sorts of things. There’s all these nice Chinese ladies who want to get to know me, I could talk to them.

You can reach out to people you’ve never talked to and never met and do it on social media. You can do it at home, you can do it at any hour, you can do it unprompted, when you’re relaxing or taking a bath or whatever. But try to reach out to people and that’s really important. It’s especially important for this election.

Now, all my recommendations are based on the premise that we will have a democracy; that our laws will function, that you can do these things, that it’s legal, that it’s protected.

If we lose democracy we lose everything. I think everybody in this room knows it.

Today, as Rick pointed out, is 30 days to the most important election of our lifetimes, of our children’s’ lifetimes and our grandkids’ lifetimes.

I don’t have a grandchild who’s ready to vote yet, but she will be affected by what we do here next month.

It brings up to me what I consider one of the most meaningful elections that ever occurred—and that occurred on September 11th, 2001. All of us in this room remember that day.

It was an election held in the back of an airplane, United Airlines Flight 93

We know what had happened. Al Qaeda hijackers had taken over that plane, killed the pilot and the co-pilot and there was one standing outside the cockpit threatening to blow up the plane with a bomb.

The passengers went into the back and they had to decide what to do. They knew that other planes had hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. They didn’t know where they were headed.

And so what did they do? They took a vote. They held an election. They held an election because that’s what we as Americans do.

When we are faced with a decision, when we are faced with a course of action, we take a vote. There was one passenger, Todd Beamer, who said, “OK, let’s roll.” And they voted to try to take back that airplane.

Nobody said the vote was rigged. Nobody said that there had to be a hand count of ballots. Nobody said that there was a secret landslide that no one had seen. And nobody said that they weren’t going to accept the results of that vote. Because that’s not what Americans do, not what real, patriotic Americans do and that’s not what those passengers did on that airplane.

They took a vote, they acted on their decision.

Now, the plane crashed. They fought for that cockpit and ultimately it crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

But by their action they may have saved the United States Capitol. They may have saved the White House. Who knows how many American lives they saved?

Let me tell you, I was on the ground in Washington, DC on 9/11, my wife was working at home, my son was in a high school next to the CIA. We were all saved by those people—as a result of their election.

Now, today, we have hijackers again. We are the passengers in the back of that plane. And these people are trying to take that aircraft into darkness and dictatorship and disaster. And we have got to get control of that aircraft.

And on November 5th we will hold that election and I hope—and I hope that we will all work and I certainly intend to—to make sure that we get that airplane under control and we land it safely in a free democracy.

So, that is one month from today. Each of us has something to do.

So, let’s roll.  

Liberty lives in light

© 2024 by David Silverberg

Milton the storm and Milton the man: Who was Florida’s suicidal governor and what lessons does he hold for today?

Florida Gov. John Milton. (Oil painting over photograph, Claribel Jett, Fla. Dept. of State)

Oct. 10, 2024 by David Silverberg

When “Milton” came up on the National Hurricane Center’s list of hurricane names, it hardly seemed appropriate for a killer storm.

Rather, it seemed nerdy, best suited for an owlish accountant. It evoked Milton Berle, the slapstick comedian who had his heyday in the early days of television (for people who remember him).

But for those with a sense of Florida history, it was a creepy evocation of a volatile governor who was so completely tied to the Confederate cause that he could not bear its defeat. A hurricane bearing his last name aimed at Florida seemed a coincidence ripe for the hauntings of Halloween—and very ominous for those following the storm’s track.

So, who was John Milton and what happened to him and what did he mean for the state of Florida? And could there be a cosmic meaning in what was otherwise a complete coincidence of timing and names?

Origins of a reluctant Floridian

The most famous John Milton was the seventeenth century English Puritan poet who penned the epic poem Paradise Lost about the revolt of the angel Satan against God and his subsequent exile to the depths of Hell.

As it happens, Florida’s John Milton was related to that John Milton. Indeed, he was part of a family distinguished both in England and the United States. His great grandfather, also named John Milton, was a hero of the Revolutionary War and a presidential candidate in 1789, when he ran as a Federalist from Georgia and received two electoral votes. His son, Homer Virgil Milton, was a hero of the War of 1812.

The John Milton who became governor of Florida was born on April 20, 1807 near Louisville, Ga., and grew up in Georgia, “reading” law (a less formal education than a degree and one also pursued by Abraham Lincoln).

Milton practiced law in Georgia and in 1830 he married Susan Amanda Cobb, with whom he had a son and two daughters. They subsequently lived in Georgia, Alabama and New Orleans.

He married a second time (presumably on the death of his first wife) and had two sons and seven daughters by his second wife, Caroline Howze.

Florida had been acquired by the United States from Spain in 1821. While it attracted immigrants as a land of opportunity then, as it does to this day, Milton, who was described by The New York Times in his youth as “gay and dashing” went there driven by a different motivation: he killed a man in a duel over a lady and had to flee Louisiana.

Wealthy by the time he moved to Florida in 1846, he bought a 7,000-acre plantation near the town of Marianna, about 65 miles northwest of Tallahassee. Named Sylvania, it was worked by an enslaved population.

When the Third Seminole War broke out in 1855, Milton served as captain of volunteers until the conflict ended in 1858.

But Milton made his real mark in politics.

Success and secession

In the presidential election of 1848 Milton served as a presidential Elector, voting for Democrat Lewis Cass. 

Florida’s Democratic Party was split between Conservatives, who favored states’ rights and Whigs who favored the union. Milton turned out to be an effective orator and a fiery Conservative. In this he followed the thinking of John Calhoun and South Carolinians who argued that states had the right to “nullify” federal laws with which they disagreed.

By 1849 the question of slavery was beginning to roil national politics. In 1852 it suddenly moved to the forefront of the national debate when Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published.

As a wealthy slave owner and states rights advocate, Milton became a defender of slavery and a proponent of secession. Elected a state senator in 1850, he obsessively pursued the idea, making emotional, intense speeches in its favor. In this he closely resembled another southerner, planter and author Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, who also fanatically advocated secession.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 brought the question of union, secession, state rights and slavery to a head.

In 1860, Florida had only 140,424 inhabitants. Most worked in agriculture in some way and settlement was largely in the northern part of the state with the exception of Key West, which at the time was America’s richest city, built on salving wrecked shipping. As small as the state’s population was, it had expanded exponentially in the years since the United States had acquired the territory.

Of the population, according to the 1860 census, 41,128 were white men, 36,319 were white women, 31,348 were black male slaves and 30,397 were black female slaves. There were only 454 free black men and 478 free black women.

The electorate was tiny. Only white men had the vote. When debate began over secession in 1860—in what may be surprising to modern readers—there was strong unionist sentiment in the state legislature and about half the state’s population.

Milton’s fiery oratory won him the Conservative nomination for governor. His opponent was Edward Hopkins, who led the Constitutional Unionists. The ultimate vote was small and extremely close: 6,994 for Milton and 5,248 for Hopkins, a difference of only 1,746 votes, but enough to make Milton governor.

It was the same election that made Abraham Lincoln president. Across the South secessionists prepared for war. The outgoing governor, Madison Perry, was authorized to spend $100,000 in arms and munitions for state forces.

Milton continued to push for secession and Edmund Ruffin of Virginia traveled to Tallahassee to add his support.

At Milton’s strenuous urging, on January 10, 1861 the state legislature passed an ordinance of secession by a vote of 62 to 7, becoming the third state to secede. The seven dissenters unsuccessfully tried to have the ordinance submitted to a general referendum but failed.

A minority of partisan politicians prevailed and declared Florida a “sovereign and independent nation.”

Civil War

Milton was such a secessionist that he didn’t even want Florida to join the Confederate States of America. He even resisted the Confederate Secretary of War’s call up of the state militia to serve in the Confederate army.

Nonetheless he realized, however vaguely, that the rebellion would take a common effort. Still, with Florida’s tiny white male population, people were not going to be its greatest contribution to the cause.

Instead, Florida contributed the fruits of its agriculture, especially cattle and salt, to the Confederacy and Milton was instrumental in organizing its collection and shipment to the north. It briefly made Florida, if not the breadbasket of the confederacy, certainly its meat monger.

During the war the Union took note of this supply and tried to stop or impede it.

In February 1864 Union troops marched out from Jacksonville, which they held, to disrupt the food supply. Their commander, Gen. Truman Seymour, decided to exceed orders and take Tallahassee. Confederates from Florida and South Carolina sought to stop him and they met in battle at the town of Olustee. The Confederates beat the Union troops who retreated back to Jacksonville.

A contemporary illustration of the Battle of Olustee, which has been criticized for various inaccuracies. For example, neither side fought from behind fortifications. (Art: US archives)

Battle even came to Fort Myers, which in 1865 was an actual fort, whose surrounding community was home to around 400 pro-Union Floridian refugees.

The fort, which was largely a wooden blockhouse, housed the 2nd Florida Cavalry, largely made of pro-Union Floridians, a company of New York volunteer infantry and the 2nd United States Colored Infantry. The troops raided surrounding ranches, depots and grazing lands to cut off Confederate supplies.

Fort Myers in 1865. (Art: Leslie’s Illustrated)

On February 20, 1865 about 500 Confederates approached the fort, which was manned by about 275 Union troops, and demanded their surrender. When the Union commander refused, battle commenced and after four hours of fighting the Confederates withdrew. In March the Union forces abandoned the fort on their own volition.

It was barely more than a skirmish but has gone down in history as the southernmost battle of the Civil War.

A shot in Sylvania

As the southern cause declined so did Milton’s will and determination and he was reportedly worn down by the cares of office.

In March 1865 he left Tallahassee for his plantation in Marianna but not before he sent a message to the state legislature. In it he stated that Union Army leaders “have developed a character so odious that death would be preferable to reunion with them.”

By the dawn of April the Confederacy was on its last legs and the capital, Richmond, was about to fall.

Apparently unable to face the prospect of a Union victory, Milton committed suicide at his home plantation, Sylvania, on April 1, putting a bullet in his brain.

The next day Richmond fell. Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia on April 9. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 15. And Edmund Ruffin, Milton’s fellow secessionist, also committed suicide on June 17.

To the best of this author’s ability to determine, John Milton was the only American governor ever to commit suicide in office.

Commentary: Omens or oddities?

Aside from the oddity of having a storm hit Florida that bore the name of one of its governors, the story of Gov. John Milton revives the specter of the causes he favored, which were otherwise laid to rest by the civil war and subsequent history.

There was the idea of nullification; that a state could simply “nullify” a federal law it didn’t like by calling it unconstitutional.

In 1830 this was the argument South Carolinians made over a federal tariff they opposed. John Milton supported their rejection of federal law and policy.

In 2023 Collier County, Fla., passed its own nullification ordinance, the misleadingly named “Bill of Rights Sanctuary” ordinance, giving itself the right to nullify federal law if a citizen deems a federal law unconstitutional. With the passing of Hurricane Milton, this ordinance may come back to haunt the county as it deals with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which operates, of course, under federal law.

There was the idea of secession, of pulling out of the federal compact altogether.

In 1860 this is what John Milton energetically propounded and vigorously pursued, eventually succeeding in leading Florida out of the federal union.

Today, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has pursued what has been called “soft secession,” defying federal mandates, rules, regulations and policies as he serves his own political ambitions. He has defied the federal government in matters large and small ranging from COVID mandates to extraditing Donald Trump to other states to answer for his crimes. He even made a point of snubbing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris when they visited or called to offer or coordinate assistance with hurricanes Helene and, yes, Milton.

No doubt DeSantis will continue to pursue his version of secessionism through the November election and after, especially if its results don’t favor his opposition to abortion rights and the election of Harris.

But as John Milton—and January 6th—helped to show, secessionism and insurrection don’t end well and they’re not likely to end well this time.

The storm named Milton also throws into relief Florida’s determined denial of the reality of climate change. From then-Gov. Rick Scott informally banning the term from state government to the legislature and DeSantis officially striking it from state legal and official documents, climate change denial is embedded in the state’s leadership mentality—even when climate change-induced storms pummel the state they govern with increasing force.

Perhaps the coincidence of an extremely powerful, destructive, climate-change fueled storm called Milton and the legacy of a fanatical but destructive governor named Milton provides a kind of poetic lesson that Floridians should heed.

And that lesson is simply this: Denying climate change is…well…suicidal.

Liberty lives in light

© 2024 by David Silverberg

Hurricane Milton seen from the International Space Station. (Photo: NASA)

Project 2025 denies climate change, strangles weather science, would cripple storm predictions

In this satellite view, two storms churn in the Atlantic Ocean at the same time that Milton spins in the Gulf of Mexico (lower left). This photo was taken about one hour before Milton was officially declared a hurricane. (Photo: NASA)

Oct. 8, 2024 by David Silverberg

Southwest Floridians know the drill when a hurricane is on the way: buy bottled water, stock up on batteries and canned foods, put up the storm shutters, fill the car and if necessary, get out of town.

But whether hunkering down at home or hitting the road, all eyes turn to news of the storm, whether on television, the Internet, mobile devices, weather apps or social media.

Much of the information on those media is the same—because it all comes from the federal government, which has the resources, the organization and the technology to provide it like no one else. And then there are the periodic updates from the National Hurricane Center, the National Weather Service, and the Hurricane Hunters who fly into the storms, that are treated like gospel from on high.

But if Project 2025 is implemented, all that information, which is now provided free to the public, would come at a price. The federal government agencies that collect and interpret the data would be broken up. And even the famous Hurricane Hunters would be shunted into a government agency that buys desks and manages the government’s real estate.

The fact that Project 2025 targets the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for elimination has caused public alarm and prompted criticism.

But what is it that Project 2025 actually seeks to do? What does Project 2025 specifically say when it comes to meteorology and government research? And what would be the results for everyday Americans if Project 2025 was actually implemented?

For all Americans, especially those living on the vulnerable, hurricane-prone Gulf “Paradise Coast” of Florida, the future of government meteorology is no academic concern.

Increasingly, it’s a matter of life and death.

Project 2025’s denial of climate change

Project 2025 is the sweeping, 887-page volume of very specific policy recommendations for presidential and legislative changes to be made under a conservative president, in this case, upon the election of Donald Trump. Increasingly infamous, it is a continuation of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership program that has been issued every four years since 1980.

Project 2025’s weather and climate recommendations are contained in its chapter on the Department of Commerce, the agency where the weather services reside. The chapter appears under the byline of Thomas Gilman, who served as the Commerce Department’s chief financial officer and assistant secretary for administration during the Donald Trump administration. Prior to taking that position, which required Senate confirmation, Gilman worked for over 40 years in the automotive industry. There, he was employed by the Chrysler Corporation. He rose to be chief financial officer for its lending and financial arm, Chrysler Financial. In 2011 he oversaw Chrysler Financial’s sale to TD Bank Group.

Thomas Gilman in 2019. (Photo: Dept. of Commerce)

Most of the public’s attention—and alarm—has focused on Project 2025’s intention to do away with NOAA.

Project 2025 does indeed intend to eliminate NOAA and states so quite explicitly at the outset of the chapter (page 674): “The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”  

But that is not where Project 2025 will have its most damaging impact.

Rather, it is the fact that Project 2025 views itself at war with what it calls “the climate change alarm industry” and sees NOAA as “a colossal operation” that is “harmful to future US prosperity.”

Throughout the document, Project 2025 proposals are clearly aimed at eliminating independent, science and data-based conclusions that investigate, measure or confirm climate change. Instead it seeks to ensure that government conclusions come into line with administration policy rather than scientific evidence.

Project 2025 holds that NOAA, as a main driver of the “climate change alarm industry,” has a “mission emphasis on prediction and management [that] seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions.”

But more than just eliminating NOAA, Project 2025 believes that science should bend to policy.

A key recommendation is that a new administration should: “Ensure Appointees Agree with Administration Aims. Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area.”

In another section it argues that NOAA’s office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research “is… the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”

When it comes to the work of the National Hurricane Center and the National Environmental Satellite Service, Project 2025 admits that the offices “provide important public safety and business functions as well as academic functions,” but it argues that “Data collected by the department should be presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”

Project 2025’s organizational mandates

In addition to changing the entire focus, tenor and scientific independence of government climatological and meteorological efforts, Project 2025 recommends extensive organizational changes.

To understand these recommendations and their impact, it is helpful to be familiar with the current system.

NOAA consists of six main offices:

  • The National Weather Service (NWS);
  • The National Ocean Service (NOS);
  • Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR);
  • The National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS);
  • The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS); and
  • The Office of Marine and Aviation Operations and NOAA Corps.

Ironically, it was Republican President Richard Nixon who in 1970 consolidated the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Weather Bureau and the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries into NOAA, which was made an office of the Commerce Department (although he wanted to make it a full-fledged Cabinet department). This occurred in the wake of 1969’s horrendous Hurricane Camille, which devastated the Louisiana Gulf coast and then—like Hurricane Helene—went north; ultimately dumping its accumulated moisture far from any coast in Nelson County, Va.

Since its creation, NOAA has evolved until it assumed its current form with different offices to deal with different aspects of weather, climate and technology.

Project 2025 sees this evolution in a negative light, especially from a budgetary standpoint.

“NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the department’s $12 billion annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department’s personnel in non-decadal Census years (2021 figures),” it notes. The offices, as noted previously, “form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future US prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.”

It continues: “NOAA today boasts that it is a provider of environmental information services, a provider of environmental stewardship services, and a leader in applied scientific research. Each of these functions could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality.”

Project 2025 wants to make NWS (National Weather Service) a revenue-generating operation. It argues that since studies have found that consumer-oriented forecasts and warnings are better provided by local broadcasts and private companies like AccuWeather, NWS “should fully commercialize its forecasting operations”—i.e., charge for its products. This, it states, would bring in revenue, make it compete in a commercial weather marketplace and the profits could be invested in more research and data tailored to customers’ needs.

NWS would become a “performance-based organization,” which in management parlance means it would have measurable goals, set metrics and performance standards—i.e., it would take on the characteristics of a for-profit company rather than a scientific laboratory.

OAR (Oceanic and Atmospheric Research) would be reduced since Project 2025 views much of its work as duplicative of the National Hurricane Center. All of its laboratories, undersea research and other research efforts “should be reviewed with an aim of consolidation and reduction of bloat.”

NOS (National Ocean Service) would have its functions transferred to the US Coast Guard and the US Geologic Survey. While Project 2025 doesn’t say so explicitly, this would presumably result in its disestablishment.

The Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, which provides the ships, planes, drones and other hardware used by NOAA agencies, including the famous Hurricane Hunters, “should be broken up and its assets reassigned to the General Services Administration or to other agencies.”

Analysis: Organizational changes

Project 2025 decimates the current structure of weather science and reporting by the US federal government—as it’s intended to do.

The end of the Hurricane Hunters?

The men and women of the NOAA Hurricane Hunters with a P-3 Orion, one of their primary aircraft. (Photo: NOAA)

Ever since a pilot flew his training aircraft directly into the eye of a hurricane on a bet in 1943, hurricane-hunting pilots and air personnel have been taking up the challenge of measuring storms.

Today they’re known as the Hurricane Hunters and they’re the stuff of legend: the best pilots in the world flying in the most dangerous and challenging weather, bringing back precious, life-saving data.

Project 2025 does not explicitly state that it would abolish the Hurricane Hunters. However, it would break up the NOAA air fleet and reassign its assets to other agencies, most notably the General Services Administration, which oversees the contracting, purchasing and management of the civilian federal government—i.e., science and meteorology is not its main mission.

This would be tantamount to ending the Hurricane Hunters. The whole structure of the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations is designed around the NOAA mission and operates according to its needs. To disperse this elaborate, intricate—and effective—organization, its people and its assets, which include aircraft, vessels, drones, other technologies and their support network, would for all intents and purposes destroy or at the very least disrupt a vast swath of American scientific capabilities when it comes to weather and climate.

And when it comes to hurricanes and dangerous storms, it would create a gaping hole in the public’s awareness and preparedness that could prove deadly just at the moment the nation needs it most.

Crippling research and ignoring the oceans

Project 2025 takes particular aim at oceanic research. OAR and NOS would be broken up and OAR likely eliminated altogether. This targeting appears to be caused by more than just the expense of maintaining these institutions—it is likely the result of oceanic research being a major source of data proving the existence of climate change

This would not only eliminate a vital source of research about the state of the oceans in general, it would also likely eliminate data of critical use to the US Navy, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine and mariners of all types. It would harm national security and impact attempts to enforce maritime borders and provide coastal protection to say nothing of private boating safety.

For-profit weather

It is in Project 2025’s intention to turn the National Weather Service into a for-profit entity that everyday Americans who turn to their television stations and apps for weather information would be impacted.

Accurate, useful government-provided weather data accessible to all Americans is essentially something people have purchased with the tax dollars they pay to the federal government. Suddenly demanding payment for this data would be a form of robbery, taking from them vital information that they already purchased with their taxes.

Free access to government-gathered weather data has also made possible a robust industry of repackaging, interpreting and disseminating that data. It’s behind every weather broadcast and specialized media like the Weather Channel as well as countless apps, blogs and individual weather efforts.

All of this would now be jeopardized as the US government sold its products to the highest bidder.

That sale, or auction, would likely put government weather data in the hands of a few extremely wealthy corporations or individuals—like Elon Musk—who could then repackage it, resell it or withhold it at will. It would destroy the credibility of government-collected weather data and potentially give rise to warped or distorted reporting in the service of private political or commercial aims rather than objective reality.

It would also put a cost on weather data whose price could then be manipulated by the individuals or corporations that owned it. Further, it would create a fragmented and unequal view of the state of the weather and climate, reducing the credibility and reliability of information on which every human being on the planet depends.

Whatever husk of NWS that would remain after its dismantlement by Project 2025 would have to have profit goals, not scientific aims or objectives, as its priority. That would result in a warping and distortion of NWS’ critical, primary mission pursuing realistic, objective science, which it might no longer be able to meet.

Analysis: Climate change denial and the Florida model

Bryan Koon, Florida’s Emergency Management Director, tries to respond to state senators’ questions without mentioning the term “climate change” in a 2015 exchange. Then-Gov. Rick Scott had informally forbidden use of the term in state government. The entire discussion can be seen in a 2-minute, 12-second video on YouTube. (Image: Fox13)

At the core of Project 2025’s goals in re-engineering American meteorology is the intention to deny the reality of climate change.

In this, Americans can see a preview of a Project 2025’s end result in the state of Florida.

Over and over again, as concern over climate change rose nationally and its consequences impacted the state with increasing severity, Florida officials responded with increasingly vehement denialism.

In 2015 then-Gov. Rick Scott (R) informally banned use of the term in state government.

His successor, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), initially reversed much of Scott’s anti-environmentalism. However, when DeSantis began a run for the presidency in 2023 on an “anti-woke,” anti-Green New Deal platform, he fully embraced climate denialism.

Ultimately, the state legislature, seeking to curry favor with DeSantis and add to their own denialist credentials, officially banned use of the term in official state documents. In March 2024 the legislature passed House Bill 1645, which struck the term “climate change” from Florida law and official documents.

“Radical green zealots want to impose their climate agenda on people through restrictions, regulations, and taxes,” DeSantis stated at the time he signed the bill.

All of this official denialism did absolutely nothing to stop the onslaught of climate-change induced weather, disasters and challenges. (As this is written, Hurricane Milton is advancing on the Florida peninsula as a Category 5 hurricane, immediately following the ravages of Hurricane Helene.) In fact, official state climate denialism has impeded local efforts to prepare and reverse the effects of climate change in communities’ own front yards, as can be seen in flooding, storms, eroding beaches and wild, unpredictable weather over a fragile and vulnerable landmass.

As DeSantis wanted to “make America Florida” as he put it in his campaign slogan, so Project 2025 would make climate denialism a pillar of American policy. Project 2025 views efforts to respond, reduce or resist climate change as “the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”

When added together, it is clear that Project 2025 seeks to alter or censor government climatological and meteorological science and research in order to deny climate change. NOAA agencies would not be following the data and drawing conclusions from it; they would be following administration directives and tailoring their findings to accommodate political policy.

This should not be surprising given former President Donald Trump’s past dismissal of climate change as a “hoax,” his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords or his effort to alter the cone of a hurricane with a Sharpie. Nor should it be surprising given that Gilman, the chapter’s author, spent 40 years working in the fossil fuel automotive industry.

Project 2025 would leave the United States naked, vulnerable and at the mercy of climate change, without the research, resources or will to meet its challenges.

And that would result in countless devastated communities and potentially millions of dead Americans.

Science in service to the nation—or not

Since colonial days Americans have been concerned with weather. As a nation of farmers, they were at its mercy and they needed some way to predict its patterns.

Two of America’s founders were, in a way, weathermen. Benjamin Franklin provided long-range forecasts that farmers used for planting in his Poor Richard’s Almanack, a very popular bestselling annual book. Thomas Jefferson, a planter, regularly took weather measurements and recorded them. On July 4, 1776 he noted that the temperature in Philadelphia reached a high of 76 degrees Fahrenheit.

In 1870, seeking to create a national weather measuring system and communicate it by telegraph, Congress created a weather office in the US Army’s Signal Division “for the Benefit of Commerce.” In 1890, following a presidential request, Congress transferred weather reporting responsibilities to a civilian US Weather Bureau in the Department of Agriculture.

Ever since then the United States government has invested in and steadily expanded meteorological and climatological research and technology. The fruits of that steady, sometimes painful, 154-year investment and effort have resulted in the most scientifically advanced, accurate, and capable weather and climate establishment in the world.

The federal government has also organized and refined its weather and climate offices to reflect changing conditions and improve their capabilities.

And throughout this period, just as the weather and climate affected everyone in the territory of the United States, so the US government freely shared its findings and results with all its citizens and the world.

Today people ordinarily think of weather forecasting in personal terms: Will it rain tomorrow? Should I bring an umbrella? Or, more importantly: Where will the storm hit?

But beyond just tomorrow’s predictions, increasingly accurate and sophisticated weather reporting and forecasting has been an incalculably powerful force multiplier for the American military, which can plan operations around it. It has enabled American agriculture to become the most productive in the world. It has made transportation more efficient and it is absolutely essential for air travel and the movement of goods by all modalities. It has, as the first weather office intended, benefited commerce.

The products of American meteorological prowess are everywhere and pervasive. As a rising tide lifts all boats, weather awareness and knowledge benefits all recipients.

Government meteorological efforts have protected Americans from the ravages of the most extreme weather. They have helped to make cities more resilient and enabled planning, whether in agriculture, construction or trade. Indeed, entire commodities markets depend on weather information provided by government research and monitoring.

Right now America is in a crisis as the climate alters due to human influence.

One response is to adapt, take measures that build resilience and preparedness, try to slow global warming, and raise awareness so that every individual can make some small effort to protect and preserve human life on the planet.

The other response is to deny that climate change is happening, to outlaw mention of “climate change,” to twist science to meet preconceived notions, or to ignore it altogether. It’s a response as likely to be successful as the Inquisition’s attempt to stamp out the Copernican solar system by banning the books that explained it.

This is the approach of Project 2025, which puts it into detailed, specific bureaucratic recommendations. If implemented by a second Donald Trump administration, it would cripple science, make Americans vulnerable, destroy cities and accelerate the very processes it seeks to deny. It would also dismantle the greatest research and applied science endeavor in history, one that has been of incalculable benefit to the United States, its citizens and the rest of the world.

Just as they have a choice between two candidates and between democracy and dictatorship in this year’s elections, when they cast their votes, Americans have a choice between ignorance, denial and disaster or knowledge, realism and progress.

On that choice on every ballot hangs the fate of the federal government’s weather and climate enterprise—and arguably, the future of human life on this planet.

This is one of a series of examinations of the implications of Project 2025 for Southwest Florida and the nation. Other articles in the series are:

Project 2025 would end federal flood insurance, devastate Southwest Florida and coastal communities

Project 2025 remake of FEMA would hit communities hard after disasters

Project 2025 takes aim at education—and Collier County, Fla.

Liberty lives in light

© 2024 by David Silverberg

General election endorsements for 2024: The most critical election of our lifetimes

The United States flag flying over the beach in Naples, Fla., on Aug. 18, 2017 during a vigil for Heather Heyer, a demonstrator murdered by white supremacist James Alex Fields during a peaceful protest in Charlottesville, Va., six days earlier. (Photo: Author)

Sept. 30, 2024

This is the most important ballot you will ever cast.

No matter your age, you have never before voted in an election this historic. Its outcome will establish your future and that of all your descendants.

This is a defining election. It will determine whether the United States of America remains a democracy or tumbles into dictatorship. It will determine whether Americans remain free, “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” or become slaves and servants to an autocratic, unrestrained tyrant. It will determine whether America remains a great power in the world or a shriveled vassal of other nations.

And every position on every ballot is critical. Down-ballot positions will determine who will hold power, who can get things done, who will govern—or, if democracy is abandoned, who will rule. Amendments and referenda will determine how you will be governed. Amendment 4 will determine whether women in Florida retain the right to choose their healthcare and make their own decisions or not.

Accordingly, The Paradise Progressive is making these endorsements for ballots appearing in the state of Florida and especially the Southwest region of Collier and Lee counties.

Uncontested or decided elections are not included. National and statewide elections, including for judges and constitutional amendments, come first. County offices for Collier and Lee counties follow.

The Paradise Progressive has always maintained that endorsing candidates is the duty of any publication or media outlet that regularly and responsibly covers elections, governance and representation. It is in this spirit these endorsements are being made.

As with all endorsements, these are only recommendations. They were entirely determined by The Paradise Progressive without consultation or input from any political party or organization. They favor candidates who support democracy regardless of formal party affiliation.

This post appears in two sections: the endorsements presented as a list followed by their explanations below. Voters should remember that they can consult this list on their mobile electronic devices at any time, even while voting.

The List

President

Kamala Harris-Tim Walz – DEM

United States Senator

Debbie Mucarsel-Powell – DEM

Representative for Congress, District 17

Manny Lopez – DEM

Representative for Congress, District 19

Kari Lerner – DEM

Representative for Congress, District 26

Joey Atkins – DEM

Justice of the Supreme Court

Renatha Francis – No

Meredith Sasso – No

Sixth District Court of Appeal

Paetra Brownlee – No

Roger Gannam – No

Joshua Mize – No

Jared Smith – No

Keith White – No

Constitutional Amendments

Amendment 1 – No

Amendment 2 – No

Amendment 3 – Yes

Amendment 4 – Yes

Amendment 5 – No

Amendment 6 – No

Collier County

State Representative, District 80

Mitchel Schlayer – DEM

State Representative, District 81

Charles Robert “Chuck” Work – DEM

State Representative, District 82

Arthur Oslund – DEM

Board of Commissioners, District 3

Burt Saunders – REP

Collier County Referendum

Yes

Lee County

State Senate, District 33

Christopher Proia – DEM

State Representative, District 77

Cornelius Fowler – DEM

State Representative, District 78

Howard Sapp – DEM

State Representative, District 79

Denise McCleary – DEM

City of Fort Myers, Ward 6

Cindy Banyai – NON-PARTISAN

Discussion and explanation

As its name implies, The Paradise Progressive approaches its coverage from a particular political perspective. For thorough, unbiased and neutral information about all these races and candidates, see Sparker’s Soapbox, whose author, Sandy Parker, does an outstanding job providing a comprehensive and objective overview.

For President

Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Timothy Walz (D-Minn.) have the experience, maturity, intelligence, commitment to democracy and loyalty to the United States, the Constitution, and American values to fulfill the duties and the responsibilities of the two highest offices in the country.

For Senate

Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D) will make an outstanding United States senator who will effectively and energetically represent the interests of Florida and all its people. (See: “Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, ready for the Senate and on a roll.”)

The incumbent, Sen. Rick Scott (R), has repeatedly failed to pursue the interests of the state and the people of Southwest Florida, especially in the wake of disasters when his votes most counted. He has advocated sunsetting important social safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. (For coverage of Scott’s record, see: “Rick Scott meets the Peter Principle” and “Rick Scott, already in a hole, digs deeper.”)

For Representative for Congress, District 17

Manny Lopez will bring much-needed civility, reasonable compromise, bipartisanship, and concern for the common good to this district covering Charlotte County and part of Sarasota County. He provides a needed contrast to the extreme ideological rhetoric and policies of its current holder.

For Representative for Congress, District 19

Kari Lerner will bring care, concern and attention to the issues facing this district covering coastal Southwest Florida from Cape Coral to Marco Island. She will ably represent its people in Congress. (To read more about Kari Lerner, see “Kari Lerner: The courage and conviction to serve in Congress.”)

In contrast, the incumbent, Byron Donalds, has proven incompetent, ineffective and indifferent to the district and its people while using it as a stepping stone for unrealistic personal ambitions that were of no benefit to his constituents. (Click here to see The Paradise Progressive’s coverage of Byron Donalds since his candidacy in 2020.)

Representative for Congress, District 26

Joey Atkins is a lawyer and former sports agent and was raised in West Palm Beach, giving him a commitment to the area of eastern Collier County, Immokalee and Miami’s western suburbs that is now the 26th Congressional District. He intends to concentrate his efforts on improving life for constituents in the district, restoring infrastructure and making life more affordable.

Justice of the Supreme Court

Justices Renatha Francis and Meredith Sasso are two justices on the Florida state Supreme Court who concurred with the argument that the wording of Amendment 4 was too vague to go to voters. The majority of the court found the wording clear and understandable. If the words of what is a very plain, simple and obvious amendment are too complex for these two justices they don’t merit retention.

 Sixth District Court of Appeal

Florida has an ideologically conservative judiciary that for all intents and purposes does not serve as a check or balance on the executive branch and the legislature. All the judicial candidates up for retention are members of the Federalist Society and share its conservative philosophy. They cannot be counted upon to rule impartially and objectively. Gov. Ron DeSantis has packed the courts with his ideological soulmates.

As a practical matter, if these justices are rejected, the likelihood is that they will be replaced by similar ideological believers, perhaps more extreme ones. Nonetheless, a significant vote of rejection would send the message that Florida voters are wise to these games and want fairer, more open-minded judges staffing their judicial branch.

Constitutional Amendments

Amendment 1: Voters can vote “yes” or “no” on this amendment. However, there should be a third option: “HELL NO!” Amendment 1 seeks to make school board elections in the state partisan. It was proposed by Southwest Florida’s own state Rep. Spencer Roach (R-79-Fort Myers), who is leaving elected office after this year. This is beyond a bad idea; it is pernicious, malicious and atrocious. Not only would currently non-partisan school board positions be politicized throughout the state, it would likely lead to partisan curricula in classrooms. This is a terrible idea and should be rejected decisively.

Amendment 2: No. This amendment to the Florida Constitution establishes hunting and fishing “as a public right and preferred means of responsibly managing and controlling fish and wildlife.” If passed it would likely be used by gun advocates to challenge all laws regulating hunting, restricting gun ownership or mandating background checks. There are very reasonable, constitutional regulations on hunting and fishing now and no need for a constitutional amendment that would lead to extensive litigation and controversy.

Amendment 3: Yes. This allows the sale and possession of recreational marijuana to adults over 21 years. This is endorsed with some trepidation: it will likely, as critics charge, complicate enforcement of sober driving laws and some people, as with any substance, will abuse it. However, it will also regulate marijuana sales, provide revenues to the state and reduce the number of arrests for petty, non-violent crimes.

Besides, there are a lot of people in this state who really need to mellow out.

Amendment 4: Yes. This clear, simple and understandable amendment returns the right of choice to women, where it belongs, and gets government out of a role it should not be playing.

Amendment 5: No. This amendment would increase the homestead exemption for property taxes, allowing it to rise with the rate of inflation. The homestead exemption was created to attract people to settle in Florida. However, it is no longer necessary for that purpose, it is adequate as is, and it does not need to be expanded.

Amendment 6: No. This amendment would repeal public financing for political campaigns for statewide positions like Governor, Attorney General and Cabinet offices. Public financing is a useful option to ensure the widest possible spectrum of candidates.

Collier County

State Representative, District 80

Mitchel Schlayer’s commitment to fighting corruption, protecting freedom of choice, protecting the environment and opposing censorship merits his election.

State Representative, District 81

Charles Robert “Chuck” Work, is a very experienced attorney who has held high office in the US Justice Department and is now ready to put his experience and expertise in the service of this district’s constituents. For a full profile of Work, see “Chuck Work: From prosecuting Watergate to campaigning for Florida’s District 81.”

State Representative, District 82

Arthur Oslund is committed to the right to choose, protecting the region’s water and defending local autonomy. When it comes to voting rights and ballot access he states: “eroding democracy is not conservative, it is treasonous!”

Board of Commissioners, District 3

Burt Saunders is a veteran lawyer, lawmaker and Collier County commissioner. He has frequently taken lone, sensible stands against extreme, damaging proposals from more radical commissioners. He merits re-election.

Collier County Referendum

Yes. This school district referendum would “continue tax-neutral flexible funding for Collier County Public Schools.” It will enable school administrators to move money between capital accounts and operational ones, giving them greater flexibility in budgeting and spending.

Lee County

State Senate, District 33

Christopher Proia is pro-choice, supports increasing affordable housing, universal healthcare, ending medical bankruptcy and improving public health and disease prevention.

State Representative, District 77

Cornelius Fowler is a union leader committed to upholding living wages, affordable housing, and quality education.

State Representative, District 78

Howard Sapp is a retired air traffic controller who supports quality education, affordable housing, addressing homelessness and preserving clean, quality water.

State Representative, District 79

Denise McCleary  is a veteran of the US Army National Guard and Reserves who was deployed during Operation Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom. She served as Chief of Audit Operations with the New Jersey National Guard. She wants to bring her extensive accounting and organizational experience to bear in service to the constituents of District 79. She is committed to making insurance affordable, providing access to affordable housing and expanding healthcare for Floridians, including Medicaid.

City of Fort Myers, Ward 6

Cindy Banyai is a committed activist who has previously run for Congress in the 19th District. She’s now seeking to put her experience and knowledge in the service of Fort Myers. Her priorities include investing in the community and putting families first, keeping development smart and affordable, mitigating the effects of climate change, supporting small business and ensuring clean water.

Liberty lives in light

© 2024 by David Silverberg

As Hurricane Helene lashes Florida coast, Rep. Byron Donalds votes to close government, starve FEMA and Flood Insurance program

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart supported funding; Rep. Greg Steube, Sen. Rick Scott were absent

Rep. Byron Donalds (Photo: Office of Rep. Byron Donalds)

Sept. 26, 2024 by David Silverberg

As Hurricane Helene began her run through the Gulf of Mexico, striking Southwest Florida and headed toward what is expected to be a devastating landfall in the Big Bend region, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.) voted against the major bill keeping the federal government functioning and providing funds for flood and disaster assistance.

The Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025 (House Resolution 9747) passed the House of Representatives yesterday, Sept. 25, by a vote of 341 to 82.

Immediately afterward, the Senate also approved the bill by a vote of 78 to 18.

The bill, having been passed by both the House and Senate, now goes to President Biden for signature.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) was absent for the Senate vote. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) voted for it.

The bill funds government operations through Dec. 20 and prevents a government shutdown on Oct. 1, the beginning of the 2025 federal fiscal year.

Of Southwest Florida’s two other congressional representatives, Rep. Greg Steube (R-17-Fla.) was absent. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-26-Fla.) voted for the bill.

While all 82 nay votes were from Republicans, 132 Republicans supported the bill as did 209 Democrats. No Democrats voted against it.

As part of its appropriations, the bill authorizes funding for the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and allows the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to spend money from its Disaster Relief Fund as quickly as necessary to aid Americans in distress.

Both the NFIP and FEMA will be playing major roles in assisting Floridians and coastal communities in coming days as Hurricane Helene, which is expected to be a Category 4 storm when it makes landfall, pounds Florida’s coast.

President Joe Biden approved an emergency declaration for 41 of Florida’s 67 counties on Tuesday, Sept. 24, making them eligible for federal aid and picking up the tab for 75 percent of response and recovery expenses.

Donalds, who has kept up a steady and vigorous drumbeat of attacks on Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris (D) on the X Internet platform and in media interviews favoring Donald Trump, had not posted any explanation or commentary on his vote as of this writing. Prior to Biden’s emergency declaration, he joined the rest of the Florida congressional delegation in calling for such a declaration.

Liberty lives in light

© 2024 by David Silverberg

Chuck Work: From prosecuting Watergate to campaigning for Florida’s District 81

Chuck Work. (Photo: Author)

Sept. 15, 2024 by David Silverberg

On Jan. 6, 2021 Charles “Chuck” Work was, like millions of other Americans, watching the certification of the election of Joe Biden as president. Like those millions of Americans, he was horrified to see an inflamed, furious mob attack the United States Capitol and the Capitol Police

But his experience and knowledge and background only intensified the horror he felt.

“All of a sudden on January 6th I was watching this unfold and I started shouting at the TV,” he recalled in an interview with The Paradise Progressive. “Where was the intelligence? Why did they not know this was happening? I considered it a gigantic intelligence failure.”

Work had particular insight into the dynamics and operations of Washington, DC demonstrations.

As a DC-based federal prosecutor in the 1960s and ‘70s, he’d been in charge of prosecuting anti-Vietnam War demonstrators and protecting government buildings, while still providing access to lawmakers and government institutions and allowing demonstrators to express their grievances.

“I knew how [demonstrations] could be properly managed so that people were not hurt, not arrested, people were listened to, members of Congress wanted to talk to them. I knew how that worked when it worked properly,” he said.

In contrast, “One of the problems with this January 6th demonstration was—it was easy to observe—was that the access was all over the place and basically, the Capitol Police were unprepared. And it was just horrible to see. I was sickened by what I saw.

“And so after the demonstration I looked at my wife and a couple of days later we said, ‘We’re no longer Republicans.’ And we went down to the Orange Blossom government center and we changed our registration to Democrats.”

Chuck Work didn’t just change his registration; he made a commitment. Today he is running as the Democratic candidate for Florida House District 81, hoping to represent the people living in the coastal area from Immokalee Road in north Naples to Marco Island, in the state capital of Tallahassee.

No ordinary Neapolitan

At a 1975 meeting, Chuck Work (left, at lectern) briefs Attorney General Edward Levi, President Gerald Ford and Deputy Attorney General Harold Tyler on a concept for cutting down career criminality, while a staffer looks on. (Photo: Campaign)

In Naples, Fla., dressed casually and enjoying a game of golf, Work might be mistaken for a typical retiree. But that would be wrong.

He’s engaged, alert, articulate and very active. One can see why during his government career he was at the center of history—big history.

He was the prosecutor on the scene when police responded to a break-in at the Watergate Hotel and office complex in 1972. He signed the search warrants that allowed them to investigate the crime.

The reason he was on duty then was because he was the United States attorney who oversaw the prosecution of local crime in the District of Columbia—no small responsibility.

He oversaw the prosecutions of anti-Vietnam War demonstrators, helping to manage the law enforcement response. When Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 and the city erupted in riots he was in charge of the legal response.

“We kept the courthouse open for five days 24 hours a day, processing more than a thousand looters; basically, people who tore apart stores and burned part of the city,” he recalls.

Work was again at the center of history when President Richard Nixon attempted to evade justice in what became known as “The Saturday Night Massacre.”

Work was good friends with Attorney General Eliot Richardson. When Nixon ordered Richardson to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, Richardson refused and resigned. When Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox he refused and resigned as well.

Work was one of the Justice Department attorneys who were in the room when Richardson announced that he had resigned. “Some of you will be tempted to follow me but the department has to run and I don’t want you to resign,” Work recalls him saying. “He said, ‘Bob Bork will be a fine attorney general.’” Robert Bork was the third person in the Justice Department hierarchy and the person who ultimately fired Cox.

After the Nixon administration Work went on to serve as deputy administrator of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration of the Justice Department.

After his government service, he joined the prestigious DC law firm of McDermott Will & Emery, where held a succession of senior positions, heading its regulation and government affairs department and ultimately serving as the partner in charge of the DC office.

He also ran in his first election and won, becoming president of the DC Bar Association. In a city housing the highest-powered lawyers in the land with one of the largest Bars in the United States, that was no small achievement.

He met his wife, Veronica Haggart, on a blind date in 1982 when she was a commissioner on the US International Trade Commission. In 1984 she was named director of international trade relations for the electronic giant, Motorola Corp., eventually rising to be vice president, head of government affairs and president of international trade.  

“We held presidential appointments in three different Republican administrations; the Nixon administration, the Ford administration and the Reagan administration,” Work explained. “Those were presidential commissions, mine was confirmed by the Senate and so was my wife’s.”

Résumés like those put both spouses in a special class in Washington. It’s not what might be called “royalty” but they’re what were once called “wise men” or perhaps are better called “sages;” people whose knowledge, experience and achievements earn them respect, admiration and influence among lawmakers, policymakers and decisionmakers.

So, when a sage comes out of retirement in a little town like Naples in the Southwest corner of Florida to get involved in its politics, it is significant and not to be taken lightly.

An active non-retirement

In person, sitting on a golf club veranda, Work is relaxed, friendly and very forthcoming.

He and Veronica came to Naples full time after a retirement spent first on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and a winter residence on the Turks and Caicos Islands. They were seasonal condo residents in Naples starting in 2014. When seasonal travel became tiresome, they relocated full time to Naples in 2019, preserving their tropical lifestyle.

And here he could have remained; unburdened and carefree, spending his days with a golf club in one hand and a drink in the other.

But he could not be blind to events around him, especially with the rise of Donald Trump. In 2016 he and his wife contacted the Democratic Party in Naples and did volunteer work for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

“I was never a big Hillary fan, don’t get me wrong, but I hated the idea of Trump being president,” he recalled. “The first thing out of my brain was, ‘This person is completely unqualified.’ So that was my first reaction to Trump. You know, we didn’t know much about him other than he was completely unqualified.

“So, we then went to [Democratic activist] Judy Freiburg and said, ‘What can we do?’ She put us to work canvassing and my wife and I hit 60 doors but I brought my son out, my younger son, and his girlfriend and they stayed with us for like three weeks and they actually worked full time in a little office. The Democrats sent them out to Clewiston. They said, ‘You guys have Clewiston, get everyone you can out there to vote.’”

Like the majority of Americans, Work and his wife were jolted by the results.  

“We were, of course, surprised and deeply disappointed that Trump won,” he said, “but we remained Republicans until the insurrection.”

American vs. MAGA

Work’s opponent in District 81 is Yvette Benaroch, a Moms for Liberty owner of a landscaping business in Marco Island who won a bruising primary battle against Councilman Greg Folley. She’s running on a predictable Trumpist platform opposing immigration, “getting wokeism out of schools” and gun rights.

Gun violence is a particularly sensitive issue for Work and one with which he has personal experience.

“I had a very bad experience as an attorney in DC,” he explained. “A young woman was in our office. She was being abused by her husband and as she was being interviewed by a police officer the husband walked in and killed her right in our office.”

That and his experience as a local crime prosecutor make him particularly sensitive to the dangers of gun violence. He’s disturbed by the influence of the gun lobby and supports the need for common sense anti-violence measures. “I’m delighted that Kamala and Tim Walz are making that an important thing to say,” he said.

But that’s not the only issue driving his campaign. He is intensely supportive of the right of women to choose.

“This is a significant right that has been taken away,” he said of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. “Why would you take away a right? I am just livid about the jurisprudence of the Dobbs opinion. And I’m livid about the two-faced, insincere answers that Justice [Brett] Kavanaugh gave [at his confirmation hearing]; Justice [Amy Coney] Barrett was not quite as insincere. It was settled law and they refused to say how they would react. That is such bullshit. It didn’t take much time disposing of the settled law argument when they overruled [Roe v. Wade]. That was so offensive.”

Another key issue for Work and one that he would be able to directly affect in Tallahassee is the loss of home rule, the right of Florida cities, towns and counties to make local rules that directly affect them. Much of this authority has been pre-empted during the course of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) administration.

“Some 80 rules and regulations and acts of the legislature have come into effect that have diluted home rule,” he pointed out and his website calls this “another glaring example of government overreach.” Examples include banning local laws that protect people from working in extremely hot conditions, preventing local leaders from creating citizen review panels for police forces and forbidding the ability to change the minimum wage.

But when it comes to legislating, “The key is working across the aisle” and when sent to Tallahassee that’s exactly what he intends to do, especially on home rule, which transcends political party and ideology.

In contrast to Benaroch, “I would hope people realize that if they send my opponent to Tallahassee, she would just be a rubber stamp. They’d send someone who will toe the party line, who is against reproductive rights, who will not stand up for the local community.”

However, if elected, “I can promise that I will stand up to them, and I will try to make a difference in Tallahassee.”

Ultimately, though, he points out, “I’m a moderate. I believe in middle of the road solutions. I believe in the truth, I believe in expertise, I believe in facts.”

And retired or not, Chuck Work is ready to work again for what he believes.

Liberty lives in light

©2024 by David Silverberg

Veronica Haggart and Chuck Work at a Democratic rally in Naples, Fla. (Photo: Author)

Melissa Blazier officially elected Collier County Supervisor of Elections when ‘ghost’ candidate withdraws

Melissa Blazier, Collier County Supervisor of Elections. (Photo: CCSoE)

Sept. 6, 2024 by David Silverberg

Melissa Blazier has officially been elected Supervisor of Elections for Collier County, Fla.

The election was confirmed when Edward Gubala, who was running as an independent write-in candidate in the general election, withdrew his candidacy on Wednesday, Sept. 4.

Edward Gubala (Photo: CCSoE)

Blazier won the primary election on Aug. 20 against candidates Timothy Guerrette and David Schaffel. Gubala was a write-in candidate but since he is no longer running in the November general election, she has officially been elected.

“I’m thrilled to announce that I have officially been elected as your Supervisor of Elections for the next four years!” Blazier announced in a Sept. 4 Facebook post. “My opponent, a write-in candidate, officially withdrew today, making this victory official.”

Addressing supporters, she stated: “This moment results from a year of hard work and unwavering support from all of you. I couldn’t have done it without your trust and commitment to ensuring fair, ethical, and secure elections in Collier County.”

Gubala, 63, a 30-year veteran firefighter and since 2004 a Naples mortgage broker with MVP Realty, entered the race just prior to the June 14 deadline as a spoiler, or “ghost” candidate to aid Guerrette. As such he closed the primary election to non-Republicans, effectively disenfranchising 119,115 independent and Democratic Collier County voters.

Edward Gubala in Tim Guerrette campaign regalia.

Guerrette finished the primary race in third place with just 16.8 percent of the vote.

Gubala never collected or spent any money on his campaign, never posted a website or produced any campaign material and never gave media interviews or conducted campaign activities.

Ghosting candidates is a frequent, entirely legal, political tactic in Florida in order to exclude non-party members from primary elections.

Liberty lives in light

© 2024 by David Silverberg

Melissa Blazier at her desk in the Supervisor of Elections office. (Photo: Author)

Lee County commissioners pass anti-Amendment 4 resolution

Pendergrass: ‘Their goal is to drive people to the polls’

The Lee County Board of Commissioners meeting on Sept. 3, 2024. (Photo: Dan Becker)

Sept. 4, 2024 by David Silverberg

On Tuesday, Sept. 3, the Lee County Board of Commissioners voted 4 to 1 to pass a resolution condemning Amendment 4, a proposed amendment to the state constitution guaranteeing a woman’s right to choose abortion.

The sole dissent was by Commissioner Raymond Sandelli (R-District 3) who voted against the resolution.

(The full text of the resolution can be read here.)

The commissioners heard 2 hours and 20 minutes of public comment on the proposed resolution. This was in addition to two previous sessions of public comment on Aug. 6 and 20. Demonstrators on both sides of the issue protested outside the building prior to the meeting’s start.

“I haven’t seen that much engagement with constituents on this many issues,” said Commissioner Kevin Ruane (R-District 1).

Commissioner Ray Sandelli (R-District 3) (Image:LCBC)

Sandelli, who has announced his retirement at the end of this year, said that he was “taken aback” when the Board was asked to handle the issue.

“Personally, I am pro-life,” he said. “And when I cast my individual vote in November, I will do so accordingly. I trust you will honor my position as I honor yours. That said, I was taken aback when the Board was asked to get involved in this.

“But my constituency is all of Lee County, be it a yes vote or a no vote. Again, the final decision will come from all who will vote in November. We should carefully study the topic, help inform people, trust our own beliefs and vote accordingly as we see fit.

“So my feeling is, I would not adopt the resolution as it stands.”

In contrast, commissioners Mike Greenwell (R-District 5), Brian Hamman (R-District 4) and Ruane said they were voting against the resolution because they considered it “vague.”

“This resolution does not change anyone’s ability to vote,” said Commission Chair Greenwell, who introduced the resolution. “It simply would be a resolution saying, ‘Please read [the amendment]. Please look at it.’ I think the language is vague for a reason and I would not consider myself a leader if I didn’t stand up and read the resolution and say, ‘There’s something wrong here.’ And I think it’s important that we bring that up.’”

He added, “We’re a divided country. We should always help the unborn.”

Hamman said he had “compassion and love and respect for people we heard here today” but he agreed with Greenwell that the amendment’s language is “very misleading and I think voters need to be made aware that this is something that needs a second look.”

Ruane also criticized what he said was “vagueness in the wording.” He insisted the Board had a right to bring up the resolution and struck a defiant note against critics.

“I’ve heard a lot of emotional speakers and I’ve excused some emotion that if I don’t vote this particular way you’re going to vote me out of office. That’s your prerogative and every day I make a decision up here, that’s what I do,” he said. “And if this vote changes your mind so be it.”

But it was Commissioner Cecil Pendergrass who had a unique view of the whole pro-choice, Amendment 4 effort, which he considered to be a Democratic Party plot to drive voters to the polls.

Commissioner Cecil Pendergrass. (Photo: LCBC)

“We should talk about the big elephant in the room,” he said. The reason the whole issue of abortion was before the Board, he argued, was because the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had decided to challenge Florida’s six-week abortion ban and wanted to flip Florida Democratic.

“The DNC decided over a year ago since they had either DeSantis or another resident of Florida running for president, they’re going to take the state of Florida, they need to push the polls to guide people to vote this year,” he said. “So here’s what they used, they used an emotional issue like this, bring it forth, that’s what their neighbors have to have this discussion, which, at the end of the day, we don’t want to have this discussion with our neighbors but we have to now, because they decided to make this the issue to bring people to the polls.”

He said that the amendment had “very vague language they threw together,” knowing it would be challenged.

“Their goal is to drive people to the polls in November for the presidential election, which is unfortunate because they’re using women’s rights, they’re using as an issue for that reason,” he charged. He said he was also voting for the resolution condemning Amendment 4 because he considered it vague.

Commentary: The Pendergrass perspective

Somehow missing from Pendergrass’ perspective was the fact that women lost their right to choose in 2022 with the Dobbs decision; that this caused a spontaneous reaction among people who acutely felt that loss; that the movement to pass Amendment 4 might be a grassroots response to restore that lost right; that 993,387 Floridians signed the petition to put it on the ballot, 101,864 more than was required; that the state Supreme Court ruled the amendment’s language to be very clear and understandable to all voters; that there are plenty of factors propelling voters to the polls that don’t require some plot from the DNC; that no matter how uncomfortable and inconvenient it is for him and his neighbors, larger forces are driving this energetic discussion of reproductive rights and not some Democratic Party plot; and that it was anti-choice activists who first proposed and insisted upon this entirely unnecessary, divisive and inappropriate resolution, creating the controversy in Lee County, Fla., that he so deplores.

An uncharitable observer might call Pendergrass’ view of the situation “stupid.” A cruder observer might add an adjective starting with the letter “f.”

On one thing and one thing alone, he was right and on which everyone can agree: there was indeed a “big elephant” in the room.

The entire 3-hour, 8-minute Board of Commissioners meeting can be seen on YouTube. Public comments begin at minute 40. The commissioners’ discussion prior to voting begins at 2:45 and ends at 2:54.

Liberty lives in light

© 2024 by David Silverberg

The Lee County Board of Commissioners taking the vote on the anti-Amendment 4 resolution. (Image: LCBC)

Project 2025 takes aim at education—and Collier County, Fla.

Like all American schools, Southwest Florida’s classrooms would feel the impact of Project 2025. (Image: First Focus on Children)

Sept. 3, 2024 by David Silverberg

If it came to pass that Donald Trump won the election and his administration implemented Project 2025’s educational proposals, how would Florida’s parents, teachers, students and school staff be affected?

Project 2025 is the sweeping, 887-page volume of very specific policy recommendations for presidential and legislative changes to be made under a conservative president, in this case, upon the election of Donald Trump. It is a continuation of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership program that has been issued every four years since 1980.

This year Project 2025 includes recruitment of personnel, training for those people and a 180-day Playbook for immediate implementation should there be a change of administrations.

Donald Trump has disavowed any knowledge of, or familiarity with, Project 2025, although the Heritage Foundation organizers say that he implemented 67 percent of their recommendations in his first administration. Former Trump staffers have been heavily involved in Project 2025’s formulation, including Sen. James David “JD” Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate.

When it comes to education, the Project 2025 recommendation that has received the most attention is the disestablishment of the US Department of Education (ED).

The very first sentence of Project 2025’s education chapter states: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.”

That proposal has alarmed parents, teachers and education experts. It has energized Trump’s opponents, whether Democrats, independents or traditional Republicans who value learning. It is the first thing that critics cite when they attack Project 2025’s education ideas.

“We are not going to let him eliminate the Department of Education that funds our public schools!” Vice President Kamala Harris declared in her speech to the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 23, to intense and prolonged applause.

Trump, despite his disavowals of Project 2025, has doubled down on ending the department.

During a rambling X interview with Elon Musk on Aug. 13 he pledged to “close the Department of Education, move education back to the states.” As recently as Friday, Aug. 30, he repeated his position at a Washington, DC conference held by Moms for Liberty—who also advocate eliminating the department.

Beyond the agency

Project 2025’s education recommendations go well beyond just ending the department.

They are contained in Chapter 11 (page 319), a sweeping chapter of 44 pages including citations, that covers a wide variety of education-related policies and proposals. It appears under the byline of Lindsey Burke, the Heritage foundation’s director of the Center for Education Policy. She has worked at the Heritage Foundation for over 16 years.

Project 2025 gathers up all the ideas that have been circulating in conservative circles, some of very long standing, and then puts them into tangible, concrete recommendations for action.

Among these ideas are many that are already in force in Florida, including expanding non-public school alternatives like charter schools, providing parents with vouchers to use in non-public schools, lowering accreditation requirements for non-public schools, passing legislation to prevent the teaching of critical race theory, and passing a “Parents Bill of Rights” that has led to practices such as book bans.

All of these would have significant consequences if implemented nationally.

But eliminating the Department of Education is Project 2025’s big idea, its headline and the one getting the most attention.

Looking ahead at the consequences of such an action is necessarily speculative, of course. But some results can be imagined—and the Collier County, Fla., public school district provides a microcosm that can give a sense of the impact at the grassroots level.

A quick history: the Department of Education

Republicans have sought termination of the current Department of Education ever since it came into being in 1980, when it was split off from the then Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

According to the department’s official history, a Department of Education was first created in 1867 to collect data about the nation’s schools. It had a budget of $15,000 and four employees. This happened in the midst of Reconstruction and the first wave of education for freed people and their children.

The next year the department was demoted to an Office of Education because of concerns that as a Cabinet department it would exert too much control over local schools.

However, starting in the 1950s public interest in education policy began to rise again along with the civil rights movement and the effort to end segregation. Segregated black schools in the South were woefully inadequate, underfunded, and discriminatory and along with the national effort to end segregation the nation made an effort to raise the general level of education for all students regardless of race.

In 1980, backed by the National Education Association, Congress passed, and President Jimmy Carter signed, the Department of Education Organization Act, making it a stand-alone Cabinet department again.

Project 2025 has a less benign view of the department’s creation. In its version, advocates of expanded education funding didn’t like the existing scattershot approach to education because “a single, captive agency would allow them to promote their agenda more effectively across Administrations. Eventually, the National Education Association made a deal and backed the right presidential candidate— Jimmy Carter—who successfully lobbied for and delivered the Cabinet-level agency.”

(Today, Project 2025 recommends rescinding the National Education Association’s congressional charter because it views it as “a demonstrably radical special interest group that overwhelmingly supports left-of-center policies and policymakers.”)

Ever since its establishment, Republicans have made ED a target and pledged to eliminate it. President Ronald Reagan, who took office immediately after Carter, was bent on ending it but the person he tapped to do the deed, Secretary of Education Terrel Bell, instead formed a commission that issued a report, A Nation at Risk, proposing reforms. Reagan liked the report so much he claimed it as his own and the department was saved, changing its focus to raising the quality of public education.

Ever since then abolishing the Department of Education has become part of the Republican mantra, an essential article of faith about which nothing has been done in actuality.

In 2016, during a campaign speech in—of course, Florida—then-candidate Donald Trump said “there is so much waste” at the department that he planned to cut it down to “shreds.”

When he became president he appointed Betsy DeVos to be secretary of the despised agency. Whatever else she did as secretary, she did not abolish the department—and as president, neither did he.

And so it stands today, a target of Project 2025.

Breaking the big bank

The US Department of Education has been described as “a big bank with a small policy shop attached.”

It’s an apt description. For all the rhetoric and misconceptions to the contrary, ED’s primary role is administering grants and financial aid to school systems and students around the country. While it tries to maintain and raise academic standards and eliminate educational inequities in school systems, it largely does this through the finances it administers.

Project 2025 would end the federal role in supporting education financially.

“To the extent that federal taxpayer dollars are used to fund education programs, those funds should be block granted to states without strings, eliminating the need for many federal and state bureaucrats,” it states. “Eventually, policymaking and funding should take place at the state and local level, closest to the affected families.”

Currently, federal funding can be a big boost to the school districts that receive it.

Collier County, Fla., illustrates this. In its tentative 2024-25 budget released on July 31, the Collier County School District estimated it would receive $7,243,150 in direct federal funding. Not all of this will come from ED; other federal agencies like the Department of Agriculture, which administers nutritional programs, also provide funding. However, it is a good indicator of the kind of federal support that primary and secondary school districts receive.

That’s not the only federal money Collier County receives. It also receives federal money passed on through state agencies and that’s much greater: $79,023,516. (Impressive as these figures might be, the vast majority of the district’s funding comes from local taxation: over $842 million.)

The funding goes for everything from salaries, to supplies, to services to furniture and more.

Breakdown of special, non-tax revenues and expenditures for Collier County Public Schools. (CCPS)

Below, where the money goes: Collier County grant recipients, amounts and officials overseeing the programs for the 2024-25 budget year. This includes grants from non-government, non-profit and philanthropic sources. (CCPS)

(Perhaps surprisingly, the federal Department has no local influence on curricula, which is entirely formulated at the local level.)

So assuming that Project 2025 was implemented as proposed and ED was terminated, the very first thing that would happen in Collier County is the school system would stand to lose up to $86 million in federal funding, whether directly or through the state.

It might make that money back, if the state—which would now have total control over all non-local educational funding—decided to be generous or at least maintain current funding levels.

The omens for this, however, are not favorable because DeSantis, i.e., the state, has a propensity and a preference for cutting appropriations for educational institutions. 

A glaring illustration of this occurred in the 2025 state budget when DeSantis vetoed $98 million in higher education funding. Florida Gulf Coast University, the local institution of higher learning, had $16.3 million excised from appropriations the legislature had otherwise approved.

Collier County public schools were not spared either: $2 million in approved appropriations were cut from its pilot education program for pre-kindergarten children.  

Collier lost 1,000 seats as a result of the pandemic and needed to ready young children from all backgrounds for kindergarten. The money would have been used for 10 new modular pre-kindergarten classrooms and modification of existing facilities so that 160 more 3 and 4 year olds and their parents could participate in school programs near their homes and elementary schools. Educators hoped it would establish strong bonds between the families and schools and prepare the children to enter the classroom. It would also train parents—from very diverse backgrounds, languages and cultures—to be school-ready, teach their children early literacy and prepare the children for schoolrooms.

The fact that the budget request was made by no less a personage than state Sen. Kathleen Passidomo (R-28-Naples), president of the Florida Senate, made no difference to DeSantis at all.

So on a practical level, terminating the Department of Education would at the very least inject great uncertainty into Collier County public schools’ cash flow. At worst it could result in a serious loss of revenue that would affect all aspects of school operations, resulting in a potentially significant reduction of capability and resources that would negatively affect students, teachers and staff. Furthermore, it would do this in a county that is rapidly growing and needs new school facilities and resources to handle the influx.

If Project 2025 were implemented these kinds of losses would apply across the country as all school districts lost federal funding.

Project 2025’s recommendation that money be provided to states “without strings” is also dangerous. The reason there are “strings” on federal money now is to ensure that the funds are used for their intended purpose and not misappropriated or diverted into private pockets. Project 2025 hates the “many federal and state bureaucrats” currently administering and overseeing federal education funds. However, the reason they’re there is to ensure that the money is spent properly. Without them there would be no oversight, regulation or enforcement.

Florida has already seen the fruits of this. The DeSantis “war on woke” in academia has also been a gold rush for favored politicians taking over academic positions for ideological reasons.

Nowhere was this clearer than at the state’s University of Florida, where former senator Ben Sasse, an outspoken conservative Republican, was appointed president in February 2023. Not only was he paid a million dollars in salary but he ballooned his office’s spending on favored consultants and provided high-priced remote positions for former staffers and Republican officials. When all this emerged, Sasse resigned and people he appointed were terminated.

Under Project 2025’s proposals, the removal of “strings” on federal funding would no doubt open the floodgates for a season of unrestrained corruption and turn ivory towers into feeding troughs.  

Analysis: Going back?

More broadly than just money, Project 2025’s measures would subvert the entire educational effort of the past 70 years to make American quality education more expansive, equitable and accessible to everyone. After all, it was an educational case, Brown vs. Board of Education that ended legal segregation in the first place.

Eliminating the department “would shutter thousands of public schools, end supports for low-income students, divert taxpayer funds to the private education of wealthy students and, ultimately, destabilize public education altogether,” argues Lily Klam, director of education policy at the First Focus on Children advocacy group. 

The reason that the federal government intervened in education in the first place was because the racial and economic disparities among different school systems, especially in the segregated South, were so great that only the federal government was capable of correcting them. Then, starting in the Reagan administration, it sought to improve public education’s quality and outcomes.

These have been the thrust of federal efforts, as embodied in the Department of Education, since its founding. It is premised on the idea that a uniformly educated, literate, thinking population benefits the nation, is essential for democracy, and makes the country stronger.

This is the notion that Project 2025 is challenging. Project 2025—and the whole anti-public education movement—whether consciously or not, would bring back the past disparities in education and make education uneven and uncertain. By undermining public education and putting the states entirely in charge, it would revive past abuses and disparities.

Ultimately, wrecking public education, as Project 2025 seeks, would lead, not just to racial inequalities, but to socio-economic and political ones as well. While the entire movement of American education since independence has been to make Americans more prosperous, educated and equal as citizens, Project 2025 would make them less prosperous, less educated and less equal. It would ultimately create an undemocratic class of literate masters ruling ignorant serfs.

When it comes to education, this is the “again” in the slogan “make America great again.”

And preventing this outcome is the “back” in the slogan “we won’t go back.”

This article is one of a series looking at the impact of Project 2025 on Southwest Florida and the nation. Others are:

Project 2025 remake of FEMA would hit communities hard after disasters

Project 2025 would end federal flood insurance, devastate Southwest Florida and coastal communities

Liberty lives in light

© 2024 by David Silverberg

Jessica Cosden, a teacher and Cape Coral councilmember, teaches a Cape Coral class in 2017. (Photo: Author’s collection)

ALERT! Lee County commissioners to consider anti-Amendment 4 resolution at Sept. 3 meeting

The men of the Board of County Commissioners of Lee County, Fla. From the left: Chair Mike Greenwell (R-District 5), Brian Hamman (R-District 4), Cecil Pendergrass (R-District 2), Ray Sandelli (R-District 3) and Kevin Ruane (R-District 1). (Photo: BOCC)

Aug. 28, 2024 by David Silverberg with reporting by Dan Becker

Updated at 11:15 am with link to full agenda.

The Board of County Commissioners of Lee County, Fla., will be considering a resolution condemning Amendment 4 at its next meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 3.

Amendment 4 is a proposed constitutional amendment to the Florida Constitution that guarantees a woman’s right to choose abortion. It will be subject to a statewide vote in the general election on Nov. 5.

The proposed Lee County resolution is on the administrative agenda for the next Board meeting. (The full agenda can be accessed here.)

The resolution was drawn up by the Lee County attorney at the direction of Board Chair Mike Greenwell (R-District 5) at the Aug. 6 meeting in response to urgings from anti-choice activists. It was further discussed at the Aug. 20 meeting.

The proposed resolution states:

“WHEREAS, the Board believes that the language of the proposed amendment is vague, deceptive, and overbroad and would strike already enacted protections instituted by the State of Florida by broadening the definition of healthcare providers to those not medically licensed, and allowing the life of the unborn to be taken right up to the moment of birth; and,

“WHEREAS, the Board believes that the passage of Amendment 4 would be detrimental to the health, safety, and welfare of the citizens of Lee County and the State of Florida.

“NOW THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THAT THE BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS OF LEE COUNTY, FLORIDA, expresses its strong opposition to Amendment 4.”

(The full text of the proposed resolution can be read at the end of this article.)

If passed, the Lee County Board would be joining neighboring Collier County’s Board in opposing Amendment 4. The Collier resolution, passed June 11, expressed the opinion of Commissioner Chris Hall (R-District 2).

To register an opinion on the proposed resolution, residents who sign up in person the day of the meeting can speak before the Board for 3 minutes. The Commission meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 3 is scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m. at the Old Lee County Courthouse, 2120 Main St., downtown Fort Myers, Fla.

To contact Lee County commissioners:

All commissioners can be contacted by mail at P.O. Box 398, Fort Myers, FL 33902-0398

Commissioner Kevin Ruane, District 1

Commissioner Cecil Pendergrass, District 2

Commissioner Ray Sandelli, District 3

Commissioner Brian Hamman, District 4

Commissioner Mike Greenwell, District 5

The full text of the proposed resolution:

Liberty lives in light

© 2024 by David Silverberg