Primary Picks—Part I: Statewide Races

Today is already the first day of early voting in Texas. I’m sitting down today to go through the ballot and figure out—and share—who’s getting my vote in the various races.

I’ve been working hard on the Mark Ramsey for Congressional District 38 campaign. That has left me less time to go over all the others. So some I’m still fuzzy about. But at least today I can put together the info I have. Whatever happens in these races, I’m ready to support the Republican candidates in the general election, barring some catastrophic news I can’t foresee.

Today I’ll get through the statewide races. The local races and judicial races will take additional posts later this week.

Governor

Governor Greg Abbott has a number of challengers this year. People outside Texas might not be aware of reasons for displeasure. We have a conservative state. We’re not locked down. Business is growing. In fact, businesses—and people—from locked down states are moving here in droves.

Public Service Announcement: Y’all are welcome here, but leave your blue state politics behind.

Anyway, what has Texans riled can be summed up with pandemic response government overreach. Governor Abbott, in campaign materials, is claiming Texas is successful because we didn’t lock down. But we did. It was comparatively short, about four weeks, a week longer for “nonessential” businesses. Then it became a local prerogative. But we did shut down. Remember the Shelley Luther, Dallas salon owner, who was arrested for opening back up a few days early? She had people on her payroll who needed income for food and housing; after a month she had to open up. So, yes, we did shut down. And it took quite a long time before the state stopped local jurisdictions from forcing lockdowns and mandates.

And mandates—that’s another thing. We never actually had mask or vaccine mandates statewide. But we didn’t get the governor to step in against them until fall 2021. A year and a half of allowing local places to impose mask mandates—on school children, on workers, on private businesses, on churches. And vaccine mandates were allowed under certain circumstances—like for healthcare workers, regardless of whether they had natural immunity. Governor Abbott’s executive order to stop mandates came at the end of the third special legislative session. That means it was his fourth opportunity to put forth an executive order at a time that the legislature could then follow up to make it lawful. But he waited until it was too late for the legislature to act—until 2023.

Back a decade or more earlier, Governor Rick Perry got into trouble with Texans by calling for a vaccine mandate of Gardasil for young women. It’s intended to prevent the spread of some causes of HPV (human papilloma virus), an STD that can lead to cervical cancer. But it had been tested on women 16-26 old—so untested on those younger, and he was requiring it for 12 and up. There were risks, including a few deaths. And it is totally unnecessary for young women who are not sexually active. He seemed shocked when there was an uproar against his mandate.

What I don’t understand is any elected official who claims to believe in the Constitution—and I’ve been a big Abbott fan in the past for his ability to articulate constitutional principles—thinking they have authority under any circumstances to force people to put something into their bodies. Ever. Even if it’s a massive Ebola outbreak. Go ahead and make a recommendation. But do not suppose you control the sovereign bodies of individual citizens.

Add to this disappointment the lack of response to the conservative grassroots and their legislative priorities.

So, Governor Abbot has challengers. There are many, but foremost are Allen West, Don Huffines, and Chad Prather. I have good and bad to say about each. You can see candidate forums here and here. Governor Abbott did not participate. I also recommend checking out the Conservative Coalition of Harris County voter’s guide and questionnaires. If you go to their website, you can get their recommendations in a page or two; they only endorse when a candidate gets 70% of their board’s support. You can also click on the level of race—federal, state, county—and get the questionnaire answers that the candidate submitted, and links to other information that candidate provided. This is for Governor and the other state, congressional, and county races.

Allen West, former military, former representative in Florida, until he was redistricted out of his district and couldn’t retain the seat. He moved to Texas—his wife’s choice after lots of military-required moves in their life. Two years ago he ran for state GOP party chair. Name recognition paid off. We had a good administrator in that position. But the grassroots elected West—during that weird convention where we were forced at the last minute to do the largest political gathering in the country (world?) online, purportedly because of COVID-19. There were tremendous problems involved—including denial of service hacking. Eventually, then, West took over the remainder of the convention. And we never really finished. We didn’t get to discuss the platform. We put off handling remaining business. It was a mess. Not necessarily caused by him, but not relieved by him either.

Then he steps down less than a year before the next convention (to be held in person in Houston in June 16-18). I have friends who explain this. There was a rule that he couldn’t run for governor while holding that other elected office, and he felt the need to run for governor. There are those who thought he only ran for RPT chair as a step to something higher, and now it appears they were right.

West talks a good conservative message. I like that. And he’s charismatic enough to draw people in. But I have yet to see him actually succeed in administration.

Then there’s Don Huffines. He’s a former state senator from near Dallas, with a good conservative voting record. He has an unfortunate way of sounding like a used car salesman, but there are times I’ve been leaning toward him. However, in the forums there have been a couple of things that trigger a negative response. One is his push for replacing state property tax with some version of a consumption tax, not necessarily a bad thing. He explained that he’s run the numbers. We run a surplus in Texas, and that should be used to buy down property taxes, and over time we can convert to a consumption tax. But, he says this will only take 8 to 10 years. That may very well be true. But no one can go into office with a plan that they may not be there to complete and expect it to happen. What mess would we be in if we were halfway there—with consumption taxes increasing to take over for property taxes—and then some other leader comes in and keeps the property taxes too?

Then there’s Chad Prather. When he got in the race, people couldn’t tell if he was serious. He’s an entertainer, with a show on The Blaze, where he does political commentary. And he’s known for being provocative, in a Texas sort of way. He started out doing YouTube videos from his truck, wearing a cowboy hat. The things he said rang true and spread. Sometimes what he says, though, is too spicy for my taste. But in the forums, he actually comes off as the most conversant in the Constitution and how government should be run according to those principles. He’s intelligent, articulate, and convincing. What I don’t know is whether he could actually translate those principles into running a state that’s something like the 12^th largest economy in the world. The principles work—every time they’re tried. But would he have the influence to implement the correct principles?

Chad Prather, image from his campaign website

What I expect to happen is that Abbott will win the Primary, and he will handily be reelected against Democrat challenger Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, who lost against Ted Cruz in a Senate race a few years ago. This is the Beto who said, “Heck, yeah, we’re taking their guns,” but has suddenly now modified to saying he’s a great fan of the 2^nd Amendment. That’s not going to convince anyone here in Texas.

Anyway, I plan to do something of a protest Primary vote, possibly for Chad Prather, maybe Huffines. This is to let Governor Abbott know that we expect better from him. Then I’ll support Abbott, who is light years far and away better than the likes of former Congressman Beto, who shouldn’t be elected to anything ever again.

I’m going to have to be briefer about the rest of these races.

 

Lieutenant Governor

Lt. Governor Dan Patrick is from our part of Texas. He was state senator for my district before this position. We want to like him here. But, as with Governor Abbott, we feel disappointed. When he put out his priorities at the beginning of last year’s legislative session, it did not fully encompass the grassroots legislative priorities—the things the state convention voted on that they wanted the legislature to accomplish. Of our 8 priorities, some version of 4 got passed, and that was better than any previous Republican-led legislature in the nearly two decades of GOP leadership. Still, what happened to the other things? Why, for instance, couldn’t we get a vote on the Senate floor once our school choice bill made it out of committee—with the support of even a Democrat committee member? The Lt. Governor is leader of the Senate. His priorities get done. But this priority did not.

So, again there are challengers: Daniel Miller (website here); Trayce Bradford (website here); Aaron Sorrells (website here); Zach Vance (website here); and Todd Bullis (website here). There was a candidate forum (Patrick did not attend) in Wise County; video here.

 

Daniel Miller is probably the most well-known. He heads the Texas Nationalist Movement (Texit—I wrote about it here), although he’s not talking about that much on the campaign. He would probably see to it that the question gets put before the people of Texas, which is all he’s been asking for—and that is in the party platform. It just never gets anywhere in the legislature, which it must go through first. His book on the subject is convincing, and I’ve leaned toward that. But in truth I want the United States to remain whole and return to the Constitution. So, until that becomes impossible, I think that’s where most Texans are. Nevertheless, Miller knows the law and the Constitution—and the state constitution—better than most. I also have liked some of what Aaron Sorrells said in the forum.

Daniel Miller, image from his campaign website

 

So, again, I may do another Primary protest vote here, probably for Daniel Miller, in the hopes that Lt. Governor Patrick will wake up to our displeasure that he hasn’t kept faith with us. I think he can do better.

 

Texas Attorney General

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (campaign info here) will have primary challengers in 2022. He has made national news, and again those outside Texas (and many inside) will wonder why the challengers. There is a corruption lawsuit always looming in the background; his defense seems to be saying that it is not criminal, not that it wasn’t done. I don’t know enough to say. But there have been a number of issues where my lawyer son Political Sphere has raised questions about his incompetence. My disappointment has been his slowness to prosecute election fraud—even when the evidence is laid out for him in detail from people I know who did the investigation here in Harris County.

 

The challengers include current Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush (campaign info here), former TX Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman (campaign info here), and US Rep. Louie Gohmert (campaign info here).

 

Eva Guzman,
image from her campaign website

George P. Bush is a Bush, which is a drawback this decade. He was actually educationally qualified to be Land Commissioner. People were upset about his handling of the Alamo preservation approach. Mostly I was not. But he had some transparency issues, to which he eventually opened the books. That said, I don’t see evidence that he’s qualified to be Attorney General.

 

Louie Gohmert is a US representative, and has been pretty reliably conservative. He also ruffles feathers. That’s a good thing, if also effective in making good things happen. Son Political Sphere doesn’t trust that he can translate that into Attorney General skills.

 

Eva Guzman, on the other hand, is a former state Supreme Court justice, and definitely has the skills and demeanor. I doubt that she’ll have enough push to oust an incumbent, but I would be pleased to see her in that position. So I’ll give her my vote in the Primary.

Texas General Land Office Commissioner

Dr. Jon Spiers,
image from his campaign website

The Texas Land Commissioner position is open, as GLO Commissioner George P. Bush is running for a different office. The candidates are Dr. Jon Spiers (campaign info here), State Senator Dawn Buckingham (campaign info here), former Texas Real Estate Commissioner Weston Martinez (campaign info here), Ben Armenta (campaign info here), Victor Avila (campaign info here), Rufus Lopez, Don W. Minton (campaign info here), and Tim Westley (campaign info here). Texas Scorecard has video conversations with five of the Texas Land Commissioner candidates here.

I haven’t spent a lot of time on this race. My first impression is to support Jon Spiers. He’s from here locally, so I got somewhat acquainted with him several years ago. He was one of eight candidates in the Congressional District 2 race after the retirement of Rep. Ted Poe; Dan Crenshaw won that race, but several of the candidates were impressive. Spiers was quite good on the Obamacare issue, which was on all our minds at the time. And he was good on other issues as well. He’s a former heart surgeon turned medical attorney (an accident made it impossible for him to continue doing heart surgery, so he went to law school). He seems thoroughly conservative.

I suggest, again, looking at their videos. And also check the Conservative Coalition of Harris County voter’s guide and questionnaires. 

 

Texas Agriculture Commissioner

 

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller (campaign info here) will be challenged by Rep. James White (campaign info here) and Carey Counsil (campaign info here). Texas Scorecard article here. Texas Scorecard has video conversations with the each of the three candidates here. Again, this is not a race I have spent a lot of time on. There are whispers of some corruption that I can’t seem to get clarity on. Maybe true, maybe spin, maybe just an attempt to discredit for political reasons. I don’t know. But my outside view is that Sid Miller has been a good Ag Commissioner, and I plan to vote for him.

Sid Miller, Texas Ag Commissioner
screenshot from this campaign video

 

 

Wayne Christian,
image from campaign website

Texas Railroad Commissioner

 

The Texas Railroad Commission is a three-person group who handle oil & gas/energy in the state. There are long historical reasons for the name, which seems confusing. But this is really about the energy industry in Texas. Only one of the three is up this election. Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian has several challengers. All candidates include Wayne Christian, Tom Slocum Jr., Sarah Stogner, Marvin “Sarge” Summers, Dawayne Tipton. I suggest, again, the CCHC questionnaire, which also shows links to their websites and social media. But my impression is that Wayne Christian has done well enough and will get my vote.

 

 

Texas Comptroller

 

This is essentially an accounting, or treasurer position.  Mark Goloby is challenging Glenn Hegar for Texas Comptroller. Goloby campaign info here. Hegar campaign info here. Goloby is actually precinct chair of my next-door precinct. He spent several years accomplishing putting an end to the Chapter 313 problem. He spoke at our Tea Party on this. It wasn’t an easy issue to take on, because it takes some explanation (I never seem able to repeat the explanations afterward). I supported him in that effort and was glad the legislature finally did what was needed—which was actually to do nothing, to not renew. But Goloby is saying the Comptroller hasn’t yet updated practices. And there are some other issues.

 

Overall I think Glenn Hegar has been a good Comptroller. One story I read acknowledged this, but added that he ought to deal with the issues brought up by his challenger. If he does that, we can be satisfied. So Hegar will get my vote—and we’ll be watching.

Glenn Hegar, image from campaign website

 

Next up, in a post later this week, will be the US congressional races and other local and county races. There are a few statewide judicial races, but rather than include them today, I’ll handle them in a separate post that will include local judicial races as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the Energy Corridor

I don’t usually spend so much time on either local or political things. But what we’re facing in my newly created congressional district is a David/Goliath battle against an establishment bent on ignoring the will of the people. So, at least until the primary is over (March 1), and maybe a runoff a couple of months after that, I’ll be talking about this race. And a surprising amount of this is the actual battle for constitutional conservatism. So it may be instructive for others working toward freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

Today’s topic is, specifically, about oil and gas—and energy more generally. This new district encompasses the Energy Corridor, a section of Houston along I-10 where a lot of energy companies are located. It seems logical that such a district ought to have a representative who knows that industry—in addition to knowing how to return to our Constitution. Mark Ramsey is that candidate.

Last week he was interviewed by the Houston Chronicle in preparation for their making recommendations. The Chronicle is anything but a constitutional-conservative newspaper. You can tell that even in the questions they ask. Today they came out with their recommendation in this race—and of course it was for the Washington, DC, pick—even though that guy reinforced his reputation for never showing up by not even responding to their request for an interview. And their characterization of our candidate was—well, not very accurate.

But let’s give them credit for an interview in which Mark got to spend half the time talking about the energy business—in far more detail than the reporter could grasp, even though he should have; it was all clear enough to me.

I’m hoping we’ll have clips of the recorded interview to share. But today I just happen to have made a transcript of the energy questions. So, let’s just let that run, with minimal commentary from me.

 

Oil & Gas—God’s Gift to Mankind

Mark Ramsey—candidate for CD 38: First and foremost, I would be the best advocate for oil & gas in the entire 435-member Congress. I’m a career oil & gas engineer. I have worked and taught how to drill wells more efficiently, safely, faster, etc., cleaner, on six continents. I have seen the benefit, the actual, real-life benefit to families, particularly in developing countries, where, effectively, if it were not for the oil & gas industry, they would still be a hundred, two hundred years behind Western civilization.

Instead, because of the oil & gas industry’s effect, which— I truly believe oil & gas is God’s gift to mankind. It powers Western civilization. But I have seen firsthand how the oil & gas industry has provided good, high-paying jobs, not just in America but in—all over the world. And that in turn has led, directly or indirectly, to roads, to schools, to hospitals, to clean water, to sanitary sewer systems—things the developing world did not have 50, 60, 70 years ago.

Almost all of that good has come about because of the oil & gas industry. The abundant, the relatively low cost—in spite of today’s price of oil at $92 bucks a barrel—it’s a low-cost energy compared to all the alternatives.

And now, with technology we’ve developed over my lifetime, it’s clean burning…. People think that carbon is an issue; one of the solutions is, you do electric generation with natural gas. That’s one of the cleanest things we can generate electricity with.

 

Mark Ramsey, left; Nick Powell, right
screenshots from Mark Ramsey's personal recording of the interview

No, It’s Not Greed; It’s Supply and Demand and Overregulation

Nick Powell, reporter: Let me just ask you real quick on, you mentioned the rising prices of gas. One of the reasons gas prices are going up is because American producers have decided not to invest in the producing more oil at the moment. They’d rather have higher prices and higher prices.—

Mark: No, that’s not entirely— I can’t really let that slide, but go ahead.

Nick: Well, I was just going to say, you’d say that they bear some responsibility for higher prices in this climate right now?

Mark: No, absolutely not. The reason that we are kind of entering a bit of a scarcity—not a lot; it’s a seasonal scarcity we see every year when cold weather hits; particularly with natural gas, not so much with liquids—but the reason we haven’t actually been drilling as much: oil wells have to be replaced. They deplete. They’re not pipes into the ground that produce forever. They deplete over time. Some last a very long time—20, 30 years or more. There’s fields in east Texas that are still producing almost a hundred years after they were discovered. That’s unusual. Most fields will deplete 3, 4, 5 years after the well is drilled.

We have to continually replace those wells. What happened is, through the ESG [environment, social, and corporate governance] movement, mostly out of New York and northeastern United States, that has shut off a lot of the funding, primarily to the independent and the wildcat style, the smaller companies.

It’s been an orchestrated effort by Wall Street to shut off funding, which is required with these very expensive projects to drill wells. The technology has advanced just spectacularly. But without the funding to actually drill the wells, you’re not going to be producing as much oil and natural gas.

oil rig in Gulf of Mexico, image found here

The second thing is the Obama-era regulations that came in have almost destroyed the Gulf of Mexico. Prior to the Obama-era regulations, we had on the order of 60, 70, and sometimes even higher than that, what are called deep-water rigs. These deep-water rigs, uh, they are typically either direct personnel that are working on the rigs or indirect personnel that are working on land—those represent approximately a thousand high-paying oil & gas jobs for every rig that’s operating in the Gulf of Mexico. Today we’ve only got about 15. And that’s due to these Obama-era regulations.

What’s even more important, perhaps, than the decrease in the number and the loss of these jobs—most of them permanently at this point—is that most of the activity by these deep-water rigs is primarily in workovers, and in repairing wells that are already there. There’s not a huge amount of true exploration or even drilling in already discovered fields. So that doesn’t bode well for energy independence, which we had achieved under President Trump. And now we’re not quite as energy independent as we could.

I would add one more thing, that the nature of oil & gas prices is that, when prices go higher, that does spur more investment. There’s a time lag that ranges from 6 months to maybe a year or two. But when, prices go high, as they are right now—and that’s not President Trump’s fault; that’s not the industry’s fault; that’s a direct result of things like the Keystone Pipeline being shut down, of federal lands being off limits to drilling. We just had a judge shut down about 1.7 million acres that had been lawfully leased in the Gulf of Mexico, over a Greenpeace-type lawsuit—that’s what caused the scarcity. That’s what causes prices to go up. It’s not greedy capitalist companies. The companies are out there competing tooth and nail. If we could free up the capital to drill more wells, gasoline prices would come back down very very rapidly.

 

Alternative Energy Welcome—but Without the Subsidies

Nick: Let me just ask you this. Let me ask you, what role do you see alternative forms of energy playing in the future, given that, you know, there is a push even by oil companies, Exxon and others, to, you know, to de-carbonize, I guess? How do you see wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal factory in the future?

Mark: Welcome to the energy business. But they should not be subsidized at taxpayer expense. The problem we had with the Valentine Day freeze, almost a year ago now… was that Ercot [Electric Reliability Council of Texas] price structure was putting reliable, low-cost generating capacity—natural gas topping units, basically—it was putting them serving effectively as backup to the wind and photovoltaics. And, as you may recall, the wind and photovoltaics dropped to about 3% of installed capacity in the Valentine’s Day freeze. There’s not hardly a machine, an industry, a plant in the entire world that would be considered a success if occasionally it was only delivering 3% of whatever its product was, in this case electricity.

frozen windmills, Texas Valentine's Day freeze 2021
image found here

Some of that has been corrected with legislation in the past year. The big issue right now is that there is a federal production tax credit on photovoltaics and on wind power that is so generous to those entities that they can sell power into the grid at a loss, and they still make money, due to the production tax credits. And that’s coming out of your pocket. That’s coming out of my pocket. That’s coming out of everyone’s pocket that’s paying federal income tax in the country. That is fundamentally unfair.

If you look at what President Trump did with China, we tried to level the playing field. We tried to stop the imbalance to American manufacturers. We have the exact same situation here in Texas with the wind power. I’m all for wind power. I just don’t think that we should be subsidizing it.

Nick: I have a couple other questions I want to get to and, you know, time is a little bit tight here. But let me, so, to clarify, you don’t support subsidizing renewable energy. Do you support subsidies for oil & gas? Federal subsidies?

Mark: That’s really not accurate. There are no real subsidies for oil & gas. Oil & gas is overregulated. that’s a big tax. For example, every time BSEE [Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement] comes out to inspect a rig out in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s a surprise inspection. There’s no warning. There’s no notice. Every time the helicopter lands, the operator gets a bill for about $30,000 to pay for the helicopter flight. That’s not a subsidy. That’s a penalty that’s going on. We’ve had— Unfortunately, the American government has had a war on the oil industry that dates back several decades now.

 

It's Time to Shut Off the Subsidies

There was a point in the Chronicle interview where Mark was about to tell this anecdote about solar energy subsidies but got interrupted. I think it should be included in a post about energy—and the free market. I had recorded him speaking in January at a meet & greet, and he included this story. So this is a transcript of Mark from that event.

Mark: I’ll give you a little anecdote. I used to live in Colorado. Right down the road from me was a place called the Solar Energy Research Institute. Sounded great. I was fresh out of college. You know, what could be better? Just free energy from the sun, kind of thing. So I went and interviewed with them, OK. I mean the job I had was great, but that one was even better. So I went and interviewed with them. It was an interesting interview. And at the end of the interview, they asked me if I had any questions. I did of course. One of the things I asked them was—this is back 40 years ago—one thing I asked them was, how long is it going to be until this is commercially viable without subsidies? I’ve been a conservative since a long time ago. This was actually back then, right out of college. “When is this going to be viable without subsidies.” You know what the answer was? Five years. Five years, OK. Five years.

I’m still on their mailing list. I like reading their stuff. Just recently they sent an annual report out. It was real interesting. It had something in the annual report: How long will it be until this is viable without subsidies? You know what the answer was? Ten years. Ten years. Ten years.

So that gives you an idea of where I’m coming from. It’s time to shut off the subsidies. Maybe phase them out. But get rid of the subsidies so that everything’s competing on a level playing field, and we’re not forcing oil & gas and nuclear and coal to play second fiddle to all these others.

 

Mark Ramsey, candidate for Texas Congressional District 38
image from campaign materials

The main opponent, by the way, the one who doesn’t show up—the Chronicle reports that he “acknowledges the importance of combating climate change but believes oil and gas are still critical in this transition period toward a decarbonized future.” In other words, he’ll keep subsidizing alternatives and penalizing oil & gas, including clean burning natural gas. And energy independence—which we had up until a year ago—is not even among his concerns.

The Energy Corridor is in this district. CD 38 deserves to be represented by an oil & gas expert. And it’s time Congress had an oil & gas expert among them. We can have that with Mark Ramsey.

Evil Enough for You?

cover image from here

I’m reading The Real Anthony Fauci, by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., which is a must read this year. It’s been slow going, because I keep stopping to mark things on every page. I’ll just share a chunk today from fairly early in the book. The question it brings up is, on some kind of scale that measures horrendous evil in the world, where does this rank?

The book is 480 pages, thoroughly footnoted. I’m reading it in Kindle, so my page numbers are based on 934 pages. This section I’m quoting starts on p. 79 of Kindle:

Leading doctors and scientists, including some of the nation’s most highly published and experienced physicians and front-line COVID specialists like [Peter] McCullough, [Pierre] Kory, Ryan Cole, David Brownstein, and [Harvey] Risch believe that Dr. Fauci’s suppression of early treatment and off-patent remedies was responsible for up to 80 percent of the deaths attributed to COVID. All five doctors independently told me the same thing. The relentless malpractice of deliberately withholding early effective COVID treatments, of forcing the use of toxic remdesivir, may have unnecessarily killed up to 500,000 Americans in hospitals.

Dr. Kory says so plainly: “Dr. Fauci’s suppression of early treatments will go down in history as having caused the death of a half a million Americans in the ICU.”

These things aren’t new to us here. I’ve been quoting many of these doctors since early in the pandemic. But having all the facts laid out in a book, with references, is still kind of stunning. Piecing it together myself, it was hard to believe what I was seeing. Now it’s clear I wasn’t imagining any of it.

Half a million is a lot of deaths. The vast majority were elderly—at or beyond life expectancy, when something at some point was going to take them. But it didn’t have to be a painful illness they could have been treated for but weren’t, and which they were forced to go through alone. Even the very aged with co-morbidities, when treated early, got better—usually without hospitalization at all.

We were never “killing Grandma” by going without a mask or vaccine; Fauci was killing Grandma by withholding treatments.

The book lays out why the doctors blame mainly Dr. Fauci, and it’s convincing. For instance, the efforts of the front-line doctors who developed treatment protocols got no financing or support from any government anywhere in the world. What they got was hostility, censoring, and censuring—“much of it orchestrated by Dr. Fauci and the US health agencies.”

Kennedy recounts the unusual absence of treatment protocols from US universities:

The large universities that rely on hundreds of millions in annual funding from NIH were also antagonistic. “We didn’t have a single academic institution come up with a single protocol,” said Dr. McCullough. “They didn’t even try. Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Duke, you name it. Not a single medical center set up even a tent to try to treat patients and prevent hospitalization and death. There wasn’t an ounce of original research coming out of America available to fight COVID—other than vaccines.” All of these universities are deeply dependent on billions of dollars that they receive from NIH. As we shall see, these institutions live in terror of offending Anthony Fauci and that fear paralyzed them in the midst of the pandemic.

“Dr. Fauci refused to promote any of these interventions,” says Kory. “It’s not just that he made no effort to find effective off-the-shelf cures—he aggressively suppressed them.”

Instead of supporting McCullough’s work, NIH and the other federal regulators began actively censoring information on this range of effective remedies. Doctors who attempted merely to open discussion about the potential benefits of early treatments for COVID found themselves heavily and inexplicably censored (pp. 78-79).

What kinds of things did Dr. Fauci suppress? There was this FDA example:

FDA sent a letter of warning that N-acetyle-L-cysteine (NAC) cannot be lawfully marketed as a dietary supplement, after decades of free access on health food shelves, and suppressive IV vitamin C, which the Chinese were using with extreme effectiveness.

Countries in the world that follow US recommendations had the same types of problems as the US. But other countries, more off the radar, used ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and other remedies in early treatment plans, and had much better success. We actually had a first world-country disadvantage.

Despite the censorship, some doctors treated—successfully. Most experienced zero hospitalizations or deaths among a wide variety of patients with age and co-morbidities. Early treatment made the difference.

Dr. McCullough is quoted as saying this of Fauci and those who helped him obstruct:

“You need, in short, to do the opposite of everything they did. It’s difficult to identify anything they did that was right” (p. 69).

The doctors’ estimates that 80% of deaths could have been prevented with early treatment—rather than the standard protocol of sending the patient home with directions to wait until they got sick enough for the hospital—is probably low. Probably all but the very most fragile could have been saved with early treatment.

Dr. Ryan Cole tells an example—one of his first, his own brother. Dr. Cole had come across Dr. McCullough’s protocol early on, so he was ready—

—when his overweight brother called Dr. Cole from a neighboring state on his way to the ER with a positive PCR test, labored breathing, blood oxygen at 86, and chest discomfort that he rated nine out of ten. “He has Type 1 diabetes,” explains Dr. Cole. Dr. Cole redirected his sibling to a local pharmacy and called in an ivermectin prescription. Within six hours, my brother’s chest pain was down to two out of ten due to the interferon effect of ivermectin, and within 24 hours after taking ivermectin, his oxygen was 98, and he then fully recovered” (p. 80).

Dr. Cole adds this:

“If you are under 70 years of age and have no severe preexisting illness, you can hardly die [from SARS-CoV-2 infection]. So, there is no fatality rate that can be reduced…. And for people who are elderly and have preexisting illness,” he adds, “as we know from Dr. Peter McCullough and his colleagues’ work, there are miraculously effective medicines to treat this virus so that the fatality rates go down another 70 to 80 percent, which means there is no ground for emergency use whatsoever. That’s a huge threat to the vaccine cartel and to remdesivir” (p. 81)

Motivations for murder tend to be money and power. Fauci’s incentive might have been money—big money for a vaccine everybody in the world is supposed to take multiple times, or maybe for the new remdesivir, which was as ineffective (or worse) as it was expensive. But he is already the most highly paid bureaucrat in America, at a bit under half a million a year. Maybe that wasn’t enough to satisfy him. But it ought to be enough to keep him from resorting to mass murder. He was already 80 when the pandemic started. He could have retired years ago and spent some of the money he’d accumulated on that more-than-comfortable salary.

I’m guessing power is the greater motivator for Fauci. This is an attitude he displays when he declares, “I am the science,” while offering no data, just his say so, simultaneously threatening anyone who doesn’t fall in line. It’s an ugly attribute. But it’s ugliest in someone who uses his power to control the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and considers his personal agenda more important than the lives of 500,000+ who could still be living among us if he hadn’t prevented their treatment.

We’re supposed to avoid judgment (Matthew 7:1), or maybe better put as “judge righteous judgment” (John 7:24). I wonder exactly how God judges someone who purposely causes the unnecessary deaths of so many people. Even when you consider mercy, it doesn’t look good for an unrepentant mass murderer and self-imposed tyrant.

Fauci isn’t the only guilty person. He might be the ringleader. Or maybe he does the bidding of someone more hidden in the shadows. But the colleagues, the bureaucrats, the functionaries who followed him, blindly or openly—those who knew they were causing deaths but that didn’t matter to them, because they wanted funding, or their job, or whatever lure he used to bind them to this evil, they are guilty as well.

Half a million deaths to your toll is massive. It’s not in the same league as six million Jews plus 8 million others killed by the Nazis, or 62 million by the USSR, 76 million by Mao’s regime in China, or even 2.2 million by the Khmer Rouge. But those were all by regime-wielding tyrants. Fauci is what you would normally think of as a pencil-pushing doctor. Plus, they all had years, maybe decades, to commit that many murders. He’s had only an intense couple of years.

 

Regime	Span of years	Estimated deaths of own people (non-military deaths)
National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NAZI)	1939-1945	14.2 million:[i]                 *   6 million Jews                 *   5.7 million non-Jewish Soviets                 *   2.5 million Polish, Serbs, others
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)	1917-1987	62 million[ii]
Chinese Communists under Mao	1949-1987	76 million
Khmer Rouge (Cambodian socialists under Pol Pot, patterned on Mao)	1975-1979	2.2 million (1/3 population)[iii]

 

How he got the power to shut down an economy, silence opposition, prevent treatment, and get people to willingly enforce his edicts on one another is harder to explain.

The damage done by the vaccine is evil for another day, but we ought to mention, despite the essential end of the pandemic through Omicron, which reaches practically the whole population whether you’ve been vaccinated or not, and maybe even if you’ve already recovered from COVID-19 in some other form—despite all that, they’re recommending it for six-month-olds, who have essential zero risk of death from the illness. The more we see how wrong they have been all along, the more they double down on the lie.

There’s something Jordan Peterson says about the dilemma a person had when faced with gestapo at the door while they were hiding Jews in the attic; should you lie? Peterson points out that you wouldn’t be in that dilemma if you and a lot of other people hadn’t waited until that moment to wonder about telling the truth.

The point is, once you know vaccines do not prevent infection—or spreading to others—you don’t give in to the pressure to take it. And that helps prevent you from being pressured into risking your children’s health with it, on down to your little baby.

The people attempting to invent a vaccine that would help in the pandemic may not have done wrong. But once they had to change the very definition of vaccine to allow this shot to be called one—even though it doesn’t prevent the illness and might not even lessen severity—they became complicit. Anyone who pressured others to take it, once its failings were already known and the VAERS data showed ever higher adverse reactions including death—when it’s still under emergency use authorization that shouldn’t have been granted, since there are effective treatments—is breaking the Nuremberg Code. This code was developed to prevent the world from ever again experimenting on human beings against their will.

Medical Case prosecutor details illegal experiments,
during the Nuremberg proceedings.
screenshot from video at the Holocaust Encyclopedia

For some, the vaccines might not have harmed, and maybe even helped prevent severe illness for those with comorbidities who would not get early treatment. But wherever there is risk, there has to be choice.

We said, “Never again!” We need to add, “Not on my watch!” Because the evil doesn’t lose its power until people stand up to it. It’s already unbelievably bad when the evildoers are sanguine about killing off half a million of our friends and family. But it will get worse unless we take away evil’s power by standing strong now.

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[i] United States Holocaust Museum's online Holocaust Encyclopedia:  https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008193.

[ii] Walter E. Williams, "Socialism's Death Count," August 7, 2012. He references Rudolph J. Rummel's book and website Death by Government. 

[iii] Socialism Sucks Facebook post April 2013.