The knives come out when you’re the frontrunner. That’s the sad truth of politics. While my own congressional campaign has focused on my story and my issues, been respectful of our fellow Republicans, and directed our criticisms solely at our Democratic opponent, I can’t say the same for my fellow Republicans.
Recently, one of those Republican opponents, in a desperate attempt to halt our tremendous momentum, dumped a file full of misleading and false allegations into the blogosphere. He tried to paint me as a Trump hating, China loving Democrat. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I’ve been a staunchly free market, small government, freedom loving conservative since my teenage years, when I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh during afternoon study hall and penned a letter to the local newspaper railing against rampant political correctness in my public high school.
Never in my life was I a registered Democratic. Disliking the corruption and hypocrisy of politics, I considered myself politically independent for most of my adult life in ultraliberal New York City, a one-party town where my contrarian vote would never have mattered anyway.
I never thought I would ever run for political office, but three years ago, my life drastically changed. After the events of 2020 – Covid, George Floyd and the BLM riots – my daughter’s prestigious Manhattan private school, the Brearley School, completely changed its mission. Abandoning academic excellence and free speech, the school adopted a political education of indoctrinating its students in critical race theory, radical gender ideology and progressive activism. As we say in Florida, Brearley went off the rails woke.
After trying and failing to get other parents to speak up, I wrote a letter objecting to the school’s obsession with race and identity, and mailed it to every family of the school. The letter went viral, was read by millions, and the media attention I received helped ignite what became the national parent’s movement and the fight against woke education.
We gave up on the progressive mismanagement of New York City, moved to Palm Beach County, and I was asked to run for Congress.
I said yes for one reason. I believe we are losing our great country. The same ideology that we saw take over our daughter’s school has captured not only our K-12 education system, but nearly every institution of America, including our universities, corporations, military, and federal government.
Whether called “wokeism”, “progressivism”, “leftism” or “social justice,” this ideology has been fully incorporated into the platform of the Democratic Party and is a fundamental rejection of America’s founding values of free speech, capitalism, individual rights, meritocracy, and objective truth.
Reclaiming our foundational American values and taking back our institutions won’t be easy, but that is my mission.
Political donations
My political opponent claimed that I financially supported a woke Democrat. This is false. He is specifically referring to a woman named Maud Maron, who ran for U.S. Congress in New York, first as an Independent and then as a Democrat.
I met Maud through a New York City parent group that was founded to fight woke ideology and covid restrictions in schools. She is one of the fiercest advocates I know for parental rights and against the insanity of gender and trans ideology. She briefly ran an organization called FAIR, which was founded to fight against, not for, woke ideology. If you still don’t believe me about Maud, you can ask our mutual friend, Megyn Kelly.
The family business and China
When I was in college, my father started a chemical distribution business, which I have been involved with since I worked college summers. Nearly 30 years later, the company, headquartered in New Jersey, continues to thrive and I am immensely proud of what my father built from scratch.
Like nearly 100% of chemical distributors worldwide, we purchase some chemicals from China, and sell them to U.S. manufacturers, including for U.S. military applications. Most of the chemicals manufactured in China are not made in the United States because of oppressive regulations created by our own federal government.
Without question, China poses the largest geopolitical threat to U.S. hegemony. If we want to keep America strong and contain China’s ambitions, we need to rebuild America’s military, bring back U.S. manufacturing capabilities, and stop the counterproductive environmental and regulatory policies that keep our supply chain dependent on China.
President Donald Trump
Two days after the presidential election of 2016, I wrote a short blog piece about the election of Donald Trump. Like so many at the time, I too bought into the narrative that Trump’s bombastic personality was not the ideal fit for the White House. But I am wiser now.
However, I got two things right in that piece. I warned that the true danger to America was not a Trump presidency, but the left’s backlash to his presidency. I predicted that the Democratic party would move far to the left, and the power of “ultra-liberals and socialists” would grow at the expense of moderates in the Democratic Party. That is exactly what has happened since 2016, leading to the woke takeover of our society, and in Joe Biden, the most left-wing, progressive presidential administration since FDR.
Trump’s brilliance, and the reason for his election in 2016, was that he, and he alone among candidates, recognized that the American middle class had been left behind, failed by corrupt big government, crony capitalism and an elitist ruling class. Neither the Democratic party nor the Republican establishment understood a vast segment of American society – what became the MAGA voter. To this day, they still don’t.
Trump brought back optimism to many Americans. Unemployment and inflation were low. Oppressive regulations were rolled back. The border was more secure, and we were energy independent. Foreign leaders respected and feared America’s strength, and Trump was the most pro-Israel President of my lifetime.
However, a Trump election victory in 2024 is not enough. We must also win control of Congress or President Trump’s agenda cannot be achieved, and he will face likely impeachment on Day 1. With the House up for grabs, every congressional race matters.
Dramatic voter demographic shifts since the last presidential election show that we can beat Lois Frankel. But let’s stop the infighting. We can’t win by allowing Republicans to tear down true conservatives using the same smear tactics that liberals use to destroy Donald Trump.
It’s time to unite the Republican party in our fight to fix our economy, secure our border, strengthen our military, save our children from indoctrination, and most importantly, to restore America’s founding values.
Thank you for reading, and if you have any questions about me or my candidacy, please email me anytime at [email protected].
