I love this video – and yet, no matter how many times I watch it, I can’t remember any of these great knots when it actually comes to putting them into use…
Yeah, this would be me (Jill). A long time ago, I discovered that long dresses make the very best house dresses. So on most days, I traipse around the farm in some sort of floor-length dress originally designed for a cocktail party, dinner, or other civilized occasion.
Apparently, somewhere along the way, I decided that formalwear was perfectly appropriate for feeding horses, checking the garden, chasing dogs, and doing laundry.
Why save the good dresses for going out?
(RWM- notice she forgot to mention the long AR? At some future time I may post some of the photos of her firing off her 20g Beretta semiautomatic…. Or the new Walther .38 easy slide “purse gun” I just got her. She does like blue, by the way.)
Have a great day folks!
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By: Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, and Jill Glasspool Malone, PhD
Last week’s essay followed Virginia’s fight over religious liberty from jailed Baptist preachers and compulsory church taxes to the Madison-Monroe debate at Hebron in January 1789. This is part II and the final essay on the history of religious liberties in America.
On October 6, 1817, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe walked together across a worn-out field west of Charlottesville. Jefferson was seventy-four. Madison was sixty-six. Monroe was the sitting President of the United States.
They had come to lay the cornerstone of what would become the University of Virginia. The land had once been part of Monroe’s farm. Monticello was only a few miles away. Montpelier was about a day’s ride to the northeast. Three presidents, neighbors in the Virginia Piedmont, stood together that morning at the beginning of Jefferson’s last great project.
Twenty-eight years earlier, Madison and Monroe had been opponents.
In January 1789, almost thirty years ago from this day, they had met at Hebron Lutheran Church during a bitterly cold congressional campaign. Patrick Henry and his allies had drawn the district map to favor Monroe. Baptists and other religious dissenters were an important constituency, and Madison had taken the unusual step of campaigning in person to answer charges that he opposed adding protections for individual rights to the new Constitution.
The last essay ended there, with Madison and Monroe debating at Hebron and Madison winning the election by 336 votes.
Five months later, on June 8, 1789, Madison stood in the House of Representatives and proposed the amendments that became the Bill of Rights.
The jailed preachers, the petitions from Virginia’s dissenting churches, the fight over compulsory religious taxes, and Madison’s insistence that religious belief was a right rather than something government could merely tolerate had brought Virginia to this point. Now Madison had to write those protections into federal law.
The Dissenters Had the Votes
Madison knew exactly which voters he needed to convince to get those protections written into the Bill of Rights.
The congressional district created by Patrick Henry’s allies joined Orange County to Albemarle, Amherst, Culpeper, Fluvanna, Goochland, Louisa, and Spotsylvania. Five of those seven counties had voted against ratification of the Constitution. Madison had helped write that Constitution, and during the Virginia ratifying convention he had resisted demands that a declaration of rights be added before it took effect. His opponents now used that against him.
Religious dissenters were particularly important. The Baptists had spent years petitioning the Virginia legislature against religious taxes and the privileges of the established church. They had supported Madison during the fight over Patrick Henry’s proposed religious assessment, but they were not prepared simply to trust him now. They wanted protections for religious liberty written into the new federal Constitution.
Culpeper mattered most. At the time, Culpeper County included what is now Madison County, including the Robinson River and Hebron valleys. Charles F. James counted six and a half Baptist churches there in 1789, more than in any other county in the congressional district. Madison later called Culpeper “the critical county.”
For us, this is local history. Madison was not coming into unfamiliar territory to court strangers. He had grown up just across the county line at Montpelier in Orange County. The Robinson River valley was only a short ride from his own home. These were neighboring counties, connected by roads, churches, farms, families, and decades of arguments over religion and government. This was Madison’s home turf.
In July 2025, we stood in Madison’s home at Montpelier, looking at the desk where he did much of the work that became the Virginia Plan. Written largely by Madison and presented at the Constitutional Convention by Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph, the Virginia Plan became the working blueprint for much of the US Constitution that followed. The National Archives agrees with this assessment and says that Madison’s Constitution proposed a strong national government with legislative, executive, and judicial branches and “traced the broad outlines of what would become the U.S. Constitution. So, we have always felt that Madison has never gotten the credit he deserves as really the father of the American Constitution.
To this day, Madison’s desk still sits in Montpelier, and from Madison’s desk at Montpelier, his family’s homeplace, the Blue Ridge Mountains fill the western horizon. This was where he lived, read, studied governments that had come before, and worked through his ideas about what the new American republic should become.
And yet he could not take these voters for granted.
In January 1789, Madison wrote George Washington that he had taken the unusual step of campaigning personally in Culpeper and Louisa. He was trying to answer reports that he opposed amendments to the Constitution. At Hebron Lutheran Church, he met Monroe before a congregation whose own history was bound up with the same fight. The German Lutherans of the Robinson River valley had petitioned the Virginia legislature against compulsory religious support years before.
Madison won Culpeper. He won the election by 336 votes.
Those votes mattered for far more than deciding whether Madison or Monroe would represent the district in Congress. The people Madison had spoken to that winter had spent decades petitioning the Virginia legislature over religious taxes, the privileges of the established church and how that wronged other religions, and the right to worship without government interference. They had supported the new nation, but many remained deeply suspicious of a federal Constitution that contained no declaration of individual rights and no explicit protection for religious liberty. Madison had now assured them that he supported amendments to address those concerns.
When Madison left Virginia for New York in the spring of 1789, he was going to the temporary seat of the new federal government, where the First Congress of the United States had convened at Federal Hall. He arrived not simply as one of Virginia’s new representatives, but as a principal author and defender of the Constitution who had just won a difficult election in a district where demands for amendments had helped determine the outcome.
The religious dissenters of Virginia had spent years pressing their state government to recognize that freedom of conscience was a right the government could neither grant nor take away. Now Madison was in Congress, and the Constitution they had challenged for failing to protect that right could still be amended.
On June 8, 1789, Madison introduced a series of amendments in the House of Representatives that would become the Bill of Rights.
From Virginia to the First Congress
Madison Addresses the Founding Assembly
Madison had not originally believed that the Constitution needed a bill of rights. When George Mason proposed adding one during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, the delegates rejected the idea. Madison believed the federal government had only the powers specifically given to it by the Constitution and questioned how much additional protection a written list of rights would provide.
But that position became increasingly difficult to defend back home. Virginia had spent years fighting over religious liberty, and many Virginians were not willing to trust the new federal government without explicit protections. The state had ratified the Constitution by a narrow vote and recommended amendments. Jefferson, writing from France, also pressed Madison about the missing bill of rights. Then Madison heard the same concerns directly from voters during his congressional campaign.
By the time Madison arrived in New York for the First Congress, he had promised to support amendments.
On June 8, 1789, he did.
Madison addressed the House of Representatives and proposed a series of amendments protecting individual rights. His original language on religion was broader than the First Amendment we know today. It protected religious belief and worship, prohibited a national religion, and declared that the “full and equal rights of conscience” could not be infringed.
Those words had a history for Madison. Virginia had spent more than a decade arguing over exactly what government could and could not do to a person’s religious conscience. Madison had been part of that fight almost from the beginning.
Now the question was what language Congress would actually put into the Constitution.
The First Amendment
Framing Freedom: The First Amendment
Madison’s proposal was not the language that ultimately became the First Amendment. The House debated it, committees revised it, the Senate changed it again, and the final wording emerged from negotiations between the two chambers.
What survived was much shorter:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
For Virginia, there was something remarkable in those words. “Free exercise” was the language Madison had fought for thirteen years earlier.
In 1776, when George Mason drafted Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, he wrote that all men should enjoy the “fullest toleration in the exercise of religion.” Madison objected. Toleration meant that government had the authority to decide which religious beliefs and practices it would permit. Madison changed the language to declare that all men were “equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”
That distinction had become the heart of Virginia’s long fight over religious freedom. Baptists and other dissenters were not asking the government to be more generous toward them. They were arguing that religious conscience was beyond the government’s authority in the first place.
Thirteen years later, “free exercise” appeared again, this time in the Constitution of the United States.
Virginia ratified the amendments on December 15, 1791. Its vote supplied the last of the three-fourths of the states required, and the Bill of Rights became part of the Constitution.
The fight over religious freedom in Virginia was not finished. But the principle that had begun with a dispute over “toleration” was now written into the First Amendment.
Finishing the Job in Virginia
The First Amendment settled what Congress could do about religion. It did not settle what Virginia would do with the remains of its own established church.
One of the largest unresolved issues was the glebes. Under the colonial system, Anglican parishes had acquired farms and other property, supported in part through public taxation, to provide income and housing for their ministers. When Virginia ended the established church, those lands did not simply disappear. Those houses and farms remained property of the Episcopal Church.
The Baptists objected. They had spent years fighting compulsory support for another denomination, and they saw the glebes as property left over from the same system. In 1786, the Baptist General Committee considered whether the glebes should be treated as public property. By a margin of a single vote, it decided they should.
The fight continued for years. In 1799, the Virginia legislature declared that the former established church no longer had a legal claim to special treatment from the state. In 1802, Virginia authorized the sale of glebe lands when the remaining parish interests in them expired.
It was an important final step in a fight that had begun decades earlier. Virginia had stopped jailing dissenting preachers. It had ended compulsory religious assessments. Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom had established that no Virginian could be forced to support a religious ministry. The First Amendment now prohibited Congress from establishing religion or interfering with its free exercise. And finally, the property inherited from Virginia’s colonial church system was being dismantled as well.
Disestablishment: The formal ending of a government-supported or officially recognized church. In Virginia, it meant ending the Church of England’s special legal status, taxpayer support, and other privileges, and establishing that government could neither favor nor require support for a particular religion.
The established church was gone not only in law, but increasingly from the institutions and property the colonial government had created to sustain it.
What Separation Meant in Practice
On New Year’s Day 1802, President Thomas Jefferson received an unusual gift at the White House: a 1,200-pound cheese made by Baptist farmers in Cheshire, Massachusetts. The Baptists had long regarded Jefferson as an ally in their fight for religious liberty, and the enormous cheese was intended as a public expression of their support.
As an aside, the 1,200-pound cheese is a reminder that the early republic operated under somewhat different rules. Deliver a half-ton gift to a sitting president today and, before anyone found a large enough cheese knife, White House lawyers and ethics officials would be asking who paid for it, who organized it, what it was worth, and whether the president was legally permitted to accept it. In 1802, the Baptists simply hauled their enormous cheese to Washington and gave it to Thomas Jefferson.
That same day, Jefferson answered a letter from another group of Baptists, the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut. They had written to him about religious liberty and their concern that in Connecticut it was treated not as an inherent right, but as something granted by government.
Jefferson’s reply contained a phrase that would become one of the most famous descriptions of the relationship between religion and government in American history. The First Amendment, he wrote, had built “a wall of separation between Church & State.”
Those words do not appear in the Constitution. They were Jefferson’s explanation of what the First Amendment meant.
Madison would later have the opportunity to show what that separation meant when he was the one sitting in the White House.
The Presidents – Together Again
Let us return now to that field outside Charlottesville on October 6, 1817.
Twenty-eight years had passed since Madison and Monroe faced one another in the congressional election that sent Madison to the First Congress. Jefferson had served two terms as president, Madison two terms after him, and Monroe was now in the first year of his own presidency. Political disagreements had strained their friendships more than once, sometimes badly. But on this October morning, the three Virginians, close enough to be considered neighbors, were together again.
They had come to lay the cornerstone of the University of Virginia.
Monroe tested the stone with a square, a plumb, and a level. The presiding Mason asked a blessing on “this and every other work undertaken for the benefit of the republic.” Jefferson and Madison stood beside him.
An aside on the Masonic ceremony: The square, plumb and level were not simply construction tools. In Masonic tradition, these tools carried moral meaning: the square represented upright conduct, the plumb moral rectitude, and the level equality.
Cornerstone ceremonies were common public events in early America, with Masonic lodges often called upon to dedicate important civic buildings. At the University of Virginia ceremony, Monroe tested the stone with the traditional instruments, and corn, wine, and oil were used in the ritual.
In traditional Masonic cornerstone ceremonies, the three substances symbolized basic blessings of life:
Corn represented plenty or abundance, particularly the necessities of life.
Wine represented joy, refreshment, and happiness.
Oil represented peace, comfort, and healing.
There is also a historical trap here. Monroe was a Freemason, but Jefferson almost certainly was not, despite generations of claims that he was. Monticello has found no evidence that Jefferson ever belonged to a Masonic lodge. His appearance amid all the Masonic ceremony at the University cornerstone laying may actually have helped create the legend.
For men of that generation, however, the symbolism of the ceremony required no secret membership to understand it. They were laying a literal foundation for a university intended to help preserve the republic they had created. A stone tested for whether it was square, level and true was an unusually appropriate symbol for the occasion.
There is something remarkable about the scene after knowing what had happened among these men. Madison and Monroe had once competed for the same seat in Congress, in an election shaped in part by the demand for a Bill of Rights. Jefferson and Madison had spent decades exchanging ideas about religious liberty and the limits of government. All three had disagreed, competed, fallen out, and reconciled.
And now they were old men standing together on land that had once belonged to Monroe, laying the first stone of the university Jefferson had spent years trying to create.
Jefferson died nine years later, on July 4, 1826. He had written his own epitaph and instructed that it identify him as the author of the Declaration of American Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and the father of the University of Virginia.
He did not include President of the United States.
Back to the Beginning: Hebron Valley
And that brings the story back home for us.
Stand in Hebron Valley and look toward the Blue Ridge. These are the same mountains Madison saw from Montpelier as he read, wrote, and worked through his ideas about the government the new nation would need. Montpelier lies just across the county line in Orange. Beyond it, to the south, are Jefferson’s Monticello and Monroe’s Highland. All three men lived within a day’s ride of this valley.
But the history of religious liberty here does not belong only to three presidents.
It belongs to the Baptist preachers who were jailed for preaching without permission, some of them in Culpeper.
It belongs to the congregations that petitioned the Virginia legislature rather than accept compulsory support for another church.
It belongs to the German Lutherans who settled along the Robinson River and eventually stood outside Hebron Lutheran Church on a bitter January day in 1789 while Madison and Monroe argued for their votes.
And it belongs to the Virginians who refused to accept that religious belief was something government had the authority merely to tolerate.
That last distinction may be the most important one in this entire story. Virginia began with an established church supported by law and taxation. Dissenters first fought to be tolerated. Then they demanded something fundamentally different: the free exercise of religion as a right, not a favor granted by government.
Madison helped put those words into Virginia’s Declaration of Rights in 1776. Jefferson wrote the Statute for Religious Freedom. Virginia’s Baptists and other dissenters kept pressure on the legislature. Madison won his congressional seat here in a campaign in which amendments to the new Constitution were very much at issue. Five months later, he proposed those amendments in Congress. And in 1791, Virginia became the final state needed to ratify the Bill of Rights.
“Free exercise” was now part of the Constitution of the United States.
Today, it is easy to encounter this history as a collection of famous names and documents: Jefferson. Madison. Monroe. The Virginia Declaration of Rights. The Statute for Religious Freedom. The First Amendment.
Living here makes it harder to see it that way. The famous men wrote the words, debated the laws, and held the offices. But ordinary Virginians kept forcing the question. They preached when they were told they could not preach. They went to jail. They refused to pay for churches they did not attend. They signed petitions. They organized their congregations. And when the new Constitution failed to protect their rights explicitly, they demanded amendments.
These were roads people traveled. These were churches where they worshipped and argued. These were neighbors, farms, county lines, and elections. Montpelier is just over the hill. Hebron Lutheran Church is still here. The Robinson River still runs through the valley. The Blue Ridge still fills the western horizon. And Monticello is less than an hour away.
The national story of the First Amendment happened here.
The Lesson Here: Our Current Fight for Liberty
Medical freedom should not depend upon whether a person can produce a religious objection acceptable to the government. The right to decide what is done to one’s own body is more fundamental than any exemption the government chooses to grant.
That distinction should sound familiar by now. The people of Hebron Valley and the religious dissenters of Virginia eventually rejected the idea that government should decide which beliefs it would tolerate. They demanded recognition of a right that existed independent of government permission. Medical freedom raises a similar question today. If bodily autonomy is a right, then government does not create that right by granting an exemption from a mandate.
This is why the fight over medical mandates is not over. Congress and state legislatures continue to wrestle with where government authority ends, and individual medical decision-making begins. Those of us who believe that medical decisions belong to individuals and families cannot treat a religious exemption as an adequate substitute for that principle. Medical freedom is a civil liberty.
The people who lived in this valley did not secure religious liberty by accepting toleration and asking government to be generous with exemptions. They kept demanding recognition of the right itself.
More than two centuries later, that may be the most important lesson they left us. There is a profound difference between a right and an exemption. One belongs to you. The other exists only so long as the government agrees to grant it.
Essays like this take time. They require digging through old records, reading the original letters and petitions, visiting the places where the history happened, and then trying to tell the story in a way that makes clear why it still matters.
Malone News is supported by its readers, not by corporate advertisers or institutional sponsors. If you value independent research, long-form writing, and our willingness to keep asking difficult questions about liberty, government power, and the rights that belong to us, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Your subscription makes this work possible. And as the people of Hebron Valley understood more than two centuries ago, preserving liberty requires people willing to defend it.
A final note:
Please also consider sharing these essays with your children and grandchildren. And on your next trip through the Virginia Piedmont, consider visiting Montpelier and Monticello. This part of Virginia is steeped in the history of our nation’s founding, with lessons that remain every bit as important today.
Jill and I can see the same Blue Ridge that Madison watched from his library window. Essays like this come from archives, county records, and long drives on back roads, and reader support is what makes that work possible. Subscribe free or paid for more stories from this corner of Virginia, which we are gathering into a book, Who Owns This Land?
James, Charles F. 1900. Documentary History of the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Virginia. Lynchburg, VA: J. P. Bell Company. Digitized by Cornell University Library, Internet Archive. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029255169. Full PDF also available at [INSERT MALONE.NEWS LINK].
In a letter discussed at the Sept. 16 commission meeting, county leaders said the request is meant to address concerns about voter-roll accuracy and to satisfy what they described as a duty under state law. They asked either for permission to run the check or for written proof that required citizenship screening has already been completed. The county asked Hobbs to respond within 10 business days.
The letter cited RCW 29A.08.125, which requires voter registration records to be screened against available government databases for issues including citizenship status, and a related provision allowing the secretary of state to work with other jurisdictions and federal agencies. Officials also requested written authorization under RCW 29A.84.150 so the county can use SAVE to verify its voter database.
They noted that if identity cannot be confirmed from records on file, state rules allow the auditor to use other government resources, public records, and direct contact with an applicant.
SAVE is now in active use for voter-roll work in about 25 states, mostly those that have sought it. Officials who have worked the system describe it as a useful supplemental tool for voter-registration checks or list maintenance. Usage expanded sharply in 2025 after the system was updated to allow bulk uploads, last-four-digit SSN searches, and no fees for election offices.
However, a recent lawsuit has slowed efforts, but prior checks and follow-up investigations in other states were not halted. Florida, Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio kept the SAVE expanded features under a separate court order.
Franklin County pointed to a recent Pasco voter fraud case as one reason public concern has grown. A local apartment manager was convicted of submitting several forged ballots tied to former tenants from the 2024 general election and later sentenced to jail time, according to the Tri-City Herald and NBC.
Beaton said, “The goal of our request is to reassure the people of Franklin County of the integrity of the voter rolls. National polling on the topic is bipartisan and shows supermajority support for a common-sense review to assure integrity. We have worked cooperatively and respected the role of the Federal government in Washington state elections during my four terms in office.
Beaton added that Washington state has shared registered-voter data with ERIC, a private 501(c)(3), for more than a decade. “If that sharing was lawful, he said, Franklin County should be able to use comparable data to show the rolls are accurate.”
Matt Beaton is the elected Franklin County Auditor and has served in that position since January 2011. Other documents related to the request are posted on the Franklin County Auditor’s Office website here.
Bill Bruch
Bill Bruch is the WA State GOP Election Integrity Committee Chairman (6th year), WAGOP Executive Board Member (6th year), Skagit County GOP Chairman (10th year), RNC Election Integrity Committee WA State Chairman, Citizen Journalist, Business Owner, 2020 WA State House Representative Candidate, Former Council Member, and WA State 2016 and 2024 RNC National Convention Delegate
Washington voters will vote on the candidates running for state Supreme Court Position 4 for the first time in November. There was no primary. The choices are King County Superior Court Judge Sean O’Donnell or Court of Appeals Judge Ian Birk. Judge O’Donnell is trying to keep the race about the work of courts. Judge Birk is trying to turn the race into a loyalty test.
That is not how judicial races are supposed to work in this state. Judges do not get to choose the parties who walk into the courtroom. They have to treat them the same. The ethical rules say so in plain language. Campaigns for the bench “must be conducted differently from campaigns for other offices.” Judicial rules tell judges and judicial candidates they shall not engage in political activity that undercuts independence, integrity, or impartiality.
The Charge That Started the Fight
In late August, Birk sent a fundraising email accusing O’Donnell of a “partisan agenda” that is “out of touch with the values and priorities of our state.” He claimed O’Donnell had joined a slate recommended by the State GOP and was beholden to Republicans. He later demanded that O’Donnell “disavow” that recommendation. Either own the GOP support, Birk said, or ask to be taken off their materials. Anything else, he argued, is trying to have it both ways.
O’Donnell says he never asked the GOP for a recommendation. Early in the year he wrote Birk and asked if they could stick to records and visions for the court. Birk never answered. O’Donnell calls the partisan-agenda charge false. He has been recommended by both the Democratic and Republican parties. Disavowing an unsolicited recommendation from one major party, he says, would itself be picking a side. That is the one thing a judge is not allowed to do.
Sixty-Two Judges Say the Attack Is False
More than five dozen judges from across Washington signed a letter defending O’Donnell and rebuking Birk. They call Birk’s accusations “serious and false.” They say those claims fail a judicial candidate’s most basic duties: get the facts right and be “scrupulously honest” in campaign statements.
These are sitting judges. Some have known O’Donnell for years. Some consult with him on cases. Some work with him on court policy. None of them, they write, have ever heard him inject partisan politics into a decision or into work for the judicial branch.
They list what O’Donnell actually talks about on the trail. Legal help is too expensive in civil and family cases. Crime victims deserve dignity. Courts need interpreters and secure courthouses. The Supreme Court’s rule-making process can be improved. That is not a secret partisan platform. That is the unglamorous work of keeping the system honest.
Support From Both Sides of the Aisle
O’Donnell’s list of backers is unusually broad for a nonpartisan race. More than 200 judges have endorsed him. So have four former U.S. Attorneys. Two Democratic members of Congress, Marilyn Strickland and Adam Smith, are on the list. So are former Governor Chris Gregoire, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown, State Lands Commissioner Dave Upthegrove, several unions, and more than half a dozen Democratic Party organizations.
Birk has the support of seven of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices and a cluster of union and Democratic district groups. He has also raised more money. Latest figures put him above $400,000. O’Donnell is near $340,000. In a state where most high-court races never see five-figure hauls, this one is already an outlier. Money does not decide whether a charge is true. Sixty-two fellow judges saying the charge is false should give voters pause.
A Colleague Names the Problem
Chelan County Superior Court Judge Kristin Ferrera put it bluntly. Partisan politics have no place in Washington judicial elections. Judges here are nonpartisan, and she takes pride in that. Only one candidate in this race is making it about party, she wrote, and it is not O’Donnell. He is the only Supreme Court candidate this cycle with support this wide. When a judge or judicial candidate leans into partisan rhetoric, she said, it should be a red flag.
That is the point rural Washington should not miss.
A court that starts sorting people by tribe stops being a court. Ranchers, loggers, small-town businesses, and crime victims do not need a justice who first asks which team they play for. They need one who reads the record and applies the law.
Judges Don’t Get to Pick Sides
O’Donnell keeps returning to the same idea. Judges take the parties as they come. Trust in the judiciary, from every quarter, is exactly what the impartiality rule is meant to protect. Asking a candidate to denounce one party’s voters so he can keep another party’s endorsement is a demand that he pick sides. Politically convenient, maybe. Compatible with the job, no.
He says he will keep talking about the issues that actually land in courtrooms: the cost of civil legal help, the risk that artificial intelligence starts doing a judge’s thinking, the duty to protect civil rights, and public safety. Political attacks, he argues, drag the same poison we see in the other Washington into our own courts. There is already enough distrust. Candidates for the highest court should not add to it.
The Choice in November
Reasonable people can prefer one résumé over the other. Birk has a record as an appellate judge. O’Donnell has twenty-five years as a prosecutor and superior court judge and has sat as a temporary justice on the Supreme Court itself. The 62 judges say the public deserves a contest about experience and ideas, not “toxic political blows.”
Eastern Washington already lives with rules written by distant people who do not know a calving season from a committee hearing. The last thing we need is a Supreme Court race that treats an unsolicited party recommendation as original sin and a demand to disavow it as courage.
O’Donnell’s answer is simple. He will not pick a team. He will not pretend the judicial rules are optional when they become inconvenient. Sixty-two of his colleagues say that is the right answer. Voters get the final word in November. They should use it to keep the courtroom a courtroom. For true impartiality, I recommend a vote for Judge O’Donnell.
Nancy Churchill is a writer and educator in rural eastern Washington State, and the chair of the Ferry County Republican Party. She may be reached at DangerousRhetoric@pm.me. The opinions expressed in Dangerous Rhetoric are her own. Dangerous Rhetoric is available on Substack, X, and occasionally Rumble.
SOURCES:
1) Judge Sean O’Donnell Facebook post and comment by Judge Kristin Ferrera, https://bit.ly/3SYWv1v
2) “WA Supreme Court race heats up over alleged partisan attack,” Seattle Times, Sept 14, 2026, https://bit.ly/4h2lASi
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The Heritage Foundation released its 2026 Election Integrity Scorecardranking all 50 states and DC against many preferred election practices and rules. Washington again finished 46th (tied with Nevada) with 40 points out of 100—the same score and rank Heritage recorded for WA in 2023, 2024, and 2025. For a universal vote-by-mail state, that stasis is the problem.
Heritage Bottom (Worst) 10 State Rankings: 51. Hawaii 50. California 48. (Oregon & Vermont), 46. Washington & Nevada) 45. Minnesota 44. New Jersey 42. New York & Illinois 41. Massachusetts.
In 2026, Heritage increased the weight of proof-of-citizenship and voter-list maintenance. Washington scored low in most tracked categories, and the report found the state lacking in nearly every field it ranked.
Washington scores poorly on voter ID, absentee-ballot rules, citizenship verification, and several registration safeguards. Heritage’s checklist treats the state’s legal design as weak: ballots go to everyone on the rolls, photo ID is not legally verified or required, and the state does not match Heritage’s model for documentary citizenship checks before registration.
Washington’s scorecard page shows low marks on absentee management and related items like voter roll management. Heritage argues that without tighter ID, citizenship documentation, and aggressive list maintenance, rolls can list people who have moved, died, or never should have been registered—and that a mail-ballot system multiplies the cost of those errors because a ballot is issued from the list, not from an in-person poll-book check on Election Day.
The practical risk Heritage is pointing at is still real policy ground: if voter rolls are bloated or outdated, every automatic ballot becomes a chance for a ballot to land at the wrong address or in the name of someone no longer eligible, making voter fraud easier. The 2026 weighting change was meant to raise the price of not closing that gap. Not surprisingly, Washington did not improve!
Explanation of Best Practices and Grading System
The grading system for the scorecard is based on an analysis of the specific election policies and laws in each state. The analysis was prepared by Heritage Foundation analysts and reviewed by election law experts, and the accuracy of the information has been periodically reviewed by state election officials.
Heritage provides individual scores in 15 different areas that we believe are essential to secure elections, with a final score based on a compilation of the individual scores for each best-practice recommendation. These 15 areas include:
Voter identification;
Maintaining the accuracy of a state’s voter registration list;
Rules surrounding the private funding of elections;
Post-election audits;
Ranked-choice voting; and
Prohibition of foreign funding on state ballot measures.
The individual scores give the public, state legislators, and other officials a measurement in each of the 15 areas identified, showing where their state laws and procedures meet best-practice standards and where they need improvement.
The Heritage Foundation will engage election leaders to solicit more input on ways to improve the Scorecard and give officials an opportunity to improve their scoring and recommend changes or priorities.
As a reminder, however, even the best laws are not worth much if responsible officials do not enforce them rigorously. Citizens in each state must make sure their elected and appointed public officials do just that.
WAGOP Chairman and LD 19 State Rep. Jim Walsh said the poor ranking reflects concerns he has raised about the state’s voter-registration system.
“There is no proof when people register to vote,” Walsh said. “There’s a mistaken belief there is proof of citizenship in Washington. All there is is a checked box, saying ‘I am a legal voter.’”
Washington’s registration system requires voters to affirm that they are U.S. citizens, but Walsh said: “Washington should require documentation of citizenship and improve the maintenance of voter-registration databases.”
WA’s Office of Secretary of State denies many of the problems and also saysautomatic voter registration applies when a person provides proof of U.S. citizenship during certain services with authorized state agencies. E.g., obtaining an enhanced driver’s license or enhanced identification card through the Department of Licensing.
Policy and legislative remedies that would actually help WA’s scorecard include:
REQUIRE documentary proof of citizenship and gov photo ID at registration; require ID or a copy of ID with mail and drop box ballots; partner with the DHS and use tools such as SAVE and demand strict voter roll maintenance and purges, remove the dead, the moved, and double registrations on a fixed schedule; publish regular, county-wide precinct-level list-maintenance reports; end automatic and same-day registration, require 30-day proof of residency to vote; end the category of “never residents;” no more signatures on the outside of voters envelopes; record where ballots are mailed and returned from with USPS tracking, tighten who can handle ballots and how chain of custody is logged; require real significant audits (10% minimum hand count) of county election vote counts; restrict who can collect or return ballots (ban ballot harvesting); require stricter signature verification; and allow election observers better access to observe.
Bill Bruch
Bill Bruch is the WA State GOP Election Integrity Committee Chairman (6th year), WAGOP Executive Board Member (6th year), Skagit County GOP Chairman (10th year), RNC Election Integrity Committee WA State Chairman, Citizen Journalist, Business Owner, 2020 WA State House Representative Candidate, Former Council Member, and WA State 2016 and 2024 RNC National Convention Delegate
By: Dr.s Jill Glasspool Malone and Robert W. Malone
AI is rapidly becoming the gatekeeper to the world’s information. Increasingly, people will not search through ten websites and decide for themselves what they believe. They will ask a machine a question and receive an answer. That makes the rules governing those machines enormously important. Who decides which sources the machine trusts? Which claims it labels misinformation? Which questions it refuses to answer? Which information it never shows you at all?
Behind the increasingly urgent campaign to regulate AI is a surprisingly small and interconnected world of billionaires, foundations, nonprofits, researchers, policy organizations and technology companies. Many are connected through a movement most Americans have never heard of: Effective Altruism. Its money helped build the field of AI safety. Its institutions helped define the threat. Its researchers and policy organizations are helping define the solutions. And one of the world’s most powerful AI companies, Anthropic, emerged from this same intellectual ecosystem while spending tens of millions of dollars to influence the rules under which it and its competitors will operate.
Now Barack Obama wants Democrats to make AI regulation a major political priority.
That is where this story stops being about obscure arguments among computer scientists. The people who write the rules for artificial intelligence may ultimately help determine what the machine is allowed to tell you.
From Bed Nets to Human Extinction
Effective Altruism, usually shortened to EA, began with an attractive idea: if money is limited, spend it where it saves the most lives. One of the movement’s signature examples was the insecticide-treated bed net. Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, particularly children, and bed nets are cheap. Forget which charity tells the most moving story. Ask how many lives can be saved for each dollar spent. And EA had an immediate win: bed nets actually saved lives, cheaply, measurably and at scale. That was a powerful contrast to the billions routinely poured into ambitious vaccine research projects for malaria that produced disappointing results. EA could point to something tangible and say: this works. That logic directed early EA money toward malaria prevention, vitamin supplementation, direct cash assistance and other interventions where results could actually be measured.
Then the arithmetic changed.
An influential branch of EA embraced longtermism, the idea that the lives of people who may exist decades, centuries or even millennia from now should count heavily in decisions made today. Add existential risk, the possibility that humanity itself could disappear, and suddenly the numbers become almost infinite.
A bed net might save one child. Preventing human extinction, according to this logic, could save every human being who might ever live. And AI was increasingly cast as the threat that could end them all. If artificial intelligence carries even a small chance of causing human extinction, then controlling its development now becomes not merely another public-policy question. Within the longtermist calculation, it becomes a moral imperative of almost unlimited value.
Americans have seen this logic before. After 9/11, Dick Cheney developed what became known as the One Percent Doctrine: if there were even a one-percent chance of a catastrophic threat, the United States should treat that threat as a certainty when deciding how to respond. The doctrine helped frame the Bush administration’s approach to the War on Terror and the expansion of executive power that followed. Cheney also became a leading defender of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program, including waterboarding. All justified under the One Percent Doctrine.
The parallel is important. Once the possible consequence becomes catastrophic enough, probability stops functioning as a brake on power. A remote possibility can justify an enormous response because the cost of being wrong is declared unthinkable. With Cheney, the nightmare was terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction. With AI longtermism, the nightmare is human extinction.
The mosquito net had become the machine.
How Money Builds a Consensus
Ideas require money before they acquire institutions, experts and political power. EA had plenty of it.
DataRepublican has done some of the most extensive work mapping this ecosystem, analyzing more than 25 gigabytes of records and tracing the recurring donors, foundations, nonprofits, university centers, researchers, policy organizations and journalists operating within it. Her work helped make visible what is difficult to see when each organization is examined separately: the same names, funders and institutions keep appearing.
At the center were Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, whose Good Ventures became one of the principal financial engines behind the movement. Their philanthropic adviser, formerly called Open Philanthropy and now Coefficient Giving, poured money into global health, pandemic preparedness, biosecurity, AI safety, AI governance and the organizations being built around them.
But look at what the money actually buys. It doesn’t simply fund research. It builds a field.
Fund the researchers who define the threat. Fund the university centers that study it. Fund the organizations that evaluate the machines. Fund the fellowships that train the next generation of experts. Fund the policy shops that turn the research into proposed regulation. Fund journalism programs that explain the threat to the public. Then move those trained people into technology companies, think tanks, lobbying organizations, and government.
The accompanying Malone Institute research dossier maps this larger ecosystem, including Coefficient Giving, Good Ventures, Longview Philanthropy, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, EA Funds, 80,000 Hours and the network of AI-safety, evaluation and policy organizations they have helped support.
None of this requires a conspiracy. That is what makes the structure more interesting. People can sincerely believe the same thing while being funded, trained, employed and credentialed inside institutions built around that belief. Eventually the institutions begin citing one another. The researchers become the experts. The experts advise government. And what began as a philosophical argument starts looking like an independent scientific consensus. And the public is told that they need to trust “the experts”, that science is dictating policy. In reality, it is money that is dictating the policy.
Then comes Anthropic.
Anthropic Is Not a Charity
Then comes Anthropic.
Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic develops Claude, one of the world’s leading AI systems. It emerged from the same intellectual world concerned with AI alignment and catastrophic risk, and built its public identity around safety.
But Anthropic is not an EA nonprofit. It is a commercial AI company competing for customers, computing power, government contracts and market dominance. Sincerity about AI risk does not eliminate financial interest.
Robert and I examined the economics of this in an earlier essay, What the AI Panic Is Actually About. The central problem is regulatory capture. Licensing, mandatory model evaluations, security programs, compute reporting, pre-release testing and armies of lawyers cost money. Anthropic can afford them. Startups, universities, and independent developers may not. Government does not have to ban a competitor. It only has to make competing too expensive.
And Anthropic is not sitting quietly while those rules are written. In 2026, the company committed $40 million to Public First Action, an organization advocating AI regulation, while Anthropic employees dramatically increased their own political giving. Anthropic has been unusually candid about its intention to influence AI policy.
The company warning government about the danger is also selling the product. The company advocating stronger regulation may benefit from the barriers that regulation creates. And the company asking government to build higher regulatory walls may be one of the companies best equipped to climb them.
And then there is an even more fundamental question: Who gets to decide whether Anthropic’s machines are safe?
Follow the Watchdogs
So who watches the companies building these machines?
One answer is METR, the Model Evaluation and Threat Research organization, a tax-exempt nonprofit increasingly positioned as an independent authority on whether frontier AI systems are dangerous. In August 2026, METR announced an extraordinary fundraising haul: roughly $71 million in new commitments in just six months.
From whom?
METR didn’t say. It thanked a long list of past and present supporters, but did not disclose who supplied most of the $71 million, how much each donor committed, or through which funding vehicles. Kevin Bass later went looking through the public record. His reconstruction found only one commitment that could be clearly matched to METR’s announced six-month fundraising window: a $350,000 Packard Foundation grant. The public source of roughly $70.65 million remains unidentified.
That is an extraordinary disclosure gap for a nonprofit positioning itself as an independent watchdog over one of the most powerful industries in the world.
METR acknowledges receiving substantial free model access and tokens from the very companies whose systems it evaluates. And with closed AI models, access is everything. An evaluator cannot walk into Anthropic, OpenAI or another laboratory and demand to inspect the machine. The company controls the model, the access, the technical cooperation and much of the information necessary to evaluate it. You do not need to write the watchdog a check to hold its leash.
Then read METR’s own May 2026 Frontier Risk Report. METR disclosed that when the project began it had no applicable personnel conflict-of-interest policy and conducted no formal recusal or disclosure process. Some staff had strong social relationships with employees of the AI companies being evaluated. METR operated from a research center that also hosted AI lab personnel. The participating companies provided complimentary model access, could require specified nonpublic information to be redacted and could quietly withdraw before final approval. METR even acknowledged that the pilot failed to comply with every requirement of the evaluator standard it was supposed to follow.
The question is why an organization with these dependencies and conflicts should automatically be described as an independent evaluator simply because Anthropic did not write it a check.
And METR is not an isolated institution. It grew out of the Alignment Research Center and sits within a larger world of AI-alignment researchers, evaluators, donors, contractors and organizations, including Redwood Research. The relationships overlap through funding, personnel, shared facilities, professional networks and access to the laboratories themselves.
That is the network Kevin Bass started following.
What Kevin Bass Found
Kevin Bass went looking for the money.
His public-records investigation traced the funding, personnel and institutional relationships surrounding METR, Anthropic and the larger EA-linked AI-safety network. What he found was not a neat conspiracy chart with one billionaire secretly writing every check. It was something harder to see and, in some ways, more important: a network in which enormous amounts of money move through foundations, donor-advised funds and nonprofits while the identities of the people ultimately supplying that money can disappear from public view.
METR is the clearest example. The nonprofit announced roughly $71 million in new funding commitments in just six months. Bass searched foundation databases, IRS filings, grant disclosures and other public records looking for the source. He could clearly match only a $350,000 Packard Foundation grant to that fundraising window. In the public records he examined, the source of roughly $70.65 million could not be identified.
The opacity goes deeper. METR’s publicly available tax filing reported millions of dollars from contributors whose identities are not disclosed on the public Form 990. Other money arrived through donor-advised funds, which can legally obscure the original donor. Bass found overlapping funders, institutional relationships, shared facilities and personnel connections throughout the larger AI-safety world. Meanwhile, AI laboratories provide evaluators with something almost as important as money: access to the closed models they are supposed to evaluate.
None of that proves that an unidentified donor controls METR or dictates its conclusions. It proves that the public cannot follow much of the money behind an organization increasingly presented as an independent watchdog over one of the most powerful industries on earth.
And that should be a problem all by itself.
Funding the People Who Explain the Danger
Then there are the journalists.
The Tarbell Center for AI Journalism trains and funds journalists covering artificial intelligence. Unlike much of the money surrounding this ecosystem, Tarbell’s funding is remarkably transparent. It lists Coefficient Giving, Longview Philanthropy and the Survival and Flourishing Fund among supporters giving more than $1 million. As of 2025, Tarbell says the majority of its funding came from Coefficient Giving, one of the principal philanthropic engines behind the AI-risk field.
Tarbell itself acknowledges the potential for “actual or perceived conflicts of interest” and says its donors have no control over what its journalists write. There is no evidence that Coefficient Giving sits in an editorial meeting ordering reporters what to say. But again, that misses the point.
The same philanthropic ecosystem helping finance the research into catastrophic AI risk is also financing journalists to explain catastrophic AI risk to the public.
Follow the information pipeline. Fund the research that defines the danger. Fund the organizations that evaluate it. Fund the policy experts proposing solutions. Then fund journalists who explain the danger to everyone else.
By the time Congress gets involved, the warnings appear to come from everywhere: researchers, nonprofit watchdogs, policy experts and journalists.
Follow the money backward, however, and many of those roads lead into the same remarkably small philanthropic ecosystem.
Obama Moves to Control the AI Rules
And then the money, the AI-safety movement and the campaign for regulation intersect with politics.
Barack Obama has been working on the politics of information control for years. As we documented in The Obama Machine: Netflix Was Only the Beginning, his April 2022 Stanford speech placed misinformation, technology platforms and government regulation into the same political framework. Artificial intelligence dramatically raises the stakes. Social media decides which human voices are amplified or suppressed. AI increasingly produces the answer itself.
Obama understands the distinction. His own Foundation now calls openly for public oversight of AI. Obama has described the technology as potentially more disruptive than social media and argued for a public regulatory structure to steer its development. The Foundation explicitly connects that project to misinformation, deepfakes, surveillance, information provenance and the need to structure the public conversation “in a trustworthy way.”
That language should sound unsettlingly familiar.
In September 2026, Obama moved from discussing regulation to Democratic political strategy. At a private Manhattan fundraiser, he urged House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries to make AI policy a priority if Democrats regain the House and encouraged prospective 2028 presidential candidates to make AI safety and its economic consequences central issues.
The machinery was already being built. In December 2025, Jeffries created the House Democratic Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy, charged with developing policy expertise in partnership with the “innovation community,” other stakeholders and congressional committees.
So follow the progression. The philanthropic ecosystem finances AI-risk research, evaluators, policy organizations and journalism. Anthropic spends heavily to influence AI policy. And now one of the Democratic Party’s most influential figures is urging his party to make AI governance a major political project.
This establishes that enormous philanthropic, corporate and political interests are converging on the same question: who gets to write the rules governing the machines that will increasingly control how Americans obtain information.
Social media gave governments and technology companies enormous power over which voices could be heard. Artificial intelligence offers something much more powerful.
The ability to shape the answer before you ever see it.
Anthropic Goes to Washington
Anthropic is no longer merely warning government about AI. It is spending serious money to shape what government does about it.
In February 2026, Anthropic gave $20 million to Public First Action, a nonprofit advocacy organization promoting AI safeguards. Five months later, it gave another $20 million, bringing its commitment to $40 million. The purpose for that money is explicit: influence the public-policy debate over AI. Anthropic said it did not intend to “sit on the sidelines” while those rules were being written.
At the same time, Anthropic dramatically expanded its direct lobbying operation. Federal disclosures show the company spent a record $1.97 million lobbying Washington in the second quarter of 2026 alone, roughly $22,000 a day and more than it had ever spent in a previous quarter.
Put the pieces together.
EA-linked philanthropy spent years financing the intellectual infrastructure around catastrophic AI risk. Researchers defined the danger. Evaluators emerged to measure it. Policy organizations developed responses. Journalism programs helped explain the threat. Anthropic built one of the world’s most valuable AI companies around a safety-centered identity and is now spending tens of millions of dollars to influence the regulatory debate. Barack Obama is urging Democrats to make AI governance a major political project.
The people building the machines, the people defining the danger, and the people writing the rules are increasingly occupying the same small political sphere.
Safety for Whom?
The existence of risk does not answer the question at the center of this story: who gets to define the danger and write the rules?
Should billionaires finance the institutions that determine which risks matter? Should AI companies help finance the political campaign for regulations governing their own industry? Should evaluators dependent on access to closed corporate models be called independent? Should the same philanthropic ecosystem fund both the experts warning about catastrophic AI and the journalists explaining that threat to the public?
And then there is the money. The largest AI companies can afford mandatory evaluations, licensing, security requirements, lawyers and regulatory departments. Their smaller competitors may not. Regulation does not have to ban competition. It can simply make competition unaffordable.
That is the conflict buried beneath the language of safety.
The Censorship Question
This is where AI becomes fundamentally different from social media. Twitter could remove a post, throttle its distribution or suspend the person who wrote it. WikiLeaks could publish documents governments desperately wanted hidden, and once those documents were public, governments had to deal with the fact that people could read them. The fight over censorship was visible because the information existed outside the gatekeepers.
AI changes that equation. Control the training data, approved sources, system prompts, refusal rules and definitions of “misinformation,” “harmful content” or “dangerous capabilities,” and the unwanted answer will never reach you. WikiLeaks might exist, the documents might be sitting there in plain sight, and the machine could simply never tell you about them. A source is never offered. A question produces a refusal. A disputed historical event is presented as settled. You cannot know what the machine was instructed not to tell you.
That is why this regulatory fight is about far more than AI safety. These systems are rapidly becoming intermediaries between people and information. Increasingly, people will ask the machine rather than search the underlying record themselves. Whoever establishes the rules governing what those machines may say acquires enormous influence over what people are permitted to know.
There may be no Twitter Files next time, and no WikiLeaks archive that breaks through the censorship barrier.
The gate can be built into the machine.
Who Gets to Write the Rules?
Follow the money and the institutional structure becomes difficult to ignore. A small group of extraordinarily wealthy donors helped build the field devoted to catastrophic AI risk. Their money funded researchers, nonprofits, evaluators, policy organizations, fellowships and journalists. Anthropic emerged from that same intellectual world, built one of the most powerful AI companies on earth, and is now spending tens of millions of dollars to influence AI policy. The company itself says its $40 million commitment to Public First Action is intended to advance public education and AI policy. Barack Obama is now urging Democrats to make AI governance a political priority. None of this requires a secret meeting or a centrally directed conspiracy. Concentrated money, shared assumptions and aligned interests can accomplish plenty on their own.
The question is no longer whether artificial intelligence needs rules. Rules are already being proposed. Anthropic has published its own framework calling for progressively stronger external testing, incident reporting and government oversight as AI capabilities increase. The question is who writes those rules, who gets designated as the experts, who gets paid to enforce them, who can afford to comply with them, and who decides what these machines will ultimately be permitted to tell us.
That last question is the one Americans should pay very close attention to. Social media taught the public what happens when government, technology companies, academics and nonprofits begin policing the boundaries of acceptable information. AI moves that power upstream. There may be no deleted tweet to discover, no suspended account to restore and no WikiLeaks document breaking through the gate. The information can simply never appear in the answer.
Demand the disclosures now. Who funds the evaluators? Who funds the experts advising Congress? Who supplied the language in the legislation? Which companies met with regulators? Who benefits financially from the compliance requirements? And above all, what protections prevent government from turning “AI safety” into authority over lawful speech and information?
Because once the rules are embedded in the machine, censorship will no longer require taking information away from you. The machine simply won’t give it to you in the first place.
Support Independent Investigation
This essay began with a simple question: who is actually behind the campaign to write America’s AI rules? Answering it meant following money through foundations and nonprofits, reading tax filings and conflict disclosures, checking lobbying records, tracing institutional relationships and separating connections that can be documented from those that cannot.
That kind of work takes time. It is also exactly what Malone News is here to do. Not repeat the approved narrative, and not substitute speculation for evidence, but follow the money, read the documents and ask questions powerful institutions would rather nobody ask.
If you value this work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your subscription makes investigations like this possible and keeps Malone News independent of the institutions being investigated.
Thank you for reading, sharing and supporting independent journalism.
Suskind, Ron. The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11. Simon & Schuster, 2006. See also PBS NewsHour, “The One Percent Doctrine,” June 20, 2006. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-one-percent-doctrine
Last week, the Washington State Supreme Court struck down Initiative 2066, a 2024 ballot measure approved by voters that sought to protect natural gas service and limit state climate change policies forcing citizens toward mandated electric heating and other alternatives.
In a 6-3 decision, the court held that I-2066 violated the single-subject rule in Article II, Section 19 of the state constitution, saying it combined natural-gas access rules, limits on local air-quality agencies, building- and energy-code changes, and amendments to the Decarbonization Act.
Chief Justice Debra L. Stephens wrote the majority opinion. Justices Steven C. González, Raquel Montoya-Lewis, G. Helen Whitener, Colleen M. Melody and Barbara A. Madsen, sitting as justice pro tempore, joined. Justice Salvador A. Mungia dissented, joined by Justices Charles W. Johnson and Sheryl Gordon McCloud. Justice Theodore J. Angelis, who is up for election, did not participate.
Supporters of I-2066, including the Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW), called the result a rejection of the voters’ choice on energy access; the dissent argued the court should have saved as much of the measure as possible. The ruling leaves existing climate change, building-code, and utility-planning policies in place. BIAW Executive Vice President Greg Lane called the decision “a direct rejection of the clearly expressed will of Washington voters. Nearly 2 million people voted to keep energy choice, and the court “has now taken that choice away.”
WAGOP Chair Rep. Jim Walsh wrote on X that the court again used the single-subject rule “as its justification for denying the people’s voice” and called that application “intellectually lazy and dishonest.”
Let’s Go Washington (LGW), the organization behind I-2066, accused state officials and the courts of creating mounting barriers to WA’s constitutionally protected initiative process. ”The decision by the Supreme Court is shameful, not only because it punishes families making heating their homes more expensive, but because it appears to be a coordinated effort by all three branches of government to annihilate the initiative process itself,” LGW founder Brian Heywood said.
“The voters made their decision and exercised a constitutional right reserved for the people. That decision was erased by a biased and one-sided court.”
Last week’s ruling on Initiative 2066 makes it the fifth time the State Supreme Court voided a voter-approved statewide initiative under the single-subject requirement. In 2000, it struck down Initiative 695, the 1999 measure that set $30 vehicle tabs and required voter approval for future state and local tax increases. It applied the same rule in 2001 to Initiative 722, which rolled back certain tax and fee increases while limiting annual property-tax growth; again in 2016 to Initiative 1366, which would have cut the state sales-tax rate unless lawmakers referred a constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds legislative vote to raise taxes; and again in 2020 to Initiative 976, another $30 car-tab measure that sought to reduce state and local vehicle taxes and fees.
Other voter-approved initiatives that have fallen on different constitutional grounds include Initiative 747, which limited property-tax levy increases, and Initiative 1240, which authorized charter schools.
Republican LD 8 State Sen. Matt Boehnke criticized the decision but noted that the court did not rule that protecting natural-gas access was unconstitutional. “WA voters had their say on I-2066. They voted to preserve access to natural gas and protect families’ and businesses’ ability to choose the energy source that works for them. The ruling doesn’t erase what voters told us: The court has made its decision, but the policy issue is still very much alive. The Legislature can and should take it up again.” Boehnke said.
I-2066 was a law in WA State adopted by voters that was overturned by six people. Interesting that five of the six justices in the majority were initially appointed by a governor; four of them were appointed by Governor Inslee. However, the three dissenting judges were ALL elected by the people!
Because the state Supreme Court is the final interpreter of the Washington Constitution, its composition will shape how future initiatives, tax measures, and energy statutes are reviewed.
Judicial elections matter now more than ever for anyone who cares about the voters’ will or how constitutional limits are applied. Five Washington Supreme Court seats are on the November 4, 2026 ballot. Voters who want different outcomes in 2027 and later will need to examine candidates’ records on Article II, Section 19, deference to voter-approved measures, and related constitutional questions, then decide for themselves.
This is why it is so vital you vote to replace Washington State Supreme Court justices this November. The future court is also expected to rule on the Democrats’ unconstitutional income tax. We have the best slate of qualified candidates we’ve had in years, and a rare opportunity to flip the court: Dave Larson, David Stevens, Scott Edwards, Todd Bloom, and Sean O’Donnell
The November 4 election may be your last chance to save Washington state.
If you want to stop WA from becoming a statewide power-grabbing socialist holocaust, then please vote the extreme leftists out of office and only elect good, qualified, common-sense public servants who will do the will of the people!
Bill Bruch
Bill Bruch is the WA State GOP Election Integrity Committee Chairman (6th year), WAGOP Executive Board Member (6th year), Skagit County GOP Chairman (10th year), RNC Election Integrity Committee WA State Chairman, Citizen Journalist, Business Owner, 2020 WA State House Representative Candidate, Former Council Member, and WA State 2016 and 2024 RNC National Convention Delegate
1. I-2066 fallout — five justices are on the ballot
Synopsis: The fight over Initiative 2066 is not only about natural gas anymore. After the Washington Supreme Court struck down the voter-approved measure, posts are turning to the next election: five justices are running, and critics Democratic governors appointed the majority that tossed the initiative. Others warn the court’s single-subject approach could reach far beyond this one ballot measure.
From the Bookmarks:
Isaac Holyk says five Supreme Court justices are on the ballot after the court overturned voters on I-2066.
Leave a comment on Story One: I-2066 fallout — five justices are on the ballot
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2. I-645: pamphlet claims, unions, and a payroll-tax threat
Synopsis: Can Olympia expand the new income tax without another public vote? Jim Walsh says the voters’ pamphlet claim that it takes a new vote to hit everyone is false — and that deleting one section would do it. Fresh posts also highlight heavy union spending to keep the tax, plus a warning of a separate 5% payroll tax push in 2027.
From the Bookmarks:
Jim Walsh calls the voters’ pamphlet statement a lie, saying the Legislature can remove Section 314 and apply the 9.9% income tax to everyone — including retirement income.
Leave a comment on Story Two: I-645 — pamphlet claims, unions, and a payroll-tax threat
3. DOJ’s noncitizen voter-fraud arrests
Synopsis: The Justice Department is posting a wave of voter-fraud cases, including arrests of illegal aliens in several states. Stephen Miller says noncitizen voting is widespread and that blue states will not share voter rolls. Supporters say the busts answer Democrats who claimed citizenship checks at registration were unnecessary.
From the Bookmarks:
Eric Daugherty reports DOJ confirmed 16 voter-fraud cases in short order, including illegal aliens from several countries.
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By: Dr.s Jill Glasspool Malone and Robert W. Malone
For five years, the medical freedom movement demanded accountability. It demanded accountability from Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, the FDA, CDC, NIH, pharmaceutical companies, universities, physicians, journalists, and politicians. It challenged emergency authorizations, mandates, censorship, vaccine safety claims, and the extraordinary speed with which a novel pharmaceutical technology was deployed across the population.
At the center of much of that movement stood Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Children’s Health Defense, which Kennedy chaired, petitioned the FDA in 2021 to revoke the Emergency Use Authorizations for the COVID vaccines. Kennedy himself described the COVID vaccine as the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” Whatever one thinks of the scientific argument, there was nothing ambiguous about Kennedy’s position. These products were dangerous. The regulatory system had failed. The public had been misled. Government had to act.
That history matters because Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is no longer standing outside the gates of the FDA demanding action. He is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. FDA, CDC, NIH, NIAID, and BARDA are all components of the department he leads.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services is the Cabinet officer responsible for the overall supervision, direction, and administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The Secretary establishes departmental policy and priorities and oversees HHS programs, operating divisions, and activities, including the FDA, CDC, NIH, and CMS, subject to authorities established by Congress and applicable law.
-— 42 U.S.C. § 3501, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Nineteen months into his tenure, the Pfizer and Moderna COVID mRNA vaccines remain licensed. NIH continues to fund mRNA vaccine research. New mRNA vaccine research awards have been made during his tenure.
And on August 5, 2026, Kennedy’s FDA approved Moderna’s MFLUSIVA, the first mRNA influenza vaccine licensed in the United States, granting traditional approval for adults 50–64 and accelerated approval for those 65 and older, despite Kennedy himself having announced when not part of the Trump administration that mRNA vaccines “fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.” The man who spent years warning America about mRNA vaccines now presides over a department that has approved another one. That is not a minor detail. It is the sort of contradiction that the medical freedom movement once would have torn apart.
Nor was Kennedy’s promise limited to vaccine recommendations or research priorities. On September 26, 2024, six weeks before the election, Kennedy explicitly endorsed Representative Paul Gosar’s End the Vaccine Carveout Act. “If we want safe and effective vaccines, we need to end the liability shield,” Kennedy said. Yet the COVID-19 PREP Act declaration protecting manufacturers remains in force through December 31, 2029. There are things Kennedy cannot do without Congress. This is not one of them.
Under the PREP Act, the HHS Secretary can amend the declaration prospectively by publishing a notice in the Federal Register. He cannot retroactively eliminate immunity that manufacturers already received, but he can alter its application going forward. Kennedy has not done so. His own HHS demonstrated that it knows perfectly well how to use this authority when it issued a new PREP Act declaration in May 2026 granting liability protection for Andes virus countermeasures. The authority exists. Kennedy has exercised it. He simply has not exercised it against the COVID liability shield he once publicly opposed.
Kennedy’s defenders have accomplishments they can legitimately point to. His FDA narrowed routine COVID vaccine approvals. He dismissed the entire ACIP and replaced its membership. HHS substantially revised the childhood vaccine schedule, although a federal court subsequently blocked that action. His administration has proposed changes to the vaccine injury compensation process, but they have yet to take effect. These are consequential actions. But many of the administration’s most significant promised reforms remain proposals rather than enacted policy. None removed a licensed COVID mRNA product from the market, and none ended the PREP Act immunity protecting its manufacturers.
Instead, Kennedy’s supporters point repeatedly to the $500 million BARDA mRNA cancellation as though it settles the question. It does not. The August 2025 action terminated or de-scoped 22 BARDA investments in mRNA vaccine development, and it was a significant policy decision. But BARDA represents only a small part of the biomedical research enterprise within HHS. BARDA’s entire FY2025 budget was roughly $1 billion, compared with nearly $50 billion for NIH alone. The cancellation therefore addressed one relatively small corner of federal biomedical research funding, not HHS-wide mRNA research.
Nor was it the removal of the Pfizer or Moderna COVID vaccines. Much of the affected work concerned future pandemic preparedness, including H5/H5N1 avian influenza, next-generation COVID vaccines, and rapid-response vaccine platforms. Some advanced mRNA projects were explicitly allowed to continue. Most importantly, HHS itself inserted a sentence into the announcement that somehow disappeared from much of the celebratory coverage: “Other uses of mRNA technology within the department are not impacted by this announcement.” This was a BARDA research-development pivot. It was not the end of federal mRNA research, much less the removal of the COVID products that Kennedy and CHD had spent years demanding be taken off the market.
There is another distinction that deserves far more attention. Kennedy took dramatic action against the ACIP committee members that he inherited. The ACIP is the CDC advisory committee that makes recommendations about who should receive vaccines after they are licensed. He dismissed all seventeen members and rebuilt the committee.
Yet VRBPAC, the FDA advisory committee that deals with the vaccines themselves and advises FDA on licensing, continues functioning. VRBPAC met in March to select influenza strains. It met again in May to consider the 2026-2027 COVID formula. It met in June to consider MFLUSIVA and voted unanimously in favor of it for the age groups considered. FDA then approved Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine. Updated Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccines were also approved for the 2026-2027 season. The CDC’s ACIP committee was torn apart. The machinery associated with licensing the products continued to operate.
That distinction becomes even more troubling because of what happened to ACIP’s COVID vaccine workgroup. By February 15, 2026, that workgroup had completed a report recommending federal recognition of post-acute COVID-19 vaccination syndrome, new diagnostic codes, clinical guidelines, and a national network of specialized treatment centers.
Dr. Robert Malone, a co-author of this essay, served as vice-chair of that workgroup. HHS postponed the February ACIP meeting after failing to publish the required public notice on time and offered no substantive public explanation. Privately, some committee members, including Dr. Malone, were told by the deputy chief of staff of HHS, Stefanie Spear that officials in the White House did not want these issues discussed publicly because of the anticipated media backlash. HHS then deliberately chose not to publish the required public notice and subsequently blamed a CDC employee for the oversight. CDC later rescheduled the meeting for March, despite knowing that a pending lawsuit could result in the committee being invalidated and the meeting canceled. As anticipated, the federal court subsequently invalidated the committee and halted its work. In other words, it is not sufficient to say that a judge stopped ACIP. HHS had already stopped the February meeting where vaccine injury was finally going to receive serious public attention, while knowing that the pending AAP lawsuit could result in further cancellations. As Secretary of HHS, Kennedy should be asked what he knew about these decisions and the litigation strategy unfolding under his watch.
The personnel story is even more troubling. The people inside FDA who were actually prepared to impose significant restrictions on COVID and mRNA vaccines were disappeared. Tracy Beth Høeg, who advocated much stronger warnings and restrictions concerning COVID vaccination in young males, was abruptly fired without explanation. Vinay Prasad imposed tougher vaccine standards, restricted COVID vaccine approvals, took direct control of vaccine safety surveillance, and ultimately refused even to review Moderna’s new mRNA influenza vaccine. FDA reversed that decision after White House involvement. Prasad subsequently left. Marty Makary, who had brought both Prasad and Høeg into positions of influence and had challenged much of the old COVID consensus, then “resigned.”
Except “resigned” does not adequately convey what happened. Contemporary reporting indicates that White House officials had already approved a plan to replace Makary and that Kennedy had become frustrated with his leadership. An administration official said the decision to replace Makary was Kennedy’s and had White House approval. Makary had other disputes with the administration, including over flavored e-cigarettes, so it would be wrong to reduce his departure entirely to vaccines. But the basic sequence is difficult to dispute. The administration had decided to replace him. Makary resigned before he could be removed.
Prasad’s story is somewhat different, but hardly comforting. He had already been pushed out once in July 2025 after attacks over his regulatory decisions. Makary fought to bring him back. After returning, Prasad took direct control of vaccine safety surveillance and pushed much tougher vaccine standards. Then came the confrontation over Moderna’s mRNA influenza vaccine. Prasad refused to review it. FDA reversed him. He subsequently left FDA. Three months after Prasad’s departure, the vaccine he refused to review was licensed.
So strip away the press releases and look at the outcome. Makary is gone. Prasad is gone. Høeg was fired. David Kaslow, is director of CBER’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review and who presided over the FDA’s presentation of Moderna’s mRNA influenza vaccine to VRBPAC, remains. The Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines remain licensed. And the Moderna mRNA influenza vaccine that Prasad refused to review has now been approved. Those facts ought to be causing an earthquake inside the medical freedom movement. If Xavier Becerra had presided over precisely this sequence of events, Children’s Health Defense would have been incandescent. Yet because the man sitting in the Secretary’s office is Bobby Kennedy, the scrutiny becomes remarkably gentle.
Meanwhile Kennedy has publicly supported nominees whose records would once have caused outrage within this movement. Erica Schwartz, nominated and subsequently confirmed to lead CDC, told senators plainly that she believes in vaccines and defended mRNA vaccination. Nicole Saphier, Trump’s Surgeon General nominee, has defended childhood vaccination and publicly criticized elements of Kennedy’s own vaccine agenda. Kennedy nevertheless praised her as a “long-time warrior for the MAHA movement.” A Cabinet secretary does not personally select every presidential nominee, and disagreement inside an administration is healthy. But there is a remarkable asymmetry here. People who actually attempted to put serious regulatory brakes on mRNA vaccines have left, while officials with conventional histories of supporting vaccination receive Kennedy’s public blessing.
And then, this month, Kennedy went home to Children’s Health Defense.
The September 17 CHD conference should trouble anyone who believes that the medical freedom movement is actually about independent thought. Kennedy walked into an organization he once led and received the kind of adulation that ought to make a movement founded on skepticism deeply uncomfortable. Kennedy told the audience that they had “a strong and steadfast friend at the White House” and urged them to be patient. Government is difficult. Bureaucracies move slowly. Courts interfere. Change takes time. Some of that is obviously true. But what followed was less an exercise in holding a powerful Cabinet secretary accountable than a celebration of Bobby Kennedy.
There is another side to Kennedy’s description of that “strong and steadfast friend” that deserves to be told. Earlier this year, Kennedy’s principal deputy chief of staff and senior counselor, Stefanie Spear, told Robert that President Trump and his West Wing advisors did not want ACIP meeting again until after the midterm election. Others were present for that conversation. No written directive has surfaced, and this can only be reported as what Spear told us. But that is what we were told. At CHD, Kennedy’s audience heard about their steadfast friend in the White House. They did not hear an explanation for why the committee where vaccine injury was finally receiving sustained attention had remained silent.
After the court ruling effectively halted the reconstituted ACIP’s work, members were instructed not to discuss committee matters with one another or with the press. That was about the point at which I resigned. The practical consequence is worth noting: since February, the physicians and scientists Kennedy himself selected for ACIP, many of them prominent voices within the medical freedom movement, have effectively been silenced as members of the committee.
Tony Lyons provided perhaps the clearest example of what the medical freedom movement is becoming. He described Kennedy as an “incredible human being” with extraordinary “integrity” and “honesty,” a man essentially sacrificing himself to protect America’s children at tremendous personal cost at the recent CHD conference. He declared Kennedy the most dangerous individual to the existing system to emerge in a generation. This was delivered at a conference supposedly devoted to transparency and accountability, at precisely the moment when there are some very difficult questions Kennedy ought to be answering.
But there is another dimension to Lyons’s praise that should not be ignored. Lyons is president of MAHA Action and co-chaired American Values 2024, the super PAC that supported Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Lyons founded Skyhorse Publishing, which publishes Kennedy’s books and reportedly has him under contract for another. Skyhorse contributed $100,000 to American Values 2024 in 2023, after earlier in-kind expenditures for pro-Kennedy newspaper advertisements. MAHA Action has subsequently promoted numerous Skyhorse titles. Lyons may be entirely sincere in his praise of Kennedy. But there are also longstanding political, professional, and financial relationships between them that matter. The medical freedom movement spent five years teaching people to examine the financial interests behind glowing statements about pharmaceutical products and public-health officials. That same standard should apply to glowing statements about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Sayer Ji promoted the CHD gathering as a meeting of people on the “front lines” fighting for “transparency, accountability, and justice in public health.” Those are admirable words. Then apply them. None of the published accounts I have seen describe anyone publicly pressing Kennedy at CHD about the surviving COVID liability shield, the COVID mRNA products still on the market, Moderna’s newly approved mRNA influenza vaccine, the continuing NIH mRNA research, or the departures of Makary, Prasad, and Høeg. The Secretary of Health and Human Services stood before the organization he once chaired, surrounded by people who had spent years demanding answers on precisely these issues, and apparently received far more adulation than interrogation.
Accountability that stops at Bobby Kennedy’s feet is not accountability. It is allegiance.
There is a word for the behavior developing around Kennedy. When a political movement reaches the point where virtually no possible outcome causes its supporters to reconsider their faith in its leader, the standards of evidence have changed. Success is attributed to the leader. Failure is attributed to his enemies, the bureaucracy, the courts, or other forces beyond his control.
That is not skepticism. It is sycophancy. And when loyalty to an individual becomes more important than the principles and standards the movement once claimed to uphold, the behavior becomes cult-like.
And there is something particularly Kennedy-esque about it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was born into America’s most mythologized political family. The Kennedy family has lived with this kind of adulation for generations. After John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy deliberately helped construct the “Camelot” mythology that would define his presidency for decades. Journalist Theodore White later acknowledged that he had allowed himself to become her instrument in creating that myth. JFK became more than a president. He became a symbol, a heroic figure surrounded by glamour, tragedy, sacrifice, and destiny, while inconvenient parts of the historical record were pushed into the shadows. Historians spent decades trying to separate the actual presidency from Camelot.
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Robert Kennedy Jr. grew up inside that world. The crowds, the reverence, the family tragedy, the courtiers, and the assumption that a Kennedy was not merely another politician but a figure of history were part of his inheritance. Much of this surrounded him during adolescence, when identity, sexuality, power, and the understanding of what it meant to be a Kennedy were still being formed. Kennedy has subsequently written publicly and privately about his own struggles with what he called his “lust demons,” describing them as his “greatest defect.”
Those struggles do not establish anything about his political leadership today, but they are part of the complicated personal history that developed alongside the Kennedy mythology. I cannot know what Kennedy privately needs or craves, and I am not going to pretend that I can see inside another man’s head. But something much simpler can be observed: he does not discourage this behavior. He returns to audiences that treat him this way, accepts the accolades, asks for their patience and loyalty, and remains the heroic protagonist in a story where successes belong to Bobby and failures belong to everyone around him.
The danger is that his followers appear increasingly willing to participate in that mythology. A movement that once warned Americans never to surrender their judgment to experts is now surrendering that judgment to an authority figure of its own. A movement that warned Americans not to trust government officials now tells its followers to trust this particular government official. A movement that insisted intentions did not matter when Fauci, Collins, Walensky, or Becerra were in charge suddenly asks everyone to consider Kennedy’s intentions, his obstacles, his enemies, his sacrifices, and how terribly difficult Washington is.
This kind of sycophancy is dangerous for Kennedy as well. Powerful people surrounded by admirers eventually stop hearing what they need to hear. Nobody wants to be the person who spoils the standing ovation. Nobody wants to tell the hero that the great victory being celebrated was considerably smaller than advertised, that the products remain on the market, that the liability shield remains intact, or that most of the people who actually tried to impose meaningful restrictions are gone. Eventually the leader hears increasingly little except reassurance from people whose status, access, careers, businesses, or identities have become intertwined with his success. That is how movements lose the capacity to correct themselves.
There is an easy test for all of this. Replace Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with past HHS secretary Xavier Becerra. Imagine that under Becerra the COVID mRNA vaccines remained licensed, the COVID liability shield remained intact through 2029, NIH continued funding mRNA vaccine research, new mRNA projects received federal money, FDA approved the nation’s first mRNA influenza vaccine, an FDA official pushing aggressive COVID vaccine restrictions and to make public the FDA’s records on vaccine-related deaths was fired, the CBER director who refused to review Moderna’s mRNA influenza vaccine left after his decision was reversed, and the FDA commissioner who had brought those people into government resigned after the administration had already decided to replace him. Imagine that HHS also postponed an ACIP meeting where a completed vaccine-injury report was to be heard and offered no substantive explanation. Then imagine Becerra appearing before his former political organization and asking everyone to be patient while its leadership praised his integrity, courage, and personal sacrifice.
Would Children’s Health Defense accept that explanation? Would Tony Lyons stand up and praise Becerra’s extraordinary integrity? Would Sayer Ji tell everyone that Becerra was fighting heroically behind the scenes? Would medical freedom influencers explain that government is complicated and people simply need to give Xavier more time?
Those questions do not determine whether Kennedy’s individual policies are right or wrong. They expose something much more important: whether the medical freedom movement still has principles that apply regardless of who holds power.
The contradiction becomes even harder to ignore when Kennedy’s own words are compared across time. In 2021, he called the COVID vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” Four years later, sitting before the Senate as HHS Secretary, Kennedy was asked whether Donald Trump deserved a Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed. Kennedy answered, “Absolutely.”He went further, calling Operation Warp Speed “genius” and saying it got a vaccine to market that was “perfectly matched to the virus at that time.”
The medical freedom movement spent five years telling Americans that friendship, credentials, reputation, and institutional prestige were irrelevant. Follow the evidence. Question authority. Demand transparency. Hold powerful people accountable.
Fine.
Then do it.
Ask Robert F. Kennedy Jr. why the COVID mRNA vaccines are still on the market. Ask whether he still believes they should be removed. Ask whether he still believes the COVID vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” Ask why NIH continues funding mRNA vaccine research. Ask why his department approved an mRNA influenza vaccine after he publicly said mRNA vaccines fail against respiratory viruses such as influenza. Ask why the COVID PREP Act liability shield remains intact when Kennedy publicly supported ending that protection before taking office and now possesses the authority to amend the declaration prospectively himself.
Ask what happened to Prasad, Makary, and Høeg. Ask what Kennedy did to protect the people inside FDA who were actually willing to confront these issues. Ask why Prasad’s refusal to review Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine was reversed after White House intervention, only for Prasad to leave and the vaccine to be approved months later. Ask what role Kennedy played in the decision to replace Makary. Ask why Høeg was fired, and whether Kennedy supported or opposed that decision. Ask why Kennedy is now praising nominees with long records of supporting vaccines, including mRNA COVID vaccination.
And ask what happened in February. Ask why HHS postponed the ACIP meeting at which the COVID vaccine workgroup was prepared to present its completed report on post-acute COVID-19 vaccination syndrome before
Those are not acts of betrayal. They are exactly what accountability is supposed to look like.
Kennedy does not need more palace courtiers. He has plenty.
What he needs, and what the medical freedom movement desperately needs if it intends to retain any intellectual credibility, are people willing to look him in the eye and apply exactly the same standards to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that they applied to everyone who came before him.
Otherwise, this was never really a movement about questioning unaccountable authority.
It was about replacing one authority with another.
Independent journalism is easy when the target is someone everyone around you already opposes. It becomes much harder when the questions involve friends, allies, institutions you once supported, or people whose success you genuinely hoped for.
Speaking truth to power means very little if it applies only when that power is held by your opponents. The real test comes when power is held by your friends.
That is why reader support matters. Malone News does not answer to a pharmaceutical company, political party, government agency, foundation, corporate advertiser, or even friends. That independence means following the evidence wherever it leads and asking difficult questions regardless of who is sitting on the other side of them.
If you value independent journalism willing to speak truth to power, even when that power is held by friends, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscriptions make this work possible and help keep Malone News independent.
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References
Children’s Health Defense. “CHD Calls on FDA to Immediately Take COVID Vaccines Off the Market.” May 20, 2021. Documents the Citizen Petition filed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Meryl Nass asking FDA to revoke the COVID-19 vaccine EUAs and refrain from licensing the vaccines. CHD petition coverage
Putterman, Samantha. PolitiFact. “No, the COVID-19 vaccine is not the deadliest vaccine ever made.” December 10, 2021. Documents Kennedy’s December 6, 2021 statement to Louisiana legislators that the COVID vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever made,” as well as his reliance on VAERS reports. Kennedy’s 2021 statement and fact check
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “HHS Winds Down mRNA Vaccine Development Under BARDA.” August 5, 2025. HHS announced termination or de-scoping of 22 mRNA vaccine-development investments “worth nearly $500 million.” The announcement expressly stated: “Other uses of mRNA technology within the department are not impacted by this announcement.” HHS BARDA mRNA announcement
Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response.Fiscal Year 2025 Congressional Justification. The FY2025 request listed BARDA at $970 million. ASPR FY2025 Congressional Justification
National Institutes of Health. FY2025 funding data. NIH reports a total FY2025 appropriation of approximately $48.5 billion, providing context for the scale of BARDA relative to NIH. NIH budget information
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “MFLUSIVA.” FDA approved Moderna’s mRNA influenza vaccine on August 5, 2026, for persons 50 years and older. Approval for persons 65 and older was granted under the accelerated-approval pathway. FDA MFLUSIVA approval page
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee June 18, 2026 Meeting.” Documents VRBPAC consideration of the safety and effectiveness of Moderna’s MFLUSIVA application. FDA June 18 VRBPAC materials
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “2026 Meeting Materials, Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.” Documents the March influenza meeting, May 28 meeting on the 2026–2027 COVID vaccine formula, and June MFLUSIVA meeting. FDA 2026 VRBPAC meeting materials
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “COVID-19 Vaccines (2026–2027 Formula) for Use in the United States Beginning in Fall 2026.” Documents VRBPAC’s May 28, 2026 deliberations and FDA’s subsequent recommendation for the updated formula. FDA 2026–2027 COVID vaccine formula
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “Coronavirus (COVID-19) | CBER-Regulated Biologics.” FDA continues to list Comirnaty, Mnexspike and Spikevax as approved mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. FDA COVID-19 vaccine regulatory information
Lawrence, Lizzy. STAT. “Prasad overruled FDA staff to reject Moderna’s flu vaccine application.” February 11, 2026. Reports that Vinay Prasad declined to accept Moderna’s mRNA influenza-vaccine application for review despite career reviewers and vaccine-office director David Kaslow favoring review. STAT reporting on Prasad and Moderna
STAT. “FDA’s Vinay Prasad, controversial CBER chief, to depart.” March 6, 2026. Reports Prasad’s departure, his increased control over vaccine-safety surveillance, and FDA’s decision to review Moderna’s influenza vaccine following White House pressure. STAT reporting on Prasad’s departure
Associated Press. “FDA official who scrutinized COVID shots and antidepressants is out in latest shake-up.” May 2026. Reports Tracy Beth Høeg’s departure from FDA amid the agency’s leadership changes.
Roubein, Rachel, and Dan Diamond. The Washington Post. “FDA chief resigns amid agency turmoil.” May 12, 2026. Reports that White House officials had signed off on a plan to replace FDA Commissioner Marty Makary before his resignation. Washington Post reporting on Makary’s departure
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Organization Chart.” September 16, 2026. Lists David Kaslow, M.D., as director of CBER’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review. FDA CBER organization chart
American Academy of Pediatrics et al. v. Kennedy et al., Civil Action No. 25-11916-BEM, U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Memorandum and Order, March 16, 2026. The court stayed the January 2026 childhood immunization schedule memorandum, the appointments of thirteen ACIP members, and votes taken by the affected ACIP. March 16, 2026 court order
Gosar, Rep. Paul.End the Vaccine Carveout Act, H.R. 9828, 118th Congress. Introduced September 25, 2024. The legislation proposed eliminating specified liability protections for vaccine manufacturers. H.R. 9828 text and legislative record
Gosar, Rep. Paul.End the Vaccine Carveout Act, H.R. 4668, 119th Congress. Reintroduced July 23, 2025. H.R. 4668 legislative record
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.Declaration Under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act for Medical Countermeasures Against Andes Virus, May 2026. The declaration identifies favipiravir as the covered countermeasure and illustrates the Secretary’s exercise of PREP Act declaration authority. Federal Register Andes virus PREP Act declaration
CNN, Inside Politics transcript. September 4, 2025. Kennedy described the original COVID vaccine as “critical” and “perfectly matched to a virus that was new in the experience of humanity,” while also discussing reported vaccine injuries. CNN transcript
Associated Press. “Kennedy tells anti-vaccine activists they have a friend in Trump’s White House.” September 17, 2026. Reports Kennedy’s appearance at the Children’s Health Defense conference and his statement: “You have a strong and steadfast friend in the White House.”
Children’s Health Defense.CHD in DC: In Order to Form a More Perfect Future. September 17, 2026. Official conference materials describe the event as highlighting officials and advocates working for “transparency, accountability and justice” in public health and list participating speakers. Official CHD conference page
Ji, Sayer. “CHD in DC: ‘In Order to Form a More Perfect Future.’” August 9, 2026. Ji described participants as being on the “front lines” fighting for transparency, accountability and justice in public health. Sayer Ji’s conference announcement
American Values 2024. Organizational materials identify Tony Lyons as co-founder/co-president and president and publisher of Skyhorse Publishing. Contemporary records document American Values 2024’s support for Kennedy’s presidential campaign. American Values 2024 leadership
FactCheck.org / Annenberg Public Policy Center. “American Values 2024.” Documents Tony Lyons and Mark Gorton as co-founders/co-chairs, American Values 2024’s support for Kennedy’s 2024 campaign, and Lyons’s publishing relationship with Kennedy. American Values 2024 background
Federal Election Commission. American Values 2024 Schedule A filing, July 31, 2023. Federal campaign-finance records document contributions from Skyhorse Publishing to American Values 2024. FEC filing
The Boston Globe. “Meet Tony Lyons, the man building RFK Jr.’s MAHA empire.” March 25, 2026. Examines the relationship among Lyons, Skyhorse Publishing, MAHA organizations, Kennedy-associated publishing, and promotion of Skyhorse titles through MAHA channels. Boston Globe reporting on Lyons and MAHA
PolitiFact. “Three takeaways from Dr. Nicole Saphier’s podcast, Trump’s nominee for the ‘nation’s doctor.’” June 2, 2026. Documents Saphier’s vaccine positions and Kennedy’s description of her as a “long-time warrior for the MAHA movement.” Nicole Saphier background and vaccine positions
Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. “Camelot Revisited.” The New Yorker, May 29, 1995. Examines Jacqueline Kennedy’s November 1963 interview with Theodore H. White and the construction of the “Camelot” image surrounding John F. Kennedy’s presidency. Camelot Revisited
National Park Service. “Commemoration, Memorialization, and Legacy: An Exploration of the Public and Private Memory of John F. Kennedy and His Presidency.” Includes material from Jacqueline Kennedy’s interview with Theodore White concerning the Camelot imagery subsequently associated with the Kennedy presidency. National Park Service Kennedy legacy materials
History. “Why Is JFK Associated With ‘Camelot’?” Reviews Jacqueline Kennedy’s role in establishing the Camelot image and Theodore White’s later acknowledgment that he had allowed himself to become her “instrument in labeling the myth.” History of the Kennedy Camelot narrative
The New Yorker. “What Does Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Actually Want?” August 2024. Profile discussing Kennedy’s personal journals and his description of his “lust demons” as his “greatest defect,” along with his account of addiction and recovery. New Yorker profile of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
By: Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, and Jill Glasspool Malone, PhD
In January 1789, snow covered the ground around a plain wooden church at the foot of the Blue Ridge. Inside, a German-speaking Lutheran congregation finished its worship service. Two fiddlers played afterward, because this congregation loved music. Then the whole crowd went outside to hear two young Virginians argue about the new Constitution.
One was James Madison, age thirty-seven. The other was James Monroe, age thirty. Both would later become President. That winter they were rivals for a seat in the first United States Congress, and each wanted the votes of the families standing in the snow.
Madison was an unlikely figure for the rough-and-tumble of Virginia politics. He was small and slightly built, and by his own later account was no commanding public speaker. Monroe, seven years younger, had already been wounded fighting in the Revolution. Yet here they were, campaigning against each other in the Virginia countryside in the middle of winter.
Madison told the story forty years later to his young friend Nicholas Trist. He called the congregation “a nest of Dutchmen” whose votes might tip the election. He remembered keeping the audience outdoors in the snow while the candidates discussed “constitutional subjects.” Riding home afterward, Madison froze his nose. As an old man, he would point to the scar on its left side and call it a battle wound (Montpelier 2021)
Photo: Hebron Lutheran Church, via FacebookPhoto credit: Judith Crouse Muffley via exploring Virginia, Facebook
That church still stands proudly. Hebron Lutheran Church, in Madison County, Virginia, is the oldest church building in continuous Lutheran use in America (Virginia DHR 1971). Jill and I farm on Hebron Valley Road, just a couple of miles from the church.
Madison won that 1789 election by 336 votes. Within months, he introduced the amendments that became the Bill of Rights. The families who worshipped in that church, and whose dead now lie in its churchyard, had been fighting for seventy years for what would become the First Amendment’s opening guarantee: that government could neither establish a religion nor prohibit its free exercise.
A Hijacked Voyage
In 1717, about eighty Lutherans from southwestern Germany waited in London for passage to Pennsylvania. William Penn’s colony there offered land and freedom of worship. While they waited, they worshipped at a German Lutheran church in London and formally organized themselves as a congregation. That congregation would eventually become Hebron Lutheran Church, and it still worships there today (Germanna Foundation 2019).
Their departure was delayed when their captain, Andrew Tarbett, was thrown into debtors’ prison. While he negotiated with his creditors, the German families remained stranded in London, and their limited savings continued to drain away.
Tarbett had another connection that would prove consequential. Earlier that year, he had met Virginia Governor Alexander Spotswood, who had let ship captains know that he wanted German settlers for his frontier lands and was willing to pay their transportation costs. When Tarbett finally secured his release and sailed, he did not take his passengers to Pennsylvania as promised. He took them to Virginia instead. Tarbett later claimed that storms had blown the ship off course (Germanna Foundation 2019).
The families arrived in Virginia penniless, in a colony they had never intended to enter. Spotswood paid Tarbett for their passage, and the Germans were then held to seven years of labor on Spotswood’s frontier lands along the Rapidan River. They would later dispute that they owed him anything at all, and surviving records cast doubt that they had any agreement with him. They had contracted for passage to Pennsylvania, where they expected land and religious freedom.
They had contracted for passage to Pennsylvania, where they expected land and religious freedom. Instead, they were taken to Virginia against their wishes and forced into seven years of labor for Alexander Spotswood, Virginia’s royal governor, the Crown-appointed official who effectively ruled the colony.
The Escape to Hebron Valley
Families who have lived in this valley for generations tell the next part as an escape. Spotswood, the story goes, intended to hold the Germans to their disputed seven years of labor and then keep them even longer. Some of the men slipped away at night and scouted west toward the mountains. They found a fertile valley, enriched by centuries of river sediment, where the Robinson River comes down from the Blue Ridge. Then, on another night, the story says, the whole community left Spotswood behind and settled there.
Photo: Brian Dunn (via Virginia Nature Lovers
The court records confirm the conflict behind the legend. Between 1723 and 1725, Spotswood sued many of the Germans, claiming they still owed him labor and money and attempting to prevent them from leaving (GRIVA 2026). The suits were tried in Spotsylvania County, named for Spotswood, before juries drawn from his own social class. The Germans answered that, by law, they owed him nothing.
They took their case beyond the local courts and petitioned the House of Burgesses, the elected lower house of Virginia’s colonial legislature. The colonial Council ultimately ordered the King’s deputy attorney in the county to defend them. Spotswood recovered only a fraction of what he demanded (Blankenbaker n.d.a). By 1726, the families had secured land patents, the colonial grants that gave them legal title to their own land, in the Robinson River valley (Germanna Foundation 2013). Their plea to the Burgesses was the congregation’s first petition to a Virginia legislature.
The valley eventually took a name from Scripture. In the Book of Numbers, Moses sends twelve men ahead to scout Canaan. They reach Hebron and bring back a cluster of grapes so heavy that two men carry it on a pole. They report a land flowing with milk and honey (Numbers 13:23, 13:27). The German settlers had also sent men ahead to scout the country before moving their families into the valley. Anyone who has seen this valley in June, or fished the Robinson River, can understand why they stayed. Many anglers consider it among the finest trout streams in Virginia.
Photo credit: Photos of Madison County, Facebook
The settlers first worshipped in a log building they called the “German Chapel.” In 1734, Pastor John Caspar Stoever and two members of the congregation sailed all the way back to Europe to raise money for a permanent church, a school, and a second pastor. The present Hebron Lutheran Church was built in 1740 (Hebron Lutheran Church Foundation n.d.).
The “Established” Church and Forced Taxation
Freedom from Spotswood did not mean religious freedom. In colonial Virginia, the Church of England was the established church. “Establishment” had a very practical meaning: the government recognized and supported one favored church, collected taxes for its clergy, granted it legal privileges, and regulated the ability of other denominations to preach and worship. It is this meaning of “establishment” that survives in the opening words of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
Every household was assessed parish taxes, often paid in tobacco, to support the local Anglican minister and the glebe, which was the term for the farm and residence provided for his use. The Lutherans of the Robinson River therefore paid taxes to support the established Anglican church while also supporting their own pastor and chapel.
The Baptists fared far worse. Beginning in 1768, Virginia county magistrates jailed Baptist preachers under laws governing public order for preaching without a license. On June 4 of that year, the sheriff of Spotsylvania seized John Waller, Lewis Craig, and James Childs. The magistrates offered to free them if they promised not to preach in the county for a year and a day. They refused. As guards marched them through the streets of Fredericksburg to jail, the three men sang an Isaac Watts hymn: “Broad is the road that leads to death” (James 1900, 29, 213).
Jail did not silence them. One Anglican churchman complained that the Baptists simply preached through the prison windows (James 1900, 38). At one jail, authorities built a high plank fence in front of the windows to prevent prisoners from preaching to people outside. Their followers raised a handkerchief on a pole above the fence as a signal that a congregation had gathered, and a prisoner preached through the boards to a crowd he could not even see (James 1900, 214).
The Culpeper jail, a short ride from Hebron, held Baptist preachers James Ireland, Elijah Craig, and others at different times. Near Culpeper Courthouse, attackers caught a Baptist layman named Thomas Waford at a spring and beat him for helping arrange the preachers’ meetings. He carried the scars past his eightieth year (James 1900, 30, 211).
Much of this history survives because Charles F. James, a Baptist minister who had himself pastored in Culpeper, went back to the Virginia Assembly journals, original petitions, and the letters of Madison and Jefferson. In his 1900 Documentary History of the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Virginia, he printed the documents chronologically so readers could examine the evidence themselves (James 1900, 7, 8). James wrote partly to rebut Patrick Henry’s grandson in a public dispute over which denomination deserved the most credit for securing religious liberty in Virginia. He made no secret of his Baptist perspective, but his lasting contribution was to gather the original documents and let them tell much of the story.
Toleration Is Not Liberty
Toleration means the state permits your church to exist. But permission can also be withdrawn. Under toleration, the government still claims the power to decide which religions are acceptable, to license preachers, and to tax people for the support of its favored church.
Religious liberty rests on a fundamentally different principle: the state has no authority over a person’s conscience. James defined it as the natural right of every person to worship according to conscience, with no earthly power entitled to compel religious conformity or tax anyone for religion (James 1900, 9).
That distinction became important in June 1776, as Virginia was declaring its independence from Britain. George Mason had drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the document that would later become an important model for the United States Bill of Rights. James Madison, then just twenty-five years old and a young delegate from Orange County, played a decisive role in shaping its protection of religious liberty.
Mason’s draft promised “the fullest toleration” in religion. Madison objected. Toleration still left government in charge, because the state retained the power to decide which religions it would tolerate. Madison pushed instead for religion to be recognized as a natural right, and the final Declaration proclaimed that “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”
The change was more than semantics. Toleration was permission granted by government. Free exercise was a right government was bound to respect. Thirteen years later, Madison would carry that principle into the amendments to the United States Constitution that became the Bill of Rights.
That fall, petitions poured into the first legislature of the newly independent Commonwealth of Virginia. On October 22, 1776, one arrived from the Robinson River valley. The “German congregation in the county of Culpeper” complained that its members were still being forced to pay parish charges to support the established Anglican church while also supporting their own church. They asked to be freed from those charges, except those supporting their own church and the poor, and sought the same legal standing for their ministers that Lutheran ministers enjoyed in Pennsylvania (James 1900, 70). That same year, under their new pastor Jacob Franck, the congregation adopted a written church constitution (Blankenbaker n.d.b).
The Hebron congregation was asking for equal treatment within the existing system. The Baptists went further. With petitions carrying about ten thousand signatures, they demanded an end to the religious establishment itself (James 1900, 184). Together, these petitions helped produce a partial victory. In 1776, Virginia ended the requirement that religious dissenters, meaning those who did not belong to the established Anglican church, pay taxes to support it. In 1779, the legislature went further and ended government payment of Anglican clergy altogether (James 1900, 184, 187).
The Assessment Fight
With the Revolution won, the defenders of government-supported religion changed tactics. In 1784, Patrick Henry backed what was called a “general assessment,” essentially a statewide tax for the support of religion. Unlike the old system, which supported the established Anglican church, taxpayers could direct their contribution to the Christian church of their choice. The Episcopalians supported the plan. So did much of the Presbyterian clergy, even though Presbyterians had fought against the old Anglican establishment. Many Presbyterian laypeople opposed it (James 1900, 189). Madison observed that the Presbyterian clergy seemed as ready to create an establishment that included them as they had been to tear down the one that excluded them (James 1900, 196).
Henry’s proposal could be presented as religious equality because the money would no longer go exclusively to one denomination. Madison saw a more fundamental problem: government would still possess the power to tax citizens for religion. In his 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, he warned that the same authority that could force a citizen to contribute “three pence only of his property” to one establishment could force him “to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever” (Madison 1785). Once government has the power to collect and distribute money for religion, it also acquires the power to decide which religions qualify to receive it.
The assessment collapsed in 1785 under a flood of petitions. In January 1786, the Virginia General Assembly passed Thomas Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom, which Jefferson had first proposed seven years earlier. The statute went further than merely ending support for a particular denomination. It declared that no person could be compelled to attend or support any religious worship, place, or ministry, and that religious belief could neither diminish nor enlarge a person’s civil rights.
James gave the Baptists much of the credit for defeating the assessment. He quoted a Baptist historian’s judgment that the Baptists were the only religious society that had plainly opposed the proposal as a religious body (James 1900, 190).
No record has yet been found showing the Hebron congregation petitioning as a body in this final fight. Their pastor, Jacob Franck, had left in 1778, and the church lacked a steady pastor until 1787 (Blankenbaker n.d.b). The original Culpeper County petitions survive at the Library of Virginia, leaving open the possibility that individual members of the Hebron community signed them even if the congregation itself did not.
A Promise Made in the Snow
The federal Constitution of 1787 contained no bill of rights. Virginia’s Baptists feared that a strong national government might someday claim the same powers over religion that Virginia’s colonial government had exercised. In 1788, opponents of the Constitution in Orange County nominated John Leland, the county’s leading Baptist preacher, to run against Madison for a seat in Virginia’s ratifying convention.
Leland later told the story to Massachusetts Governor George Briggs. Riding home from Philadelphia, Madison went out of his way to visit Leland and spent half a day explaining the Constitution and answering his concerns. When the two men later faced the voters of Orange County, Madison climbed onto a hogshead, a huge wooden barrel used to pack and ship tobacco, which had been stood upright as an improvised platform. He spoke for two hours. Leland later conceded that Madison was “not particularly a pleasing or eloquent speaker.” When the crowd called for Leland to speak, he climbed onto the same tobacco barrel and fully endorsed Madison. Madison won the election (James 1900, 152, 156, 157).
But the political fight was not over. Patrick Henry had opposed Madison during Virginia’s battle over ratification of the Constitution. After ratification, Henry and his allies in the Virginia legislature denied Madison a seat in the new United States Senate. They then drew Madison’s congressional district to include counties where opposition to the new Constitution was strong and recruited James Monroe to run against him (Montpelier 2021).
Madison campaigned on a promise. On January 2, 1789, he wrote to Baptist minister George Eve that, if elected to Congress, he would work for amendments protecting religious liberty, “particularly the rights of Conscience in the fullest latitude.”(Madison 1789).
Later that month, Madison stood outside the German Lutheran church at Hebron, in the snow, and made his case again. His listeners included the descendants of families who had been diverted to Virginia against their will, forced into years of labor under Spotswood, and later taxed to support a church that was not their own. Their congregation had petitioned Virginia for relief from those religious taxes. Madison was now asking for their votes while promising constitutional protection for freedom of conscience. He carried the district by 336 votes (Virginia Synod 2019).
On June 8, 1789, Madison kept that promise. He rose in the first United States Congress and introduced the amendments that would become the Bill of Rights. His proposed language declared that no person’s civil rights would be abridged because of religious belief or worship and that “nor shall any national religion be established.” Congress revised the wording, and the states ratified the final text in December 1791:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
The two phrases now had a history behind them. “Free exercise” reached back to the change Madison had fought for as a twenty-five-year-old delegate in Virginia in 1776: religious belief was a right, not something government merely tolerated. “Establishment” described the system the Hebron families knew firsthand, in which government favored a church, supported its clergy through taxation, and imposed those costs even upon people who worshipped elsewhere.
For the families at Hebron, religious establishment had not been an abstract political idea. It meant being forced to pay taxes, often in tobacco, to support the Anglican church while also supporting their own Lutheran church. The First Amendment now prohibited the new federal government from establishing and supporting a favored religion, while also protecting the people’s right to freely practice their own.
Photo: Steven Marks Facebook
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For more than a century after its adoption, the First Amendment restricted the federal government, not the states. States could maintain their own arrangements between government and religion. Massachusetts, for example, continued a system of public support for religion until 1833.
That changed gradually after the Civil War and the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1947, in Everson v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment’s prohibition against an establishment of religion also applied to state and local governments. In deciding what “establishment” meant, the justices went back to the struggle that had taken place in Virginia more than 160 years earlier.
Writing for the majority, Justice Hugo Black recounted Virginia’s fight over religious taxation, Madison’s opposition to Patrick Henry’s general assessment, and Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom. Justice Wiley Rutledge went even further in dissent, attaching Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments to his opinion in full (Everson1947). The justices disagreed over how the First Amendment should apply to the particular case before them, but both sides treated the Virginia struggle as important evidence of what the prohibition against religious establishment was intended to prevent.
This history matters today. Modern disputes involving government support for religious schools, religious activity in public schools, and public funding that reaches religious institutions continue to raise the same underlying question that confronted Madison in Virginia: where does protection of religious liberty end and government support of religion begin?
James had also documented an uncomfortable pattern in the earlier Virginia fight. Some clergy who demanded religious liberty when excluded from the established system became more receptive to government support once their own denominations were offered a share. Madison saw the danger in the arrangement itself. Once government collects and distributes money for religious purposes, government must also decide which institutions and activities qualify to receive it. That was precisely the kind of entanglement between civil authority and religion that he had opposed in Virginia.
Back to the Churchyard
Hebron appears earlier in Scripture as well. Abraham, still a foreigner and sojourner in Canaan, bought his first piece of land there, a field containing the cave in which he buried his wife Sarah (Genesis 23). The first land Abraham actually owned in the promised land was a grave.
Photo: Robert Malone, 2026
The graveyard at Hebron Lutheran Church carries something of that same meaning. The families buried there descended from people who had intended to settle freely in Pennsylvania, but instead were carried to Virginia against their will and forced into years of labor under Virginia’s royal governor. They eventually left him for a valley at the foot of the Blue Ridge. There they farmed their own land, paid taxes to support a church they did not attend, and built and supported a Lutheran church of their own. In 1776, they petitioned the new Commonwealth of Virginia for equal treatment. Their children and grandchildren would later stand outside that same church in the snow while James Madison asked for their votes and promised to protect their freedom of conscience.
From the Hebron Lutheran Church Facebook page.
Those families have put down generational roots that endure to this day. Their surnames still fill Madison County’s deed books and church rolls, and can still be read on the stones in Hebron’s graveyard. Uhl became Yowell, Öhler became Aylor, Weber became Weaver, and Klaar became Clore (Germanna Foundation 2013). The chairman of the Madison County Board of Supervisors today is a Yowell, and the county’s sheriff since 2019 is a Weaver (Madison County 2026; VPAP 2019). An Utz married to a Fray represented Madison in the House of Delegates a century ago (Swem and Williams 1918).
Madison County has also grown far more slowly than its neighbors. Between 1980 and 2020, Culpeper County more than doubled in population, and Greene County nearly tripled, while Madison grew by only 14 percent, to 13,837 people (US Census Bureau 2020). Geography, commuter highways, and the national park explain some of that difference. Jill and I think something else may be at work as well: a deeply rooted local conviction that good bottomland belongs in hay and cattle rather than subdivisions. Families whose ancestors fought to own and farm this ground are not eager to give it up for something as transient as money.
If you ever come to visit Jill and me, take the back roads instead of Route 29. Follow the Robinson River along the mountains, past hayfields, cattle, and some of the best trout water in Virginia. Turn onto Hebron Church Road and stop at the plain wooden church at the foot of the valley. Walk among the stones in the graveyard. The congregation still worships there on Sunday mornings. Our farm lies just over the hill, about two miles away as the crow flies.
RWM/JGM
Willow Rudolph, from Photos of Madison County (Facebook)The historic silver chalice, brought to Hebron from Germany in 1734, was used for communion. Photo credit: Hebron Lutheran Church, Facebook.
Jill and I write this from a farm on Hebron Valley Road, just over the hill from the church in this story. Essays like this take time in archives, churchyards, and county courthouses, and reader support makes that possible. Subscribe free or paid for part two tomorrow, and for more stories from the Piedmont we are gathering for an upcoming book, tentatively titled Who Owns This Land?
Swem, Earl G., and John W. Williams. 1918. A Register of the General Assembly of Virginia, 1776-1918. Richmond: Davis Bottom, Superintendent of Public Printing.
US Census Bureau. 2020. “Decennial Census of Population and Housing, 2020.” Washington, DC: US Department of Commerce.
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