There is nothing quite like the slow-motion humiliation of a small-town official caught in the amber of his own convenience. Donal Collins, supervisor of a municipality that could fit inside a Manhattan city block with room to spare, has spent the better part of a year making FOIL compliance feel like a personal affront. Three missed deadlines. A lawyer dispatched on a Saturday — a Saturday — to insist that no, no, this was not constructive denial of access. My reply? That’s for a judge to decide.

Subscribe now

The documents, when they finally materialized, were almost poignant in their thinness. Karen Carpenter thin, as they say. One mandatory disclosure for 2025, filed in March of 2026. And what it failed to disclose was the one thing everyone in town is already whispering about: the relationship between Collins and the Williams family, who claim 83 acres of farmland — all but the vineyard parcel, conveniently — is worked by Collins himself. Or so the story goes.

This was already simmering beautifully before the FOIL battle even began. In August 2025, a board member Jon Wapner had the temerity to email Collins directly, requesting a workshop discussion about what he politely characterized as a conflict of interest. He wanted it on the September 4th agenda. It never appeared. One imagines the agenda-setting process as something less than rigorous.

Meanwhile, the Williams were moving with the confidence of people who know exactly which levers to pull. Their application to enter Ag District 10 was already in motion, and Collins — who had announced he would not be voting on the matter — was cheerfully telling the Agricultural and Farmland Protection Board that yes, yes, farming was absolutely occurring at 509 Bashford Road. The investigative rigor behind that determination? A drive-by. Literally. A drive past the property and a note confirming: farm.

The county, as required by law, notified Collins that 509 Bashford Road had applied for inclusion on November 7th. He did not share this with the board. His reasoning, offered with the weary confidence of a man who has long confused his own interests with the public’s, was that he didn’t think he needed to.

The recusal, when it finally came, arrived without explanation. No rationale. No acknowledgment of the slow-building controversy, the reporting, the questions multiplying like kudzu. Late and unexplained, as so much of this has been.

The stakes, it turns out, are not small. With 509 Bashford inside an agricultural district, the Williams gain a significant legal cudgel — the ability to approach the state Department of Agriculture and Markets and effectively tie the town’s hands on the vineyard. This, one suspects, was always the destination. The scenic route just happened to run through Donal Collins.

The Fox Hill Vineyard file is a remarkable document of entitlement: flawed applications, neighbor opposition exceeding 60 letters, more than 200 signatures. A normal applicant might recalibrate. The Williams are not recalibrating.

A source in California who has worked with Ed and Cherie Williams offered this, unprompted: moving across the country to pursue their medical careers was simply the logistics. Working with them was always, always about money, and how to make more of it.

I cannot say I was surprised.

©2026 All Rights Reserved | Josh@thepowellhousepress.com

Chad Green was three years old when he died in a cancer clinic in Tijuana. The year was 1979. I was eight. I remember it because it was everywhere, and because a friend of mine, Teresa Powers, had a sister with leukemia who died from it, and the reporter on the news said Chad’s leukemia was treatable. Survival rate for his type, at the time, fifty percent. Today it is eighty. He died because his parents stopped the chemotherapy and drove their dying child across a border to be treated with apricot pits.

Subscribe now

Gerald and Diana Green were not monsters. They were scared working-class parents who had watched their toddler writhe through brutal treatment and decided, with a desperation that is not hard to understand, that there had to be something better. The injections had turned Chad, at times, into what his mother described as a wild animal. So they put their faith in laetrile, a compound derived from apricot pits that its promoters called Vitamin B-17 and the medical establishment called what it was: a useless drug with a cyanide byproduct slowly poisoning the child it claimed to save. The fringe movement behind laetrile used his face as its martyr right up until the child was dead, at which point it moved on to the next desperate family. Legal battles over the case climbed to the Supreme Court. It became a landmark in the history of parental rights against medical authority. It also became, for a few decades, a warning severe enough to push the worst of this industry toward the margins.

The margins did not hold. They never do.

William Makis is not a doctor. He was, once. A nuclear medicine radiologist trained in Alberta, the author of more than a hundred peer-reviewed papers, a credentialed insider at Alberta Health Services. That is the biography he still leads with because it is the only part of the story that flatters him, so it is the part he repeats, a credential worn like a costume long after the performance ended. His active Alberta medical license lapsed in February 2019. What followed was not a quiet retirement. It was a reinvention built on the bones of his professional disgrace.

Before the Substack empire, there were the lawsuits. After being terminated from Alberta Health Services following professional complaints, and found guilty of unprofessional conduct by a College of Physicians and Surgeons tribunal in 2018, Makis sued AHS and several colleagues, alleging conspiracies and misconduct. Courts repeatedly rejected his claims. Alberta courts eventually designated him a vexatious litigant, an extremely rare status reserved for individuals who abuse the legal system with bad-faith filings. He alleged a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy involving AHS, lawyers, and judges. The courts were not persuaded. They rarely are when the evidence is paranoia dressed as litigation. A man who cannot win in court finds other audiences. Makis found the internet. The internet, as it always does, was ready for him.

The pitch he developed is elegant in the way that cons are elegant: simple, emotionally irresistible, and designed to be unfalsifiable. COVID-19 vaccines, Makis claims, cause a new and terrifying phenomenon he calls “turbo cancer.” Turbo cancers, in his telling, are aggressive, rapid-onset malignancies that strike the vaccinated, particularly in younger cohorts, are resistant to conventional treatment, and are rising fast. The oncological community has not recognized this phenomenon. Makis has an explanation for that: they are hiding it, or bought off, or simply too compromised to see what he alone can see. The term did not exist before 2021. It was coined in anti-vaccine circles and popularized largely by Makis himself, spreading from fringe Substacks to mainstream-adjacent platforms with remarkable speed. It is a masterpiece of medical branding. The name alone implies urgency, novelty, and a secret. The kind of thing your oncologist would never tell you. The kind of thing only he is brave enough to say.

The cure, conveniently, is ivermectin. Makis claims the antiparasitic drug works against cancer through at least fifteen distinct biological pathways. He runs what he describes as an “Ivermectin Cancer Clinic” promoting high-dose ivermectin and repurposed antiparasitic drugs for cancer care. The clinic markets protocols for every cancer grade, categorized by severity and priced accordingly. The actual science on ivermectin and cancer is preliminary at best. There is a small body of preclinical data, laboratory studies on cancer cells and animal models, suggesting possible anti-tumor activity. One clinical trial involving ivermectin and breast cancer is currently underway. The results of that trial will determine whether any of this translates to human patients. Makis is not waiting for results. He is selling protocols now, to people who are dying now. That is the whole point. Dying people cannot wait for peer review. Makis knows this. His business depends on it.

He built a six-figure subscription operation on Substack, with over 118,000 subscribers paying between five and fifty dollars a month. His header promises “INTEL on COVID-19, mRNA Vaccines, Turbo Cancer, Cancer Therapy, Ivermectin, Mebendazole, Fenbendazole.” A disclaimer at the bottom notes the content is “not medical advice.” This is the tell. It is the fine print that separates a media business from a medical practice, legally, while doing nothing to change what a terrified cancer patient actually does with the information at two in the morning after the oncologist has delivered the news and left the room. Makis knows who is reading. He is not writing for the curious. He is writing for the desperate, and the desperate are an audience that will pay whatever the protocol costs because the alternative is accepting that they are going to die.

The laetrile promoters of the 1970s worked this same territory. Banned in the United States, they sent their patients to Mexican clinics, sold hope in newspaper ads, and watched desperate people spend their final months on a compound derived from apricot pits while their actual cancers progressed. The regulatory apparatus eventually caught up with most of them. What distinguishes Makis is not the scheme. The scheme is ancient. What distinguishes him is the infrastructure. The Substack gives him direct access to subscribers without a distributor, an editor, or a regulator in the chain. The “not medical advice” disclaimer gives him legal cover. The “turbo cancer” brand gives him a captive audience that self-selects for fear and distrust of exactly the institutions that might otherwise protect them. And the MAHA political moment gives him a legitimacy the laetrile crowd never had. The term “turbo cancer,” his invention, has migrated into serious institutional spaces, cited approvingly at MAHA Institute events and amplified by figures with actual oncological credentials who should know better. This is how misinformation scales: not through the fringes alone, but through the occasional credentialed voice that gives it just enough respectability to travel.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta eventually had enough. After growing concerns that Makis was presenting himself as a physician and providing medical advice without an active license, the College pursued legal action. In August 2025, the Court of King’s Bench granted an interim injunction. On March 4, 2026, it granted a permanent one. The terms are specific. Makis is restricted from representing or implying that he is licensed to practice medicine in Alberta, restricted from offering or providing any health services to the public including advice or consultations regarding cancer treatment, and prohibited from using the title of doctor, oncologist, the abbreviation Dr., or any of the protected titles under Alberta’s Health Professions Act. The court’s reasoning was blunt. The risk to the public lies in the unauthorized practice of medicine. Proof of actual harm to specific individuals is not required. The act itself is the harm. Worth noting: the CPSA was explicit that its case was never about any specific medication. This is not a war on ivermectin. It is an action against a man who spent years selling medical authority he no longer possessed to people too frightened to check his credentials.

Makis, predictably, characterized the injunction as persecution. He blamed Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. And then he announced he was applying for a Florida medical license. Florida’s Board of Medicine issued a notice of intent to approve his licensure with conditions. This is not a surprise. It is almost a perfect outcome for a man who has spent years exploiting the gap between what the rules say and what the rules do.

Florida’s own statute, Section 458.331(1)(b), is unambiguous. Having a license “revoked, suspended, or otherwise acted against” by another jurisdiction constitutes grounds for disciplinary action in Florida. The law is on the books. But statutory authority is not the same as practice, and the gap between them is where Makis intends to operate. There is also what practitioners in this field call the surrender trick. A physician under investigation in one state can voluntarily surrender his license before formal revocation proceedings conclude. The end result is the same: the doctor can no longer practice in that state. But the accountability is different. When a physician surrenders rather than faces revocation, the full record may not surface in a standard search. And surrender is voluntary. It is up to the doctor to surrender in every state, not the licensing board. Most doctors simply do not do that. Surrender in one jurisdiction, keep the others, move to Florida.

Florida’s sluggishness on physician oversight is not purely bureaucratic incompetence. There is political scaffolding holding it in place. The state funds the defense of accused physicians during disciplinary proceedings. The agency doing the investigating has been gutted by a $55.6 million budget cut that left it structurally unable to run a robust licensing review. The medical lobby in Tallahassee has been effective for decades. The Interstate Medical Licensure Compact, designed to address physician shortages, processes new license applications in one to three business days while discipline cases rot in a queue that can stretch past a year. The asymmetry is not accidental. Florida has a large, aging, medically dependent population, a documented physician shortage, a Surgeon General with his own complicated relationship with medical consensus, and an oversight apparatus that looks appropriately structured on paper and is functionally inert in practice. Florida does not accept doctors like Makis because it doesn’t know about them. It accepts them because the people who built the system preferred it that way.

The injunction in Alberta is a start. It is not a solution. The Substack is still running. The protocols are still priced and available. The audience is still there, still desperate, still paying.

Chad Green’s parents spent their son’s final months in a Tijuana clinic, watching him die of a curable disease while a fringe movement told them they were brave dissenters fighting a corrupt medical establishment. The movement did not mourn him. It used him, and then it found the next family. Forty-five years later, the delivery mechanism is more sophisticated. The branding is sharper. The political cover is real in a way it never was for the laetrile circuit. But the business model is identical: find the dying, give them a name for what they fear, sell them something that isn’t medicine, and make sure the fine print says so. The only thing that has genuinely changed is that this time, the man running the clinic is headed to Florida with a new license number and a clean search result, and the next desperate family is already subscribing.

Why Your Subscription Matters

Independent journalism answers to readers—not advertisers, corporations, or access-hungry editors. No story gets killed because it upsets a sponsor. No punch gets pulled because someone important made a phone call.

Your support makes possible sharp commentary, fearless satire, and reporting that follows the story wherever it leads. In an era of manufactured narratives and algorithmic blandness, that independence isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity.

Subscribe to The Powell House Press. Or settle for content that tells you what someone else wants you to hear.

©2026 All Rights Reserved | The Powell House Press

I thought the strangest thing to come out of hacking Trump’s lackies was Kash Patel’s belly dancing. But no, Ice Barbie’s husband Byron might have well jumped out of a cake.

There is a certain poetic justice in the universe, and it has a wicked sense of timing.

Kristi Noem, Ice Barbie, the glamour governor, the sequined scold who made a national career out of policing other people’s gender expression, was fired by Donald Trump last week. She had barely cleared her desk at the Department of Homeland Security when the Daily Mail dropped a thunderbolt from the plains: her husband, Bryon, had a secret life. A very pink secret life.

Bryon Noem, 56, insurance man, South Dakota pillar of traditional values, had allegedly been spending his evenings chatting up women in the “bimbofication” community, a fetish subculture devoted to the aesthetics of hypersexualized, balloon-breasted Barbiedom, and sending them selfies. In one photo, he appears wearing a flesh-colored top stuffed with balloons and tight pink shorts. He reportedly sent $25,000 to three women via Cash App and PayPal. The account name was Jason Jackson. The voicemail said: “Noem Insurance, leave a message.”

Someone Googled it.

“You turn me into a girl,” he apparently told one of his online companions. “Should I put on leggings?”

Reader, he put on the leggings.

Kristi’s spokesperson confirmed the family had been “blindsided.” Kristi was “devastated.” They asked for privacy and prayers. Trump told the Daily Mail he felt badly. He hadn’t seen anything. He knew nothing. He was shocked, shocked to find gender-bending going on in the establishment.

This is the Grand Old Passion Play, performed on an endless loop, with a fresh cast of characters and the same third act. The senator in the airport stall. The pastor with the second phone. The architect of the bathroom bills whose own bathroom contained multitudes. The conservative movement has been staging this production for so long that it ought to have its own Broadway run. It practically does.

Kristi Noem spent years as the prairie Savonarola of gender. She signed a Religious Freedom Restoration Act to let businesses discriminate against gay people. She banned transgender girls from sports. She banned gender-affirming care for minors. She stood at podiums and warned about the threat posed by children who were confused about who they were.

Bryon was apparently less confused.

The irony, and it is a many-layered confection, like a Barbie Dream Cake, is that Bryon Noem is not, strictly speaking, a hypocrite. Cross-dressing is not a gay or trans identity. He is, apparently, a straight man with an unusual hobby and a very bad alias. The hypocrisy belongs entirely to his wife, who spent a career making life harder for anyone who deviated from the gender binary while the man she married in 1992 was asking strangers to rate his figure in pink shorts.

The Noems were high school sweethearts. They attended the same church. They had three children and espoused traditional values on social media with the enthusiasm of people who had something to prove. Now Kristi is out of a job, her husband is in the tabloids, and their thirty-year advertisement for Christian family life has acquired some complicated footnotes.

Counterintelligence expert Jack Barsky called Bryon’s judgment “astounding.” That’s the polite version. The impolite version is that the woman responsible for keeping the nation’s borders secure was married to someone conducting a parallel digital life under a pseudonymous Cash App account, which is precisely the sort of thing foreign intelligence services look for when they are trying to find leverage over Cabinet secretaries.

Bryon denied being a blackmail risk. The family asked for prayers.

He should count his blessings anyway. Had his particular kink run toward dressing as a dog - we all know what happened to Cricket.

Why Your Subscription Matters

Independent journalism answers to readers—not advertisers, corporations, or access-hungry editors. No story gets killed because it upsets a sponsor. No punch gets pulled because someone important made a phone call.

Your support makes possible sharp commentary, fearless satire, and reporting that follows the story wherever it leads. In an era of manufactured narratives and algorithmic blandness, that independence isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity.

Subscribe to The Powell House Press. Or settle for content that tells you what someone else wants you to hear.

©2026 All Rights Reserved | The Powell House Press

Subscribe now

Speaker Mike Johnson. Look past the dewy skin. The practiced smile. The soft piety wrapped in the adolescent confidence of a high school boy who just got a hand job behind the bleachers in the shadow of Friday night lights. For a while, you want to wave it off. Let him have his moment. The assumption is that time will do what it always does, reduce him to what he is: another forgettable congressman from a forgettable district, dressed up in Warby Parker frames and a Jos. A. Bank suit, playing statesman in a city full of them.

It’s not that simple. He has enabled the United States into an undeclared war. He has the power to do something about it. He won’t. Understanding why is the story. It is a terrifying peek behind the curtain.

Johnson isn’t just a type. He’s a concentration of several troubling ones. He represents a particular strain of American public life where religion gets reshaped into something rigid and punitive, where the Constitution becomes a prop rather than a framework, and where the responsibilities of office run a very distant second to personal ideology. Washington has seen true believers before. It has rarely handed one the gavel.

Subscribe now

From a distance, his personal life presents as orderly. Almost golden. Up close, it feels plated. Too smooth, too curated, ultimately fragile. Scratch it and the base metal shows through. It’s not what it seems.

The same applies to his family life, which reads as either paradox or outright contradiction, depending on the day.

Take the now-public arrangement between Johnson and his teenage son: an “accountability” app monitoring pornography use. On its face, moral discipline. Step back, and it’s hard to ignore how strange it is. Adolescence is precisely the period when privacy and autonomy begin to matter, when curiosity about bodies and sexuality is both normal and developmentally essential. Every serious clinician will tell you so. Johnson, apparently, does not consult serious clinicians.

This is not an argument that pornography is harmless. It isn’t. But in a world where young people are navigating substance use, mental health crises, and social collapse, this level of surveillance focused with such intensity on one aspect of a teenager’s private life reveals something about the surveyor as much as the surveilled.

More unsettling is that Johnson chose to make it public. What might have stayed inside the house became something else entirely. A disclosure that exposed his son to scrutiny during one of the most sensitive phases of development. That decision says as much as the monitoring itself. It is the act of a man who has confused righteousness with performance for so long he no longer knows the difference.

There is something worth naming here. A household that monitors a teenager’s pornography use, runs a counseling practice that catalogs sexual sin in forensic detail, and produces operating agreements grouping gay people alongside those who abuse animals — that household is thinking about sex constantly. Categorizing it, documenting it, watching for it. The preoccupation is total. At some point the surveillance becomes its own kind of fixation, and the distance between the monitor and the monitored gets hard to measure. A horny teenager, at least, isn’t charging by the hour.

Arrangements like that don’t emerge in isolation. They reflect a worldview that shapes not just parenting, but marriage, work, and identity. In Johnson’s case, that worldview is a total system, and it reaches into every corner of life. Nowhere is that more visible than in the professional path of his wife.

Kelly Renee Lary Johnson began as a schoolteacher, earning a degree in elementary education from Louisiana Tech University before shifting into counseling. She later operated a faith-based practice, Onward Christian Counseling Services, offering guidance to individuals, couples, and families through a “biblically based” model incorporating temperament theory common in certain Christian counseling circles. It sounds credentialed. It sounds clinical. It is neither.

Her titles, “Licensed Pastoral Counselor” and “Certified Temperament Counselor,” come from the National Christian Counselors Association. These are religious certifications. Not state-issued mental health licenses. The distinction is not semantic. It is everything.

Legally, that places her work in the category of pastoral or ministerial counseling, not regulated clinical practice. She is permitted to offer faith-based guidance. She is not licensed as a psychologist or professional counselor under state law. Her services are not subject to the standards, oversight, or scope-of-practice requirements that govern licensed mental health professionals. A person in genuine crisis, sitting across from Kelly Johnson, has fewer legal protections than they would at a licensed therapist’s office. That is not an accident. It the money-making plan. All cash and no training.

That gap between the language of counseling and the reality of its regulation becomes more concerning when paired with the beliefs informing the practice. On her business’s website, a 2017 operating agreement groups homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender identity alongside bestiality and incest as sinful and offensive to God, while staking out a hardline position on life beginning at conception.

Within that framework, the impulse to monitor and control behavior, especially sexual behavior, makes perfect sense. If the boundaries are that narrow, the perceived risk of deviation becomes enormous. Everything becomes a threat. Everyone becomes a candidate for correction.

When those beliefs are paired with the language of counseling and offered to the public for a fee, the potential for harm is not theoretical. The presentation suggests clinical authority. The foundation is explicitly doctrinal. That is a dangerous combination.

The pattern doesn’t stop at home.

Before politics, Johnson built his legal career around religious liberty advocacy. He worked with the Alliance Defending Freedom as both attorney and spokesperson, focusing on First Amendment claims tied to the free exercise of religion. His work touched on abortion, marriage law, and public religious expression, including involvement in defending Louisiana’s 2004 constitutional amendment defining marriage. He later founded Freedom Guard, continuing as chief counsel, representing individuals and religious organizations in disputes with government entities. Much of this practice centered on conscience objections, public religious expression, and conflicts arising in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges. His work also included litigation connected to the Ark Encounter project, particularly around tax treatment. They didn’t want to pay.

Framed one way, this is constitutional law. Framed honestly, it is a highly selective interpretation of it, one that consistently elevates a specific religious viewpoint while colliding with the civil rights of others.

That same impulse, to formalize belief into structure, shows up even more clearly in Johnson’s attempt to build a law school.

Around 2010, he was selected as founding dean of a proposed law school at Louisiana College. The goal was a Christian law school grounded in a biblical worldview, training attorneys to approach the Constitution and public policy through explicitly religious principles. The ambition was not small. The execution was catastrophic.

The project ran into immediate structural problems. Louisiana College was experiencing internal governance disputes, leadership instability, and conflicts between trustees and faculty. The law school failed to secure accreditation, struggled with fundraising, and could not demonstrate the financial stability required to move forward. The situation deteriorated further amid allegations of financial mismanagement, leading to lawsuits and deeper institutional fracture. Johnson resigned as founding dean in 2012. No students. No accreditation. No program.

In another career, that kind of failure might have been definitive. Here, it became a pivot point. The faithful are nothing if not resilient.

Between 2012 and his election to Congress in 2016, Johnson returned to legal advocacy with Freedom Guard, maintaining ties to the Alliance Defending Freedom. His focus remained consistent. Then something else took shape: a rebrand.

Johnson began presenting himself more broadly as a “constitutional lawyer.” A label that carries neutrality and authority. In practice, his work remained anything but neutral. His legal efforts repeatedly sought to embed a particular religious framework into public law, often under the banner of freedom, with the consistent effect of narrowing it for others. He borrowed the vocabulary of the Founders and filled it with theology. Nobody much noticed.

The tension between how the work is described and what it does runs through his entire career.

It also surfaces in how he presents himself publicly. In an interview with Katie Miller, Johnson and his wife offer a glimpse into their dynamic. Sitting together, Kelly Johnson appears composed and firmly rooted in the same ideological framework that defines their professional lives. At one point, she compares the male brain to spaghetti. Johnson nods along, whether out of agreement or habit is unclear. The roles are settled. The script is familiar. The worldview is intact. It has all the warmth of a corporate training video and all the flexibility of concrete.

The personal, the professional, and the ideological all point in the same direction. Mike and Kelly Johnson have built a shared project, one that merges faith, authority, and public life into a single, tightly controlled paradigm paved with money. It is, in its way, impressive. It is also, in its way, terrifying.

The framework’s danger is what it does to truth. It allows falsehoods to be enshrined as fact. It serves a lawyer well when the laws answer to a higher authority than the courts. When the ultimate judge communicates legal interpretations through tongues and prayer rather than decisions and precedent. The complexities of the human mind and its pathos become devils and hobgoblins, not problems rooted in trauma and neuroscience. It is a binary world. Men, then women. A separate but almost equal paradigm where the friction it causes in the real world is simply prayed away.

It is a world with an artificial truth. This is the take-home.

Mike Johnson’s relationship with the truth is non-existent. The man created the “America First Award” and handed it to a president who has made billions off the office itself. He stood there with a garish gold-plated eagle while American troops deployed across the globe without a congressional declaration of war. A declaration that is his constitutional responsibility to bring to the floor. Instead he smiled for the camera and tossed a golden statue to his false god.

In a strange way it all makes sense. Jesus didn’t write the Constitution, so why should Mike have to play by those pagan rules?

In his twisted reality the United States is not at war. Trump is not getting rich. And he is a patriot.

This is who Mike Johnson sees in the mirror. Funny, I see a zealot in the Speaker’s chair.

Why Your Subscription Matters

Independent journalism answers to readers—not advertisers, corporations, or access-hungry editors. No story gets killed because it upsets a sponsor. No punch gets pulled because someone important made a phone call.

Your support makes possible sharp commentary, fearless satire, and reporting that follows the story wherever it leads. In an era of manufactured narratives and algorithmic blandness, that independence isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity.

Subscribe to The Powell House Press. Or settle for content that tells you what someone else wants you to hear.

©2026 All Rights Reserved | The Powell House Press

As reported in the March 8th post of The Powell House Press, the Chatham Zoning Board of Appeals had decided at the last minute to “delay” their decision on 509 Bashford Road’s tasting room applicati…

Read more

Tonight, the Town of Chatham receives the Zoning Board of Appeals decision on whether Ed and Cherie Williams can use their garage for something. Just what that use is? Good question, and now a largel…

Read more

Scroll through social media for five minutes and you’ll find them. The influencers hawking mystery shakes. The telehealth clinics pushing GLP-1s to anyone with a credit card. The THC-infused everythi…

Read more

I wonder at times what happens when a person is elected to office and reason seems to fly out the window. I suppose it’s that same mental switch that allows them to think that if they ignore somethin…

Read more

There is a kind of man who never takes no for an answer. He carries himself like the outcome is already settled. He has the air of confidence and the stink of arrogance.

Subscribe now

This week I wrote about a few …

Read more

As the town of Chatham waits for the Zoning Board of Appeals to decide if the garage at 509 Bashford Road is appropriate as a subordinate structure — a tasting room for commercial use, for an unlicen…

Read more

I have thought of writing this for some time now, the way you mean to clean out a junk drawer, aware of it every morning when you dig through it looking for something ordinary and out of place, like a safety pin or a battery; deciding to dig through it and look for what matters; circling the task in the mind and then, inevitably, setting it aside.

Even the junk has meaning, or is it just complications? Personal history implicates other people’s privacy, or maybe in this case, their junk. I have always wanted to believe in privacy, the way I believe in rinsing a coffee pot when it’s drained. An unexamined ethos or maybe just a habit. Now at times I think my routine skates on the thin ice of irresponsibility, one that dims a warning. All in the name of an artificial game called fairness.

Read more

At the center is the case of Philip Esformes, who ran one of the largest healthcare fraud schemes in U.S. history. Despite defrauding Medicare and Medicaid and abusing vulnerable patients, he received clemency through a network of religious affiliation, charitable giving, and political access—particularly connections tied to Kushner and organizations like the Aleph Institute.

The essay draws a parallel between this system and the tactics of televangelists like Jim Bakker and Joel Osteen—not in theology, but in structure: build trust through faith, convert that trust into money and influence, and then reframe accountability as an attack on belief itself.

It then widens the lens to Kushner’s post-White House career, particularly his private equity firm Affinity Partners, which secured billions from foreign governments—most notably Saudi Arabia—despite having no track record. The argument is that these deals function less like traditional investments and more like rewards for political access and influence.

Underlying all of this is a broader claim: religious identity, philanthropy, and political power are being fused into a system that shields elite actors from consequences. Whether it’s pardons, financial deals, or public narratives, the same pattern repeats—wealth is justified, scrutiny is deflected, and the language of faith is used as cover.

The conclusion is blunt: this isn’t about religion or ideology. It’s about power and money—operating behind a moral shield that many people are reluctant to question.

Why Your Subscription Matters

Independent journalism answers to readers—not advertisers, corporations, or access-hungry editors. No story gets killed because it upsets a sponsor. No punch gets pulled because someone important made a phone call.

Your support makes possible sharp commentary, fearless satire, and reporting that follows the story wherever it leads. In an era of manufactured narratives and algorithmic blandness, that independence isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity.

Subscribe to The Powell House Press. Or settle for content that tells you what someone else wants you to hear.

Subscribe now

When I saw him in his deposition, the way he managed his hair, that tempest-in-a-teapot cowlick right above his eyebrow, the intensity of his eyes, the way his tee shirt peeked out of his crewneck sw…

Read more

©2026 All Rights Reserved | josh@thepowellhousepress.com

There is a sermon that American audiences have heard so many times, delivered in so many registers, from so many pulpits and podiums and cable news green rooms, that it has acquired the smooth, worn …

Read more

It seems that in more recent times America has developed almost an appetite for corruption — a certain tolerance for grift and a reverence for the rich. Toss in characters whose colors and flaws seem plagiarized from Tennessee Williams’ diary: A plastic surgeon and a wife named after a fortified wine, replete with a French twist. A northeast farmer with a Tulane education and the ethics of a bayou politician. A well-meaning collection of town elders who seem perplexed by a growing chorus of discontent from the townsfolk. Indeed, it seems almost literary. But it’s not a literary work; it’s real life. And maybe Chatham never had an appetite for any of this — maybe, just maybe, they had a tolerance. It could be that a desire to be neighborly was mistaken for something else. This could be less Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and more To Kill a Mockingbird, where true justice proves more durable than Big Daddy.

Justice has a biblical tone to it, doesn’t it? But strip away the Johns, Pauls, and the story of all the world’s creatures on a precursor to a Carnival Cruise, and justice becomes less abstract. It’s measured on a scale of laws: ones you abide by or the ones you break. Like a game of Jenga, the Williams have continued to pull out pieces of the legal tower to win the game, but now it’s worth looking at whether they have brought down the high-rise with their need to win.

Subscribe now

Indeed, Team Williams — and it does look like a team — have done a lot to win their coveted wedding venue. But was it clever, or was it simply breaking the law? If they broke the law, or bent it out of shape, if team members violated their ethical obligations, then the question becomes: how effective are the local powers that be in protecting the land and its citizens? Or will it take a judge?

You can compare their approach to the Planning Board, the ZBA, the Building Department and the County to a child who, denied screen time by Mommy, goes padding off to find Daddy. But here’s the thing: it’s not just that. What the Williams and their lawyers might have been doing actually has a name. It’s called “segmentation”, and it is illegal. I’ll get to that, and I’ll explain precisely why this whole affair is looking the way it’s looking. But before we dive into the deep end of the legal pool, let’s linger for a moment in the shallow end.

A Form Full of Something from a Bull, but no Cows in Sight

What exactly do you call it when someone lies on a government form, signs it, and submits it? I want to be specific. I’m talking about the 303-b application, the form filed to move a property into an agricultural district in Columbia County.

NY Penal Law § 175.30 — Offering a False Instrument for Filing in the Second Degree, which covers knowingly presenting a written instrument containing false information to a public office, with the expectation it will become part of the official record: a Class A misdemeanor. § 175.35 takes it further, to the First Degree, when that same act is carried out with intent to defraud the state or any political subdivision: a Class E felony.

Submitting one that contains false information? That’s considerably more than losing screen time for the weekend.

Last October, Cherie Williams filed her application to legitimize Fox Hill Vineyard as a real farm — Pinocchio fashion. Like much of what the Williams have “created,” the document had a familiar flair for invention. I know this because I have a copy of the signed and submitted application — the entire packet, obtained without a FOIL request. The County’s own Resolution 70-2026 required them to post it publicly, and they didn’t. A gentle nudge was all it took to get it emailed to me.

Now don’t jump to the conclusion that the packet was complete. Missing is a memo from the Agriculture and Farmland Protection Board stating its rationale for finding no environmental impact — a document that was supposed to be included. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Anything bearing Collins’s stamp tends to require something close to surgery to extract. The file itself, however, was illuminating.

There in all its PDF glory is document 303-b asking for inclusion into Agriculture District 10. It was filled out and signed by Cherie Williams, not Edwin. He doesn’t own the land, she does. This is not unusual – a lot of surgeons do this to protect their home – the wife is a safe harbor in stormy malpractice seas.

The numbers on the form read with the serene confidence of someone who never expected to be fact-checked: Total Acres of all parcel(s) to be included: 53.70. Total Acres Used for Agricultural Purposes: 51.7. No Cherie, no. A third of that land is woods and wetlands, the kind of quietly lovely, thoroughly unfarmed terrain that produces nothing more agricultural than atmosphere. The Williams are already pocketing a full tax exemption, courtesy of Donal Collins rolling up some hay bales on their behalf. The real number isn’t 51.7 acres of agricultural productivity. It’s closer to 5.17, a decimal point that somehow migrated rightward, taking the truth with it.

Tax minimization is, of course, a sport played enthusiastically across the social spectrum, from Park Avenue to the rural counties. One barely raises an eyebrow. But the creativity on display in Part 2 of the application is something else entirely — a work of pastoral fiction so ambitious it practically demands its own imprint.

Cherie Williams describes the property as “presently cleared of trees and primarily utilized for beef cattle operations,” managed by “Local Farmer Dunn Collins of Chatham, NY” for “grazing beef cattle and harvesting hay.” It reads like a brochure for an agritourism destination, doesn’t it. The only problem (and it is rather a significant one) is that there have never been cattle on this land during the Williams’s tenure. Nope, not a one. There hasn’t been a head of cattle on that land since I was a boy living down the road over 50 years ago. There is no fencing. The cattle exist exclusively on the form, which is to say, they do not exist at all. Not at 509 Bashford Road and that is the land at issue.

It’s Part 3 where the application really begins to unspool. Filed in October 2025, it claims 200 vines, not the 400 cited in the application submitted to the town of Chatham, and certainly not the 5,000 the Williams claimed to be planning in their December 5th, 2025 email to me. Numbers, it seems, are treated as suggestions in the Fox Hill universe, fluid and negotiable depending on the audience. An honest survey of the property tells a different story: roughly 20 acres consumed by house, woods, solar infrastructure, and wetlands. The credible agricultural footprint is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 acres, not 51, not 53, not whatever figure best serves the application of the moment.

And then there is the matter of Old MacDonal who has no farm on Bashford Road. Donal Collins. Dunn Collins. Supervisor Collins. The Town Supervisor of the very municipality where all of this is unfolding, a detail that the form, in its chatty way, attempts to obfuscate or implicate. It is hard to tell. His dual role as both the agricultural steward of Fox Hill and the elected head of town government has been, to put it gently, a topic of animated private conversation — both in Hudson and Chatham. The question of who knew what and when about 509 Bashford Road’s ambitions has circulated at the level of knowing glances and careful phrasing. And a few questions continue to simmer. When did the town of Chatham know? Did they have an obligation to know? Was the County required to notify them before waving the property into Agricultural District 10?

Some members of the town board have apparently been genuinely uncertain on this last point, wondering aloud whether the notification obligation truly fell to the County and whether anyone in Chatham actually received it. The investigative rigor on display would not have taxed Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys — separate or sleuthing together.

The answer, it turns out, is printed right in Part 5 of the very application that Mrs. Williams — like Cher, only Cherie — signed, in language admirably free of ambiguity: “I further understand that all applications will be forwarded to the local municipality for comments.”

The form knew. And now, so does everyone else. If it is unclear to some readers let me make it plain: it became “town” business when the “town” was asked to comment.

Which brings us, with the inevitability of a bad renovation that keeps requiring new permits, to what this form and the attorney’s letter that followed it three months later actually prove when you set them side by side. Because the beauty of these two documents, read together rather than in the comfortable isolation each was designed for, is that they corroborate something with almost theatrical clarity. Something more significant than Cherie’s big little lies, they corroborate segmentation.

Segmentation: The Strategy That Breaks the Law

The State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA), is New York’s primary environmental law. Before any government agency approves an action, it must first assess that action’s potential environmental impact. Full disclosure. Full review. Informed decision-making. The whole point is to look before you leap. It is, in other words, the precise opposite of what has been happening at 509 Bashford Road.

Segmentation is how applicants like the Williams try to game that system. The rule under SEQRA is that a project must be reviewed in its entirety. You cannot break a large, interconnected undertaking into smaller pieces and review each piece in isolation, as if the other pieces didn’t exist or weren’t planned. The regulations are unambiguous on this point. It is prohibited under 6 NYCRR § 617.3(g). Not discouraged. Not frowned upon. Prohibited.

The classic move goes like this. Rather than presenting a complete vision to a single reviewing body, applicants advance a project incrementally, across different phases, before different municipalities and agencies, over time. What begins as one modest application becomes, years later, something considerably different and often larger than any single board was ever asked to evaluate. Each body sees only what is in front of it at that moment. None is positioned to assess what the pieces add up to. The reviewing agency, seeing only the slice in front of it, sees nothing alarming and approves. Then the next slice. Then the next. Eventually a full project materializes, assembled from approvals that were each individually waved through without anyone ever reviewing what they added up to. The frog, as they say, does not notice the water heating.

Now look at the 303-b application. Filed in October 2025, it asks Columbia County to include 509 Bashford Road in Agricultural District 10. On its face it describes a modest farming operation: some hay, some cattle (phantom cattle, as we’ve established) and 200 vines (not 400 or 5000 according to Dr. Williams himself) on a fraction of an acre (not 51). The language is quietly bucolic. Nothing about this filing, reviewed on its own merits by the County Agricultural and Farmland Protection Board, announces itself as the opening legal maneuver in a campaign to establish a commercial venue.

But buried in Part III is a sentence that rather gives the game away. The applicant describes the long-term intention as expanding the vineyard over the next four years, with rows mapped across the hillside in a “progressive planting strategy” designed to maximize sunlight, drainage, and air circulation for “premium grape production.” The scale of that ambition was made explicit by Dr. Williams himself in his December 5, 2025 email, where he disclosed the target of 5,000 vines — along with, for good measure, his farming expertise and his attention to following the law. Five thousand vines is not 200 any more than a garage is a tasting room. But this, the 5000, is nowhere to be found in the application process.

There is also the matter of proposed use and municipal permits/approvals required to establish this use, which the form specifically asks for. The answer filed: “The future plans for the property include expansion of the vineyard with the addition of a tasting room which was determined to be a permitted use by the Town of Chatham CEO.” The tasting room is disclosed, yes. The fact that there is no licensed winery nor a permit to sell wine? A disclosure that the tasting room approval was in active dispute, already the subject of a neighbor’s appeal, before the application was voted on — those are nowhere to be found. They exist with the grazing cows. The County board reviewing the 303-b sees a farm seeking agricultural district protection. It does not see a commercial winery seeking regulatory cover. It does not see the scope. It does not see the ongoing litigation. And remember, Donal Collins’s big lift was recusal — and only after the horse was out of the barn (and no, there are no horses on 509 Bashford either).

Then comes Lawrence Howard’s January 2026 letter to the Zoning Board of Appeals, which performs the opposite narrowing trick with equal elegance. Where the 303-b quietly buries the commercial ambitions beneath the pastoral language of fictional beef cattle and a one-man hay harvest, the Howard letter minimizes the tasting room until it is barely a whisper of an action. The proposal, the letter informs us, is limited to “the interior modification of an existing garage and the expansion of the parking area to accommodate around eight vehicles.” Gatherings of 15 to 20 people, no more than fifteen times per year, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. only. Nothing to see here. Note to YELP: sedans and minivans only.

And then the keystone argument: no site plan review required, because the tasting room is simply permitted as accessory use. This matters enormously. Site plan review is the mechanism through which SEQRA environmental review is typically triggered for projects of this kind. If the attorney can persuade the ZBA that the tasting room is an as-of-right agricultural use requiring no site plan review, then no SEQRA review ever gets conducted, not for the tasting room, not for the parking, not for the 5,000-vine expansion, not for whatever phase follows. The legal architecture depends entirely on keeping each piece below the threshold that would require the whole to be examined.

Place the two documents side by side and what emerges is a project that neither filing has fully disclosed to the body reviewing it. A 53-acre property in Chatham is being systematically repositioned from residential-agricultural to a functioning commercial winery: tasting room, expanded parking, 5,000-vine long-term plan, gatherings of up to 20 people fifteen times a year, and future phases presumably to follow. That project, reviewed honestly as a whole by any single body with SEQRA obligations, would require a coordinated environmental assessment: traffic, noise, drainage, water use, impacts on neighboring properties, cumulative effects across all phases.

Instead, the County is asked to consider only whether an over-estimated 51 acres of land should be included in an agricultural district. The Town ZBA is asked to consider only whether a garage conversion is an as-of-right accessory use. No single agency has been asked, or apparently permitted, to consider all of it together. That is not an accident. That is the strategy.

The applications are not independent. The agricultural district status obtained through the 303-b strengthens the argument that the tasting room is an agricultural use. The tasting room, once approved, anchors the case for the vineyard expansion. The vineyard expansion justifies the agricultural district inclusion. Each piece depends on the others. They were planned together and are being approved separately, which is, with the concision that legal language occasionally achieves, the definition of an impermissibly segmented project under SEQRA.

The Howard letter even inadvertently confirms the interdependence when it argues that wine production is an agricultural use regardless of where the grapes are processed. That argument only needs to be made if you are anticipating a scale of operation where the question becomes legally relevant. A farm stand selling jam does not require a three-page brief on the agricultural nature of off-site processing.

Courts in New York have consistently held that related actions must be reviewed together when they are part of a single plan, or when the approval of one is contingent on or connected to the approval of others. The test is not whether the applications were filed separately. The test is whether they are functionally interdependent pieces of a larger whole. The 303-b application’s own disclosure of the 4 year expansion plan makes it very difficult to argue otherwise. You cannot claim two actions are unrelated when one of them describes the future the other is designed to enable.

The mosaic has been assembled one tile at a time, with each tile presented to a different set of eyes. But the picture has been visible from the beginning, to anyone willing to look at all the tiles at once.

And the fragmentation of review is only part of the problem. Because a process this carefully constructed to avoid scrutiny depends on one additional condition: that the public never gets a clear look at any of it. As it turns out, that condition has been well maintained.

Subscribe now

This has been going on for over six years. Six years of shifting numbers, phantom cattle, and boards and offices handed single pieces of a puzzle that only makes sense whole. Six years during which the applicants have claimed, depending on the audience, everything from a modest hobby vineyard to a full commercial venue with tastings, weddings, and five thousand vines. And at least three of those years with Donal Collins — the Town Supervisor with an undisclosed relationship to the property — sitting at the head of the table while questions of notice, comment, and approval circulated beneath him like a current he preferred not to name.

And through all of it, there remains yet another structural failure that has operated in quiet service of the same outcome: the question of public notice.

The Notice That Notified Almost No One

At a recent Chatham Town Board meeting, Supervisor Collins offered what passed for a moment of transparency — or perhaps merely a deflection from the fact that he had shared none of this with the community or his board, as required by Resolution 72-24 (if you don’t know about Resolution 72-24 you can read it here). The county, he mentioned, was reviewing its notice policies. Expensive, he said. Questionable efficacy. It was the kind of offhand remark that invites no follow-up. But the efficacy, it turns out, is worth examining in some detail.

There is a legal requirement, before a property can be waved into an Agricultural District, that the public be notified. A hearing must be announced. The community must have the opportunity to weigh in. This is not a courtesy. It is the law. And in Columbia County, that legal obligation is discharged through publication in the local newspaper of record, the Columbia County Register Star.

Here is what that means in practice.

I reached out to the Register Star directly and communicated with a woman named Rhona. What she shared was instructive. The paper prints 4,600 copies total, distributed between Greene and Columbia Counties. Sixty percent, 2,760 copies, go to Columbia County. Of those, she told me, the majority stay in the city of Hudson.

So let’s be generous. Let’s say Hudson absorbs roughly half the Columbia County run, call it 1,400 copies, and the remaining 1,360 are distributed across the eighteen towns by household.

Chatham’s households number roughly 1,640, about 7.6 percent of the combined household count across those eighteen towns. Apply that share to 1,360 remaining papers and Chatham receives, at most, about 103 copies.

One hundred and three newspapers. For a town of four thousand people.

That is 2.5 percent of Chatham’s population, and that was the generous version. The real number, once you account for what actually stays in Hudson, is smaller still. We are now talking about a town being legally notified through a document that reached, on the most charitable arithmetic available, roughly 2.5 percent of its residents.

The notice was published, the box was ticked, and the hearing was announced — in the technical sense of the word. But whether anyone in Chatham actually saw it, understood that 509 Bashford Road was about to be folded into Agricultural District 10, or grasped what that inclusion was meant to enable, was another matter entirely. The 97.5 percent of town residents who never received a copy were left, as with so much in this affair, in the dark.

Supervisor Collins was right about one thing: the efficacy is questionable. What he did not mention is that a notice that reaches almost no one is not a flaw in this application — it is a feature of it. Segmented review, captured oversight, a public notice regime that functions as formality rather than genuine mechanism of public awareness: these are not separate failures that happened to coincide. They are the architecture. Each reinforces the others. Each depends on the others. And it is precisely what Collins, the Williams, and their lawyers have depended on from the beginning.

So here is where the Jenga tower lands. Not on the Williams. Not on the supervisor who somehow managed to be both the town’s elected steward and the man with an undisclosed business relationship with the very people whose application he was overseeing. It lands, as it always does in these arrangements, on the people who were never invited to the table — the residents of Chatham and Columbia County, whose tax dollars will now fund the legal defense of a flawed process engineered to benefit two people pursuing a vanity vineyard and a party venue, secretly shepherded through by a supervisor with a documented history of sidelining his fellow board members and a personal stake in the outcome.

Both municipalities are already late on their FOIL responses. That is not a footnote. Under New York law, that lateness is a constructive denial, and it means that any citizen with standing can walk into Supreme Court today and file an Article 78 proceeding to compel production — with attorney’s fees attached. The taxpayers of Chatham will pay those fees. The taxpayers of Columbia County will pay those fees. Donal Collins, depending on what a court makes of his rather remarkable arrangement — a town supervisor with an undisclosed connection to a property whose approvals repeatedly crossed his desk — may find that his official title offers less protection than he has assumed.

The legal exposure is real and it is layered: a potentially false instrument filed with the county, a SEQRA process that was never conducted, a notice regime that reached 2.5 percent of the town it was meant to inform, an administrative record missing its own required environmental justification, and a six-year segmentation strategy that New York courts have consistently refused to excuse regardless of how elegantly it was assembled.

But strip away the statutes and the case citations and what you have is simpler and older than any of it. A community’s trust was exploited.

Not that it matters to Dr. Williams. He made his position clear: he “doesn’t give a f*ck about what the neighbors think.” It is, in retrospect, the Rosetta Stone of this entire affair. A man that indifferent to the people around him doesn’t lose much sleep over what he tells them — or the boards that represent them, or the forms that require the truth under penalty of law. Indifference to people and indifference to facts travel together. They always have.

That indifference may yet prove more costly than any filing error or procedural overreach. Because Chatham was paying attention. The neighbors do give a f*ck. And so, as it turns out, do certain government agencies — think the NYS Comptroller, and yes, maybe even the Chatham Town Board.

This may not be the Bravo TV ending Ed and Cherie Williams wrote for themselves. But Chatham may yet get its To Kill a Mockingbird moment. True justice, as that title reminds us, has a way of being more durable than Big Daddy. Or, in this case, Donal.

Note: At the time of publication, the Town of Chatham had requested a six-day extension on the outstanding FOIL request; Columbia County indicated it was working on its response but offered no firm delivery date. They remain out of legal compliance (not that I’ll sue). The Chatham Town Board, the Planning Board, and the Zoning Board of Appeals, as well as the Columbia County Chairman, were each contacted for comment on multiple occasions. None responded.

Why Your Subscription Matters

Independent journalism answers to readers—not advertisers, corporations, or access-hungry editors. No story gets killed because it upsets a sponsor. No punch gets pulled because someone important made a phone call.

Your support makes possible sharp commentary, fearless satire, and reporting that follows the story wherever it leads. In an era of manufactured narratives and algorithmic blandness, that independence isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity.

Subscribe to The Powell House Press. Or settle for content that tells you what someone else wants you to hear.

Subscribe now

©2026 All Rights Reserved | josh@thepowellhousepress.com

Read more

Note: this week’s Wine Wars installment is being pushed to Friday or Saturday — and it will be worth the wait. What’s coming involves documents that have not been seen publicly and are damning and ju…

Read more

Start with a number. In 1952, the United States recorded 57,628 cases of poliomyelitis. Thousands were paralyzed. More than three thousand died. In hospitals across the country, children lay inside i…

Read more

©2026 All Rights Reserved | josh@thepowellhousepress.com