Beginning in 2020, for five long years, wrongly secured injunctions didn't just muzzle me — Clifford R. Fischer and his accomplices surgically removed me from my entire professional life. I was forbidden to enter my own offices. Forbidden to speak to my employees. Forbidden to contact my clients, or a single soul who might become one. And since nearly every home-based business and commercial tenant on earth is a potential Fischer client, that last prohibition did what it was designed to do: it killed my ability to work and severed me from the entire business world in one stroke. The pursuit of happiness? I was barred from my life's work and forbidden to speak freely about my own life — legally erased not only from all I had built, but from meaningful connection with almost everyone I knew. Tell me: in what world does that not equate to the denial of one’s pursuit of happiness? The injunctions causing me this pain were finally overturned on December 9, 2025.
What made these betrayals cut even deeper is that I was never their only victim. To wage his campaign against me, Cliff apparently felt he had to betray nearly everyone close to me and to the company we had built together — one by one. Others, young and mature professionals, who had sacrificed and given years to decades to Fischer. To Cliff, they were collateral damage — acceptable losses in a war only he had declared. But there is no such thing as acceptable loss when it is measured in people. The human cost reached far beyond me: families fractured, friendships and work-family bonds of decades severed in an afternoon, the lives of people who had poured years of loyalty, hard work, and sacrifice into Fischer upended — loyalty repaid with wreckage. That is evil.
There are others — good people who placed their trust in me, and who paid dearly when I was wrongly forbidden to support and protect them. They paid in ways they never chose or deserved. I am not yet free to speak their names. But I will. Every one of them is written down. Every one of them will have their day on the page. Silence in the form of sealed court proceedings protected the people who did this. Sunshine in the form of public scrutiny will enlighten the world as to their evil acts, they will not remain protected for much longer.
Corporate officers and directors — and attorneys sworn to uphold the law, including some of my own — appeared to facilitate serious misconduct, or at the very least, looked the other way. The actions and inactions by those from inside and outside my companies, and the actions and inactions inside courtrooms by my own attorneys shielded the wrongdoers and allowed this situation to compound into a disastrous, colossal mess in the form of a receiver-controlled sale that was anything but a transparent, arm’s-length, third-party transaction it is purported to be. The very system built to deliver justice has served to shield the wrongdoers and the powerful instead.
Everything I have described — the injunctions, the betrayals, the silence enforced by people sworn to prevent exactly that — was not only a personal catastrophe. It was an education. It taught me what liberty and equality actually are, and what it costs when they fail, in a way no classroom ever could. I don't write about these words as theory. I have lived on both sides of them, and it changed how I understand the two ideals this country was founded on.
Before those years, "liberty" and "equality" were words I saluted without examining. Afterward, I understood they are not slogans at all. They are profound, often competing ideas that press against each other in every life and every law — and depending on the context, they can mean almost opposite things.
Take a claim I first read with resistance. In The Unruly Monkey, John Train writes that "liberty and equality are contradictory, since only heavy government control — meaning reduced liberty — can prevent the able and energetic from rising to the top and staying there." My instinct was to disagree. Then I saw what he was actually naming: not equality before the law, but equality of outcome. And on that, he is right. You cannot flatten the natural differences between people — in talent, effort, character, drive — without a heavy hand forcing the flattening. The hand is the problem. Every inch of enforced sameness is paid for in freedom.
I believe deeply in the other kind of liberty: the freedom to use your God-given gifts to build, create, and pursue happiness. The years I was restricted from doing exactly that were among the saddest of my life. And I've come to believe my rights were violated in part because of real flaws in our legal system — power that polices itself, authority without adequate check, justice that is not equally available to everyone who needs it.
Which is why the other half of the equality question matters so much to me. Train draws a distinction worth keeping: "Equality is an important legal conception, not a fact of anthropology." The first half is exactly right. Equality before the law is not in tension with liberty — it is the thing that guarantees liberty. When it fails, when power tilts the scales, it is always the vulnerable who pay, regardless of what the facts or the law actually say. I know, because I watched it happen to me.
So here is the distinction I had to lose five years to understand. There are two equalities, and they are not friends. Equality before the law protects freedom. Equality of outcome consumes it. The first says the same rules apply to everyone. The second says the same result must reach everyone — and someone powerful always has to force that result, at the cost of the very freedoms that let people rise in the first place.
This tension is woven through our founding. The framers declared all men created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, then built a structure — separation of powers, checks and balances — to protect the liberty that would inevitably produce unequal results among free people. The Fourteenth Amendment later wrote equality before the law into the Constitution itself. They held both ideals at once, on purpose, in tension, because they understood that a free country needs both and can be destroyed by too much of either.
When liberty is stripped away, the pursuit of happiness becomes impossible. When equality before the law is compromised, the pursuit becomes a rigged game. Real liberty requires genuine equality under the law — and it cannot survive the aggressive pursuit of equality of outcome, which always ends by sacrificing the freedoms it claims to serve.
Take away the equality of outcomes, I no longer see liberty and equality as enemies. They are two halves of the American experiment — and I have learned, the hard way, how much wisdom, restraint, and vigilance it takes to hold them in balance. I have learned something else, too, that I would not wish on anyone. You never truly know the weight of liberty, or of equality, while you still hold them. You learn it in the silence after they are taken — when you reach for your own voice, your own work, your own life, and find them gone. I know that weight now. I will spend the rest of my days making sure others never have to.