America’s seafood industry employs around a million people, according to a 2023 U.S. Marine Fisheries Service report, but Daily Signal contributor Steve Cortes says that in places like Maine, government regulation is leading to the sector’s collapse.  

In his new YouTube documentary, “American Seafood: For Our Health and Economy,” Cortes visits the docks of Maine’s shoreline to explore the lobster trade, how federal government oversight drives fishermen out of business, and why the U.S. should catch and consume more seafood. 

The Lobster Man

Chef Andrew Gruel, a former lobsterman, explained the life of a Maine fisherman and the difficulties they face. 

Fishermen, he said, begin their days at 4 or 5 a.m., setting traps and hauling their catches from the cold waters. 

“Lobsterman, it’s a family business. Your grandfather did it, his grandfather did it, but now, these guys they’re at the end of the rope,” Gruel said. “They’re shutting down because they can’t make money anymore.” 

Even as lobster has become more expensive over the last 20 years, Gruel said, the fishermen who catch them are seeing less and less of that profit. 

Regulations

One of the seafood industry’s largest obstacles is government regulation, according to Cortes. 

Because politicians and environmentalists blame lobstermen for the declining population of the right whale, fishermen must now use specialized lines and traps that would not entangle a whale—even though no whale deaths have ever been attributed to lobster equipment. 

Other initiatives also aim at sustaining the fishing population, but Gruel said Maine lobstermen didn’t need government intervention to preserve populations. 

“The fishermen, the ranchers, the farmers, the producers, we are the best stewards of our own environment,” Gruel said. “They [old Maine fishermen] knew that if they overfished their product, then their grandkids wouldn’t have an industry by which to get their living.” 

Predatory Trade

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, America imported $20.3 billion more seafood than it exported in 2023—around 80% of U.S. consumed seafood comes from countries such as Canada, Indonesia, and Vietnam—countries that have cheap labor costs and dubious standards, according to Gruel. 

“They’re using slave labor,” Gruel claimed. “We don’t know what chemicals they use on that—you’ve got traces of chlorine, malachite green, all these antibiotics, cocaine residue, you name it.” 

Sixty percent of these imports are farmed, “junk seafood,” according to Cortes, and is often mislabeled, misleading, and bad for Americans compared to wild-caught or sustainably fished seafood from places like Maine and Louisiana. 

Solutions

While Gruel said fishermen have allies on Capitol Hill such as Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, he also advocated for broader deregulation of and more investment in the domestic fishing industry.  

“We need to catch more fish,” Gruel said. “It’s that simple.” 

“The ocean is the most resilient organism in the world, the most resilient resource,” he added. “We do rehabilitate over time and stocks do rebuild themselves.” 

Deregulation would also lead to greater private investment as businessmen see the longevity of America’s own fisheries. 

“America is blessed with oceans,” Cortes concluded his documentary, “Let’s harness the full potential of that resource, and by doing so, get healthier and wealthier.” 

On March 8, 2020, Anthony Fauci told “60 Minutes” that a healthy person had “no reason to be walking around with a mask.” Within a year, he was applauding the idea of wearing two.

The official explanation is that the science changed—that we learned about presymptomatic and asymptomatic spread. Fauci’s own diary destroys that explanation twice, in his own hand, and what it leaves behind is inventory management, sold to a frightened country as medicine.

I pull back the curtain on the mask war in my new book, “Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison”—and I can tell you what the other side of it looked like, because I was fighting it. While Fauci was on television explaining why Americans did not need masks, I was in the West Wing getting them some—the good kind, the N95 kind essential for first responders.

On Feb. 9, 2020—31 days before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic—I wrote a memo to the Coronavirus Task Force warning that China produced about half the world’s N95 masks, was blocking their export, and that “The U.S. therefore faces the real prospect of a severe mask shortage!”

I asked for an export halt, purchase guarantees for every domestic producer at maximum output, and Buy American rules for the masks that cover an American face.

Then the phone rang. On March 12, a Honeywell vice president told me the company could stand up two new N95 manufacturing lines, in Rhode Island and Arizona, if Washington moved fast. Washington does not move fast. So I gave her my word—no signature, no paper.

Within 24 hours, Honeywell’s trucks, on my word, were hauling production machinery out of Massachusetts. By the end of the first Trump administration, those two manufacturing lines were turning out tens of millions of American-made N95s a month and employing more than a thousand Americans.

That was my mask war. Making masks. Now Fauci’s.

Here is the first thing his diary kills: his alibi for switching his position on masks. Supposedly the guidance changed when science learned that people without symptoms could spread the virus. But in the first days of February 2020, George Gao—the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention—told Fauci directly, in Fauci’s words, “that infected people can be asymptomatic and that asymptomatic people can transmit.”

He knew in the first week of February. He told “60 Minutes” there was no reason for a mask a month later.

Here is the second thing, and it is worse. On June 23, 2020, after a six-hour House hearing, Fauci recorded a run-in with a West Virginia congressman who was “giving me s— about saying early on that we should not wear masks to save them for the HCWs [health care workers] at a time when there was a shortage.”

Read it again. Save them for the health care workers. On Fauci’s own telling, the “no reason” of March 8 was never an assessment of the evidence. It was supply triage. Tell the public not to worry about getting masks—so the masks stay on the shelf for the people who need them, in his judgment, more.

In the same March weeks Anthony Fauci was managing a shortage by misleading Americans about masks, Honeywell’s trucks were rolling toward Rhode Island on nothing but my word, and two factories were preparing to end the shortage he was lying to accommodate. One of us treated it as a production problem and fixed it. The other treated it as a communications problem.

And watch the staircase he climbed. March 31, in the diary: “We probably were too strong in saying masks do not work.” Not the science changed—we were too strong.

By summer: “There’s no doubt that wearing masks protects you.” By autumn: “begging people to wear masks.” By February 2021, two of them.

No reason, to too strong, to no doubt, to begging, to double up—each certainty delivered with exactly the confidence of the one it silently replaced. A scientist updating his communication based on evidence says what he said, what changed, and why. This was a ratchet.

Let me be precise, because flattening this debate was itself the trick. I was never anti-mask; I ran mask production. The mask on those trucks had a federal filtration standard, a fit requirement, and a nurse’s face to protect. What Washington eventually sold under that same four-letter word ran down to a damp and floppy bandanna on a 5-year-old.

And the children paid for it. Fauci’s influence imposed years of face covering on small children at low risk from the disease, without evidence of benefit at that age, while treating the developmental cost to children as not important enough to measure.

Everything I did in that war was supply. What President Trump and I never did was order one free citizen to wear anything.

As for Tony, there is an old line that you can tell when he is lying because his lips are moving. Maybe that is the real reason he wore the mask.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Relations between the United States and Germany may sometimes seem strained at the federal level. However, a group of 28 exchange students from western Germany joined scores of their American counterparts in Henrico County this week to build a bridge, of sorts, between their respective high schools.

The students unveiled an art project on the campus of Mills E. Godwin High School in Henrico County, just days before the German visitors are to return to their homeland. The art is a companion piece to one that many of the same students built over the summer at a school in Homburg, Germany.

The sculpture in Virginia is made up of interlocking wooden pieces anchored to the ground. Students used power tools to install it, which an American art teacher who contributed to the project said made her nervous. But nobody was injured in the course of the installation. On the wooden slats, students wrote messages of hope, such as “a little kindness goes a long way” and “believe in yourself” in English and German.

“The work you’ve done and the words that you have put on these remarkable art pieces are more than just words, and they need to be carried forward,” John Vithoulkas, the Henrico County manager, said at a ceremony to unveil the project.

German sculptor Martin Steinert planned both sculptures. The German installation “shows a wave movement to symbolize the Atlantic Ocean, separating our two schools and our countries,” he said. That first sculpture was finished in June, when Virginia students were visiting Germany. “Its counterpart installation here represents five sails—the sails of a ship capable of crossing that ocean, embodying the hope that many students will continue to make that journey in both directions for years to come.”

Steinert said he was impressed by the way the students collaborated on the project. “The young people worked together, interacted, and supported one another,” he said. “I was deeply impressed and it instilled a sense of optimism in me.”

German teacher Steffan Leonhardt noted that the exchange helps unite the countries at the human level, even when geopolitics may seem unsettled. “It doesn’t matter who is sitting in the White House or the Chancellery in Berlin, it’s the people here who make it happen,” he told a group at the ceremony.

Students from both countries praised the collaboration. “I think this project is really cool, and it definitely shows the cooperation between the two nations,” Shilah Glasneck, a Godwin student, said. “I’ve learned a lot more of the language and a lot more about the culture” of Germany.

“I learned a lot about America,” Xenia Martel said. “We had a lot of fun working on it. We learned a lot about American culture and American schools.”

The exchange program is run by the German American Partnership Program, supported by the Goethe-Institut. It is marking its 30th anniversary this year, although there have been several years when students did not travel because of COVID. This year, 10 Godwin students went to Homburg in June, and 8 German students made the return trip this month.  

Both art projects are fragile and are outdoors, so neither is intended to be permanent.

“It is exposed to the elements, and probably in a few years the school managers will say we have to get rid of it, because it has become unstable,” Leonhardt said. “But we hope that in years to come these exchanges will still be happening.”

Meanwhile, Principal Leigh Dunavant said the high school itself may be renovated in or around  2030. The art would probably need to be moved or taken down before that can begin.