A Monkey with a Machine Gun

How Dr. Castro tried to "strengthen" the Live Local Act.

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.”
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Bonhoeffer wrote that line from a German prison cell in 1943, not long before he was hanged for his role in the plot to assassinate Hitler. His point was that evil at least provokes a sense of unease, and thus “always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion,” while stupidity is immune to reason, impervious to facts, and utterly without defense. You cannot use logic and reason to argue someone out of a position they did not use logic and reason to arrive at in the first place.

Ganz genau, Herr Bonhoeffer!

Given that the very first word in this post is “stupidity,” I’m confident all my readers already know who this post is about. Because who are we kidding, if the last two years have taught us anything, it’s that conferring legislative authority upon a middle-aged adolescent such as Dr. Castro is more dangerous than bestowing that same power upon an overtly corrupt but cognitively unimpaired politician—much the same way giving an AK-47 to a monkey is more dangerous than giving one to an actual mercenary.

Commissioner Castro is deeply humbled and honored by the trust the people of Coral Gables have placed in her.

By the way, I realize that’s a chimp in the GIF above and that chimps are apes, not monkeys. But I needed an alliteration for the title, okay. Just work with me here, people.

Anyway, the stupidity Bonhoeffer was referring to wasn’t your standard low-IQ stupidity. He was actually identifying a kind of socio-psychological phenomenon whereby otherwise intelligent people fall for incredibly dumb ideas through groupthink and emotional manipulation. More specifically, he was referring to the millions of reasonably intelligent German citizens who somehow fell for palpably absurd Nazi propaganda. It’s an observation that, nearly a century later, applies with striking precision to the bizarre spectacle of thousands of intelligent Coral Gables residents eagerly electing a conspicuously braindead permit expeditor with no civic record and obvious ulterior motives to one of the city’s highest offices all because of their seething hatred of Vince Lago and Rhonda Anderson.

In other words, the stupidity here operates on multiple levels.

Live Loca!

At this point, you may be wondering what has prompted this renewed interest in Dr. Castro’s flickering cognition. If so, you probably missed the last commission meeting, specifically item F3: Dr. Castro’s ridiculous resolution urging the Florida Legislature to amend the Live Local Act to calculate affordability using municipal rather than county-wide median incomes.

If passed, her resolution would have encouraged Tallahassee to use Coral Gables’ median income instead of Miami-Dade County’s when calculating “attainable” rents for Live Local projects within the city. Since the Gables has a significantly higher median income than the county as a whole, this would raise the rent threshold that qualifies as “attainable,” making Live Local developments far more profitable here than anywhere else in the county. In other words, developers could charge higher rents while still accessing Live Local’s state-mandated zoning overrides that lead to taller buildings, greater density, reduced parking requirements, and other developer-friendly concessions. In practical terms, Castro’s proposed change would have turned Coral Gables into the most lucrative Live Local target in South Florida, inviting a development bonanza that would permanently reshape the city’s character and scale.

It was, without question, the single dumbest proposal in commission history—which, of course, makes it utterly befitting its sponsor.

Fortunately, the good doctor’s resolution was dead on arrival, as it took approximately .07 seconds for every adult in the room to see just how reckless it was. Well, almost every adult in the room. Ariel, for some reason, only saw the light at the eleventh hour. According to His Holiness, he came into the meeting thinking Dr. Castro’s legislation was “a great idea,” but was ultimately swayed by his colleagues’ counterarguments, the sheer complexity and surprising insight of which is matched only by “Cancer is bad. We should not want to get cancer.”

Really, though, the notion that Ariel had several days to ruminate on this legislation and yet could not spot the gaping hole in its logic (until it was explained to him) is disqualifying in itself. I get that he’s gone all-in on this ‘I’ve been born again and can only see the goodness in everything’ damage-control strategy, but he might want to occasionally set it aside and engage in some rudimentary policy analysis before showing up to vote.

Oh, and if it’s not too much—and since he won’t do the right thing and resign—might His Eminence be so kind as to occasionally comport himself like a city commissioner (which is, after all, the only job he has) and spend a little less time LARPing as Marco Rubio, gallivanting around Brussels, and wedding-crashing the European Parliament?

As you can see, those photos are from Ariel’s Instagram page. But the National Archives offers even better examples of this tireless hero’s historic achievements:

But back to the doctor and her no good, very bad idea. Fortunately, her resolution failed to secure a second and died on the floor, so to speak, but not before Lago, Anderson and Lara had an opportunity to hang this rotting albatross around Dr. Castro’s neck. Lago, for his part, made sure to emphasize the fundamental incompatibility of Dr. Castro’s authorship of such blatantly pro-development policy and her claiming to be staunchly anti-development, going as far as to characterize the resolution as a “Trojan Horse” for massive development.

Now, I’m perfectly content to let Dr. Castro own this as a pro-development sellout, and I fully expect her opponents to weaponize it come election season. But I can’t say I believe it. No, I’m going to take the contrarian position on this one, and submit to you this: Dr. Castro did not push this resolution because she is pro-development. She pushed it because someone duped her into fronting it. She pushed it because, quite simply, she didn’t understand it.

The limited radius of self

Indeed, I really don’t believe Dr. Castro is pro- or anti-development in any meaningful sense. I don’t think she’s pro- or anti- much of anything, at least not anything complex or abstract. I think she’s pro-Maserati, pro-Gucci, pro-Louis Vuitton, pro-Chanel. I think she’s pro-money and pro-attention. I know she’s anti-Lago. But these are concrete, tangible things she can grasp, luxury goods she can hold, praise she can hear, enemies she can see.

Being pro- or anti-development, by contrast, requires abstract thinking. It requires the cognitive capacity to hold hypotheticals in your mind: If we approve this variance, what does the neighborhood look like in ten years? How does cumulative density affect traffic patterns? What happens to property values when you fundamentally alter neighborhood character? These are questions that demand you simulate future states, understand emergent properties, and appreciate how the effects of any decision can compound over time.

Dr. Castro simply does not operate on this level. She is either wholly incapable of abstract thought or completely uninterested in it. Her mind is empty outside the boundaries of her own immediate needs and desires. Nothing exists for her beyond the radius of self.

Consider her civic resume: not a single vote cast in a single election—anywhere—until finally, at the cusp of 40, she found a way to get her own name on a ballot. This is a woman who, as an adult, lived through the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the Great Recession, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, and two of the most politically volatile decades in American history. And yet none of this was compelling enough to get Dr. Castro off her ass long enough to bubble in a measly ballot.

By the way, we all know people this detached and apathetic. They’re called children.

And let’s not pretend that her sudden decision to run for public office in 2023 was the result of some civic awakening. She’d just inherited her mother’s Gables-based permit expediting business and realized it might be rather convenient to have direct authority over the very building department that processes most of her permits.

I’ll give her this: that inert brain of hers suddenly shows some signs of life as soon as things become a bit more material.

Then there’s the way Dr. Castro managed the item on the dais, or rather mangled it. She could barely explain her own proposal. When she wasn’t staring down at her tablet, struggling to pronounce words she supposedly wrote, she was locked onto one specific person in the audience—the way a child in a school play searches desperately for their parents’ faces in the crowd, silently pleading: Am I doing this right? Do you approve? Are you proud of me?

The whole performance was awkward, clumsy, and utterly clueless. She exhibited the kind of difficulty with the material that you wouldn’t expect from its supposed author. Unless, of course, she wasn’t actually the author at all. But don’t just take my word for it. See for yourself:

“Strengthen Live Local.” Goodness gracious, and to think that was her rehearsed intro, before she received any pushback, before she was forced to think on her feet. Then again, when Dr. Castro “thinks on her feet,” her thoughts tend to magically appear on the screen in front of her as if texted or emailed from some external source. Watch how she clearly reads from her tablet in response to comments she’d heard literally minutes earlier, and how when she’s forced to go off-script she starts babbling about trying to “push people outside.” That last part’s pretty amazing, because I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed someone self-discover the concept of creating ghettos in real time. Brava, doctor. Brava!

Yeah, I’m sorry, but there’s just no way Dr. Castro cooked this up by herself. That resolution was a really bad idea, but a really bad idea that lies well beyond her intellectual reach. I think someone fed it to her, convinced her it would deliver the political win she desperately needs, and correctly calculated that she’d be too dazzled by terms like “area median income” to spot the canyon-sized conceptual hole in the proposal’s logic.

This may sound like a conspiracy to some, but if it is, it’s a conspiracy infinitely more plausible than any explanation that begins with “Dr. Castro was thinking about an issue” or “Dr. Castro had an idea.” And it’s not like we haven’t watched her gladly serve as the frontman for KFC’s worst ideas for two years running. The notion that a professional stooge was once again deployed as someone’s useful idiot isn’t exactly farfetched.

Besides, if this really was her idea rather than a concerted effort by wealthy developers looking for a willing vehicle, then this awfully apropos op-ed—published mere days after the commission meeting—would have to be dismissed as a remarkably uncanny coincidence:

Disarmament

In some strange and depressing way, the truth doesn’t even matter here. Whether this legislation sprang fully formed from the barren moonscape of Dr. Castro’s mind or she’s merely serving as someone else’s useful idiot, the moral is the same: no thinking person would be caught dead within a hundred miles of this resolution, much less put their name on it. The sheer ignorance, incuriosity, and yes, stupidity required to think it was a good idea is far more dangerous than any form of cunning corruption. It’s the same stupidity that enabled KFC’s career-ending raises, that saw Dr. Castro giggle like a K-pop fangirl when she first laid eyes on Amos Rojas—roughly 15 minutes before voting to make him city manager—and the same stupidity that has her doubling down on the very strategies that brought KFC down in the first place.

I know the usual suspects will clutch their pearls at this. They’ll see my slamming Dr. Castro for being pathologically stupid as mean, arrogant, and, of course, misogynistic—although I’ve learned it’s perfectly acceptable to be mean to politicians so long as they have a penis.

Yeah, whatever.

I have no problem with stupid people in general. I know lots of them. I’m one of them half the time. What I have a problem with is stupid people in positions of power, positions that directly affect my quality of life. I have a big problem with the Queen of Sheba haughtiness that seems to accompany it. And I have a massive problem with stupid people writing my laws, setting my tax rates, and doling out millions in public dollars to their political allies through reckless COLAs as if it’s Monopoly money.

No one’s asking for genius here. Governance isn’t rocket science. It just requires basic adult cognition: read the material, think a step ahead, understand that your decisions have consequences beyond your immediate desires. That’s the floor. And there’s a reason that floor exists. We don’t let children vote, much less write and pass laws, because government is a powerful tool, and powerful tools in careless hands cause damage. When we forget that, when we get cavalier about who wields that power, we end up exactly where we are now, with a government hamstrung by a toxic imbecile proffering harmful resolutions she can barely read, much less understand.

Needless to say, the next election can’t come soon enough. It’s time to disarm this trigger-happy little monkey.