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Highlights of Seth Grossman interview with John DeMasi on WPGTalkRadio.com, 1450AM and 95.5 FM near Atlantic City on March 21, 2026:
ATLANTIC CITY HAS BIGGEST ST. PATRICK’S DAY PARADE EVER. BUT WITHOUT THE PEOPLE WHO STARTED THAT TRADITION: DICK AND CATHY BURKE AND THEIR IRISH PUB.
JOHN DEMASI: Before Seth Grossman gets into anything, we have a most important thing to ask him. What really happened to the Irish pub on Saint Patrick’s Day?
SETH GROSSMAN: Of course, I don’t know. I had no idea it was closed until I read it in The Press of Atlantic City. I hate to let you down. But I do not have any inside information on what happened to the Irish Pub, other than I have very fond memories of the place going back more than fifty years. I remember how its owners, Dick and Cathy Burke put together Atlantic City’s first St. Patrick’s Day Parade back in the nineteen eighties. I remember marching down the Boardwalk with them.
This year, Atlantic City had the biggest St. Patrick’s Day Parade ever. I was sad and ironic that Dick and Cathy Burke, the people who started it all weren’t there.
I am here on behalf of LibertyAndProsperity.com, a private association. We are a group of individuals who share common goals and values. We formed a private organization to promote them. We meet for breakfast and talk about the issues that concern us at 09:30 every Saturday morning, at Sal’s Coal Fired Pizza in Somers Point. We have a website. We have, special events from time to time. We have free email updates. And, if you’d like to get them, you know, just sign up, through the website or, email us at info@libertyandprosperity.com.
We are a typical private association of roughly 180 individuals. America was once famous for private, independent associations like outs. To pay for our activities, we pay dues of $30 per year and we received private donations of about $30,000 per year. We use that money to be here on the radio, to have the website and the emails and the special events.
So it is discouraging and ironic to find besides raising funds for our group, we are forced to pay taxes to support other private groups that pursue agendas we disagree with.
Think of all the time, effort, and talent we spend persuading people to donate to us. Every week, I beg for donations on the air, we beg for money on our website, and we have many fundraising events to pay for what we do. We need donations of roughly $33,000 each year to be on the radio, to have a website, to send email updates and to sponsor special events.
And yet the Atlantic County Queer Alliance doesn’t have to do any of this. They just fill out forms and a bunch of government agencies that we pay for give them all the money they need. Last Tuesday, on St. Patrick’s Day, the CRDA, the New Jersey Casino Reinvestment Development Authority voted to give a grant of 96,453.23 to the Atlantic County Queer Alliance.
This money will be used to fund the mission of the Atlantic County Queer Alliance? According to its webgsite, that is to advance the acceptance and enrichment of LGBTQIA+ people and supporters of LGBTQIA+ so-called “rights” in South Jersey. And of course, LGBTQIA+ means Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Intersexual, Asexual and Plus, whatever that is.
Now I’m sure the Atlantic County Queer Alliance said, “We are a nice group of people”, and we would like to patronize the Atlantic City casino hotels and spend money there. So force the casinos to give $96,000 of the tax on their gross casino win to help our group.
But any private group can make that same claim. Our group, Liberty and Prosperity can go up to CRDA and say, if you give us $96,000, we will organize all sorts of events to promote Atlantic City casino hotels and invite people to meet us in Atlantic City. . .
THE IRAN WAR: ARE WE DOING MORE THAN KILLING A HANDFUL OF ISLAMIC LEADERS WHO WANT TO BE MARTYRS?
We are both part of the “Boomer” Generation. Our dads and their friends fought in World War II and we heard their stories growing up. I went to Central Junior High School in Atlantic City in the early 1960s, and I had a social studies teacher named Mr. Wirtshafter, Stan Wirtshafter.
He told us he was in a tank unit in Germany at the end of World War II. He talked about being attacked by young boys in the Hitler Youth. He said these 13 and 14 year old kids would charge their tanks with grenades, bazookas and mines. He said they did not surrender, and that they had to kill every one of them. He said how awful it was to look at the bodies of these 13 and 14 year old, even 12 year old kids. And they had to kill those kids to stop those kids from killing them.
We heard stories from veterans who were in Okinawa. They had women and children in caves and foxholes shooting at them. They had boys who could barely fly airplanes crashing them into their ships.
Why did they do that? Those German kids believed the most important thing they could do in life was to die for Germany, to die for Hitler. And it was the same for the Japanese. To them, the most noble thing, the greatest thing they could achieve in life was to die fighting for their Emperor.
How did our parents’ generation deal with them. They did not go to war against them by choice. Germany and Japan chose to go to war against us.
Our parents’ generation did everything they could NOT to go to war against these fanatics. In 1936, they did nothing when Germany broke its World War I treaty and formed a new army. They did nothing when Hitler marched that army up to the French border. They nothing when Germany invaded and occupied Austria, then Czechoslovakia and then Poland. Americans didn’t start to worry about Germany until it took over France and half of Europe. And by then, it was too late. The Nazis were too strong. And when Hitler thought he was strong enough, he declared war on us! On December 11, 1941.
Our parents’ generation also chose to do nothing about Japan. They did nothing when Japan took over Korea and Taiwan. We did nothing when they invaded China. We did nothing when the Japanese did their own Holocaust and murdered about 700,000 men, women, and children in Nanking, China in 1937. But it didn’t do us any good. On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked us.
So we have to be careful when we talk about “Wars of Choice.” Sometimes the only choice is do you go to war when your enemy is weak? Or do you wait until your enemy is strong enough to destroy you? Do you fight them before they have nuclear bombs? Or do you wait until after they have nuclear bombs?
My concern with Trump is not what he is doing against Iran. However, I am worried that he was not explaining all along why he is doing what he is doing, and what we are up against. It seems to me that nobody is explaining to the American people what we are up against.
It seems like some of these newscasters or so-called military experts we see on TV are talking about video games instead of real people. They are saying “look at who we killed” and “look at what we just blew up.”
Didn’t we go through that with the wars in Iraq? We blew up all this stuff and called in “Shock and Awe”. But that did nothing to cause Saddam Hussein and his regime to surrender? If anything, it caused a lot of Iraqis to hate us as much as they hated Saddam Hussein. We didn’t get rid of Saddam Hussein until we put boots on the ground and sent them into Baghdad.
The Islamic regime in Iran is even worse. When we kill these leaders, we’re actually giving them what they want. A fundamental idea of Islam is the The Day of Judgment, the “Yam al-Qiyamah.”
That is the day when the world ends and everybody dies. And then everyone gets to spend eternity in either Paradise or Jannah, or in the Hell Fires of Jahannam.
How do you get to heaven? Well, you’re supposed live your life according to what is written in the Quran or following the teachings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad. However, most Muslims don’t do that. Most Muslims have sinned, they have done things wrong. So how can a sinner get into Paradise?
Well Islam offers a very easy Get Out of Hell Fires card. All you need to do is get yourself killed in a Jihad trying to kill non-believers. If you do that, all your sins are instantly forgiven, and you iget to spend eternity in Paradise, complete with your 72 virgins.
So by killing a handful of these people, we are giving them exactly what they want. We are helping them fulfill their dreams. And for every one we kill, there are dozens eager to take their place because they want the same thing.
Meanwhile, we have these military leaders and experts on TV laughing and joking like we’re achieving something. But as a Boomer, who heard the stories told by my dad’s generation, I worry about that. According to them, you have to defeat and destroy these people completely. That’s what we had to do with Germany and Japan.
But if we don’t do that, they are going to wear us down and get us to quit.
And simply doing nothing and trying to ignore them is no solution. Suppose we let them destroy Israel. Let them destroy all these countries in the Middle East. Let them kill all the Christians in Nigeria. Let them take over Africa. Let them take over England, France and Germany.
At some point, they’re going to be here. And we had better prepare our kids to deal with them. Right now, we’re not preparing anyone. Very few Americans have any idea of how dangerous these people are. They have no value for life.
And let’s not forget Zulfi Hoxha. He is the Albanian kid who grew up in Margate and graduated Atlantic City High School in 2010. Then, five years later, he went to Syria and became a leader of the Islamic State. There, he made a video addressed to all Muslims living in the United States. It was actually called “Avoid Hellfire.” In it, Hoxha told American Muslims that they could easily enjoy eternity in Paradise and avoid Hellfire by getting themselves killed while murdering non-believers.
He said anyone can do it. “Can’t you stab a non-believer, or push one off a building, or in front of a bus? Or run one over with your car? “You can be a sinner. You can be a loser. You can be a failure. But if you get yourself killed doing jihad, you are an instant hero, an instant success. . . “
WHY ARE PUBLIC SCHOOLS SO RIDICULOUSLY EXPENSIVE?
Last week we talked about the Egg Harbor Public Schools going $36,000,000 deeper into debt to pay for routine maintenance, replacements, and improvements for their public schools. And, of course, they rigged the day of the referendum to win the vote. The school board could have put this on the ballot last November when you had 18,000 people voting.
However, they knew that most taxpayers of Egg Harbor Township would vote against borrowing the money. So they held a special election on March 10 when only 2,400 people turned out. And, of course, they got 1,400 people to vote yes. They was a very small number of people in a town with 37,000 voters. But is was enough to approve borrowing $36 million.
But let’s look at the big picture. Why are public schools so expensive? When we boomers were young, everybody had lots of kids. There were lots of schools. You only had one parent working. That one parent could afford a good house. That one parent could afford the property taxes. There was no sales tax. There was no, state income tax, and everything was fine.
Today, it now costs $25,000 each year to educate one child in our public schools. So just one classroom with 20 kids costs a half-billion dollars a year.
Do the arithmetic. You have a typical $300,000 house in a town paying maybe $9,000 per year in real estate taxes. But if the family that lives there has two kids, those two kids alone cost the town $50,000 per year just for the schools. So every house with two kids is causing the town to lose more than $42,000 each year.
That is why to every politician in every town, children are the biggest public enemy. That is why they write these crazy zoning laws designed to keep children out. That is why only have housing for senior citizens and expensive seasonal vacation homes. That’s what local politicians do to keep property taxes downs.
And then people demand new state and federal taxes to keep property taxes down. That’s why we started a new state sales tax in 1966. That’s why we started a new state income tax in New Jersey in 1976. That s why the teachers unions forced President Jimmy Carter to create a federal Department of Education in 1979.
And now even all that money isn’t enough. So Egg Harbor Township has to borrow $36 million just to replace the roofs and regular equipment. This is not sustainable.
But will anybody, any Republican or Democrat say, “We can’t do this anymore? We have to do something different?” We ask questions like that at our Liberty and Prosperity breakfasts. . .
JOHN DEMASI: You know, 25,000 a year, that is a lot of money. There are private high schools and private schools in this country that that charge that, but they’re they’re giving a top notch education. How come it costs so much?
SETH GROSSMAN: I can answer that, but it would take up all three hours of your program. But I can tell you it’s not just the union salaries. Probably the biggest problem is the idea that if a kid not getting an education, it’s the school’s fault. We’re not spending enough money. We don’t have a program to reach that kid.
So if you have one kid who isn’t learning. If he or she is disrupting a class, you can’t just expel the kid like we used to do. The taxpayers have to pay for a special tutor for that kid, and put together a special program for that one kid. And that often costs $70,000 to $80,000 per year for each kid. When you do that for a few dozen kids, you bankrupt the school district. And so the superintendent or the principal tells the teachers, “Sorry, we have to keep that disruptive kid who won’t learn in your class. So he disrupts the whole class and nobody learns anything. And then the best teachers quit. And then you have to give all the teachers big pay hikes to put up with this.
BADER FIELD IN ATLANTIC CITY, WONDERLAND IN OCEAN CITY: IT TAKES YEARS AND COSTS A FORTUNE TO GET PERMITS TO BUILD ANYTHING.
Finally, I’d like to talk about what used to be the Wonderland Amusement Park in Ocean City and what used to be the Bader Field Airport in Atlantic City. They are both basically the same issue.
The site of the old Bader Field Airport in Atlantic City has been sitting empty for the past 30 years. Why? It used to be an airport, but we build a casino hotel at the end of its main runway. Now for the past 30 years, every state and local politician has been trying to find the perfect new use for that land.
And be by looking for the perfect new use, all these politicians found no new use. And so the property is still empty 30 years later.
At one time, this was never a problem. The law in New Jersey and the rest of the America used to be quite clear. The government did not own any property unless it was needed for public use. Once the government found that it owned any property was no longer needed for public use, it would sell it. It would auction the land off to the highest bidder.
And what if somebody bought the land cheap? They would be paying taxes on it right away. I guarantee you that if Atlantic City sold Bader Field to the highest bidder 30 years ago, it would have collected more in taxes than its ever going to get for it now.
Well what would the buyer use that land for? Frankly its none of our business. Nobody knows better what land should be used for more than the owner. Certainly, a bunch of politicians who have nothing invested are the worst people to decide.
Now of course politicians and voters have the right to make zoning laws. They have the right to decide what should NOT be built in certain areas. We would not want Bader Field to be used for a smelly garbage dump or fish processing plant. But nobody would use prime, expensive land for industrial use anyway.
And it’s the same thing with the land as 6th and the Boardwalk in Ocean City that used to be the Wonderland Amusement Park. What’s the perfect use for the property? Well, if you ask anyone in Ocean City, they will tell you it should be an amusement park. And that is only because it was an amusement park for ninety years. But it can’t be used as an amusement park anymore because it lost money for everybody who tried to do it. It has to be something else. Well, what else could it be?
Well, why not let the person who’s willing to spend the money to buy it and invest it and spend their, you know, years of their life, making something work, let that person decide. But once you let the so-called public decide, people who don’t invest a dime, and who lose nothing if their proposals fail, you end up with nothing. No matter what somebody proposes and no matter how much they spend on architects and engineers and artists to draw pictures of the project, some people will say, “No, I don’t like this. No. I don’t like that. By time you get ten thousand people to agree on something, you’ll have thirty years go by just like Atlantic City with Bader Field. Think of how much money, and how many jobs, and how much in taxes were lost by having that property at 6th Street and the Boardwalk sit empty in Ocean City. . .
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