
Michael Angelos 1953-2024 : “An Oasis of Liberty”
Michael Charles Angelos, 70, passed away peacefully on the evening of Tuesday May 28, 2024 at his home in Davenport, Iowa. He was cremated at Halligan-McCabe-DeVries Funeral Home and had no funeral or service per his wishes. Mike was interred in Linwood Cemetery in Dubuque, Iowa, next to his father, James Angelos.
Mike was born in Dubuque, Iowa on November 3, 1953 to James Andrew Angelos and Helen Mary (Petrakis) Angelos. He graduated from Iowa State University in 1976 with a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering. Mike worked for Harrington Signal Control Process Division and Honeywell before retiring from the Rock Island Arsenal after 25 years of service. He enjoyed golfing, playing basketball, watching ISU football, and researching his Greek ancestors through genealogy.
He is survived by his sister, Andrea (John) Ellerbach; nieces Aurora (Jason) Hawk and Natalie (Larry) Ellerbach Cadile; great niece Luciana Cadile; Julie Schmidt Urban; and many cousins and friends. In addition to his parents, he was preceded in death by his grandparents, Charles K. and Mary A. (Antonopoulos) Petrakis; Andrew D. and Vera T. (Vrotsos) Angelos; and great parents Theodore G. and Irene E. (Skondrianos) Vrotsos.
And Now for the Rest of the Story
There's so much more to Angelos, as those of us who worked with him called him. I first met Mike Angelos around 2006 when many of us were waking up to the wisdom of Dr. Ron Paul, former multi-term Texas congressman, three-time Presidential candidate, best-selling author, and sound-money and peaceful-foreign-policy promoter. No, this article isn't about Ron Paul. But it goes without saying to those who knew and loved Angelos that Ron Paul is/was the nexus around which our mutual orbits frequently collided.
Angelos was quiet, reserved, soft-spoken, and a relentless driving force for restoring Liberty in Iowa and living by Iowa's state flag creed: “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.” When he and Michael Elliot and James Getman and I started the local Meetup we called “SuperLiberty,” we all agreed that the mission of such a voluntary association virtual and IRL meetup would be to “make Scott County an oasis of liberty in Iowa.”
The SuperLiberty meetup was promoted at Meetup.com, on social media, and by word of mouth. We hosted an open-to-the-public/no-membership-fee round table discussion and networking event in the basement of the downtown Davenport Public Library. Every other week on Saturday morning, there would be as few as six and as many as 20 attendees. The meetings started with a rundown of a definition of terms that focused on the differences between privileges and rights. You know: nutballs like us that actually read the Bill of Rights and state and federal constitutions. Then, each attendee would be asked to give a brief report of what they have been up to lately to make a difference with citizen vigilance, advocacy, and/or protesting. This is before instant messaging on phones, posting on a dozen socials. It's the type of forum and gathering our country's founders did, except they were in a tavern most of the time and we kept the vibe all business in the library basement! Invariably, each attendee would give everyone an update about the state wide or nation wide advocacy group they were current focused on. Angelos was one of the primary forces that kept SuperLiberty going when he helped stand up and monitor a list-serve e-mail list via Meetup.com for SuperLiberty.
I admired and greatly appreciated Angelos' moderating skills on this list-serve. I learned a lot in those threads, and met many new friends. There were skirmishes, sure. But he was a natural at keeping shit-posting out, common sense in, and reminding the group what the mission is from time to time. He researched voraciously and always shared substantive information after having reviewed it himself before posting links and comments. He was the deft fact-checker on the inside, and diplomatically called out bull crap when required, always encouraging the other party to prove him wrong so he was more informed. When I go back and look at the threads from more than 15 years ago, the topics and local situations we were being contacted about and vetted by our core team, it is staggering.
The Ultimate Local Concerned Citizen
Angelos, like many of us in SuperLiberty, attempted to be part of the mainstream two-party system when Ron Paul decided to run for president as a Republican and not a Libertarian in 2007. That pivot to influencing a local political party made us inherently focus on what else was going on locally. We had heard about Agenda 21 – the global agenda to centrally control local population growth, labor-food-energy resources and property rights – many times in the SuperLiberty meetups, all under the guise of “sustainable development” or “smart growth.” Based on Agenda 21 hawks in other states, we learned that the County government is where these agendas were taking root. None of us even knew who was on the County Board of Supervisors back in 2010. Angelos, Elliott, and I attended our first Scott County Board of Supervisor public meeting to start paying attention. I will never forget the board chair pointing to us three sitting there before the meeting started and asking who we were and why we were there? They were not used to citizens just showing up to monitor their activities back then.
Angelos was a frequent Letters to the Editor submitter to the Quad-City Times, sending in letters on a variety of topics many times each month, attempting to awake any who would listen to topics and perspectives not being shared in the daily paper of record. He had an ongoing feud with the editors who would edit his letter's copy, much to his chagrin, and he kept a file of what he submitted alongside what made it to print, for posterity. He even cataloged by topic and author other local letter writers' submissions. The Davenport Public Library should archive his archives of such letters.
Angelos and his late-in-life-life-partner Julie Schmidt Urban were true urban (no pun intended) pioneers for food freedom spearheading the Davenport city ordinance that governed allowing residents to have chickens on their properties in 2017. It was the first of any such ordinance in Scott County. They solicited petitions for months at the farmers' markets and eventually got all but one alderman to agree to a backyard or urban chicken ordinance. The city even engaged Angelos and Julie to be the teachers of the class required to complete one's application, which they did through 2020.
Iowans for Accountability
In 2010, Angelos helped form the Iowans For Accountability, a non political party organization to run three candidates for Scott County Supervisor (ScottCountyIFA.blogspot.com/2010/11/election-day-update.html). Like many of us, he was fed up with faux conservatives on the Board rubber stamping our property rights away, and something had to be done to shake the system up. None of us even knew such an NPPO could be formed, but Angelos helped research the law, and if at least 50 percent of the then-63 precincts in Scott County had an eligible voter convene a meeting to form the NPPO, then that NPPO and its nominees would be on the ballot.
It took three meetings to get this accomplished in 2010, and Angelos was elected Secretary of the new NPPO that nominated John Green, Jesse Anderson, and John Riley for Supervisor that year. The uni-party prevailed, of course. This was during the SECC911 era when the County formed a new uncapped taxing authority with multiple governmental entities under a state code 28E, and added a new line item to all of our property taxes to create a new Emergency Management Agency subsidiary to consolidate 911 dispatching. It would take years for consolidation to happen and few even recall that the 28E organization was formed illegally with no signatures from the enabling governance members until years after SECC911 was implemented and the taxes were collected that paid the debt for an already built a multi-million dollar structure. But I digress. Back to Angelos.
I will never forget sitting with Angelos in the Scott County court house for the proceedings of empaneling and swearing in the Scott County Grand Jury for its year of service in 2011. SuperLiberty had been involved with the Fully Informed Jury Association and had been publishing an eight-page tabloid newspaper called Concerned Citizen that many of us took turns handing out in front of the courthouse every Monday morning to all who entered. The paper included information about juries voting their conscience, especially if a law was unjust. We eventually started researching the esoteric and back then hardly mentioned county grand jury and the Iowa Criminal Code 2.0 that in part governed their duties. After months of pressing then county attorney Mike Walton, he got a letter from then Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller confirming Angelos' persistent petitions to Walton that the identity of the county grand jury should be public, while their proceedings remain private.
With that letter from Walton in hand, Angelos and I confirmed when the next grand jury swearing in would be and attended. Eventually into the proceedings, the judge pointed to me and Angelos, asking, “Who are you, and why are you here?” Our answer was, “Is this not a public proceeding, your honor?” He said, “See me in chambers afterwards!” Angelos and I went into his office after the grand jury was sworn in, and showed him the letter and explained that we were simply trying to ensure the watchers knew we were watching the watchers and knowing who the annual grand jury is in your county is good preventative maintenance. The judge read the letter and then said, “Good for you guys. Well done. Carry on.”
We mailed each of the grand jurors a tool kit to help inform them of how important their role was to ensuring the government served the people, not the other way around (ScottCottcountyIFA.blogspot.com/2011/08/ifa-open-letter-to-scott-county-grand.html). So for nearly 10 years, Angelos and I would be joined by as many as a dozen other concerned citizens to be present at the annual Scott County Grand Jury empanelment, and we would publish the grand jury names and contact information at the Iowans for Accountability Web site. Sadly, beginning in 2023, the new county attorney and new court clerk have taken direction from the new state attorney general's office, and now claim that the grand jury membership is secret. That's a whole other story for the next Reader edition.
What's in the Water Again?
Angelos was a pragmatic planner, always helping whatever groups were meeting about an issue to stay focused on the mission and tasks at hand. One such group he helped lead was the Fluoride Free Quad Cities project, started in 2012. Nearly 12 years ago, Angelos and the SuperLiberty crew were ahead of the curve on examining how and why our water supply continues to contain a neural toxin in the form of a highly corrosive hydrofluorosilicic acid in the name of fighting tooth decay, also known as water fluoridation. We reported on this topic extensively in the Reader pages (RCReader.com/tags/fluoride).
Back then, Angelos helped organize “Have the Debate” events in January of 2013, where the one of the world's leading experts on neural toxins, Dr. Paul Connett, PhD spoke publicly at the Moline and Bettendorf public libraries. Mike wrote back then, "We are very fortunate to have the caliber of scientist and author that Dr. Connett is to help us launch this public debate about an issue that impacts nearly everyone living and working in Scott and Rock Island counties. This is not a partisan issue, and if we can't have a public and adult discussion about the chemicals going into our drinking water, then we are going to have an even harder time addressing what many consider partisan issues."
This campaign prompted the Scott County Health department to break out the white coats and assure the Supervisors and Davenport City Council that medicating a populace without its consent with an industrial waste by product, rather than the pharmaceutical grade fluoride the original contract called for, was good for the poor kids who won't stop eating candy and can't afford to go to the dentist. Angelos tried to get local dentists or an educator at the University of Iowa dentistry school to debate Dr. Connett, but no one would have such a debate. The Davenport city council dutifully listened to Fluoride Free Quad Cities at a public meeting, and then, with prepared remarks, a handful of city councilmen dismissed the concerns with conspiracy talking points, telling us behind the scene that there was just not enough people on the petition or showing up to city hall to even review the terms of the 1950s-era original contract to see if it was up to current standards. Angelos kept the group going for several more years, but the issue never gained enough traction for a widespread public discussion. Now, more than 10 years later, Angelos' shared vision is coming to fruition with the September 24, 2024 federal-court ruling compelling the EPA to do its job and regulate this “unreasonable risk” to children. Angelos would have loved to meet Connett's son Michael, who has been fighting this battle in the California federal court for seven years. See the story by Flouride Action Network's executive director on page 4 for more details.
A Stickler for Details
In 2020, Angelos joined former Scott County Supervisor Diane Holst as a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the Center for Technical and Civic Life (CTCL) over their private funding (from Facebook founder Zuckerberg's foundation that injected $400MM into swing county elections in 2020) of public elections in Scott County, Iowa. These efforts led in part to the resignation of then County Auditor Roxanna Moritz, who Angelos worked well with upon Moritz taking office years earlier. Angelos helped Michael Elliot run for Auditor as an independent. Even though he did not win the election, it was Elliot's platform that Angelos helped craft that Moritz in part adopted, giving the voters of Scott County its first published chain of custody policy in more than 30 years.
Angelos would be chagrined to learn that in 2022 the county supervisors voted in unison to make that chain of custody policy which was previously public, now secret. The ordinance reads in part, “WHEREAS, while the Scott County Auditor’s Office advocates for 100-percent transparency in local government, the Office recognizes that releasing public records related to vulnerabilities of election infrastructure would be irresponsible and detrimental to the voters and may allow bad actors to affect the integrity of elections administered by the County.” I can hear Angelos now, applying his engineering mind to this self congratulatory passage, stating something like, “So much for 100-percent transparency. We never asked the Auditors office to publish vulnerabilities. Wait … you are stating it is a public record. We want to know who is responsible for moving the election assets from points A to B.” See the 2024 Auditor's race questionnaire for more info.
There are so many projects in the name of citizen vigilance and sound governance that Angelos participated in, it's hard to keep track of them all! They include Continental Congress 2009 in St. Charles, Illinois, where Angelos was an Iowa delegate for the week-long We the People Foundation-led, nationally attended citizen forum to document remedial instructions to the federal and state legislators on the well-documented constitutional violations. Angelos was front and center when those instructions The Articles of Freedom were delivered in person to our local state legislators and again on April 19, 2010 when we held an event at the state capitol and personally delivered them to the governor, and Senator Tom Harkins office. Senator Chuck Grassley sent an aide to the event to receive the documents, and only state senator Dr. David Hartsuch responded to the instructions by recording a video agreeing with the fundamental premise that citizens have the right to withhold their money when petitions for redress of grievance go unanswered.
Michael Angelos is sorely missed. He was very private and very few even knew he was dying of kidney cancer toward the end. He did not want any funeral service. However, those of us who loved him and enjoyed his revolutionary spirit will be celebrating Angelos' life on what would have been his 71st birthday on Sunday, November 3, at the Freight House's Front Street Brewery (421 West River Drive, Davenport IA), beginning at 3 p.m. Please join us in celebrating Angelos' tireless effort to make the Quad Cities an oasis for Liberty.