An Open Letter to the NAACP: What is an “Obama Lover”?

An Open Letter to the NAACP: What is an “Obama Lover”?

May 22, 2023
 
NAACP
National Headquarters
4805 Mt. Hope Drive
Baltimore, MD 21215
 
Dears Sirs and Madam:
 
Rob Eichmann founded this blog. He was a Republican State Committeeman from Gloucester County, New Jersey, and an early supporter of the Tea Party movement.
 
Eichmann was a passionate conservative. He also hated racism, anti-Semitism, and the use of race or ethnicity to gain an edge in political campaigning. He became disturbed by what he saw as an appeal to race by some members of the GOP during the Obama years.
 
Eichmann compiled a catalog of instances of what he considered to be racist behavior by Republicans in New Jersey and, after seeking direction from the NAACP, brought it to the attention of the NJGOP in a 2011 “Report to the Members of the Republican State Committee of New Jersey” (nicknamed the “Racism Report”). It is disturbing to read, particularly the references to First Lady Michelle Obama.
 
The State Committee acted on the Racism Report and passed a resolution condemning the acts outlined in it – but they never forgave Eichmann for having embarrassed them. He ran for re-election to the State Committee while undergoing chemotherapy for throat cancer. Someone was found to run against him, and without a vote of the Committee, the NJGOP authorized paying for a series of attack mailers against one of its own members, which was unprecedented. But Eichmann’s cancer had gotten worse. Unable to speak to even offer a defense, he died before election day. If anyone wonders why this blog allows contributors to use pseudonyms, there is your answer.
 
Rob Eichmann understood language and how quickly it descends into coarseness. Failing to call out casual or purposeful racist language normalizes it and makes it commonplace. Of course, these concerns can be overdone, and they have been in recent years. The goal is to strike a balance. But complaints over comedy are very different from politicians who use language and symbols to reach past rational political discussion and try to stir a subconscious remembering of "blood and soil". To seek a base and irrational political response.
 
The NJGOP knows this. In 2017, New Jersey National Committeeman Bill Palatucci sponsored an RNC resolution that condemned racist behavior in the aftermath of the Charlottesville, Virginia, protests. Closer to home however, GOP leaders in New Jersey appear to have a blind spot when it comes to questionable behavior by establishment insiders.
 
Take the case of Assemblyman Parker Space. In the aftermath of the murder of nine people by Dylann Roof, Space acknowledged going on a road trip with the brother of actress Janeane Garofalo to get a Confederate flag tattoo. That was the same year Space was the only member of the New Jersey Assembly to abstain from voting on AR255 – a resolution to condemn official use of the Confederate flag or “elements thereof”. There were no “Nay” votes.
 
In 2017, Assemblyman Space posted a picture of himself and his wife, Sussex County Commissioner and GOP State Committeewoman Jill Space, on Facebook under a Confederate battle flag with the logo of Hank Williams Jr. plastered on it and wrote: “Hope no one is offended! Lol.” The logo included the words "If the south would've won, we would've had it made." Space has hosted annual “Ground Hog Day” celebrations for decades with a series of ground hogs named “Stonewall Jackson”.
 
This isn’t a heritage thing, this is Sussex County, New Jersey. The soldier depicted on the monument in Newton, the county seat, is a Union soldier. The battle honors listed on that monument were battles fought against the Confederacy.
 
Even though it has long been acknowledged within GOP circles that the continued antics of Assemblyman Space were a bar to his political advancement (at least two recent meetings were held in which this was discussed by party leaders – one on February 17, 2020, and another on March 18, 2022), state and local party leaders have put him forward as the next Senator from the 24th Legislative District (Sussex, Morris, and Warren counties). Space is unopposed in the upcoming June 6th GOP primary but is running with two Assembly candidates who are opposed.
 
As Senator, Parker Space will have senatorial courtesy over the gubernatorial appointment of all judicial and prosecutorial positions in his district, as well as numerous other appointments. He will also have the ability to review all gubernatorial appointments, of any kind, made statewide.
 
Assemblyman Space is running with a team that includes two candidates for Assembly – Sussex County Commissioner Dawn Fantasia and Chester Township Mayor Mike Inganamort. Another team member is the Sussex County Surrogate, a judicial officer, who had spoken up with his concerns about Space.
 
There was a recent controversy over a mailer put out by this team. They claimed their Assembly opponent had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and pictured the two of them. Some who received the mailer believed the opponent’s skin tone was darkened to match President Obama’s. The First Vice Chairwoman of the Sussex County GOP wrote a letter expressing her distaste for the tactic, noting that the campaign’s political consultant was criticized on at least two other occasions for similar incidents – an ad in which so-called “chop suey” font was used to describe an opponent of Korean heritage and a pejorative reference to another opponent’s religion (Sikhism).  
 
The political consulting firm responsible for that mailer is co-owned by Congressman Michael Lawler of New York. The State of New Jersey’s corporate filings currently lists Congressman Lawler as co-owner of the firm as does his congressional financial disclosure statement (made as a candidate) for 2022.
 
The campaign’s most recent tactic has been to call their opponent an “Obama Lover”. Parker Space and his team have used the phrase, “shady Obama-loving liberals” in mailers paid for by the three of them. Their attack is based on a CNN focus group interview in 2017, in which their opponent was identified as a Republican who had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but who then voted for Donald Trump in 2016. The opponent has stated that he voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020 (and Romney in 2012).
 
The latest cable ad targeting the opponent calls him an “Obama loving liberal”. The use of the words “lover” and “loving” is striking to us. What does “love” have to do with it? Why does a vote for Barack Obama, 16 years ago, make one an “Obama Lover”? What is the author of the cable ad trying to suggest?
 
It is noteworthy that the cable ad is being run by a SuperPAC called Stronger Foundations. Open Secrets reports that this SuperPAC is affiliated with the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) and is funded by ELEC825 – an arm of IUOE Local 825. It is also noteworthy that on his 2022 congressional financial disclosure statement, Congressman Michael Lawler lists that he earned income as a lobbyist for IUOE Local 825.
 
The problem we see with many GOP establishment politicians and political consultants is that they don’t understand the conservatives in their own party. So, when they try to appeal to them, they assume they are dealing with “racists” and fashion their messages accordingly. But most conservatives understand that America is a nation based on an idea and that to be a part of America one needs simply to embrace the idea of America. Color and ethnicity and all the rest does not matter. But you can’t tell these consultants this because they believe that it does.  
 
As before, we are writing to you to seek your guidance. From the past, we understand how quickly the language of political discourse can spiral into a bad place and we want to avoid that and prevent its normalization. In doing so, we can honor the memory of our founder, the late Rob Eichmann (1965-2013).
 
Sincerely,
 
Jersey Conservative
 

Gas Tax union SuperPAC playing for Space-Fantasia-Inganamort in LD24?

By Rubashov

Stronger Foundations SuperPAC spent six-figures trashing Assemblyman Jay Webber in 2018. Webber – the most conservative member of the Assembly – was the Republican congressional candidate facing Democrat Mikie Sherrill, who ended up winning the race, flipping the seat to the Democrats, and giving Nancy Pelosi a vote for Speaker. The details are here:
 

https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/detail/2018?cmte=C00678623&tab=targeted_candidates

 
Open Secrets, a non-partisan group that monitors dark money in politics and the potential corruption that it leads to, identifies Stronger Foundations as a “Liberal” SuperPAC: Stronger Foundations Inc Outside Spending • OpenSecrets
 
The Stronger Foundations SuperPAC is funded by the International Union of Operating Engineers – the union that supported the largest gas tax increase in New Jersey’s history. The donations funding the attack on Republican Webber were made by the ENGINEERS LABOR-EMPLOYER COOPERATIVE of Springfield, New Jersey (aka ELEC825). ELEC825 is run by Kate Gibbs, the former Freeholder from Burlington County who in 2022 tried to have Sussex County hire a political operative from Burlington County as the Sussex County Administrator. Earlier, the union was successful in having one of its operatives installed as the County’s Communications officer.
 
Kate Gibbs has a close working relationship with Space-Fantasia-Inganamort political consultant Chris Russell of Checkmate Strategies. There is documentation to support this. And, as this involves a labor union, there is an additional level of scrutiny provided by the United States Department of Labor.
 
Now it looks like Stronger Foundations has jumped into the GOP primary in District 24 (Sussex, Morris, and Warren counties). Stronger Foundations appears to be augmenting the team’s cable buy. Recent NJELEC filings indicate that the team might be having some money issues:
 
Space
Raised            $100,778.50
Spent             $71,309.75
Debt               $33,353.11
Net                 $16,203.81
 
Fantasia
Raised            $69,303.78
Spent             $55,105.04
Debt               $6,116.00
Net                 $8,082.74
 
Inganamort
Raised            $69,364.68
Spent             $63,356.01
Debt               $100,000.00
Net                 $8,660.27
 
Judge for yourself:

“Voters can’t make informed decisions unless they’re informed.  If you asked any self-respecting constituent of George Santos, they’d tell you they wish they knew then what they know now.”
 
Micah Rasmussen
Director of the Rebovich Institute of New Jersey Politics at Rider University

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

George Orwell

N.B. We welcome a conversation on this and all topics raised on this website.  Jersey Conservative is entirely open to your ideas and opinions.  To submit a rebuttal, clarification, an opposing opinion or any column for publication, please contact the Editor at info@JerseyConservative.org.

Should elementary schools be used as adult walk-in COVID vaccine clinics?

By Rubashov

With the death of local news coverage, there are few media platforms willing to cast a light on the goings on of the centers of gravity in local communities. Last year, Jennifer Dericks’ TAPinto took a deep dive into the machinations behind the siting of a mega-warehouse in Sparta Township. Her coverage not only exposed a questionable process – it flipped control of local government, giving a very red town a blue governing majority.
 
Because, at the end of the day, most sane people do not want “my party right or wrong”. They want a government that listens to their concerns. They want the party of government to react to what worries them – not tell them to “shut up and go back to sleep”.
 
Some counties and local governments have become transparency free zones with no external oversight. Local media simply doesn’t exist, and the situation is a great incubator of corruption.
 
Think of the work done by New Jersey Herald reporters to uncover the Sussex Solar scandal that cost taxpayers $40 million. A similar scandal now would go unnoticed – except for blogs like this one and news websites, like Jennifer Dericks’ TAPinto. For better, or worse, this is all voters and taxpayers have left. There is nobody else to blow the whistle.
 
The great upside to controversy is that people remember you are there. This was forwarded to us. It concerns an event held in Franklin Borough, in Sussex County. It seems a walk-in COVID vaccination clinic was set-up at the elementary school auditorium there. As an inducement, the vaccine providers offered a “$25 gift card” to anyone receiving a vaccine.
 
Now, we hear all the time about school security and about the need to harden school security. If we are not mistaken, a great deal of taxpayers’ money has been spent to this end. It appears to us that if you are spending money to harden school security on the one hand, you should not be posting “walk-ins welcome” signs on the other. And that is what the advertisement says: “Walk-ins welcome!”
 
The clinic is run by Zufall Health Center of Dover, New Jersey. It is a not-for-profit organization that managed to generate in excess of $20 million in revenue, according to its last available 990 tax return. Zufall Health Center’s GuideStar profile states:
 
“Zufall Health Center provides medical, dental & behavioral health to more than 39,500 uninsured and underinsured patients and more than 141,000 medical, dental & behavioral health visits to low-income community residents.
 
Zufall Health Center provided specially targeted health services to the homeless, residents of public housing, and immigrant farm workers in Northwest New Jersey.”
 
https://www.guidestar.org/profile/22-3125397
 
Now, we are quite sure that these communities are in need of such services. But in times such as those we live in, is the auditorium of an elementary school the appropriate site?
 
One parent expressed this concern: “The school administration has set up a covid vaccine clinic at the school during school hours letting strangers onto school property and into the school building during school hours so they can receive their shot and a $25 gift card. Who knows what kind of people will show up for the free $25?” A fair enough concern and one that local leaders should take note of and react to.
 
Franklin Borough is not short of political muscle either. It is the home of Senator Steve Oroho and County Commissioner Dawn Fantasia. Looking into the concerns of the people they represent is their job. We expect them to get on with it.
 

Update from parents at the Franklin elementary school. 

 A parent writes: 

“The flyer stated it was in the auditorium. However, the clinic was set up in the school’s ‘zoom room’ a gymnasium in the school’s basement right in the heart of the building.  Patrons had to access this area by using the front doors and walking past student areas such as hallways and classrooms.  In these days, where we need to keep our schools safe, the Franklin School Administration and Board of Education put our children in absolute danger.” 

 Another parent noted: 

“…the zoom room is the gym area for the preschool program. They set up a medical facility where our children play on a daily basis.” 

“Voters can’t make informed decisions unless they’re informed.  If you asked any self-respecting constituent of George Santos, they’d tell you they wish they knew then what they know now.”
 
Micah Rasmussen
Director of the Rebovich Institute of New Jersey Politics at Rider University

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

George Orwell

Fantasia, consultant, fell out over COVID pay for county workers.

By Sussex County Watchdog

Sussex County Commissioner Dawn Fantasia called a meeting of GOP county leaders last year. The meeting was held on March 18, 2022, at a private club in the county. A quorum of the Board of Commissioners was present, and the agenda revolved around one item: The Sussex County Watchdog blog and its editorializing in support of county workers. 

The Watchdog blog had long been critical of the Board and how it was managing county government. One point of contention was the Board’s poor treatment of frontline county workers – like road maintenance crews – and its lavish spending on, and expansion of, administrative staff. Fewer and fewer workers seemed to require more and more administration. And while these “insider-connected” administrators got raises and benefits – county workers qualified for food stamps, the food pantry, subsidized heating fuel, and other anti-poverty programs because they were paid so poorly for a fulltime work week. 

The Watchdog blog website and Facebook page are filled with these stories. You can read them for yourself. 

A particular point of contention was bonus pay for frontline county workers who continued to do their jobs while exposed to COVID hazards during the pandemic. These bonuses were covered under the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and federal money would be used to pay them out. The county administration at the time opposed worker bonuses – and in a letter from the then county labor counsel, was quite frank about it. 

Commissioner Fantasia called the March 18th meeting to confront the Sussex County GOP’s consultant, Bill Winkler, because it was known that he wrote some of the critical stories about the Board. Fantasia and others – notably Jill and Parker Space – wanted the blog shut down or Winkler fired. 

Winkler explained that he did not own the blog – which is a fact beyond dispute – but was the author of some of the critical stories. He pointed out that he had voluntarily lobbied on behalf of better pay and ARPA bonuses for county workers, so his position was well-known. 

Given the number of County Commissioners at this meeting, a record should have been kept, but the meeting was called by Commissioner Fantasia and, if there is a transcript, she would have it. Other county officials were present, including the County Surrogate. 

At the March 18th meeting, Assemblyman Parker Space was asked about his road trip with actress Janeane Garofalo’s brother, in the aftermath of the terrorist mass murder of nine people (including Pastor and State Senator Clementa C. Pinckney). Space acknowledged that the purpose of the trip was a Confederate flag tattoo but refused to address it further. This incident factored into the deal made between him and Senator Steve Oroho, in which Space would announce that he wasn’t running for re-election in return for Oroho’s support for Jill Space for County Commissioner. Of course, much has changed since. 

There is a dearth of media platforms that stand in opposition to the establishment narrative or that present an alternative perspective. The situation is bad nationally – but even worse locally, where some counties and local governments have become transparency free zones with no external oversight. Local media simply doesn’t exist, and the situation is a great incubator of corruption. 

Think of the work done by New Jersey Herald reporters to uncover the Sussex Solar scandal that cost taxpayers $40 million. A similar scandal now would go unnoticed – except for blogs like Sussex County Watchdog and news websites, like Jennifer Dericks’ TAPinto. For better, or worse, this is all voters and taxpayers have left. There is nobody else to blow the whistle. 

Dawn Fantasia is an example of how politicians become when there is no local media to scrutinize them. They believe the First Amendment shouldn’t apply to politicians like them. They believe that they can suppress what remains of local media. 

Tucker Carlson reminds us, “Free speech is the main right that you have. Without it, you have no others.” 

Micah Rasmussen, Director of the Rebovich Institute of New Jersey Politics at Rider University, reminds us of what happens when there’s nobody watching the politicians: “Voters can't make informed decisions unless they're informed. If you asked any self-respecting constituent of George Santos, they'd tell you they wish they knew then what they know now.” 

Who is right on critical speech: Tucker Carlson or Dawn Fantasia?

By Rubashov 

In common with so many establishment politicians, County Commissioner Dawn Fantasia seems to believe that large parts of her public life – the life she made public – are off limits to discussion. We got a taste of this earlier today, when her campaign sent around an email that entirely evaded what the voters have a right to know. 

Commissioner Fantasia made a statement that suggests she might be open to policies that allow registered sex offenders, convicted of sex crimes against children, to be granted custody of minor children. That is why we asked her for a clarification of her statement. We even invited her to publish her clarification, unedited, on our website. 

Fantasia’s statement was made on the front page of the November 10, 2014, edition of the Star-Ledger, the largest circulation newspaper in New Jersey. In a story concerning her former husband, a schoolteacher who was convicted of a sex crime against one of his students (and “required to register as a sex offender under Megan's Law and… undergo parole supervision for life”, ibid April 18, 2008), the Star-Ledger reported: 

“Like Jim Cunneely, Dawn Cunneely [Fantasia] believes he will never commit a similar crime. She calls him a good father, and she has granted him joint custody of the children.” 

Nobody made this up. It is on the front page of the state’s largest newspaper. And we’re not discussing events that happened at the time of her husband’s arrest and trial – but rather, statements made years after, when Dawn Fantasia was pursuing political office. Further, it appears the 2014 front page story was in aid of marketing a book, written by Fantasia’s former husband. Published in 2013, it is called “Folie A Deux” and is 374 pages of public disclosure. Anyone can buy it on Amazon for $19.95. 

So far, Fantasia has refused to issue a clarification, even though, as a member of the New Jersey Legislature, she will be voting on bills that affect Megan’s Law and mandatory sentencing, and sex crimes, and child custody. And in her 780-word email earlier today, Fantasia again failed to clarify for voters her position on this matter. 

Do voters have a right to know Dawn Fantasia’s position? 

Micah Rasmussen, Director of the Rebovich Institute of New Jersey Politics at Rider University, provides this answer: “Voters can't make informed decisions unless they're informed. If you asked any self-respecting constituent of George Santos, they'd tell you they wish they knew then what they know now.” 

But Commissioner Fantasia’s email today takes a different path. It lays out the argument that a politician who currently holds elected public office and who is pursuing higher elected public office should not have to answer to the public.  

And why? Fantasia claims a feminist exemption. Her campaign’s 780-word email is full of emotional rhetoric and offense-taking, but short on clarity. Please Dawn, just tell us how you would vote if you were a member of the Assembly. That’s all we asked.  

The Fantasia campaign’s email is similar to political mailings sent out earlier this year, that urged voters not to read non-establishment media. This is something out of the old Soviet Union – or one of Joseph Goebbels screeds, decrying “Jewish atrocity propaganda”. Disgusting really, and an example of how over-powerful politicians think they have become. 

Dawn Fantasia is a politician. She is paid by an organization that receives millions in taxpayer funding. She is an elected official who gets paid by the taxpayer. She is seeking higher public office – and a substantial pay raise. Dawn Fantasia does not get to decide what is or isn’t journalism.  

She might think she’s a big deal, but the United States Supreme Court has over-ruled her. They have determined that blogs are indeed journalism and that bloggers are indeed journalists. The Society of Professional Journalists agrees as well. 

Last week, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced that he was bringing his perspective to Twitter. His short statement contained a great deal of insights, such as this one, regarding statements that run counter to those of the “official” or establishment narrative: 

“The rule of what you can’t say, defines everything. It’s filthy, really, And it’s utterly corrupting. You can’t have a free society if people aren’t allowed to say what they think is true. Speech is the fundamental prerequisite for democracy. That’s why it is enshrined in the first of our constitutional amendments.” 

Carlson then goes on to point out the dearth of media platforms that stand in opposition to the establishment narrative or that present an alternative perspective. The situation is bad nationally – but even worse locally, where some counties and local governments have become transparency free zones with no external oversight. Local media simply doesn’t exist, and the situation is a great incubator of corruption.  

Dawn Fantasia is an example of how politicians become when there is no local media to scrutinize them. They become apoplectic when asked questions about statements they made to the largest newspaper in the state. 

Tucker Carlson reminds us, “Free speech is the main right that you have. Without it, you have no others.” 

As an Assemblywoman – a member of the New Jersey Legislature – Dawn Fantasia will be voting on bills that affect Megan’s Law and mandatory sentencing, and sex crimes, and child custody. Fantasia’s statement certainly suggests that she might be open to policies that allow registered sex offenders, convicted of sex crimes against children, to be granted custody of minor children. That is why we asked her for a clarification of her statement from 2014. So far, she has refused. 

Earlier today, she refused again. 

Is it OK to suggest a candidate did something criminal when they didn’t?

By Rubashov

The Killian documents controversy (aka Memogate or Rathergate) involved six documents containing allegations about President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972–73. Dan Rather presented these documents as authentic in a broadcast aired by CBS on September 8, 2004, less than two months before the 2004 presidential election, but it was later found that CBS had failed to authenticate them. The documents were allegedly typed in 1973, but several typewriter and typographical experts soon concluded that they were forgeries.
 
Fast forward to 2023, and the legislative campaign of Parker Space, Dawn Fantasia, and Mike Inganamort has put out a mailer alleging that opponent Josh Aikens was a registered voter in Pennsylvania, while he was registered in New Jersey. To back up that claim, the campaign mailer includes an image of a document that they had shopped around to reporters last month.
 
But the image on the mailer is not the same document given to reporters. The Space-Fantasia-Inganamort campaign appears to have deliberately altered the document, removing a very important part of it (literally chopping it off). That part of the document indicates that the person in question, who shares a name with the opponent, last voted on November 2, 1999.
 
The opponent, Josh Aikens, was a 16-year-old in 1999 and a well-known member of the High Point High School soccer team. He was living with his parents in Wantage – not far from Space Farms.
 
Is the document even real? If real, was the document deliberately altered by the campaign? Is Josh Aikens a victim of identity fraud? Or is there some other explanation.
 
Tossing aside such reasonable doubts. The campaign mailer goes on to irrationally suggest that Aikens may have committed the crime of “voter fraud”. The mailer refers to Aikens as “shady” even though the document – both in its unaltered and altered forms – does not indicate that “voter fraud” occurred. Nevertheless, the Space-Fantasia-Inganamort mailer uses the words “voter fraud” and “shady”.
 
The penalty for voter fraud can include a fine, up to two years imprisonment, and disenfranchisement. It is a serious allegation and not something to be lightly tossed around. If it happened, it should be reported to the prosecutor’s office in both states. But, of course, it has not been. Reporting something as a crime, when you know no crime has occurred, can be a crime itself.
 
Along with the word “conservative”, the phrase “voter fraud” is fast being made meaningless by the language pimps who manage some of the state’s political campaigns. Unwittingly, these particular language pimps have opened the door to some embarrassing questions of their own making.
 
For example, will these language pimps suggest to their client – gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli – that he needs to register from his new address?
 
From her public Facebook posts, Sussex County Commissioner Dawn Fantasia appears to be residing on a farm in Warren County. How will the language pimps she employs advise her?
 
And what about those various public officials in Sussex County – both elected and appointed – whose residency in Sussex County is required, but who keep most of their lives outside the County? Once the language of impropriety has been tossed about, don’t expect it to end with a campaign.

1999. High Point High School
Sussex County, New Jersey

When faced with an allegation of voter fraud – an allegation of criminal behavior – Assembly candidate Josh Aikens (a family man with a spotless legal record) addressed it publicly. He faced two journalists and told them directly that he had never lived in Pennsylvania.
 
This stands in contrast with Sussex County Commissioner Dawn Fantasia, who has consistently refused to address her very real, and very spotty, legal troubles.
 
Last September, the Commissioner was embroiled in a legal battle with Ashley Furniture over a debt of $2,045.06 (Docket SSX-DC-001706-22). And it appears she avoided the court notice (not at that address?). Most recently, there’s docket number SSX-DC-000502-23, filed on March 6, 2023. The plaintiff – a credit card company – is demanding a judgment in the amount of $1,152.00.
 
There are other incidents as well. On March 7, 2017, judgment was entered in the Superior Court, Special Civil Part, in favor of plaintiff CAPITAL ONE BANK and against defendant DAWN CUNNEELY (the Commissioner’s former married name) in the amount of $1,623.85 plus cost of $57.00. A Writ of Execution was issued by the Clerk of the Superior Court, Special Civil Part, with regard to this matter (Docket SSX-DC-000051-17). On November 16, 2017, pursuant to said Execution, Court Officer MICHAEL SCRIVANI levied on all monies on deposit in the Wells Fargo Bank, in the name of DAWN CUNNEELY. Judge David Weaver issued the Writ of Execution for $1,898.44.
 
And then there was judgment SSX-VJ-000722-16 (Docket SSX-DC-000631-16) against defendant DAWN FANTASIA (aka DAWN CUNNEELY). In which an order to garnish wages was executed on June 17, 2016, for the amount of $826.21. The listed employer was ILEARN SCHOOLS in Elmwood Park, NJ 07407.
 
These court actions were taken while Dawn Fantasia held public office. We have avoided those that concerned her as a private citizen, but before she held office, Fantasia was a joint debtor in a bankruptcy, filed by her husband, in 2008.
 
The Space-Fantasia-Inganamort team are sending out mailers and making allegations against a 16-year-old. Does it not follow that their entire histories are relevant?  
 

- - -

 Senate candidate Parker Space has been dodging the question of when and why he got a Confederate flag tattoo. He denied having one and repeatedly lied to the media about it in 2017 -- that much is on the record.

Sources have confirmed that the Assemblyman, accompanied by actress Janeane Garofalo’s brother, got the tattoo in the aftermath of the terrorist mass murder of nine people (including Pastor and State Senator Clementa C. Pinckney). Space was confronted about this at a March 18, 2022, meeting – attended by State Senator Steve Oroho and other Sussex County political leaders. He refused to address it.
 
Will his running mates care to comment on this? Two of those running mates, Commissioner Dawn Fantasia and Surrogate Gary Chiusano, were present at the March 18, 2022, meeting. In fact, Commissioner Fantasia called the meeting.

- - -
Commissioner Dawn Fantasia seems to believe that large parts of her public life – the life she made public – are off limits to discussion. When asked why, she invariably claims a feminist exemption. “I am the only woman running”, and statements like that. But there are statements she made, after beginning her political career in 2014, that need examination.
 
One such statement by Fantasia was made on the front page of the November 10, 2014, edition of the Star-Ledger, the largest circulation newspaper in New Jersey. In a story concerning her former husband, a schoolteacher who was convicted of a sex crime against one of his students (and “required to register as a sex offender under Megan's Law and… undergo parole supervision for life”, ibid April 18, 2008), the Star-Ledger reported:
 
“Like Jim Cunneely, Dawn Cunneely [Fantasia] believes he will never commit a similar crime. She calls him a good father, and she has granted him joint custody of the children.”
 
Studies vary, but the U.S. Justice Department’s National Sexual Violence Resource Center states: “Contrary to conventional wisdom, most re-offenses do not occur within the first several years after release. For example, in one study, subsequent sex offenses occurred as late as 10 years after prison discharge. The study found a 30 percent recidivism rate at year 10 of offender's release from prison. By the year 25, re-offending had increased to 52 percent.”
 
Nobody made this document up. It is on the front page of the state’s largest newspaper. And we’re not discussing events that happened when somebody was 16-years-old – but rather, statements of an adult pursuing a political office.
 
Nevertheless, Commissioner Fantasia believes that she should not have to clarify her statement – even though, as an Assemblywoman – a member of the New Jersey Legislature – she will be voting on bills that affect Megan’s Law and mandatory sentencing, and sex crimes, and child custody.
 
Fantasia’s statement certainly suggests that she might be open to policies that allow registered sex offenders, convicted of sex crimes against children, to be granted custody of minor children. That is why we asked her for a clarification of her statement from 2014. So far, she has refused.
 
Finally, before anyone suggests that we are revisiting some secret, best left in the dark, place – remember that the 2014 front page story was possibly in aid of marketing a book, written by Fantasia’s former husband. Published in 2013, it is called “Folie A Deux” and is 374 pages of self-disclosure. You can buy it on Amazon for $19.95.

“Voters can’t make informed decisions unless they’re informed.  If you asked any self-respecting constituent of George Santos, they’d tell you they wish they knew then what they know now.”
 
Micah Rasmussen
Director of the Rebovich Institute of New Jersey Politics at Rider University

Matt Taibbi et al: Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex

By Rubashov

In January, NPR’s WHYY heralded the passage of S-588, the “first in the nation” K-12 “information literacy education” mandate, signed into law by Governor Phil Murphy. The new mandate addresses “disinformation” and “misinformation” in what is described as a “post-truth world”. WHYY reported:
 
It comes two years after lies about the results of the 2020 election underpinned the Jan. 6, insurrection, and as misinformation proliferates on social media and the internet…
 
The law, passed with overwhelmingly bipartisan support, requires the [State] Board of Education to create statewide information literacy standards. Students will be required to learn the skills needed to assess information from a variety of sources.
 
…Assemblyman Dan Benson (D-Mercer), another sponsor, said he expects the state to fully implement the new learning standards within the next two school years.
 
“[The Department of Education is] going to convene a committee that includes certified school library media specialists, as well as teaching staff, and they’re going to come up with information literacy standards,” Benson said. “Then once that’s done, there’s a process of review by experts.”
 
Olga Polites, state advocacy leader for Media Literacy Now and a retired Burlington County English teacher, said the new law is crucial for combating misinformation, especially after the 2021 insurrection.
 
Media Literacy Now organized around the issue, sparking a conversation that led to movement on the legislation after it stalled for years, Polites said.
 
…Polites said the law will provide educators with the foundational tools needed to be able to talk about misinformation on issues like vaccines and other current events “without pushback from parents who might object to some of the information that is shared.” She also said it could help students educate adult family members on information literacy, too.
 
Many Republican legislators continue to support this new mandate, most recently Assemblyman Brian Bergen, wrote an opinion piece in Save Jersey defending it. But listen to what Governor Murphy had to say about it:
 
“…in New Jersey we are the first state to ensure that our kids, and the generations to come, possess the skills needed to discern fact from fiction and reject disinformation.”
 
Now who do we think is going to pick the bureaucrats who will implement the new mandate? Will it be the Republicans? Or Phil Murphy and the Democrats?
 
This was a massive failure in intelligence gathering on the part of Republican caucus staff and its leadership.  The worst failure in a generation. Nearly every GOP Senator voted for this, while in the Assembly, a few district staffers kept their members away from it by doing a simple Google search and realizing who was behind it. For example, a simple Google search comes up with a WHYY op-ed by Professor Polites, dated February 6, 2021. It is titled, “The next generation of American voters must learn to decipher fact from fiction.”
 
“The next generation of American voters..." Get it? This is about influencing future voters on how to vote. At taxpayer expense. Turning every classroom in the state into a political education center.
 
Well, a group of internationally well-known journalists have put together a primer on what they call the “Censorship-Industrial Complex”. They have listed the top 50 organizations behind this globally. Some of them figured directly into the lobbying for and fashioning of S-588. Others are the parent organizations of more local groups involved in this and similar efforts.
 
Their work is a good first step in identifying who and what is behind the implementation of the new “disinformation” curriculum mandate by the Murphy administration. Hopefully, Republican staffers will use it and Republican legislators will educate themselves (though we doubt it).
 

The citizen's starter kit to understanding the new global information cartel: The top 50 Organizations to Know

 
By SUSAN SCHMIDT, ANDREW LOWENTHAL, TOM WYATT, TECHNO FOG, MATT ORFALEA, MATT TAIBBI, AND THE HUNT FOR TOM CLANCY (MAY 10, 2023)
 
Introduction by Matt Taibbi
 
On January 17, 1960, outgoing President and former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower gave one of the most consequential speeches in American history. Eisenhower for eight years had been a popular president, whose appeal drew upon a reputation as a person of great personal fortitude, who’d guided the United States to victory in an existential fight for survival in World War II. Nonetheless, as he prepared to vacate the Oval Office for handsome young John F. Kennedy, he warned the country it was now at the mercy of a power even he could not overcome.
 
Until World War II, America had no permanent arms manufacturing industry. Now it did, and this new sector, Eisenhower said, was building up around itself a cultural, financial, and political support system accruing enormous power. This “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” he said, adding:
 
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
 
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes… Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
 
This was the direst of warnings, but the address has tended in the popular press to be ignored. After sixty-plus years, most of America – including most of the American left, which traditionally focused the most on this issue – has lost its fear that our arms industry might conquer democracy from within.
 
Now, however, we’ve unfortunately found cause to reconsider Eisenhower’s warning.
 
While the civilian population only in recent years began haggling over “de-platforming” incidents involving figures like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos, government agencies had already long been advancing a new theory of international conflict, in which the informational landscape is more importantly understood as a battlefield than a forum for exchanging ideas. In this view, “spammy” ads, “junk” news, and the sharing of work from “disinformation agents” like Jones aren’t inevitable features of a free Internet, but sorties in a new form of conflict called “hybrid warfare.”
 
In 1996, just the Internet was becoming part of daily life in America, the U.S. Army published “Field Manual 100-6,” which spoke of “an expanding information domain termed the Global Information Environment” that contains “information processes and systems that are beyond the direct influence of the military.” Military commanders needed to understand that “information dominance” in the “GIE” would henceforth be a crucial element for “operating effectively.”
 
You’ll often see it implied that “information operations” are only practiced by America’s enemies, because only America’s enemies are low enough, and deprived enough of real firepower, to require the use of such tactics, needing as they do to “overcome military limitations.” We rarely hear about America’s own lengthy history with “active measures” and “information operations,” but popular media gives us space to read about the desperate tactics of the Asiatic enemy, perennially described as something like an incurable trans-continental golf cheat.
 
Indeed, part of the new mania surrounding “hybrid warfare” is the idea that while the American human being is accustomed to living in clear states of “war” or “peace,” the Russian, Chinese, or Iranian citizen is born into a state of constant conflict, where war is always ongoing, whether declared or not. In the face of such adversaries, America’s “open” information landscape is little more than military weakness.
 
In March of 2017, in a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee on hybrid war, chairman Mac Thornberry opened the session with ominous remarks, suggesting that in the wider context of history, an America built on constitutional principles of decentralized power might have been badly designed:
 
“Americans are used to thinking of a binary state of either war or peace. That is the way our organizations, doctrine, and approaches are geared. Other countries, including Russia, China, and Iran, use a wider array of centrally controlled, or at least centrally directed, instruments of national power and influence to achieve their objectives…
 
Whether it is contributing to foreign political parties, targeted assassinations of opponents, infiltrating non-uniformed personnel such as the little green men, traditional media and social media, influence operations, or cyber-connected activity, all of these tactics and more are used to advance their national interests and most often to damage American national interests…
 
The historical records suggest that hybrid warfare in one form or another may well be the norm for human conflict, rather than the exception.”
 
Around that same time, i.e. shortly after the election of Donald Trump, it was becoming gospel among the future leaders of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” that interference by “malign foreign threat actors” and the vicissitudes of Western domestic politics must be linked. Everything, from John Podesta’s emails to Trump’s Rust Belt primary victories to Brexit, were to be understood first and foremost as hybrid war events.
 
This is why the Trump-Russia scandal in the United States will likely be remembered as a crucial moment in 21st-century history, even though the investigation superficially ended a non-story, fake news in itself. What the Mueller investigation didn’t accomplish in ousting Trump from office, it did accomplish in birthing a vast new public-private bureaucracy devoted to stopping “mis-, dis-, and malinformation,” while smoothing public acquiescence to the emergence of a spate of new government agencies with “information warfare” missions.
 
The “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.
 
Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the “defense” sector, the “anti-disinformation” complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have “military limitations.” The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign “disinformation.” It’s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy’s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy.
 
They suggest we must rethink old conceptions about rights, and give ourselves over to new surveillance techniques like “toxicity monitoring,” replace the musty old free press with editors claiming a “nose for news” with an updated model that uses automated assignment tools like “newsworthy claim extraction,” and submit to frank thought-policing mechanisms like the “redirect method,” which sends ads at online browsers of dangerous content, pushing them toward “constructive alternative messages.”
 
Binding all this is a commitment to a new homogeneous politics, which the complex of public and private agencies listed below seeks to capture in something like a Unified Field Theory of neoliberal narrative, which can be perpetually tweaked and amplified online via algorithm and machine learning. This is what some of the organizations on this list mean when they talk about coming up with a “shared vocabulary” of information disorder, or “credibility,” or “media literacy.”
 
Anti-disinformation groups talk endlessly about building “resilience” to disinformation (which in practice means making sure the public hears approved narratives so often that anything else seems frightening or repellent), and audiences are trained to question not only the need for checks and balances, but competition. Competition is increasingly frowned upon not just in the “marketplace of ideas” (an idea itself more and more often described as outdated), but in the traditional capitalist sense. In the Twitter Files we repeatedly find documents like this unsigned “Sphere of Influence” review circulated by the Carnegie Endowment that wonders aloud if tech companies really need to be competing to “get it right”:

In place of competition, the groups we’ve been tracking favor the concept of the “shared endeavor” (one British group has even started a “Shared Endeavour” program), in which key “stakeholders” hash out their disagreements in private, but present a unified front.
 
Who are the leaders of these messaging campaigns? If you care to ask, the groups below are a good place to start.
 
“The Top 50 List” is intended as a resource for reporters and researchers beginning their journey toward learning the scale and ambition of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Written like a magazine feature, it tries to answer a few basic questions about funding, organization type, history, and especially, methodology. Many anti-disinformation groups adhere to the same formulaic approach to research, often using the same “hate-mapping,” guilt-by-association-type analysis to identify wrong-thinkers and suppressive persons. There is even a tendency to use what one Twitter Files source described as the same “hairball” graphs.
 
Where they compete, often, is in the area of gibberish verbiage describing their respective analytical methods. My favorite came from the Public Good Projects, which in a display of predictive skills reminiscent of the “unsinkable Titanic” described itself as the “Buzzfeed of public health.”
 
Together, these groups are fast achieving what Eisenhower feared: the elimination of “balance” between the democratic need for liberalizing laws and institutions, and the vigilance required for military preparation. Democratic society requires the nourishment of free debate, disagreement, and intellectual tension, but the groups below seek instead that “shared vocabulary” to deploy on the hybrid battlefield. They propose to serve as the guardians of that “vocabulary,” which sounds very like the scenario Ike outlined in 1961, in which “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific and technological elite.”
 
Without further ado, an introduction to the main players in this “CIC”:
 

Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know (racket.news)

 

The battle for our children’s future is not being fought in China or in the Middle East. It’s happening inside their minds and inside our classrooms.

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

George Orwell

N.B. We welcome a conversation on this and all topics raised on this website.  Jersey Conservative is entirely open to your ideas and opinions.  To submit a column for publication, please contact jerseyconservativetips@protonmail.com.

LD24: The inconsistencies of political morality.

 
In 2017, Senator Steve Oroho became quite emotional over an allegation that he committed a crime. The allegation – one of bribery – was made by an opponent during his re-election effort that year. Oroho ending up replying to that allegation with a threat of legal action.
 
Fast forward to 2023, Dawn Fantasia is attempting a similarly snide allegation of criminality against one of her opponents – suggesting that he committed voter fraud. She’s even produced a document in an effort to argue that he lived and voted in Pennsylvania while residing and voting in New Jersey. But according to that document, the person the document actually refers to, last voted in 1999 – when Fantasia’s opponent was 16 years old and a well-known student attending high school in Sussex County. Fantasia’s allegation is, in a word, ridiculous.
 
Maybe Fantasia isn’t a close reader or maybe she doesn’t care if she trashes the reputation of an innocent man? But what about Steve Oroho and Hal Wirths? Shouldn’t they care? Fantasia is their hand-picked candidate for Assembly and they have remained silent as she’s tossed around allegations every bit as hurtful as the bribery allegation against Steve Oroho in 2017. Why the silence? Is it okay to trash someone… so long as it’s not you?
 
And while she is quick to make-up stuff and talk about allegations of criminality against others, Dawn Fantasia doesn’t believe that anyone should discuss the actual criminal convictions of those associated with her. In common with so many other “prince” and “princess” candidates recruited by the establishment these days, their past is off limits – even as they fashion the pasts of others.
 
For example, Dawn Fantasia has spent her entire professional career working for iLearn Schools. She’s been nurtured by a leadership that values loyalty above all else and she’s held key positions, including Chief Growth Officer and Chief Communications Officer.
 
But according to The Record newspaper & NorthJersey.com, iLearn Schools is linked to an Islamic cleric who is a convicted criminal in his native Turkey and wanted for terrorism.  Here’s a good overview from The Record/ NorthJersey.com (February 16, 2017):
 

WATCHDOG Investigation: Charter school leaders, founders linked to controversial Turkish cleric

 
A group of charter schools that arose from North Jersey’s Turkish community is rapidly growing in the state, with seven schools collecting more than $60 million in taxpayer money last year alone to fund their growth.
 
Now, an investigation by The Record and NorthJersey.com shows that some founders and leaders of the schools have close ties to the movement of Fethullah Gulen, the controversial Islamic cleric accused of working to overthrow the government in his native Turkey last summer. Gulen is fighting extradition demands as he lives in a secluded compound in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains, about 10 miles from the New Jersey border.
 
…Some belong to Turkish émigré groups that tout the cleric's teachings. There are also political donors who collectively have furnished hundreds of thousands in donations to U.S. office holders while the North Jersey charter schools in general have been adept at wooing state and local government officials with trips to Turkey and, in some cases, jobs.
 
Records show the charter schools in North Jersey also have been a channel for state taxpayer money to private entities that serve the schools as landlords or vendors — in one case, a Wayne boarding school that is openly Gulen inspired.
 
Turkish prosecutors accuse Gulen of attempts to overthrow the government and of instigating the 2016 coup attempt. In 2000, he was found guilty, in absentia, of scheming to overthrow the government by embedding civil servants in various governmental offices. A Turkish criminal court has issued an arrest warrant for Gulen and Turkey is demanding his extradition from the United States. Gulen is wanted as a terrorist leader in Turkey and Pakistan, as well as by the OIC and GCC. Turkey is a member of NATO.
 
…Officials in the turbulent Turkish republic have maintained Gulen is leveraging a network of more than 100 charter schools nationwide and U.S. tax dollars to support revolution back home that would put his followers in power.
 
“It’s clear these schools were being used both to raise funds for Gulen and employ Gulen followers and teachers and basically have them tie a percent of their income back to Gulen,” said Robert Amsterdam, a London-based lawyer hired by the Turkish government who is investigating charter schools in the U.S. that he alleges are linked to Gulen.
 
…As the international controversy around Gulen swirls, the Turkish-led schools in New Jersey continue to collect tens of millions of dollars in state financing and local tax support, public records show.
 
The Record's review raises key questions about state oversight of the schools…
 
The investigation found:
 
A state-financed property deal involving the Paterson Charter School for Science and Technology also benefited its landlord, a private group with close ties to the Gulen movement:
 
That group sold the property and used the proceeds to help open a new campus in Wayne for its private boarding school that hews closely to Gulen's teachings and caters largely to students from Turkey. 
 
Public money, in fees and rent that could amount to millions of dollars over time, continues to flow to the charter school's new landlord, a firm with multiple ties to Turkish charter schools in New Jersey and elsewhere. 
 
Connections run deep among people involved with the schools, Gulenist groups and Turkish charter schools elsewhere in the U.S:  
 
Two of the New Jersey schools, for example, have a founder who has served as a director at the New York-based Alliance for Shared Values, considered the voice of the Gulen movement in this country.  
 
The CEO of iLearn Schools Inc. – an Elmwood Park-based non-profit that manages four of the local charter schools – comes from a charter network in Texas that the Turkish government claims is linked to the Gulen movement. 
 
The schools and their vendors have successfully courted prominent public-school educators and political figures.   
 
The state’s top charter school regulator, Harold Lee, left his post last summer for a job at iLearn.
 
This is the same Harold Lee who appears as a host on invitations for Assembly candidate Dawn Fantasia’s May 17th fundraiser in Sussex County. During Dawn Fantasia’s December 2022 interview with LD24 and SRM staff, she made it very clear that iLearn’s leadership would facilitate her role as a legislator and that they saw her advancement in positive terms for their movement. The Record/ NorthJersey.com continues:
 
Security consulting contracts at four of the schools worth more than $90,000 a year are held by ex-Bergen County Sheriff Leo McGuire, who took a 10-day trip to Turkey before he left office in 2010 with his family and local Turkish nationals tied to the schools. It was paid for in part by a Gulenist group.
 
More than $30 million in long-term, low-interest loans have been granted by the state to benefit the Paterson charter school despite its continuing financial and academic troubles:
 
In 2014, a Wall Street ratings agency downgraded the bonds issued for its expansion to junk status because the school’s revenues had fallen. Last year, Wall Street lowered its overall outlook on the bonds to “negative.”
 
Tracking tax dollars spent by the schools can be difficult because of loopholes in state law:
 
ILearn, which is set to add a fifth charter to its chain this year, declined to answer routine requests for information about its payroll, saying that as a private contractor it is not subject to the state Open Public Records law.
  
State officials said it is unclear if such charter-management organizations fall under the law, even though charters draw their funding directly from the tax-funded budgets of regular public schools. 
 
…A number of prominent Turkish nationals connected to the charters or their vendors have emerged as fundraisers and contributors to Hillary Clinton and Obama, among other political leaders. A former head of the Science and Technology charter in Paterson, Furkan Kosar, is the president of the Council of Turkic American Associations. Kosar raised more than $500,000 for Obama’s re-election bid in 2012. He did not return calls made to the council.
 
Critics say the presence of big-money contributors connected to the schools in New Jersey and other states is evidence the cleric and his followers are advancing the Gulen movement at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.
 
“They’re engaging in a series of activities that really don’t have anything to do with charter schools, and have much more to do with building political influence in the U.S. for his movement,” said Amsterdam, the lawyer for the Turkish government.
 
Among those critics is retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s recently ousted national security adviser who claimed American taxpayers “are helping finance Gulen’s 160 charter schools in the United States” in an op-ed piece written in November for The Hill, the congressional newspaper that assailed the Obama administration for allowing Gulen to remain in the United States.
 
Are Steve Oroho and Hal Wirths aware of this? And if they are, do they support Gulen and his works? Moreover, are they comfortable with sending someone from that organization into the GOP legislative caucus?

BBC: Anti-Gulen protest in Turkey.

"It's all the same people that dug the hole, and every time we ask for a clear, third-party fresh set of eyes, they throw in somebody else that appears out of the past. How many times can you recycle the same names? Are they protecting specific people, or are they protecting the county?”

(New Jersey Herald, March 28, 2015)

We welcome your commentary.  If you would like to submit a column for publication, please contact us at jerseyconservativetips@protonmail.com.

The Morris GOP AWOL on defense of parental rights.

The NJEA argues that removing any book from a school library is something akin to the book burning that went on in 1930s Germany. Of course, the NJEA and its allies think nothing of canceling an author with whom they disagree – mirroring a practice common in authoritarian regimes of all ideological stripes.
 
There is a great difference between canceling an author along with his or her work and deciding that certain reading material isn’t “age appropriate” for a certain audience. If it is all the same, then it would follow that Penthouse magazine and Hustler would be found on the shelves of school libraries, and their presence supported by the NJEA as a “defense against book burning.”
 
You can’t cancel the author of the Harry Potter series because you disagree with her, but then claim that setting age-appropriate standards at a school library is a bridge too far. But that’s what’s being done at the Roxbury School District in Morris County. This recent Fox News coverage explains the controversy:

“The battle for our children’s future is not being fought in China or in the Middle East. It’s happening inside their minds and inside our classrooms.”

Roxbury has become ground zero in the fight for parental rights in New Jersey. Advocates and parents are even being sued by a board of education employee, a school librarian, for pushing back and demanding that the board remove certain sexually explicit books from the school library. Books that parents believe are inappropriate for their minor children.
 
Remember, unlike those who want to cancel author J.K. Rowling, an adult, for having an opinion – these parents only wish to limit the access their minor children have to this material. Adults are free to do what they like (and that goes for their children, once they are adults).
 
At a meeting of the Board of Education on Monday night, parental rights advocates from around the state showed up to support the parents being sued and to speak out in their defense. But not the Morris County GOP. Not the Republican establishment.
 
Parental rights advocate Josh Aikens was there. Aikens, a candidate for Assembly, was joined by running mate Jason Sarnoski. Aikens delivered an impassioned defense of parental rights – as he has hundreds of times before throughout his effort to recruit and train conservative school board candidates. But where were all those Republicans who claim to be “conservative” and claim to be “pro-parent”.
 
Are the language pimps who run the campaigns of GOP establishment politicians doing to the phrase “pro-parent” what they did to the word “conservative”?
 
A year ago, the GOP legislative caucuses were big on parental rights. After all, parental rights is the issue responsible for Republicans winning in Virginia in 2021 and for Florida going from a purple state to one that is bright red.  
 
But then a GOP State Senator stood up in caucus and claimed a family member was “transitioning”. And that’s how quickly the rot sets in. Never underestimate the power of the personal to undermine policy. To a GOP leadership unsure of its principles, not wishing to offend a colleague is a ready excuse to take the chicken run on a controversial issue.
 
Overnight… the GOP’s digital and social media campaign in support of parental rights dried up. Now, “pro-parent” is just a convenient label, to be applied on campaign mailings, and media advertisements – by the language pimps who run establishment politicians’ campaigns. A label that, if allowed to, will be forgotten the moment the election is over.

How will Bergen’s “disinformation” mandate handle transubstantiation?

How will Murphy-appointed truth arbitrators deal with concepts like transubstantiation and transgenderism?
 

 
By Rubashov
 
A Republican legislator, Assemblyman Brian Bergen of Morris County, recently wrote a column defending the new “disinformation” curriculum mandate signed into law by Governor Phil Murphy in January. The new mandate had the support of nearly every Republican legislator in New Jersey.
 
Outside of New Jersey, you can’t find a Republican who wants to give government the ultimate power to determine what is true and what is false – and then teach it to children. In New Jersey, you can’t find an elected Republican legislator who doesn’t want to hand the Murphy administration that power. Why?
 
Under the new “disinformation” curriculum mandate, Governor Murphy's appointed government truth arbitrators will set standards on how to handle children’s questions about concepts like “transubstantiation” and “transgenderism”. How will these truth arbitrators address these ideas?
 
Both are faith-based concepts. Transubstantiation is “the conversion of the substance of the Eucharistic elements into the body and blood of Christ at consecration, only the appearances of bread and wine still remaining.” It is a major element in Christian and especially Roman Catholic theology.
 
Transgenderism is the idea that an individual can change gender by self-determination. Of course, official truth arbitrators would rather you use the word “transness”, as the word “transgenderism” is now considered to be officially “offensive”. If you persist in looking the word up, you can see how official truth arbitrators have already been at work. The Cambridge Dictionary, for example, provides this definition and present it as a fact:
 
Transgenderism: [noun] the fact of not having your gender match the body you were born with. This word is often used by people who think that this is a bad thing, or who want to suggest that transgender people are wrong about their gender.
 
Example: The county school system defended the new lessons that introduce students to sexual orientation and transgenderism in grades eight and 10.

Note: This word was more common in the past and it is still used in some formal writing, but it is now considered offensive by many people.
 
That isn’t so much a definition as it is an ideological talking point. That’s how corrupted etymology has become on the Internet. So, which term will be presented as fact and which as fiction by the official government truth arbitrators of the Murphy administration? And mind you, both are faith-based. Both can be proven false by the scientific method.
 
And to whom will those found to be “untruthful” appeal?

Once labeled “disinformation” – as Galileo Galilei was, for teaching the fact that the earth revolves around the sun – to whom will the accused make their appeal? Will Murphy establish a court of truth for such appeals? Will this court handle accusations of heresies against truth, with unrepentant cases prosecuted by the civil courts – as they did during the Inquisition?
 
Having labeled disinformation “dangerous” as the current Legislature has, will some future Legislature empanel a committee to combat the distribution of “disinformation”? Will it drag heretics before it – label them “unpatriotic” – and ask them to name others who participate in the vast “disinformation” conspiracy?
 
Perhaps Assemblyman Bergen is salivating at the thought of purging all “non-truthers”? But before he does, let us reach into the past for some calming words, written at another time of madness and committees and “truth” and “patriotism” and “heresy”:
 
“The Congress has the right to do nearly anything conceivable. It has only to define a situation or an action as a ‘clear and present danger’ to public safety, public morals, or public health. The selling and eating of mince pie could be made a crime if Congress determined that mince pie was a danger to public health – which it probably is. Since many parents raise their children badly, mother love could be defined as a danger to the general welfare.”

“The Congress had a perfect right to pass the Alien and Sedition Act. This law was repealed because of public revulsion. The Escaped Slave laws had to be removed because the people of free states found them immoral. The Prohibition laws were so generally flouted that all law suffered as a consequence.
 
We have seen and been revolted by the Soviet Union’s encouragement of spying and telling, children reporting their parents, wives informing on their husbands. In Hitler’s Germany, it was considered patriotic to report your friends and relations to authorities. And we in America have felt safe from and superior to these things. But are we so safe or superior?”
 
“In their attempts to save the nation from attack, they [Congress] could well undermine the deep personal morality which is the nation’s final defense.”
 
“My father was a great man, as any lucky man’s father must be. He taught me rules I do not think are abrogated by our nervous and hysterical times. These laws have not been annulled; these rules of attitudes. He taught me – glory to God, honor to my family, loyalty to my friends, respect for the law, love of country and instant and open revolt against tyranny, whether it come from the bully in the schoolyard, the foreign dictator, or the local demagogue.
 
And, if this be treason, gentlemen, make the most of it.”
 
John Steinbeck (1957)
 
American writer. Author of The Red Pony, Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, The Moon Is Down, Cannery Row, The Wayward Bus, The Pearl, Burning Bright, East of Eden, Sweet Thursday, The Winter of Our Discontent, Travels with Charley: In Search of America, America and Americans, and Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War (among many others).

John Steinbeck
(1902-1968)

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1940)
Nobel Prize in Literature (1962)

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

George Orwell

N.B. We welcome a conversation on this and all topics raised on this website.  Jersey Conservative is entirely open to your ideas and opinions.  To submit a column for publication, please contact: jerseyconservativetips@protonmail.com.

In 2020, Assemblyman Space got $359,838 from the federal government.

Here is an interesting transaction that isn’t subject to legislative disclosure in New Jersey but should be:
 
In February 2020, Space Farms Inc. got $359,838 in a Warranty Easement Deed it "sold" to the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program - Wetland Reserve Easement via the Commodity Credit Conservation Service of the US Department of Agriculture. The federal government paid to "acquire" three parcels of Space Farms Inc's properties - yet Space Farms Inc is still listed as owning the properties under this unusual agreement. It seems despite "selling" the parcels the Space business is allowed to still hold title - despite getting the $359,838.
 
Remember that this deal concerns not one but two elected public officials – Assemblyman Parker Space and Sussex County Commissioner Jill Space – both of whom are paid by the taxpayers. Space Farms is also a public vendor, holding contracts in several counties.
 
Every state requires elected members of the legislature to file some form of financial disclosure. Most require it annually. Some states are serious about it.
 
For example, states that are serious about financial disclosure require employment information, including the employer or business name, job title, a description of the business and the work involved, and the salary or income from that employment. Ditto for the legislator’s spouse.
 
Serious states require disclosure of all for-profit and non-profit corporations and business entities in which the legislator or spouse serves as an officer/director and some require a description of the purpose of that entity. Investment information is also required: Name, description, and value/holding amount. All stocks. And ditto for the spouse.
 
They don’t stop there. States that are serious about open government require their legislators to individually list every client and every payment from a government unit. That includes the client’s name and information, and the income from that client. Spouses included.
 
All real estate owned by the legislator or the legislator’s spouse is identified, some states extend this to dependents as well. The value of each property, any encumbrances on the property and any income derived from the property and from whom is also reportable.
 
States interested in transparency audit these disclosures for accuracy and penalize legislators who fail to report accurately. And it is all made public and easily accessible.
 
Unfortunately, New Jersey isn’t one of these serious states and in the last six months has taken major steps to remove citizens’ access to open government, transparency, and public disclosure. For example, both chambers of the Legislature recently approved a resolution that would no longer require lawmakers to disclose their home addresses, including the town they live in or any description of the home, on financial disclosure forms. The resolution didn’t need the governor’s approval and applies to the legislative financial disclosures due in May 2023.
 
Some have suggested that the undisclosed deal for $359,838 was worked out with the assistance of Congressman Josh Gottheimer’s office. Of course, the Democrat Congressman represents much of Sussex County, and such assistance could justifiably be provided to any constituent. That said, there is an unresolved controversy regarding Assemblyman Parker Space (R-24) and Sussex County Commissioner Jill Space (also a Republican State Committeewoman) helping at a campaign event for the Democrat Congressman in August 2022.
 
The practice of Republican elected officials supporting Democrats has been going on since Josh Gottheimer’s first race in 2016 – one in which the Bergen County Democrat defeated Republican incumbent Congressman Scott Garrett of Sussex County. After some local Republicans complained about their former mayor/ councilman supporting Gottheimer, Sussex County GOP Chairman Jerry Scanlan wrote to the elected official, laying out the complaint:
 
I’m writing to you because your past and recent endorsements of Democrats have sparked a controversy within our party. At present, the Sussex County Republican Committee does not act in response to elected members of our party openly supporting Democrats during a General Election, but we will be taking up this question at our county committee meeting on September 21st.
 
As you are aware, you have benefitted from the support of members of our committee and from the committee itself. The question is whether we should continue to provide such support in the face of your repeated support of Democrats. It’s a free country, and we are as free to withhold our support as you are to give yours.
 
In a press release prepared by Democrat Josh Gottheimer’s campaign this week, this statement is attributed to you… I’d appreciate you showing up at our September 21st county committee meeting, where you will have a chance to explain yourself.
 
The elected official in question responded to Scanlan and defended his support for the Democrat but announced that he was resigning his office (which he did, on October 15, 2022, for “health reasons”). The matter was discussed but not formally taken up at the September 21, 2022, meeting.
 
Other occurrences were brought to the attention of the county GOP – including an August 18, 2022, incident in which Commissioner and Assemblyman Space were “surprise guests” at a Gottheimer campaign telephone townhall event. Commissioner Jill Space led the event in the pledge of allegiance and Assemblyman Space was on hand to participate in a Q & A with the Democrat Congressman.
 
When one Democrat asked how people could help Gottheimer succeed in combatting “crazy Republicans doing crazy things”, the Commissioner and the Assemblyman offered no objection to this slur against their party and its members. They put up no defense throughout the plainly anti-Republican event.
 
Correspondence related to this incident confirmed that the Commissioner and Assemblyman acknowledged what they did but insisted that helping Gottheimer in this way was a smart political move. There were calls to have Commissioner Space removed from the State Committee (an additional elected position she holds) and NJGOP Chairman Bob Hugin personally admonished them.
 
As both the Commissioner and the Assemblyman are members of the GOP county committee, this triggered a request that the Sussex County Republican Committee “formally adopt rules governing the behavior of county committee members in this regard and with regards to any and all Democrat Party candidates.” It was suggested that the adopted rules extend to “candidates and elected officials who seek or who have sought and received the support of the Sussex County Republican Committee.”
 
This request was to be formally discussed at the March 9, 2023, meeting and rules adopted then or at the next meeting on June 21, 2023. But the March 9, 2023, meeting was cancelled and not rescheduled.
 
The meeting was canceled after there was a move to censure Commissioner Space and a request that she resign as one of the county’s two representatives on the Republican State Committee. There was some discussion about censuring the Assemblyman as well, as he is a member of the County Committee.
 
There have been suggestions that the couple could retaliate by switching parties, but that is unlikely. There hasn’t been a niche in the Democratic Party to accommodate them since the days of Alabama Governor George C. Wallace.
 
Despite Gottheimer’s coziness with the pair, most mainstream Democrats remember Parker Space’s antics – like calling a female candidate a “bitch” and having various Confederate flag tattoos (including one gained in the aftermath of a horrific incident). The pair were also heavily criticized for posing under a band banner that incorporated the Confederate flag as part of its design. So, joining the Democrats isn’t a serious threat.
 
But will anything be done about two elected Republicans, in the state’s most Republican county, helping the Democrats keep control of Congress? Perhaps more importantly, when will New Jersey have disclosure laws that makes legislators and county officials disclose $359,838 from the federal government?

SOUTHERN DEMOCRATS?

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

George Orwell
(Read the original version of 1984 and not the attempted revised version the anti-Life Liberty and Freedom establishment is trying to adapt to their ideology).

N.B. We welcome a conversation on this and all topics raised on this website.  Jersey Conservative is entirely open to your ideas and opinions.  To submit a column for publication, please contact jerseyconservativetips@protonmail.com.

Micah Rasmussen: “Voters can’t make informed decisions unless they’re informed.”

By Rubashov
 
Commenting in a New Jersey Globe story last Friday, Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute of New Jersey Politics at Rider University, had these wise words to offer:
 
“Voters can’t make informed decisions unless they’re informed.  If you asked any self-respecting constituent of George Santos, they’d tell you they wish they knew then what they know now.”
 
“Voter diligence is the most bedrock, necessary principle of casting an informed vote.  It will do Verona zero good to learn the story of their new council member after the election.”
 
To read the full article, visit:
 

Verona council candidate has history of arrests, bankruptcy - New Jersey Globe

 
Contemplating George Santos, the Republican Congressman from Long Island who lied his way into office in a more spectacular way than most politicians do, we were wondering if it could be said that Democrats are better at vetting candidates than Republicans. When it comes to ideology, the ACU (American Conservative Union) ratings seem to suggest so.
 
The ACU rates legislators using an analysis of the votes they cast across 186 policy areas ranging from cultural and life issues to tax, fiscal, and regulatory policies. In New Jersey, only 6 (out of 49) Republicans voted the conservative position at least 80% of the time. Conversely, a record 71 (out of 71) Democrats earned CPAC’s “Coalition of the Radical Left” designation for conservative ratings below 10%.
 
At least from an ideological perspective anyway, the Democrats are doing an excellent job of recruiting candidates who reflect the platform of their party. That’s impressive, and it means that a Democrat voter can trust he or she is getting what they’re voting for when they vote Democrat. A Republican voter, on the other hand, is almost certainly not getting what he or she is voting for when they vote for the GOP candidate. Could this be affecting turnout?
 
Republican candidates have learned to “act conservative” and “talk conservative” in primaries – and then to put it all behind them as soon as the primary is over. For example, Sussex County is solidly Republican with an all-Republican board of County Commissioners. But after campaigning as “social conservatives” the Board passed an LGBTQ+ Pride Resolution. Can anyone imagine an all-Democrat board in a Democrat county passing a Pro-Life resolution? It just wouldn’t happen.
 
The GOP establishment in New Jersey uses a “Goodfellas” vetting process that is unsuitable for the modern political environment. It does not produce candidates who Republican voters can count on to be Republican. That’s where conservative media and primaries come in. Both are methods to get to the truth about candidates who make use of the “conservative” label.
 
For example, one of those Sussex County commissioners is presently a candidate for Assembly. Dawn Fantasia was close to GOP county insiders and received a very cursory vetting at Senator Steve Oroho’s kitchen table when she was seeking the office of Freeholder (now Commissioner) in 2018. Only after gaining countywide office did she vote for and defend the LGBTQ+ Pride Resolution and have a board member of the largest LGBTQ+ lobby organization, Garden State Equality, swear her into office as Commissioner Director. When was the last time New Jersey Right-to-Life’s Marie Tasy swore-in a Democrat?
 
Surprised by these post-election revelations – and given the importance of parental rights and the battle over Governor Murphy’s mandated LGBTQ+ curriculum – Fantasia has earned a greater degree of scrutiny in her campaign for Assembly this year. Scrutiny from conservatives – but not from the party establishment.
 
The party establishment seems intent on being stung again – George Santos style – and is bewailing the examination of the public records relating to Fantasia. See, they not only want George Santos, they get mad when they can’t have it.
 
The reaction from party establishment types to this public vetting of Dawn Fantasia (and all the other candidates, as well) is predictably Woke. In her defense, they have called upon identity politics and proclaimed Fantasia, as “the only woman in the race”, to be sacrosanct. Stop the vetting and let’s find out once she’s in office – the George Santos method!

It is noteworthy that George Santos used the same identity politics defense when questioned about his background: How dare anyone examine the background of the candidate about to become "the the first LGBTQ+ non-incumbent Republican elected to federal office."
 
And while the Morris County contingent of the GOP establishment is doing its bit for identity politics... this is about Sussex County, where a convicted cannibal ran for county office and politicos (plural) hire hit men. Where someone shows up to a GOP county committee meeting, wearing a gun, and looking for a certain blogger to suppress. It’s the Sussex County of pristine open spaces and Confederate flags – and a political class now dominated by an aficionado of those flags. So, it should come as no surprise that an operative of the local GOP establishment has crossed the line into open threats of violence. Is there a Dylann Roof out there – being stoked from above?
 
Stay tuned…

How nuts will they get?
  

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

George Orwell

Gilmore slaps down Russell at “A Seat At The Table” event.

By Rubashov
 
Addressing yesterday’s morning session of the state’s premier conservative conference – “A Seat At The Table” – New Jersey Republican powerhouse George Gilmore called out Jack Ciattarelli strategist Chris Russell for comments he made on Tuesday. Gilmore, the Ocean County GOP Chairman, told conservatives to resist GOP establishment calls to give up and acquiesce to the Left. Surveying a packed room, he said to conference attendees that they are proof the conservative movement is alive and well in New Jersey.
 
According to those present on Tuesday, Russell cited recent polling to argue the conservative movement is dead demographically in New Jersey and the nation. Accordingly, Republican candidates would need to change into something more in line with the Wokeism embraced by the Democrats.
 
On the abortion issue, Russell painted a Pro-Choice future in New Jersey, but this characterization was thoroughly rubbished by a poll released midweek by New Jersey Right to Life’s Marie Tasy. Writing for NJ Globe (April 27th), Joey Fox offered a perspective that clashed with Russell’s view:
 
N.J. Right to Life-sponsored poll finds nuanced opinions on abortion… people have very different personal definitions of words like pro-choice and pro-life, as the next question on the poll demonstrated.
 
27% of respondents said that abortion should be allowed at any time during a pregnancy, while 6% said it should never be allowed under any circumstances. That puts two-thirds of New Jerseyans somewhere in the middle: 12% said abortion should be allowed only in the first six months; 25% said it should be allowed only in the first three months; 23% said it should only be allowed in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother; and 6% said it should only be allowed to save the life of the mother with no other exceptions.
 
On one hand, that means only 35% of New Jerseyans want to implement a wide-ranging abortion ban like the ones that have passed in countless Republican-led states. On the other, it means 73% of New Jerseyans think there should be some restrictions on abortion – something which New Jersey has very few of thanks to a variety of legislative, executive, and judicial actions made over the course of decades.
 
Among them is the Freedom of Reproductive Choice Act, a bill signed by Gov. Phil Murphy last year codifying abortion access into state law. NJ Right to Life executive director Marie Tasy said in a statement that her organization’s new poll is evidence that the bill was misguided and should be repealed.
 
Gilmore’s speech at “A Seat At The Table” rebuffed so-called surrender monkeys (Russell… and Ciattarelli?) who would prefer to draw a line under the abortion issue, move on, and never hear the phrase “Pro-Life” again. Russell got into trouble last year when he criticized the parental rights movement for using “extreme right-wing buzzwords”. 
 
Russell’s firm, Checkmate Strategies, is the consultant of record to the most Left-wing members of the GOP’s legislative caucus. In a break with tradition, SRM leaders (including Minority Leader Steve Oroho and incoming leader Tony Bucco) have allowed Russell to target the GOP’s most populist conservative legislator, Ed Durr. This would have never happened under Republican Senate President Donald DiFrancesco, who would have black-balled a consultant for working against one of his incumbents.
 
Curiously, in addition to working for the most Left-wing members of the GOP legislative caucus, Russell also works for Assemblyman Parker Space, a Senate candidate fond of Confederate symbols. In his campaign literature, Russell characterizes Space as an ideological “conservative” when this isn’t true. Having an affection for displaying fringe symbols is not conservative by any meaning of the word.
 
Never a policy leader in Trenton, Parker Space’s ideological voting record has declined to the point where he would not be confused with a movement conservative anywhere else in America. Outside of New Jersey, a Confederate flag tattoo is not a substitute for an ideological policy paper.

In common with all the LD24 legislators, Space's record as measured by the ACU (American Conservative Union) has declined.  In general, the conservative voting scores have declined for Republicans legislators in New Jersey and the GOP caucus has become much more moderate. The average Republican scored in the mid-80s in 2012, now that score is in the mid-60s. Take LD24 for example:
 
Senator Steve Oroho has declined from an 85% average to a 71% score.
 
Assemblyman Parker Space declined from a 90% average to a 78% score.
 
Assemblyman Hal Wirths declined from a 76% average to a 68% score.
 
And this is in what is arguably the most conservative district in the state!
 
It’s tragic.

This is not conservative!

Racialist, maybe, but NOT conservative!

Don't confuse them.
 

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

George Orwell

Is the NJ GOP now the center of the “Never Again Trump” movement?

By Rubashov
 
Former President Donald Trump is the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination – but you wouldn’t know it from the hard time he uniformly receives from the GOP establishment in New Jersey. Left-of-Center Republicans like State Senator Jon Bramnick have little tolerance for Trump, while preaching a friendly “why can’t we get along” message towards Democrats like Phil Murphy.
 
This behavior is strange, given the high degree of deference generally displayed by NJ GOPers towards Republicans in leadership positions. Who can forget the Christie Cult in its heyday – the excruciating reverence and strict obedience expected from all its disciples? We recall an NJGOP State Committee meeting featuring a series of groveling displays that recalled a Monty Python sketch, The Refreshment Room at Bletchley…
 
“…someone whom I've always personally admired, perhaps more deeply, more strongly, more abjectly than ever before. (applause) A man, well more than a man, a god (applause), a great god, whose personality is so totally and utterly wonderful my feeble words of welcome sound wretchedly and pathetically inadequate. (by now on his knees) Someone whose boots I would gladly lick clean until holes wore through my tongue, a man who is so totally and utterly wonderful, that I would rather be sealed in a pit of my own filth, than dare tread on the same stage with him…”
 
You get the idea. It was quite an act – and the whole leadership of the party got in on it, one striving to outdo the other – the Christie Cult at high tide.
 
Nowadays, as if on cue, the cult is taking a hard look at Donald Trump and either vocalizing their displeasure or silently providing the former President with no support as he undergoes what even Democrats concede is a political prosecution. Is the GOP establishment in New Jersey still under the spell of Chris Christie? Is their dream of a President Chris Christie still alive?
 
Recent statements by the former Governor himself seem to indicate that he is looking for a path to a presidential run. And the GOP establishment is gathering in support of Christie for President 2.0.
 
In a column over the weekend, Matt Rooney at Save Jersey questioned Christie’s viability:
 

VIDEO: Christie claims Trump “failed us” to silent crowd in N.H. 2024 pitch preview (savejersey.com)

 
But Rooney, once a Christie acolyte (now an nonbeliever), was countered by GOP establishment insiders – like the Whitman-era Carl Golden, who wrote an InsiderNJ column that appeared to argue Christie was the right voice to counter Trump:
 

Will Christie Be “In It To Win It?” - Insider NJ

 
In another InsiderNJ column, Alan Steinberg – the increasingly far-Left former Whitman GOPer – suggested a running mate for Christie’s presidential ambitions in Congresswoman Nancy Mace. She’s a favorite in Morris County, where she has appeared at fundraisers for local GOPers, but is best known for attacking her own party on guns and abortion:
 

Nancy Mace, as a Running Mate, could increase Viability of a Christie Prez Candidacy - Insider NJ

 
Whether Chris Christie runs or remains a Trump-bashing pundit, the coming divide in the NJ GOP will be on which side you come down in the clash between Donald Trump and Chris Christie. But one thing is clear”, the old Christie Cult is back and running. Just consider the silence.
 

Is Chris Christie talking to primary voters? Or ABC executives?

That's a good question posed by Matt Rooney.
 

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

George Orwell

Should NJ companies sign-up to a UN compact that promotes abortion?

By Rubashov
 
The United Nations Global Compact asserts that “abortion is a human right… and that the right to life begins at birth.”
 
Compliance with the UN Global Compact is a big part of the ESG agenda. And we’ve been hearing a lot about ESG lately – the social credit scoring used by Woke interests to praise or punish the actions of private businesses.
 
Governor Ron DeSantis said that “the ESG — Environmental, Social and Governance — agenda is infiltrating board rooms across America. Financial institutions are using ESG to discriminate against everyday citizens for our religious, political, and social beliefs. Law-abiding businesses disfavored by corporate liberals, such as gun manufacturers and sellers, are facing unprecedented discrimination from banks and payment processors. This is a direct threat to our American way of life.”
 
President Donald Trump called ESG a “woke financial scams” and “radical left garbage”, adding: “The entire ESG scheme is designed to funnel your retirement money to the maniacs on the radical left.”
 
Locally, the discussion of ESG has centered around the attempt by establishment Republicans to bring an ESG consultant into the GOP legislative caucus in Trenton. Those behind the move knew about it going in. They were provided background information on Mayor Mike Inganamort – an Assembly candidate who is a partner in ASG Advisors LLP, a company whose business is ESG.
 
Frankly, Mayor Inganamort has been exceedingly dishonest about his relationship with ASG Advisors LLP. When Jersey Conservative pointed out Mike Inganamort’s connection to ESG, the candidate immediately scrubbed his company’s website of any mention of ESG. His running mates lied, claiming he held a minor position in the company. Face it, the only way you get to scrub the company website of stuff that suddenly becomes embarrassing to you is if you run the company.
 
Let’s take a look at Mike Inganamort’s LinkedIn page to see what he says – in his own words – about his relationship to ASG Advisors LLP:
 
ASG Advisors
17 yrs
Partner
Jun 2019 - Present · 3 yrs 11 mos         
Managing Principal
Jan 2015 - Jun 2019 · 4 yrs 6 mos         
Principal
Jan 2011 - Dec 2014 · 4 yrs         
Associate
May 2006 - Dec 2010 · 4 yrs 8 mos
 
So, Mike Inganamort claims that he’s been with ASG Advisors LLP for 17 years, during which time he’s been a “principal” at the firm, a “managing principal”, and is now a “partner”. Maybe to Parker Space and Dawn Fantasia that sounds like a “minor role”, but it doesn’t to us. Somebody’s been lying to the voters.
 
Now it’s true that Mike Inganamort wasn’t a “founder” of the company. This information was all given to those vetting him at the LD24 office and SRM back in December.
 
ASG Advisors LLP (aka American Strategy Group Limited Liability Partnership) was filed in New Jersey on February 23, 2002, as a Domestic Limited Liability Partnership. The original partners included John Carrino, who also served as the Agent. The Managing Partner was Matthew Barnes, who is the only one of the original partners remaining today. According to the company website, Mathew Barnes and Mike Inganamort are the two named “partners” at ASG Advisors at present.
 
The company hasn't filed an annual report since 2013. According to the State of New Jersey, the business status is “REVOKED FOR NOT FILING ANNUAL REPORT FOR 2 CONSECUTIVE YEARS.” On October 16, 2013, the Department of Revenue suspended ASG Advisors LLP and the State claims that the suspension has not yet been lifted. Go figure.
 
That original partner – John Carrino – popped up in a notable corruption case in Bergen County. According to a press release from the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey (dated December 4, 2015), Carrino played a role in the conviction of Joseph Ferriero:
 
The former chairman of the Bergen County Democratic Organization (BCDO), was sentenced today to 35 months in prison for his role in a racketeering scheme involving fraud and soliciting and accepting bribes as a party official, U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman announced.
 
“The sentence handed down today to Joseph Ferriero is the final result of his running a local political organization as a criminal enterprise,” U.S. Attorney Fishman said. “He used his power and position to enrich himself through a racketeering operation fueled by influence peddling, bribes and kickbacks. Punishing this kind of political corruption has been – and continues to be – a priority for this office.”
 
…According to documents filed in this case and the evidence at trial:
Ferriero served as the chairman of the BCDO from 1998 until January 2009 and was the sole member of SJC Consulting LLC.  The jury found Ferriero accepted bribes in his capacity as BCDO chairman in the course of a scheme involving SJC. Ferriero agreed with John Carrino, a Nutley, New Jersey-based attorney and software developer, that Ferriero would recommend and provide a favorable opinion of the software developer and his companies to various public officials in Bergen County with whom Ferriero had influence. The software developer agreed to pay Ferriero one-quarter to one-third of the gross receipts from any contract obtained as a result of Ferriero’s efforts. Ferriero’s financial interest in the software developer’s public contracts was completely hidden using two shell companies, one of which was created and incorporated in Nevada for the sole purpose of contracting with and accepting payments from another shell company controlled by the software developer.
 
As we mentioned before, Matthew Barnes and Mike Inganamort are the two current “partners” in ASG Advisors LLP. So, we found it very curious that Mike Inganamort would tell Fred Snowflack of InsiderNJ: “I don’t own the company.”
 
Okay, maybe it’s generational (or the new generation of politicians) but words like “principal”, “managing principal”, and “partner” used to mean something. Hey, maybe Inganamort lied on his LinkedIn page. Maybe he’ll claim it was hacked.
 
In any case, Inganamort’s “partner” signed up ASG Advisors LLP to the United Nations Global Compact. That was in December 2021, when – according to his LinkedIn page – Mike Inganamort was a “partner” in the company.

Mike Inganamort's excuses sound like this:

"Sure I work at Planned Parenthood, but I don't participate in abortions. Besides, Planned Parenthood does a whole lot more than just abortions. I'm with the 'good' part of the business."

In an attached document regarding the implementation of the United Nations Global Compact, ASG Advisors LLP wrote:
 
“Internally, we have begun the process of requiring strategic partners to signify agreement to the 10 principles in order for them to be a collaborator with our firm.”
 
“We intend to encourage existing and any new clients not already a member of the UNGC to evaluate the program and give serious consideration to becoming a signatory.”
 
“We are a small firm with a small carbon and environmental impact. Nevertheless, we do have protocols in place to minimize our adverse environmental impact.”
 
“Espousing the practical and reputational benefits of environmental responsibility is central to our organization’s value proposition.”
 
“We encourage a work-from-home policy wherein employees and contractors are free from communities with carbon impacts, and we have instituted recycling programs at two of our work centers. When possible, we encourage carpooling to client sites rather than driving individually.”
 
“ASG has implemented a 13-point ‘go-green’ initiative for people working from home, which includes specific guidance on decreasing energy (turning off peripherals) and paper use.”
 
“With the exception of our place-based consulting services, we estimate that our conference call-to-in person meeting ratio exceeds 10-1, which significantly mitigates our carbon impact.”
 
“We have dialed up our environmental sustainability advisory work since 2015 to offer a fuller suite of corporate sustainability advice, including ESG consulting.”
 
For the record, here is what Mike Inganamort’s “partner” in ASG Advisors LLP claims their business does. This is from Matthew Barnes’ LinkedIn page:
 
Co-Founder and Partner of international corporate social responsibility, ESG and community investment boutique. • Help clients design and execute CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility], philanthropic, community/stakeholder engagement projects that deliver measurable social impact in health, education, and inclusive prosperity. • Coordinate ESG strategy, materiality assessments, data collection and reporting for multiple companies for more comprehensive and compelling sustainability reporting. • Lead consulting engagements for Fortune 500 clients in healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, energy, technology and professional services industries, as well as international NGOs, with over 90% client retention. • Designed, led, advised on and/or evaluated population health and education programming representing tens of millions of dollars for Novo Nordisk, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Prudential, Verizon, Henry Schein, multiple banks, and other foundations. • Speaker and convener on CSR and ESG strategy, cross-sector partnerships & coalition development, monitoring & evaluation.

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
George Orwell

We welcome a conversation on this and all topics raised on this website.  Jersey Conservative is entirely open to your ideas and opinions.  To submit a column for publication, please contact: jerseyconservativetips@protonmail.com.

In flap over LGBTQ+ mural, did Fantasia side with GSE, against Archdiocese?

 
Everyone familiar with the records of County Commissioner Dawn Fantasia and Mayor Mike Inganamort pretty much accepts that they are liberal on many social issues. In January, Fred Snowflack of Insider NJ noted that the two had been attacked by “some on the right” for “supporting gay pride resolutions” and other acts of “wokeism” (like flying the LGBTQ+ flag alongside the American flag).
 
Of course, “gay pride” isn’t the issue. The issue is what some of those other letters stand for and especially that open ended “+” sign. “T” is in support of the very controversial transgenderism movement being thrust upon school children at a very inappropriate age. “+” includes such letters a “K” for sado-masochistic “Kink”. No responsible elected official should be placing the force of government behind such things, giving them government’s seal of approval. It is simply irresponsible.
 
At a recent public meeting, Dawn Fantasia tried to take credit for the idea in 2019 to place a question on the ballot in Sussex County that opposed Governor Phil Murphy’s Sanctuary State directive. This is in no way true or honest. The idea belonged entirely to this blog – a blog Ms. Fantasia has repeatedly attacked. The idea belonged to the blogger who was assisting the Sussex County GOP at the time and there is an extensive email exchange that involves every elected Republican at the county and state level that documents this.
 
In fact, Ms. Fantasia related her concerns to this blogger that she was exposed on the issue of illegal immigration because the charter school she ran had a large number of children of undocumented immigrants. Commissioner Fantasia has a long affiliation with ILearn Schools, Inc., which runs several charter schools in Bergen and Passaic Counties.
 
In reviewing that email exchange, we came across an email sent from Ms. Fantasia on May 24, 2019. The “Subject” line read: “Re: statement from the archdiocese of newark murals” (sic). Ms. Fantasia wrote:
 
This is our high school. I have multiple conference calls regarding this again today, and I've spoken to Tom Prol. The article is filled with an incredible amount of misinformation and this is completely blown out of proportion.
School will have additional statement.
 
This link was attached:
 

https://www.insidernj.com/press-release/archdiocese-newark-statement-regarding-bascs-mural/

 
The “Tom Prol” referred to is a founder and board member of Garden State Equality, the state’s most prominent LGBTQ+ lobby and political action group. Ms. Fantasia chose Tom Prol to swear her in as County Commissioner.
 
An attorney, Tom Prol has become a prominent public vendor in Sussex County. He has received lucrative government contracts in a supposedly Republican-controlled County. This is curious, given his decidedly left-of-center lobbying position. Garden State Equality provided much of the content and direction in establishing the LGBTQ+ sex-ed curriculum mandated by the Murphy administration.
 
The controversy was about a mural painted on a cafeteria pillar at a facility shared by the Bergen Arts and Science Charter School (an ILearn school) and Holy Trinity Church in Hackensack. Commissioner Fantasia is the middle school principal at the Bergen Arts and Science Charter School. Ms. Fantasia has been with ILearn Schools (and its predecessor) since 2008, serving as Chief Growth Officer and Chief Communications Officer.
 
The mural was painted “to support the LGBT community.” The painting featured a rainbow heart and interlocking abstract male figures. Fr. Paul Prevosto, pastor of Holy Trinity Church, asked administrators at Bergen Arts and Science Charter School to paint over the mural, after parishioners complained that church property was being used for the display. Parishioners described the mural as “sexual” in nature.
 
Bergen Arts and Science leases the school building from Holy Trinity. Both the church and the school share use of common spaces including the cafeteria, which the church uses for events and parties.
 
The lease agreement between the school and church states that “due to the Catholic nature of the Landlord, [the] Tenant promises to conduct no affairs or establish any organizations that would be contrary to its Catholic moral values, ethics and faith.”
 
Garden State Equality wasted no time in trashing the Archdiocese and Holy Trinity parish. GSE executive director Chris Fuscarino complained that Holy Trinity had caused the school to end its “long-running daily educational program” that celebrated LGBTQ+ figures during Pride Month. He also cited the removal of a poster “supportive” of LGBTQ+ students, signed by faculty and students, declaring a “safe space”.
 
Fuscarino said: “This type of hate-fueled bigotry is precisely why New Jersey needs LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum.” Murphy’s LGBTQ+ Curriculum Law passed in January 2019, and took effect in 2020. The Bergen Arts and Science Charter School worked with GSE to implement the law.
 
Garden State Equality board member Tom Prol called it “rank censorship and out of step with New Jersey values”.  

Dawn Fantasia was sworn in as director of Sussex County's Board of County Commissioners on Wednesday, with attorney Tom Prol administering her oath. SOURCE: Sussex County website/ social media.

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

George Orwell

 

We welcome a conversation on this and all topics raised on this website.  Jersey Conservative is entirely open to your ideas and opinions.  To submit a column for publication, please contact: jerseyconservativetips@protonmail.com.

Jon Kurpis sets the record straight to LD39: Evidence of how the Trenton swamp manipulates GOP voters.

We are interested in restoring journalism back in New Jersey. We defend and uphold the bedrock of what our state Constitution says, our Rights and Privileges in Article 1, Section VI. We, at JerseyConservative will always maintain an open dialogue with the public. Have a piece you wish to rebut, you can, contact: jerseyconservativetips@protonmail.com.

By Jon Kurpis -Saddle River Municipal Chair

As a proud populist (America First) Republican and elected County Committee member / Municipal Chair from a ruby red community, I have come to enjoy the articles published by Jersey Conservative (JC). JC articles tend to be hard hitting, intelligently written and from a for the people perspective. It was therefore quite alarming to read Rob Owen’s article LD39: Evidence of how the Trenton swamp manipulates GOP voters that included multiple irrefutable lies about me.

First and foremost, neither Rob Owen nor anyone from Jersey Conservative contacted me to do a fact check or had the courtesy to include proof to back up these obviously false allegations. Rob Owen apparently feels that he is above journalistic rigor and somehow just knows exactly how things went down with my personal campaigns. With that as the back drop, I will now factually dismantle the lies Fake Rob Owen made up about me to give the voters / readers the truth and to protect my good name.

Lie #1: Schepisi had Auth Booted from Passaic Line

Rob Owen wrote:

“But in Passaic County, she (Schepisi) was actually working to undermine her popular running mate and boot him off the Passaic line.”

“Then, days after the filing deadline, a decision was made to boot Auth from the Passaic line ensuring that Schepisi, Azzariti and Kurpis would appear on the Passaic ballot together despite the vote of the Passaic County Republican organization.”

Although Schepisi, Auth and Azzariti did originally win the Passaic line, Owen's suggestion that Schepisi got Auth booted from it is lie.The truth is Auth did NOT accept his place on the line for technical reasons.

In order for Auth to accept his spot on the Passaic line, it would have required that he unbracket from his running mate DeAnne DeFuccio. And because unbracketing would also mean splitting up their shared signatures, it opened up the possibility that DeFuccio could be completely removed from the ballot if a few of her signatures were challenged and found to be invalid. Rather than risking the possibility of losing DeFuccio from the ballot altogether, Auth strategically rejected his invitation to run on the Passaic County line with Azzariti.

Prior to Auth voluntarily turning down his spot on the line, I personally realized the predicament he and DeFuccio were in being that they had so few signatures. In fact, I preemptively submitted an official letter to Passaic County Chairman Murphy requesting to be considered to fill any void that would occur if an Assembly candidate chose not to accept the line. When Auth eventually turned down his invitation, a spot opened up (as I anticipated) and I was already in position to appropriately fill that void and also was the only candidate left to fill the spot on the line.

Screen shot of official letter sent to Chairman Murphy. Should anyone want the full letter with the remainder of my resume, I’d be happy to provide it.

As you can see, I was clever enough to put myself in the proper position to fill the void when Auth voluntarily chose not to unbracket from DeFuccio and run on the Passaic line. Rob Owen’s assertion that Schepisi somehow manipulated the Passaic County line is an intentional lie meant to decieve Jersey Conservative readers.

Lie #2: My campaign signs were influenced by Schepisi and included lies meant to decieve voters.

Rob Owen wrote:

“That didn’t didn’t stop Schepisi’s candidates from distributing lawn signs implying it was actually Azzariti who would appear with her on a so-called “Official GOP Line…campaign was political disinformation par excellence.”

First and foremost, I’M NOT SCHEPISI’S OR ANYONE ELSE’S CANDIDATE. I’m a 45 year old husband, father and alpha male. I do what I want, when I want and how I want. I certainly don’t ask Holly Schepisi or anyone for permission to fight for the people.

Furthermore, Fake Rob Owen's bullshit contention that my campaign signs were in some way immoral makes his own writing the only example of “political disinformation par excellence”.

I directly oversaw every aspect of my sign strategy. I personally designed 2 separate campaign signs (1 for Passaic and 1 for Bergen). Each county sign was unique and included accurate wording based on its anticipated location.

My Passaic campaign sign included the message “Vote Official GOP Line” as Azzariti and I were both on the official GOP line. This phrase was included at Chairman Murphy’s suggestion so that other on-the-line candidates would also get traction from these signs. Below is a photo Chairman Murphy sent me to confirm our Passaic signs were delivered and met his expectations.

Its also worth noting that my campaign purposefully arranged for the Passaic signs to be delivered to the Passaic County HQ so that they could only be used in Passaic County.

As for my Bergen County signs, I personally made sure the design did NOT include any mention of the line because Azzariti and I were not on the line. It did however mention that we could be found in Column 5 which was accurate.

As you can see from the examples above, my campaign signs were perfectly acceptable and used only in the counties for which they were designed. ANY suggestion that my signs tricked the voters or were used in an inappropriate manner is Fake news at its worst.

Lie #3: Schepisi went against the will of the voter by endorsing me.

Rob Owen wrote:

“Rejecting the will of Bergen County Republicans, Schepisi announced a full-throated, unequivocal endorsement of Azzariti and his running mate, Jon Kurpis.”

If Schepisi, Auth and DeFuccio won the 2021 line via a fair convention, one could then potentially claim that those results would represent the will of the Bergen County Republicans. Unfortunately for Rob Owen and his fakakta narrative, there was no free and fair convention to award the line in 2021. Schepisi, Auth and DeFuccio crafted a backroom deal based on the absurd and irrelevant excuse that somehow a replacement election to fill a vacant assembly/senate seat is all that’s needed and the BCRO unilaterally gifted them the line.

There was no convention to get the line and the will of Bergen County Republicans was never established. It was therefore impossible for Schepisi to going against the will of Bergen County Republicans by endorsing me. And should there be any question as to why she endorsed me, the truthful answer that I was an incredible candidate (if not the best candidate). Once again, Fake Rob Owen opted to obscure the truth and push obvious disinformation.

Although not specifically directed at me, I also take offense with the articles notion that I could have been pressured to drop out of the race.

Rob Owen wrote:

“But Republican “leadership…had already decided to support Azzariti and swooped in to squash the opposition.”

For the record, not one person suggested or attempted to pressure me to drop out of the 2023 Assembly race. Not Schepisi. Not Auth. Not Azzariti. Not Zisa. Not DiMaio. Not Hugin. NOBODY!

And had ANY Republican been stupid enough to threaten or pressure me to step aside, I would have laughed in their face. I’m an America First warrior who is perfectly willing to kick the establishment and/or swamp in the ass. It's completely absurd to suggest that I would let anyone ever interfere with my willingness to serve the people.

In conclusion, Fake Rob Owen should be embarrassed and ashamed of the verifiable lies and disinformation he spread about me and my campaigns in his article. I’m ethical, for the people and have a track record of transparency and fair play. I would NEVER let a candidate interfere with my campaign or use me for political vengeance. I would never create, put up or allow signs that in any way decieved the voter. I would never involve myself in an immoral scheme to steal the line. I only do things for the right reasons and Fake Rob Owen is an idiot for posting these lies and thinking I would let it slide.

I thank Jersey Conservative for publishing this full rebuttal. If Fake Rob Owen has any class or integrity, he will stop being a coward, identify himself for real and offer up an apology for intentionally lying about me and to the readers.

Thank you all for your continued support,

Jon Kurpis

Saddle River Municipal Chair

LD24: Inganamort finally admits his role in promoting ESG.

By Rubashov
 
The case of Mayor Mike Inganamort is a testament to the tragic vetting process used by the GOP establishment. Instead of trying to create a legislative caucus that is representative of the party’s rank-and-file, the establishment insists on hoarding insider “goodfellas”.

The GOP establishment would keep out all principled conservatives if they could.

The GOP establishment would keep out all principled conservatives if they could. They make a fetish of ignoring grassroots activists – which is why they must depend on labor unions for literature drops (but never for the full ticket because labor never backs a full Republican ticket, just the rare candidate).
 
Mike Inganamort is personally a nice enough fellow. He’s the scion of a family of developers who once ran the GOP machine in Bergen County. The family’s prominence ebbed after the son of Bergen County GOP Chairman John Inganamort was convicted for his role in bringing “a cocaine-laden boat” to “the dock of his father's Florida home.” The drugs were valued at $50 million – at the time the Bergen Record called it “one of the largest drug seizures in the city's (Boca Raton) history.” Inganamort was succeeded as county chairman by John Schepisi.
 
Mike Inganamort is politically ambitious. So ambitious, in fact, that he pursued two offices at the same time – running for Mayor of Chester Township while seeking the Assembly nomination. He’s been mayor since January and wants your vote for the Assembly nomination this June. That’s some operator.
 

The GOP establishment who vetted Mike Inganamort cared so little for the conservatives who make up the vast majority of the party – both in New Jersey and nationally – that they paid no attention to how Mike Inganamort makes his money.

The GOP establishment who vetted Mike Inganamort cared so little for the conservatives who make up the vast majority of the party – both in New Jersey and nationally – that they paid no attention to how Mike Inganamort makes his money.

Assembly candidate Mike Inganamort is a partner in a company whose business is ESG. The company is called ASG Advisors and it advertised itself on its website in this way:
 
ABOUT…
 
Impact assessment support for clients driving social change.
 
Our specialized ESG practice advises companies on Environmental, Social & Governance strategy, reporting and disclosures, and thought leadership.
 
ASG ADVISORS can support the following areas -----
Health & Healthcare/ Global Development/ Diversity, Equity & Inclusion/ Inclusive Prosperity/ Arts & Culture/ Gender & Women/ Education, STEM & Up-Skilling/ Urban Renewal/ Social Entrepreneurship/ Circular Economy/ Religious & Faith-based/ Conservation & Natural Resources/ Youth/ Civics & Public Service/ Democracy & Freedom
 
Assembly candidate Mike Inganamort was described on his company’s website as:
 
“Michael Inganamort principally leads communications and public policy-related efforts.”
 
“Michael Inganamort, ASG Partner, leads the firm’s issue advocacy and thought leadership engagements, drawing on his experience in and out of government in Washington, DC and New Jersey.”
 
The GOP establishment’s vetting of its candidates is so bad that they recruited an active ESG merchant. A partner in a business described by Governor Ron DeSantis as:
 
“Spawned by leftist elites, the ESG — Environmental, Social and Governance — agenda is infiltrating board rooms across America. Financial institutions are using ESG to discriminate against everyday citizens for our religious, political, and social beliefs. Law-abiding businesses disfavored by corporate liberals, such as gun manufacturers and sellers, are facing unprecedented discrimination from banks and payment processors. This is a direct threat to our American way of life.”
 
Donald Trump described ESG this way: “These poorly performing woke financial scams are radical left garbage that would never be funded on their own and certainly never be funded on their own merits. The entire ESG scheme is designed to funnel your retirement money to the maniacs on the radical left.”
 
When Jersey Conservative pointed out Mike Inganamort’s connection to ESG, the candidate acted rather dishonestly and immediately scrubbed his company’s website of any mention of ESG. Now, the only way you get to scrub the company website of stuff that suddenly becomes embarrassing to you is if you run the company. But that didn’t stop Inganamort’s running mate – County Commissioner Dawn Fantasia – from trying to downplay ESG by claiming he was just a minor member of the firm.
 
Assemblyman Parker Space tried to explain that Inganamort was just a facilitator of the ESG scam, not a promoter. Morris County GOP Chairman Laura Ali went into Woke mode and called the messenger a “hate blog” (presumably that meant the comments of Governor DeSantis and President Trump as well).
 
But Sussex County Commissioner Bill Hayden cornered them when he proposed an anti-ESG resolution to the Sussex County Board of Commissioners. It would be political suicide for fellow Commissioner Dawn Fantasia not to vote for Hayden’s resolution – but doing so would place her in direct conflict with her own ticket. So, she had Mike Inganamort address the Board meeting before the vote – in an attempt to “thread the needle” – putting the best spin on what he does for money.
 
In her remarks, Commissioner Fantasia did not come out in opposition to ESG – only the use of ESG “social credit scoring” for public sector investments. Commissioner Dawn Fantasia actually defended corporations that embrace the Woke ESG agenda. As this Heritage Foundation video makes clear, ESG’s primary threat is from private corporate actors, like banks and financial institutions:
 

DENIED: Is Your Credit Score Woke Enough? ESG Explained - YouTube

 
Mike Inganamort’s remarks were narrowly aimed at public investments and public pension funds only. He said that he now opposed the government’s use of ESG as a tool for investing. But this was disingenuous. Inganamort knows quite well that the ideology of ESG does not flow from government, but to government from Woke corporations like BlackRock. 
 
Meanwhile, the impact of the ESG that Inganamort promotes is clearly shown by some of the very clients he brags about on his company website. Corporations that, with Inganamort’s assistance, promote ESG and the Woke ideology and Leftist political action that flow from it. Here is an example from an ESG “diversity, equity, inclusion, & belonging” report from just one of the corporations Inganamort works with (according to his website):
 

According to the National Center on Transgender Equality, the EQUALITY ACT  would codify Murphy's Woke Public School Curriculum Agenda in Federal law.

That’s private businesses – aka Woke corporations – lobbying for federal legislation that would discriminate against religious beliefs and force a dangerous sexual agenda on children. That’s who Mayor Mike Inganamort works with, that is what he promotes and facilitates. His attempt to thread the needle failed.

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

George Orwell

We welcome a conversation on this and all topics raised on this website.  Jersey Conservative is entirely open to your ideas and opinions.  To submit a column for publication, please contact: jerseyconservativetips@protonmail.com.

The One Party State

by Joshua Einstein- Sotomayor

The indictment of President Trump on (forgive the phrase) trumped up charges, is demonstrable proof Democrats seek to turn our country into a one party state. Not only did the Federal Election Commission not bring charges against President Trump for alleged campaign violations but Manhattan DA Bragg, who has indicted him, does not have the jurisdiction to do so.

Both the state statute of limitations on the accusation of paying a prostitute hidden hush money (a misdemeanor) has expired, and Bragg has failed to identify for the courts a felony attached to the allegation that would extend the time limitation.

The giant fishing-expedition-meets-persecution is meant to publicly crucify a presidential candidate, not because he did anything wrong, but because he won the 2016 Presidential election and the Democrats are afraid for 2024.
Since 2016, and during the Trump presidency, Democrats argued he was a Russian stooge, ignoring the fact that he re-opened access to American weapons for Eastern European nations previously closed by Obama. They ignored the fact that while Putin invaded Ukraine during both the Obama and Biden presidencies, Putin refrained from aggression targeting Ukraine during Trump’s.
They ignore that Clinton's campaign manufactured the disproven Steele Dossier, paid for by campaign money for which Clinton was found to have violated federal election law by the Federal Election Commission. The dossier-to-know-where was then laundered through the intelligence agencies into another trumped up investigation turning up zilch.

According to Democrats, if your name is Clinton you cannot only launder made-up paid for opposition “research” into a “investigation” by the Department of Justice, but you can use an unsecured laptop latter physically destroyed, for official and secret government work, while Secretary of State and face no legal repercussions.
According to Democrats, if your last name is Biden you can co-mingle monetary funds and bank accounts among family members elected to high office and those appointed to the boards of corporations receiving millions of dollars for work they have no experience nor qualifications in without a peep from the media.

According to the Democrats, Jeffery Epstein killed himself and the public does not have the right to see the client list of the deceased pimp of abused teenage prostitutes. Yet, if President Trump allegedly used an adult prostitute at some random time in the past, it’s vital to national security he be locked up despite there being no victim, the passing of the statute of limitations, and the lack of jurisdiction by Manhattan DA Bragg.
This is not to forget that until the discovery in Biden’s unsecured garage (shared with his drug addled son) of never de-classified documents from his time as VP, the Democrats were targeting Trump over pieces of paper. In fact, despite ongoing communications between Trump’s team, the executive branch, and the Secret Service, Democrats orchestrated a purposely televised armed raid to take documents President Trump had declassified and which were protected by Secret Service members in yet another act of public persecution theater.

After years of never ending efforts to delegitimize President Trump’s 2016 victory, Democrats (uncontented with the potential of a fair fight in 2024) are attempting to weaponize the (in)justice system.
Lest one think efforts to create a one party state are only Trump Derangement Syndrome, remember the Democrat failed efforts at overturning the Bush Jr. election, or of Obama's mocking then presidential candidate Romney (when he correctly identified Russia as an adversary and Obama retorted that "the 1980's called, they want their foreign policy back").

Whether the Democrat’s constant refrain (going back at least as far as Reagan), that whomever the Republican leader is they are bigoted, racist, ant-Semitic, xenophobic, sexist, etc.. or today's Democrats (who have opened a pandora's box of political prosecutions with their persecution of Trump), the goal remains the same - not to defeat, but to destroy their political opposition. That's what a politically party aspiring to be a one party state does and the opposite of a multi-party democratic republic. America deserves better than the one party state the Democrats want.

N.B. We welcome a conversation on this and all topics raised on this website.  Jersey Conservative is entirely open to your ideas and opinions.  To submit a column for publication, please contact: jerseyconservativetips@protonmail.com.

Should candidates be required to reveal ongoing litigation to the public?

By Rubashov
 
New Jersey has some of the highest levels of taxation, government spending, and public debt in America. Electing candidates who are fiscally prudent is in everyone’s best interests. But can voters know what they’re getting if they don’t know who they’re voting for – and how do they know who they’re voting for in a public disclosure regime of diminishing information?
 
That’s a problem that party bosses are happy to solve. Their suggestion is for the voters to leave it up to them. Allow the bosses to pick which “Goodfellas” they want to run. Then the voters can just take their word for it. But does any of that really sound good to average voters?
 
Voters are skeptical of political parties and mistrustful of elections. A poll conducted in northern New Jersey asked voters whether they agreed with the statement, “On the whole, I trust my party to put up good candidates.” Just 47% of Republicans agreed. 63% of Democrats. And only 23% of swing voters. And a mere 32% of all voters agreed with the statement, “On the whole, I trust our election process and results.”
 
Could greater transparency make a difference in restoring confidence in the process? Does knowing more about who you are voting for matter? The current tactic of competing for reassurances from other elected officials doesn’t appear to be inspiring voter trust.
 
So, should candidates for elected office in New Jersey be required to disclose any ongoing litigation on their personal financial disclosure statement? Would it provide an increased level of confidence in the choices on the ballot?
 
Last month, we published a column detailing some of the litigation faced by Assembly candidate Dawn Fantasia, who currently holds the office of County Commissioner in Sussex County and, before that, was the Council President in Franklin Borough. The column noted:
 
Nevertheless, Commissioner Fantasia is a powerful elected official who wants to be an even more powerful elected official. The people have a right to know her story before they vote, because they will most certainly suffer it after.
 
From public documents gathered by a licensed professional researcher and brought to our attention, it seems the Commissioner’s problems with budgeting are personal as well as professional. Last September, the Commissioner was embroiled in a legal battle with Ashley Furniture over a debt of $2,045.06 (Docket SSX-DC-001706-22). And it appears she avoided the court notice…
 
There were other incidents as well. On March 7, 2017, judgment was entered in the Superior Court, Special Civil Part, in favor of plaintiff CAPITAL ONE BANK and against defendant DAWN CUNNEELY (the Commissioner’s former married name) in the amount of $1,623.85 plus cost of $57.00. A Writ of Exception was issued by the Clerk of the Superior Court, Special Civil Part, with regard to this matter (Docket SSX-DC-000051-17). On November 16, 2017, pursuant to said Execution, Court Officer MICHAEL SCRIVANI levied on all monies on deposit in the Wells Fargo Bank, in the name of DAWN CUNNEELY. Judge David Weaver issued the Writ of Execution for $1,898.44.
 
And then there was judgment SSX-VJ-000722-16 (Docket SSX-DC-000631-16) against defendant DAWN FANTASIA (aka DAWN CUNNEELY). In which an order to garnish wages was executed on June 17, 2016, for the amount of $826.21. The listed employer was ILEARN SCHOOLS in Elmwood Park, NJ 07407.
 
These court actions were taken while Dawn Fantasia held public office. We have avoided those that concerned her as a private citizen. Doubtless there are reasons and perhaps those reasons provide absolution.  
 
Well, there’s a new piece of litigation, filed last month, that was brought to our attention after we published our column.

The docket number is SSX-DC-000502-23, filed on March 6, 2023. The plaintiff – a credit card company – is demanding a judgement in the amount of $1,152.00.
 
Should voters have this information before making their choice? The party bosses say “no” and they are fixing it that soon, you will have no way to even find out about it. When that happens, you will only have them and their assurances that so-and-so is a “Goodfella”.
 
What will become of representative democracy then?

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

George Orwell

N.B. We welcome a conversation on this and all topics raised on this website.  Jersey Conservative is entirely open to your ideas and opinions.  To submit a column for publication, please contact: jerseyconservativetips@protonmail.com.