Who is Mike Lavery, the new and old NJGOP Chairman?

By Rubashov

Identity dysphoria is the distress a person feels due to a mismatch between what they identify as and the reality of what they are.  There’s a lot of it going around within New Jersey’s political class – especially amongst those “insiders” who jostle for position in “this 100 that” or “that top 50 this”.
 
Governor Phil Murphy – a Goldman Sachs robber baron – identifies as the champion of the destitute (even of those he has made destitute).  Murphy’s prep school heiress wife thinks a Marxist revolution just happened and that she’s a Bolshevik. 

I think it so… and so it is! That’s their working principle.

“I’m not a politician, at all”. GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Steinhardt puts out a video with these words coming out of his mouth. Steinhardt goes on to make the claim – himself, on video – that he’s “different” from “the same Trenton insider politicians who run for governor”.

Why is the guy who was head of one of the state’s two major political parties for three years saying these words? Who wrote such nonsense?

Maybe he believes it – like Murphy does. If so, just mark it down to another case of identity dysphoria. It’s become a national phenomenon that takes many forms. Conservative Ben Shapiro’s blog recently covered an extreme manifestation of identity dysphoria…

Over the weekend, the NJGOP sent out an email blast that provided a photograph of new Chairman Mike Lavery and these words: “Give a warm welcome to the new NJGOP Chairman, Michael Lavery” That was it.

We have come to expect the NJGOP to be light on the details of specific solutions and Republican legislation to address the problems faced by the state’s citizens, but now it appears that tendency has banished such things as biographical details of those who lead or are employed by the State Committee. So, as a service, we will take a crack at filling in those details. And there is much.

It seems that in passing over Bob Hugin and selecting Mike Lavery, the members of State Committee rejected someone who has given millions to Republican causes of all ideological stripes, to embrace someone who has harnessed politics to make money for himself and his law firm. Even Hugin’s public promise to raise a million dollars for the NJGOP didn’t cause most of the voting members to take their eyes from Lavery, so what’s with the attraction?

To start with, Mike Lavery held the job of NJGOP Chairman before – in 2017 – after gubernatorial candidate Kim Guadagno objected to “non-politician” Doug Steinhardt becoming NJGOP Chairman, on the grounds that his wife had recently accepted a six-figure political appointment from then-Governor Chris Christie. Guadagno claimed she didn’t like “the optics”.

When he served in 2017, Lavery was said to be a “placeholder” for Steinhardt, the media reporting that Lavery is “very close to Steinhardt” and calling him “one of his (Steinhardt’s) best friends”. Indeed, Steinhardt made Lavery the NJGOP’s General Counsel.

Writing of his appointment in 2017, InsiderNJ noted that “puzzled reactions around the state” turned to “cynical head shakes of disbelief” when people learned that Lavery was the nephew of the (now former) Ocean County GOP Chairman, George Gilmore. Gilmore, a powerful party boss, ran a politically connected law firm before being convicted on federal charges. He recently lost an appeal in federal court.

Optics?

There’s a whole lot more to the Mike Lavery story, much more than we can accommodate in so short a column, but as the NJGOP’s email blast was so lacking in information, let’s at least provide you with a sketch of the new Chairman…

Like Doug Steinhardt, Mike Lavery is a member of what has been jokingly called the “Warren County mafia” – a political (and legal business) machine with great success in monetizing that which falls under their control. A former legislative aide to then-Senator Leonard Lance, from 2005 to 2011 Lavery was the Mayor of Hackettstown.

In 2015, Mike Lavery got a political appointment as a Commissioner for the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission. A year later, he was made Chairman of the Commission. The Bridge Commission is a $160 million operation that controls bridges serving four New Jersey counties – Sussex, Warren, Hunterdon, and Mercer. Besides Lavery, the two other Republican Commissioners are Warren County residents. Both reside in Doug Steinhardt’s hometown of Lopatcong.

According to his biography on the website of the law firm he founded (Lavery, Selvaggi, Abromitis and Cohen) Mike Lavery is “the director of the firm's Municipal Government Practice” and is considered “one of the state's foremost attorneys in the area of municipal government law.” His biography states:

“He presently represents numerous governmental entities and serves as Special Counsel to the County of Warren for Open Space & Farmland Preservation.

Mr. Lavery has been appointed to be the Township Attorney for Hardwick, Lopatcong, Mansfield, Oxford, Greenwich and Washington (Warren County) Townships, as well as Attorney for the Frelinghuysen Township Land Use Board, the Chester Township Zoning Board of Adjustment, the Warren County Soil Conservation District and Special Counsel to the County of Sussex.

Michael is also a seasoned land use attorney. He has represented many developers, corporations and individuals in a variety of applications. He is recognized by land use boards throughout northern New Jersey…”

That’s a brief outline of who the new NJGOP Chairman is. He does serve on the boards of various organizations – such as the Centenary College Board of Trustees (yes, that Centenary College, the one that once banned conservative Steve Lonegan from speaking on campus) – but we couldn’t find any involvement in movement conservatism. Not that we expected to.

Mike Lavery’s law firm has an extensive record of involvement in all sorts of things that some, or indeed many, would find “controversial”. The firm is currently involved in an effort that has effectively blocked citizen activists from getting to the bottom of the solar scam that ripped-off property taxpayers in Sussex, Morris, and Somerset Counties. This is important, because Phil Murphy is pushing the same sort of solar scam – as part of his new energy plan.

Taxpayers need to know what happened the last time, to prepare and ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Taxpayers need closure on the scam they’re still paying off and that their children and grandchildren will be paying off.

Studying the interconnections of New Jersey’s political, lawyer-lobbyist firms is instructive and should be required as part of every social studies course. Move over LGBTQ curriculum… forget the silly black and white of the two-party charade… this is how power really works. None of these firms – the really powerful ones – care a fig for party loyalty or platforms or issues. They are all a mix of Democrats and Republicans engaged in the time-honored practice of enriching themselves.

Lavery’s own firm includes the Democrat Mayor of Hoboken, Ravinder Bhalla, “a seasoned litigator and trial attorney in the areas of complex civil litigation, local government law, employment and civil rights law, and criminal defense law.” Before joining Lavery’s firm, Wikipedia reports that “Bhalla was a civil rights attorney at the law firm of Florio, Perrucci, Steinhardt & Fader who have represented NJ Transit.” Initially a strong supporter of COVID restrictions, Bhalla apparently dismissed them to join rallies organized by the Black Lives Matter movement to defund the police.

In 2017, newly elected Mayor Bhalla bragged, “I’m Everything Trump Hates.”

Bhalla’s presence at the Lavery firm does question the new NJGOP Chairman’s commitment to the “Fair School Funding” concept championed by Senator Mike Doherty and others. Hoboken is one of 31 Abbott districts statewide, now referred to as “SDA Districts” based on the requirement for the state to cover all costs for school building and renovation projects. These 31 districts suck up 60% of all the education aid – the state’s income tax revenue.

More than a decade ago, it was clearly established that half the state’s financially at-risk children resided outside these 31 districts. For nearly two decades, there have been calls to kick wealthy districts like Hoboken out of the Abbott/ SDA system. And yet… there appears to be no appetite by the Republican Party establishment to do so. 31 mainly Democrat machine-controlled districts get 60% and the remaining more than 500 districts (many of which are Republican) get the leftovers and the NJGOP appears fine with that.

When folks from outside New Jersey ask why the NJGOP has never pushed a winning “haves and have nots” strategy based on the inequity of a school funding system that forces poor families in rural and suburban New Jersey to subsidize the property tax bills of wealthy people in towns like Hoboken… well, you need to explain the interconnectedness of those lawyer-lobbyist firms to them. Next to your family, nothing is so intimate as who you share a business with.

Which is why it is so important to make the NJGOP and the Republican gubernatorial candidates take positions on actual solutions and legislation. No more getting by with words like “conservative” or “pro-life” or “pro-Second Amendment”. If you are conservative, make “Fair School Funding” a priority and talk about it. If pro-life, take a public position on S-3030/ A-4848. If pro-Second Amendment, sign-on to activists’ legal challenges and provide counsel and raise money. Words should mean something…

Unless you are suffering from identity dysphoria?

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

George Orwell

Posters? Dems allow weakest possible response to slavery

by Rubashov

Led by virtue-signaling poseurs like Senator Loretta Weinberg, Democrat legislative leaders have held up addressing the problem of modern slavery.In fact, they don’t even recognize it as a problem and consistently fail to call it by its name – slavery.

New Jersey Democrats openly diss the United Nations, and the work of people like UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed, who recently reminded world leaders: “This is 2020. Centuries have passed since the end of the transatlantic slave trade. Yet more than 40.3 million people remain victims of modern slavery — 5 in every 1,000 people in the world… Modern slavery is a blight in our world that we must eradicate.”

Human trafficking is modern day slavery – and yet there are legislators in Trenton and their staffs who not only deny it but enable it by blocking legislation designed to stop human trafficking and the sexual exploitation of children. Lawyer-lobbyist firms are some of the biggest supporters of the primarily Democrat legislators who react to any common sense restrictions on sexual exploitation as wanting to “take away my porn”.

The Internet is used extensively by human traffickers to ensnare their victims and then to monetize their degradation and suffering. The New York Times recently outed Pornhub, for its role in monetizing crimes like child rape. Two Fridays ago, the New York Times reported:“Facebook removed 12.4 million images related to child exploitation in a three-month period this year. Twitter closed 264,000 accounts in six months last year for engaging in sexual exploitation of children.”

What is Pornhub? The New York Times points out details that would shock all but the most hardened Democrat legislators and their staffs:

“Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for ‘girls under18’ (no space) or ‘14yo’ leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.”

How does Pornhub monetize the rape of children? Again, from the New York Times:

“After a 15-year-old girl went missing in Florida, her mother found her on Pornhub — in 58 sex videos. Sexual assaults on a 14-year-old California girl were posted on Pornhub and were reported to the authorities not by the company but by a classmate who saw the videos. In each case, offenders were arrested for the assaults, but Pornhub escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them.”

A 23-year-old university student says that “Pornhub became my trafficker.” She was trafficked when she was 9 years-old and is now studying to be an attorney. She told the New York Times: “I’m still getting sold… I may never be able to get away from this. I may be 40 with eight kids, and people are still masturbating to my photos.”

an inadequate response to the problem uncovered by the New York Times. In response to all this national publicity about modern slavery – human trafficking – and the sexual exploitation of vulnerable women and children, the Democrat-controlled Legislature did something… they passed a bill to require posters to be hung-up at locations like dressing rooms, restrooms, and restroom stalls at strip clubs, sexually oriented businesses, and massage parlors. This is not a bad thing and it does serve a purpose, but it is an inadequate response to the problem uncovered by the New York Times. A poster cannot stop what Pornhub is up to. The technology employed simply isn’t up to the job.

While blocking other legislation, the Democrats allowed this legislation (S-280) to get a hearing and a vote because now they can say they did something about “human trafficking” (they refuse to join the United Nations in calling it “modern slavery”). Now Democrats can go back to protecting the corporate establishment that is invested in platforms like Pornhub.

In a press statement, S-280's Republican sponsor, Senator Tom Kean Jr., noted: “Human trafficking occurs today across New Jersey in places where many of us would never suspect it, including our own communities. Victims are often lured with the prospect of a job, and then have their passports, money, and identification stolen by their handlers. They’re moved around and forced to work for the benefit of others. It’s imperative that victims and those who may have witnessed exploitation know that help is just a phone call away.

Senator Kean’s press statement specifically stated: “Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery that exploits victims for sex, labor, or both.”

His legislation, S-280, requires the New Jersey Commission on Human Trafficking to develop new signs and posters with directions for obtaining help and services to be displayed in places where the victims of human trafficking are most likely to see them. The new public awareness poster would include the toll-free phone number for the National Human Trafficking Hotline, a 24-hour service.

Posters will be placed in workplaces, bars, airports, train stations, welcome centers, truck stops, weigh stations, emergency rooms, urgent care centers, farm labor contractors, job recruitment centers, service areas, rest areas along interstate highways, public transportation, hotels, motels, campsites, and similar places of public accommodation. All of this is good and Senator Kean deserves great thanks for shaming the Democrats into passing this legislation, but the Democrats continue to oppose any measure to address the problems uncovered by the New York Times.

Legislation to shut down Internet-based sex trafficking and slavery does exist and has been waiting for a hearing and a vote. It is called the Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation Prevention Act. Senator Steve Oroho has championed this legislation for years. Democrats like Loretta Weinberg and Teresa Ruiz have blocked it from getting a hearing and a vote.

To make matters worse, the NJGOP has been AWOL in its support of the Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation Prevention Act. In advance of Tuesday’s vote for a new NJGOP Chairman, we suggested that Members of the State Committee ask the two candidates for Chairman – Bob Hugin and Mike Lavery – to take a position on the Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation Prevention Act. For Bob Hugin, it would have been a re-affirmation, because he supported the Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation Prevention Act at a bi-partisan event in 2018 to support its passage…

Unfortunately, we have not heard from Mike Lavery, the eventual winner and new NJGOP Chairman. Lavery held the Chairmanship in 2017, and we did not hear from him then on the Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation Prevention Act. This is something that Mike Lavery needs to correct. Every State Committee Member – and especially those who voted for him – needs to take personal responsibility to ensure that Chairman Lavery and the NJGOP take a clear stand against slavery, against human trafficking, against the sexual exploitation of vulnerable women and children.

Opposition to slavery is at the very core of who the Republican Party is. It is the very reason it was established. It is important that the New Jersey Republican Party take a stand and do the right thing. Activists can’t do it alone, the entire party should stand up for victims of slavery and sexual exploitation.

“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”

Abraham Lincoln
First Republican President of the United States of America