Democrats are fueling business-bashing in “red” Sussex County

By Sussex Watchdog

New Jersey lost a third of its small businesses during the pandemic. Institutionally, it’s the worst taxed state in America and one of the least friendly to small businesses. Now, instead of extending a helping hand, local Democrats are finding ways to place more pressure on family and other small businesses trying to make ends meet.

Frustrated by their inability to reverse democratic outcomes in local elections and force elected Republicans to enact their “Woke” agenda, the Democrats who gave us dark money/ murder-for-hire political consultant Sean Caddle are now involved with organizing a list of approved “progressive businesses” in Sussex County and labeling other businesses as worthy of having a brick tossed through their window.

No kidding…

“It is his millions of relationships that will give man his humanity… It is not our ideological rights that are important but the quality of our relationships with each other, with all men, with knowledge and art and God that count.

“Every group on earth that has put ideology before human relations has failed; always disaster and bitterness and bloodshed have come... it aroused in men more hate than love, more concern for their own group than for all people, more lust for power than compassion for human need.”

Lillian Smith
Civil Rights pioneer

Is this what happens when Democrats get together and put their “progressive” minds to work? Bricks through windows???

Democrats are fanning out all over Sussex County and then reporting about businesses as to whether they should belong on the “approved” list… as well as those they think deserve a brick or a boycott or both. Even a young attorney got involved in the effort (while assuring everyone that her business belongs on the “approved” list).

Fights are erupting online over businesses interpreted to have ideological gray areas. Like a bike shop that didn’t want to fly the right flag (Note: we’re not talking the American flag). When the lawyer suggested a bar be included on the approved list, another Democrat activist objected, writing:

“Are you sure about this? (That bar) was on my reject list due to posts last year.”

To which the young lawyer replies:

“They got rid of that owner (partly for that reason)”.

Aren’t we lucky to live at a time when its not your business acumen or professional competence or the service you provide or your product that matters… but rather your posts on social media and how these modern “Vestal Virgins” interpret them?

One Democrat county committeeman and former candidate for Freeholder (who is now using a female name after apparently installing what can only be described as impressive breast implants) targeted the business of someone who didn’t support his candidacy:

“What is his business so I can advise everyone I know to avoid the fascist pos”.

How civil.

The Democrats have got so out of hand that one usually quite radical Democrat begged her fellow “progressives” to be cool…

“I received direct communication alleging that group members are messaging business owners in what is being considered harassing fashion. Please for the love of God, don’t do that.”

Well, at least there is one non-cuckoo in the cuckoo nest. That’s something, anyway.

LD-39: Democrat PAC boss sued for sexual harassment

Joe Waks is a good artist and we admire his work. 

But there is another side to him.  It happens.  The poet W. H. Auden wrote about it in his "The Prolific and the Devourer."  Art is at war with politics and it cannot help but be.  Art can never be the servant, for when it is it is no longer art but propaganda disguised as art.

Joe Waks is also a lawyer, a political operative, and a career patronage employee with the Hudson County Democrat machine.  He's held every kind of patronage job from Chief of Staff to Mayor Doria to Appointments Counsel to Director of Municipal Services to his current gig in the Hudson County Office of Cultural & Heritage Affairs.  His political gods are Joe Doria and Vinnie Prieto. 

Yes, Joe Waks is a man at odds with himself.  The good artist and the machine politician inhabit uneasily the same skin.  And the demands of politics are many.

When the bosses tell you to crush a woman whistleblower... you crush her.

And when they tell you to start a SuperPAC as a means of flushing $550,000 in unspecified contributions into attack ads on a woman legislator... you do it.  Because, they own you. 

It is a crime that an artist as talented as Joe must rely on base politicians for his bread and cheese.  But needs must.  It happens.  A thousand little compromises go by and you wake one day and realize that you have been totally compromised.

From all accounts, the Deputy Registrar of Bayonne, a union organizer in Hudson County, is a woman who resists being compromised.  She is a woman of strong personal conviction -- with a solid sense of right and wrong.  It was she who blew the whistle on two employees who she claimed had misused federal money that had been meant for the victims of Hurricane Sandy. 

The bosses didn't like it and they didn't like her, so they went to her supervisors and... well, she filed a lawsuit in federal court over what she claimed they did to her.  The case number is 14-cv-03695 and was filed in the U.S. District Court in Newark on June 9, 2014.  It is an active case and is still before the Court.  Most of the documents associated with the case are available to the public.  Here are some excerpts from those documents filed in federal court:

The latest filing from that case was on October 25, 2017.  The defendants -- including the political machine that runs the City of Bayonne -- are doing their best to slow the process, drag it out, knowing that they have an endless pot of money called property taxpayers, while the lady union leader does not.

And it was about this time that a new SuperPAC suddenly appeared, called the Progressive Values Committee.  Funny name, isn't it? 

The SuperPAC's front was Joe Waks.  The PAC lists Joe Waks' home in Bayonne as its headquarters.  The political consultants running the PAC are a couple of media buyers who work for gubernatorial candidate Phil Murphy and the Democrat legislative campaign committees.  In the case of the Progressive Values Committee, they operate from a shell company within their principal company. 

Somehow, a couple of major donors to Democrat Assembly Speaker Vinnie Prieto got the word to send $550,000 through the mail slot in Joe Waks' living room in Bayonne, New Jersey.  Now imagine that.

Yep, they want us to believe that this artist has SuperPACs on his mind.  They want us to believe that one day he had the notion to be creative and, instead of painting, he said to himself, "I'll create a SuperPAC."  But it gets better, because then they want us to believe that two major donors to Speaker Vinnie somehow figured out that there was this artist with his SuperPAC in Bayonne and if they sent him over a half million bucks he would somehow, on his own, figure out exactly how Speaker Vinnie wanted it used. 

That's right.  $550,000 magically appeared through his mail slot and this artist in Hudson County figured out that he needed to send it to exactly where Speaker Vinnie needed it sent -- to Bergen, Passaic, and Morris Counties.  And what's more is that Joe Waks doesn't get to keep any of it.  It just comes through his letter slot, plops onto his living room floor, then the professionals come by to collect it, take it to the cable television stations and buy the time. 

When contacted by Matt Friedman of Politico, the NJEA's spokesperson said that their "quarter million dollar contribution was aimed at supporting candidates it has endorsed, not in propping up Prieto."  Okay, then why not use your own SuperPAC?  Why the subterfuge?  Why move $250,000 from your perfectly good SuperPAC into a SuperPAC operated out of someone's living room? 

We get it.  You were told what to do.  That's how machines operate.  You're told to sexually harass a woman employee... you do it.  You're told to send a quarter million dollars from your SuperPAC to one directly controlled by the machine bosses... you do it.  Told to use that money to trash a woman legislator... you do it.  Heck, when Joe Doria needed a face for his lobbying business, Joe Waks dutifully complied.  It's not called a "machine" for nothing.

It is a real shame that Joe Waks didn't have the courage to say NO to Vinnie Prieto.  He should have told Prieto to shove his SuperPAC scheme. 

Joe's father would have.  Judge David Waks was a man of great integrity.  He was not only an honest man, David Waks was a compassionate and decent man.  The story goes that David Waks once gave his shoes to a man who had just lost his home to a fire.  He didn't have shoes and so the Judge gave the man his... and then walked home in his stocking feet.  A man like that would not have done the bidding of Vinnie Prieto.

Dirtbag behavior: Sad to report, it's not only the Left

Last week, we all witnessed some of the more ridiculous antics of the Left, and there has been a lot of commentary about how certain people allowed their emotions to get the better of them.  Madonna made her threats, while others went in for displays of very bad taste.

Jersey Conservative reported on this, and we were quickly reminded that such poor behavior doesn't begin or end with the ideological Left.  Those reminding us were none other than those denizens of the new ideological "Right" -- the Tea Party.  Not everyone in the Tea Party behaves like a 15-year-old who got into his parents' liquor cabinet, but enough do to give the movement a bad name. 

Last week, an innocent family had an aerial view of their family home placed on a public Facebook page with the words "target acquired" posted underneath and the statement, "got to love drones LOL," posted under that.

The organizer of a draft campaign committee for Gail Phoebus publicly posted those personal details, believing that they belonged to a "political consultant" who works in Sussex County.  But as with so much that comes from these people, the Phoebus campaigner -- who is also a key figure in the Skylands Tea Party of Sussex County -- got it all wrong.

The home "targeted" by the Phoebus campaigner/ Tea Party activist is in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and it belongs to a perfectly innocent family with young children.  It is not the home of the "political consultant" that Mr. Tea Party seemed intent on injuring.

After a Sussex County blog reported this, the Phoebus campaign "administrator" appealed to his fellow Tea Partiers.  They responded with threats of violence and personal harm:

The "political consultant" (who is, in fact, a free lance writer) has already been the"target" of malicious and injurious acts by officials in Andover Township, where Phoebus once served as mayor.   They will have to shoulder some of the responsibility if one of their more emotional "supporters" gets a little too motivated and acts out against the consultant or even an inadvertent "target" of their hate.

If what these people post on their Facebook pages is anything to go by, they are certainly able to back up their anger with something a lot worse than words.

Instead of hate, maybe these folks should try calming down long enough to have a polite, rational, dignified policy discussion.  As the writer Isaac Asimov reminded us, "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

But this keeps going from bad to worse.  Earlier this week another "administrator" of the Phoebus campaign and Tea Partier decided that he wasn't going to be outdone by the Left when it came to posting tasteless images.  He took the image below and explored an even lower range of human discourse.

Yes, this Tea Partier photoshopped the images of several Sussex County Republicans onto vaginas.  The images included a Republican State Senator, a Republican Assemblyman, a Republican candidate for Assembly, a Republican candidate for Freeholder, and a Republican free lance writer from Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  The photograph of the last, courtesy of Andover Township, New Jersey.

Mind you, the person photo-shopping Republicans onto vaginas isn't a member of some Left-wing organization protesting Donald Trump.   This person claims to be a Right-winger and member of the Tea Party, who had his photo taken earlier this month with Steve Rogers, the GOP candidate for Governor he says he's supporting.  Everyone involved is a Trump supporter.  This is how crazy some people act when they disagree with someone who agrees with them most of the time, imagine how nuts they'll get when it is someone on the other side?

The people trashed by this Tea Partier are among the most conservative in New Jersey, with perfect voting records on the Second Amendment and the Right-to-Life; top ratings from Americans for Prosperity and the American Conservative Union; who have consistently been there for the conservative movement and the Republican Party.  Heck, the free lance writer once worked for the National Rifle Association as a congressional district Election Volunteer Coordinator. 

Now we know people in the same Tea Party group -- the Skylands Tea Party.  They have names like Tom and Doug and Roseann and Sue.  They are grandparents and business owners and professionals.  How would they explain these images to their grandchildren?  Would they teach their grandchildren how to photo-shop the images of people who have helped them and their community onto a vagina?  Would they explain to them that this is the right way to deal with people when they fail to agree with you 100 percent of the time?  It's 100 percent or your face goes on a vagina! 

In closing, let us leave you with this image, posted at Halloween, by one of your members.  Our advice to you is to chill.  Push the restart button and begin to act like responsible adults.  End the rhetoric of hate.