Jim McGreevey-linked group smears Allen (and Biden) over border.

By Rubashov

Poor Phil Murphy must be getting desperate. He’s got to be to look to Jim McGreevey for a lifeline.

If the former Governor hadn’t employed his novel diversion, does anybody doubt that there would have been a criminal investigation into the part he played in his corrupt administration? Corruption and kink – those were the features of McGreevey’s tenure as Governor. Didn’t the Star-Ledger and The Record do fat exclusives on it? Wasn’t it reported that he assigned one of his own staffers to have sex with his First Lady? Some crazy stuff.

Having taken the same road as Nixon-dirty tricks operative Chuck Colson, the former Governor is now a preacher – lecturing anyone who will listen about right from wrong. Like Colson, Jim McGreevey’s ministry involves prisons, but he can’t seem to stay out of politics. Of course, politics is where the money is… and the attention… and the celebrity (and the former Governor is, and always has been, a supreme narcissist).

On Saturday, the Star-Ledger/ NJ.com ran an opinion column by a director at Jim McGreevey’s organization. This fellow is the vice president of something called the New Jersey Latino Pastors and Ministers Coalition. He co-wrote the column with the president of the aforementioned – who is, according to the Star-Ledger/ NJ.com, “very active in the Union City Clergy Association of Mayor Brian Stack.”

Hey, are these guys ward healers… or members of the clergy?

Now if you search the Guidestar website, which rates the reliability of charitable organizations and other non-profits, you will not find the New Jersey Latino Pastors and Ministers Coalition. You also won’t find them in a search of the Internal Revenue Service’s website. The group doesn’t appear to be registered with the IRS as a non-profit organization. It’s not even listed as an existing organization – or one that ever existed – with the New Jersey Department of the Treasury’s Division of Revenue. And that’s the Murphy administration!

So, where did this group come from?

From news reports in the Star-Ledger/ NJ.com, it seems the New Jersey Latino Pastors and Ministers Coalition was formed during Phil Murphy’s first campaign for Governor. As reported in the Star-Ledger/ NJ.com, Murphy spent heavily on a coalition building effort led by operatives like Al Alvarez and Derek Green.

According to the Star-Ledger/ NJ.com, the Murphy campaign paid Green two million dollars for his efforts. Like Alvarez, Green was rewarded with a taxpayer-supported government appointment. Green became Murphy’s “senior adviser on diversity, faith, urban and regional growth.” Get the picture?

On July 6th, the New Jersey Latino Pastors and Ministers Coalition held a press conference in Newark to formally endorse Governor Phil Murphy for re-election. Later that day, the Governor issued a statement accepting their endorsement.

The Star-Ledger/ NJ.com opinion column by the two men who run the New Jersey Latino Pastors and Ministers Coalition followed the coordinated Democrat Party talking points that have been pushed by Murphy’s campaign, and by Murphy himself. Coincidence?

On August 9th, Governor Murphy attacked Diane Allen for suggesting that COVID-19 could be brought over the border by undocumented immigration. That’s undocumented – as in nobody got their names, let alone tested them for anything from STDs to COVID!

Murphy said that the idea that unmasked, unvaccinated people, kept in close confinement before being shepherded in tightly packed groups across the border, might pick up the virus along the way was “conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact”. He went on to suggest that even being concerned about the possibility of such a thing was “making people less healthy and putting their lives at risk”.

Murphy’s statements placed him in direct conflict with the administration of President Joe Biden, who has repeatedly extended the closure of the borders with Mexico and Canada due to concerns over cross-border transmission of coronavirus. The ban on all non-essential travel will continue to at least August 21st, the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security announced. The restriction on non-essential travel began in March 2020 “due to the coronavirus pandemic” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

President Biden shares the same concerns as Senator Allen about cross-border transmission of COVID-19. Of course, being able to test those crossing the border is essential to containing the spread of coronavirus and its variants. Illegal border-crossings by undocumented immigrants totally defeats the ability to test, treat, and contain the virus.

Nowhere in their column do the two men who run the New Jersey Latino Pastors and Ministers Coalition acknowledge that the borders with Mexico and Canada are currently closed, by the Biden administration, due to concerns about the transmission of COVID-19. People with titles like reverend and pastor shouldn’t openly lie like that. It damages their entire mission (if indeed they still have a mission beyond shilling for powerful people in government).

The leaders of the New Jersey Latino Pastors and Ministers Coalition need to watch this video... and then issue an apology to Diane Allen (or make the same accusation against President Joe Biden).

One of the authors identifies as an American Baptist. The other was religiously educated at a seminary run by the Reformed Episcopal Church. We intend to write to both entities for their opinion about the dishonesty displayed by these two “clergymen” and by their use of a political candidate’s talking points in a deeply misogynistic attempt to smear a woman with a record that is clearly at odds with their mischaracterization of her. We will offer to debate the matter with them before both bodies.

And it gets worse. In their column, and on orders from God only knows who, these two deeply compromised men tried to label Diane Allen a “racist” for her words, while ignoring the words and actions of President Biden. Allen and Biden concur and the two cannot be separated.

We also find it strange that people who are ordained by color-blind religious denominations set themselves up as heads of exclusionary organizations that have more to do with voter-segmenting than the message of Christ that “all men are brothers”. Any honest reader of their column will agree that it has very little to do with Christianity and a whole lot to do with the campaign of Governor Phil Murphy and a political hit job. So, why put on your collars to do it?

In our opinion, a group with a name like “New Jersey Latino Pastors and Ministers Coalition” sounds exclusionary and racist. Why shouldn’t a church be open to everyone? Maybe that’s why Mayor Stack had the good sense to give his group a geographic-sounding name – “Union City Clergy Association” – instead of an exclusionary one.

So, who are the racists here?

Being political hatchet men may serve the personal needs of these two men, but we doubt it is the look desired by the American Baptist congregation or the Reformed Episcopal Church. In trading their clerical mantles for the misogynistic garb of political lowlifes, the only thing the leaders of the New Jersey Latino Pastors and Ministers Coalition have smeared is their congregations and the broader church.

Again, this is the beginning. Stay tuned…

“The entire business model of the Democratic Party is to avoid dealing with its own populists’ concerns, so they’ve never seen the Sanders wing of the party as anything but a threat to what they do for a living, which is basically take corporate money and then sell themselves as socially progressive. That’s what they do for a living. That’s their business.”

Matt Taibbi
Journalist and author of Hate, Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another.

Ringwood: Is national politics destroying neighborhood and civility?

By Rubashov

A few weeks ago, The Economist posed the question: “What gets lost when national politics eats everything?”

In an article, about how national politics is dividing a small town in Maine, the magazine cited a 2016 book by philosopher Nancy Rosenblum called Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America. Rosenblum is the Senator Joseph S. Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government at Harvard University and co-editor of the Annual Review of Political Science. She studies modern political thought and constitutional law. Professor Rosenblum has been the Chair of both the government department at Harvard and the political science department at Brown University, and a member of the leadership of several professional organizations in political science and political philosophy.

In her book, Professor Rosenblum warned of imposing abstract and totalist political ideologies over the daily interactions of a community and the people who live there. Rosenblum writes: “For reciprocity among neighbors as ‘decent folk’ turns on the real possibility of disregarding precisely the social inequalities, racial and sectarian differences, and conflicting ideological commitments that citizens bring to public life.”

The Economist notes: “Passions about such matters can simplify and coarsen relations among neighbors. They collapse the generous spaces made – not always, but often enough – for eccentricities, personal lapses and political opinions, for the tolerance and empathy that sustain pluralism.”

Looking around New Jersey, you can find no better example of what happens when one group decides to erase those “generous spaces” than the town of Ringwood, in Passaic County. Yes, Ringwood, a semi-rural enclave once called Stonetown. By the 1960’s it had been transformed from farms to residential developments and summer homes. Back then there was a sort of hippie commune, called Camp Midvale.

The Sierra Club’s Jeff Tittel grew up there and provided this background: “The original founders of the camp were a European hiking group, the Nature Friends. They were pioneer conservationists. They were an open people and their camp was an interracial camp.” Ah, the sweet air of tolerance!

In 1991, the site of Camp Midvale became the Weis Ecology Center and today is the New Weiss Center for Education, Arts, and Recreation. The Highlands Nature Friends, Inc. is the non-profit membership organization that owns and operates The New Weis Center. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

But today, neighborhood groups like the Highlands Nature Friends must share the public square with groups like the Ringwood Anti-Racism Collaborative – an organization not unlike the gangs of puritan witch hunters that once roamed the countryside, looking for people to burn. Pity the person whose social media pages get noticed by this group, because you will never pass muster, never be pure enough.

From what it has posted on its own social media page, this group appears to support “Antiracism and Equity”, while opposing “Equality and Whiteness”. The group advises its neighbors in Ringwood to “treat racism like COVID-19” and to do the following:

1. Assume you have it.
2. Listen to experts about it.
3. Don’t spread it.
4. Be willing to change your life to end it.

In humanspeak, this translates to:

1. You are guilty of the original sin of skin color!
2. Shut up and listen!
3. Don’t talk back!
4. Be willing to do what we tell you to do and (most importantly) pay the price we tell you to pay!

Yep, it is little more than modern day fascism. With an economic sting in its tail that is more scam than justice.

What effect will this have on the neighborliness one hopes to find in a small town? How will it end?

Well, Professor Rosenblum has this warning for us. Citing how some Americans stood by and watched as their Japanese-American neighbors were packed off to internment camps during the World War Two, she writes: “The family next door was seen through the lens of racial and political categories, and through the miasma of mistrust thrown up by war. Pluralism gave way to totalism.”

Author and civil rights pioneer Lillian Smith offers this perspective (given when she accepted the Charles S. Johnson Award for her work):

“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. The civil rights movement has done a magnificent job but it is now faced with the ancient choice between good and evil, between love for all men and lust for a group’s power.”

“Every group on earth that has put ideology before human relations has failed; always disaster and bitterness and bloodshed have come. This movement, too, may fail. If it does, it will be because 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.”

“We must avoid the trap of totalism which lures a man into thinking there is only one way, one answer, one option, and that others must be forced into this One Way, and forced into it Now.”

Unfortunately, the "anti-White" ideology of the Ringwood Anti-Racism Collaborative has been wholly embraced by the local Democrat committee in Ringwood and by its candidates. One candidate for town council, Jessie Kitzman, is a young and very radicalized Public Defender who has completely lost touch with common sense. For example, Kitzman calls for the abolition of confinement for criminals – at a time when violent crime is surging across the United States.

Except that she doesn’t believe that…

Kitzman does crazy...

What is happening in Ringwood is an example of what not to do if you value your town, your neighbors, and civility. We will be following the goings-on in Ringwood over the next months and reporting back.

Stay tuned…

“It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.”
 
Robert Heinlein, author