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.
