Is Gottheimer pushing Northern Ireland-style “troubles” on America?

By Rubashov

Once upon a time, Joe Cryan would have told you all about it. His father certainly could. A population facing long-term economic decline, courtesy of the empire-building schemes of global imperialists.

Instead of addressing the economic problems, the government labels them “terrorists” and ratchets up the use of authoritarian surveillance measures. They make it illegal to peaceably assemble and to protest. Eventually, they start to arrest and detain – and set up political wings in their prisons.

“The Troubles” plagued Northern Ireland for more than thirty years. What began as government’s over-reaction to what was essentially an economic and civil rights protest movement ended with a power-sharing agreement. How could it not have? It was a matter of demographics. Whether we’re discussing a substantial minority, a plurality, or maybe even an essential majority – no government can jail that many people for long.

But along the way, politicians corrupted the use of law enforcement for political ends. They made frequent use of the show trial. Falsely accusing people to fit their narrative and to reinforce their bigotry.

If you fit the image of the “enemy” in their narrative – pale-skinned, of the wrong ethnicity, wrong religion, wrong economic class, wrong area, wrong education, wrong dialect, wrong politics, wrong cultural allegiances – you were in danger. Just ask the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, or the Maguire Seven. Just ask them what it was like to check those “wrong” boxes during “The Troubles”?

“That man… ordered that these people be used as scapegoats by a nation that was baying for blood…

” (Gareth Peirce)

Like they are today.

In a recent missive sent to local elected officials, Congressman Josh Gottheimer issued words that sound as if they were plucked from a British government statement of the 1970s:

“I believe that we can all agree that providing law enforcement and the intelligence community with all the tools necessary to prosecute, financially counter, and defeat these groups is of the utmost importance to keep our shared constituents safe.”

“All the tools necessary”. With such words the British government did away with due process and the rule of law.

Politicians like Josh Gottheimer have started down a dangerous, undemocratic, deeply illiberal path. They seek to shore up their own weak political positions by criminalizing the political positions of others.

During the last campaign, we watched as a panicky Gottheimer made false accusations against private citizens who supported his political opponent, accusing them of the high crime of “domestic terrorism”. But nobody was ever charged with a crime of any kind. Totally unfounded. Undeterred, now he is expanding the accusation of “domestic terrorism” to include large swathes of his own constituency.

In the same missive, Gottheimer attempts to rally his audience with this time worn appeal to war: “Extremists (as in people who think the “wrong” thoughts) present a clear and present danger to New Jersey families.”

He claims there was a “sharp rise in domestic terror and violent extremism both here in New Jersey and nationwide” and, for this reason, he is working to expand the PATRIOT Act to refocus its broad powers from enemies abroad to enemies within. Not content with a forever war overseas, Gottheimer is looking to create a forever war within the United States. America’s version of “The Troubles.”

Politicians use war to seduce entire societies. War makes it easy to lie and create fictions that the public believes. That great man of the Left, author and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, titled his book on the subject: “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” In the arid landscape that Josh Gottheimer appears to inhabit, this certainly seems the case.

“Someone has finely said that ‘truth is the first casualty in war’; and never was a greater untruth spoken than that war is waged for the protection of women and homes.

”

Ethel Annakin Snowdon
Human Rights campaigner

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 Marianna at Marianna@JerseyConservative.org

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