Event: “On Direct Action”

I’ll be moderating this event, which takes place Saturday, September 19, 1-3 pm in Princeton. It’s a conversation with four of the ten activists who helped shut down Port Elizabeth, New Jersey this past May 22 to stop the shipment through the port of weapons to Israel.

Scan the QR code on the flyer to register. Confirmed attendees will receive the location of the venue, which by request of the venue is only to be divulged to confirmed attendees.

They Have Some Planes

“We have some planes…”
–Muhammad Atta, 9/11 hijacker

The great horror of 9/11 was supposed to be that Al Qaeda hijacked a bunch of American planes and used the civilians on them as mere cannon fodder for their military ends. The great redemption was supposed to be United Flight 93, which flew out of Newark, bound for San Francisco, but crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania when passengers stormed the cockpit and brought it down.

The horror hasn’t really ended. It’s just been concealed. United Flight 90 is the standard United flight to Tel Aviv out of Newark that I’ve taken for a decade, starting from the same place as Flight 93, but flying in exactly the reverse direction. It turns out that everyone on it is, and has for some time been, a human shield for Israel. Our lives–and the honest truth–mean so little to our ruling class that they’ll sacrifice both to Israel without a thought.

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That Time a College President Got Something Right

I rarely have kind words for college administrators, much less college presidents, so when a kind word occurs to me, it probably makes sense to write it down before I forget it. And one just did.

I was in the public library this evening looking at the new releases, when I saw Salman Rushdie’s new-ish book, Knife, published in 2024, about the murder attempt on him at a talk he gave in Chautauqua, New York in 2022. The documentary film adaptation of the book, Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, is coming out this month.

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West Orange: ICE-Free at Last

As I’ve mentioned here a few times, I split my time between Princeton and West Orange, New Jersey. So I pay attention to local politics in both places, and engage in activism in both.

Since the fall of 2025, I’ve written seven or eight posts here describing the effort to persuade West Orange’s municipal government to take a stand in favor of migrant rights and against ICE. In 2025, the effort focused on getting West Orange Council to pass a resolution in favor of the Immigrant Trust Act. In 2026, it’s focused on getting the Council to pass what’s commonly called ICE-Free legislation.

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Home Is Where the Bombs Are

For decades now, we’ve been force-fed the dogma that American higher-education is the epitome of “woke”–a fully-owned subsidiary of “the Left.” I spent three years working for the National Association of Scholars, an outfit dedicated to manufacturing and marketing propaganda of this kind. I spent twenty-six years in higher education, teaching at a dozen institutions on two continents. I happen to live in a college town, Princeton, have lived here for fifteen years, am walking distance from Princeton University, and spend time on campus just about every day. I happen to work near another college town, New Brunswick, home to Rutgers University, and spend time on campus there about once a week. And I have friends and colleagues in higher education across the United States and Canada. So I’m no stranger to higher education or to controversies about it.

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The Neo-Nazis and the Permit Raj

Princeton Patch has now confirmed that a white supremacist rally did in fact take place in Princeton this past Saturday afternoon, August 29th. Don’t miss the neo-Nazi video embedded in the article, “Youth in Revolt.” Apparently, the spirit of Leni Riefenstahl never quite died.

Unfortunately, the rally is (like so many things) increasingly being seen as a law enforcement matter, and the police, fixated by definition on matters of law enforcement, are now pursuing the thought that the people participating in the rally lacked a permit to march down the street or through Monument Park, and should have had one. Law enforcement’s idea of a solution to the rise of neo-Nazism in Princeton is to set up a Permit Raj: demand that activists get permits to exercise the privilege of assembling, marching, chanting, or holding signs. And make sure to demote those activities to the status of privileges in the process.

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“Keep New Jersey White” (take 2)

I posted this yesterday but pulled it after I started to doubt the provenance of the photo. The photo seemed real enough, but I wasn’t sure exactly when the event had happened, and was worried that it was old footage recently unearthed but misleadingly described as recent.

I’ve now traced the source of the photo to my own satisfaction, and am convinced both that the photo is real and that the event it depicts really did take place this past weekend–on Saturday, August 29th. The original eyewitness source appears to be one Andrea Christo of East Windsor, New Jersey, who filmed the demonstration as she drove by, and then either took a still of the scene below or screenshotted her own video. Here’s a link to her Facebook post, and here’s a link to her video. I’m grateful to Ms Christo for documenting this event, and hope that it finds its way into the local press.


People have been telling me for fifteen years that my worries about the rise of fascism and neo-Nazi racism are overblown. Well, here’s a photo of the corner of Nassau and Stockton Streets, taken on August 29th in the supposedly woke college town of Princeton, New Jersey. “Keep New Jersey White.” Since New Jersey isn’t white, their point, obviously, is that it has to be made white at gunpoint. Any guesses how?

(ht: Zellie Imani and Rev Erich Kussman; photo credit: Andrea Christo)

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“Keep New Jersey White” Mystery Photo

UPDATE: See my August 31 update to this post.

I originally posted this with a critique of the message involved, but about an hour after I posted it, got skeptical that the photo was either real or genuinely depicted an event that took place on August 29th, as is being alleged online. So I’ve deleted the original post pending verification that the photo depicts a demonstration that took place at Nassau and Stockton in Princeton on the afternoon of August 29, 2026.

(ht: Zellie Imani and Rev Erich Kussman)

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Princeton in the Service of Empire

“Organized activity”–aka, peaceful political activity–has been banned at Princeton University’s Cannon Green since the enforced closure of Gaza Solidarity Encampment in May 2024, a first since the British Army’s occupation of Princeton in 1777.

There’s one notable exception: ROTC. That’s what you’re looking at just above. I took the photo last Friday morning. It’s Princeton’s Army ROTC unit using Cannon Green for military training.

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