And so do I
Here at long last is Senator Holly Schepisi’s “response” to my earlier post critiquing her claims about the New Jersey Department of Health’s May 28 inspection of Delaney Hall:

Yeah. That’s really fucking stupid.

Schepisi starts out by accusing me of using a “pseudonym.” Her first bit of evidence for this is that there’s a doctor with my name at Valley Hospital in Paramus, New Jersey. Well, there is a doctor with my last name at Valley Hospital–my brother, Suleman Khawaja. He doesn’t have the same first name as me, largely because he’s not the same person as me. “Suleman” looks nothing like “Irfan,” but I guess we all look the same to some people.

Her second piece of evidence is that there’s a professor with the name “Irfan Khawaja” at Felician University. Right. There was. That was me, six years ago. I have a different job now, but have the same name. Funny thing: I’m the same person in 2026 as I was in 2020.

So far, we’ve encountered two embarrassing confusions in quest of a conspiracy theory. It’s worth knowing that I sent Schepisi an email with my post, and posted a link to the post itself on Facebook. Here is her office’s acknowledgment of the email:

I ended up sending it a third time, also on Facebook. This thrice-sent post comes from this blog, which has a bio of me. I also happen to have a LinkedIn account which has a profile picture of me. How dumb do you have to be–how totally unable to process straightforward textual evidence–to miss all of this, and fast-forward to a conspiracy theory about pseudonyms?

Incidentally, I don’t for a minute believe Schepisi’s bullshit about encountering “fifteen” instances of my name online, because I happen to know there aren’t “fifteen”: there are thousands. “Irfan Khawaja” is a common name among Pakistanis. I don’t expect the average person to know this, but I do expect it of a person trying to confabulate a conspiracy theory about my identity.

Let’s jump into the Matrix for a minute, though. Imagine for a moment that the conspiracy theory was true. Imagine that all this time, I was not Irfan Khawaja. What would it prove? John Locke wrote his Two Treatises on Government anonymously. The Federalist Papers were written under pseudonyms. The claims of these texts aren’t refuted by pointing these things out. Mine wouldn’t be, either. The issue isn’t my identity, but what I actually said. Does Schepisi have a rebuttal to offer the real Irfan Khawaja that she can’t offer the “fake” one? Or is the point to change the subject from the defects of Delaney Hall to the mystery of my identity?

Outside Delaney Hall, June 29, 2026

It’s pretty obvious that Schepisi has nothing substantive to say about my post, or about conditions in Delaney Hall. But she has lots of falsehoods to dispense.

(1) She claims here that she was merely “reposting an official communication from the Governor’s office.” No, she was posting an article from Politico that contained a report from the New Jersey Department of Health (NJDOH), and the NJDOH’s report flatly contradicted the claims she made for it.

(2) She had claimed in her earlier post that the NJDOH report had proven detainees’ allegations “wrong.” It did nothing of the sort, and Dr Washington, the Health Commissioner, made clear that it didn’t.

(3) She had quoted Politico’s itself false claim that Delaney Hall had been given a “Satisfactory” evaluation. It had not. It had been given a Conditionally Satisfactory evaluation, which is not a Satisfactory one, and which indicates that the facility was out of compliance with state health regulations.

(4) She had claimed that if Delaney Hall had gotten a Satisfactory evaluation, that would have proven the detainees’ allegations wrong. That’s not true, either. Delaney Hall’s getting a Satisfactory evaluation on March 28 would not have proven that the allegations made on or before March 22 were false. And they did not prove it.

I argue for these claims at tedious length in the original post. There’s no point repeating them here. People who didn’t read the first time around aren’t going to read the second. It doesn’t help Schepisi’s case that GEO Group has twice refused health inspectors full access to the facility, and that Delaney Hall’s air conditioning system has now broken down during the hottest heat wave in recent memory. They’re clearly not sending their best over there.

At face value, Schepisi’s claims here are simply too stupid to be believed. No one of her education and attainments can really be as stupid as these comments of hers are. Given that, I think it’s a reasonable inference that she’s trying very hard to play dumb, which is another way of saying that she’s trying her best to wriggle out of the situation by deception. Put another way, a simpler way: she’s lying by deliberately trying to confuse the issues.

Ariel Gold, Delaney Hall, June 15, 2026

People like to blather on about “civil discourse.” They have much less to say about how to deal with the frauds, cranks, and fascists one encounters outside of the prettified, largely thought-experimental universe that the advocates of “civility” inhabit. They have to less to say, in other words, when what we’re talking about is no longer a drill or a dress rehearsal, but a fight to the finish.

How do you respond to a person who eagerly cheerleads for the mass expulsion of millions of peaceful people from her country, who refuses to acknowledge her own country’s responsibility for the crises that brought them here, who professes total indifference to the conditions under which they’re incarcerated, and who, with the eager acquiescence of the press, serves up one falsehood after another about what is actually going on? How do you respond when, given a chance at “civility,” such people truculently serve up gaslighting, bullshit, and lies?

You don’t respond by inviting them to tea. You shut them down. If people like Holly Schepisi are shouted down, interrupted, disrupted, and (by interruption) rendered incapable of speech, I’m all in favor of it. You read that right. Shut them down. The power these people wield is not merely a power of “free speech,” but a power to use their speech in the direct service of policies that violate rights on a continental scale. There is no unfettered right to do that.

Given that, the activists who interrupt these people deserve our gratitude, not our criticism. They understand, much better than the quavering, clueless losers who call themselves “liberals” today, that fascism is realized as much by speech-wielding-coercion as by brute force itself. Threats of expulsion and mass incarceration are not exercises of free speech. Neither are the orders given to carry them out, and neither are the lies told to conceal the crimes involved. Pro-ICE politicians are not simply “complicit” in what ICE or DHS are doing. They are among the primary agents of its violations, all collectively responsible for it. They fund it, they enable it, they legislate for it, and they give it legalized immunity. Those are not innocently discursive acts. They are acts of war.

There is no right to free speech in the effectuation of mass deportation or mass incarceration in concentration camps. Lenin didn’t have it. Eichmann didn’t have it. Hugo Black didn’t have it. Idi Amin didn’t have it. Slobodan Milosevic didn’t have it. Itamar Ben-Gvir doesn’t have it, Markwayne Mullin doesn’t have it, Donald Trump doesn’t have it, and Holly Schepisi doesn’t have it, either. No one does, and no one will.

There can be no “civility” with the advocates of mass expulsion and concentration camps. There will be no peace and no rest until Delaney Hall is shut down, ICE is shut down, DHS is shut down, and their political enablers are shut down. It’s too bad that Holly Schepisi has decided to bring falsehoods to a truth fight. As a famous migrant put it, only the truth will set us free (John 8:32). And like it or not, that means all of us, “illegal” or not. No civility, no mental reservations, and no compromises: either we’re all free, or you’ve got a permanent fight on your hands. Your choice.