How is that after Justin Goldsman was fired by Gary Schaer in 2025 precisely over the comments to which I’ve recently drawn attention, West Orange is now in the position of wondering whether he should be elected to Town Council? What exactly is there to wonder about?

I don’t think of Gary Schaer as someone who has sky-high principles on this issue. How can it be that Gary Schaer saw fit to fire Goldsman, but the electorate has re-opened the issue and furrowed its collective brow over the same painfully-litigated issues? I guess Justin Goldsman wasn’t good enough to stay on Schaer’s staff, but is good enough for consideration for West Orange Council. In some ways, that fits. At some level, the Council deserves him. The problem is, we don’t.

West Orange Council meeting, February 2025 (photo credit: CAIR New Jersey)

One explanation for the widespread ignorance on this issue is the appalling, incompetent quality of the press coverage that’s out there. Here is a piece from West Orange Patch, published almost a year and a half after Goldsman’s termination:

Goldsman has served as a congressional assistant under the late U.S. Rep. Donald Payne Jr., and as the chief of staff to policy chair of the New Jersey Assembly, Gary Schaer. The native West Orange resident serves on the town’s Environmental Commission, Public Relations Commission, the West Orange Scholarship Fund, and the leadership of the West Orange Hispanic Foundation. He is a member of the West Orange Kiwanis Club, and is a former commissioner on the town’s Human Relations Commission.

Am I really supposed to believe that West Orange Patch just had no fucking idea that Justin Goldsman had “served…as the chief of staff to policy chair of the New Jersey Assembly, Gary Schaer,” but had also been fired by the great man, for cause? How do you miss that? And does the result of missing a fact that big still qualify as journalism? What exactly is the difference between “journalism” of this caliber and plain-old PR? Or propaganda?

I mentioned the Goldsman case to a Jersey newspaper editor who told me that while he found the story interesting, it was too “local” for his regional paper. So Justin Goldsman’s termination is too regional for West Orange Patch, but his candidacy is too local for a regional paper. Could these journalists have invented a better recipe for impunity? Maybe the real problem is that the story is too cringey and uncomfortable for everyone, above all for Justin himself and his delusional supporters.

But that’s not my problem. Cringey and uncomfortable is my forte. I don’t care who covers the story or who doesn’t, or what excuses they adduce or don’t. They don’t have to cover the story. I will. The numbers on my last Justin Goldsman post convince me that there’s interest in this story that exceeds my usual readership. But even that isn’t the deciding factor. The deciding factor is that he’s got to go.