Category Archives: cancel culture

Port Elizabeth 4 On Trial

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, General announcements, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

Port Elizabeth 4 Face Trial for Blocking the Shipment of Weapons to Israel’s Genocide 

Press Contacts: Mary Anne Grady Flores, gradyflores08@gmail.com (607)-280-8797
                          Haqq Sankara, haqqsankara@tuta.com (interviews available)

August 5; press conference: 9:30 am; trial scheduled to begin 10 am
1 Police Plaza
Elizabeth Municipal Court
Elizabeth, New Jersey 07201

July 30th.  Four activists known as the Port Elizabeth 4, face trial on Wednesday, August 5th at 10 am at 1 Police Plaza, Elizabeth, NJ (press conference at 9:30 am) for blocking the main roadway to the Port of Elizabeth on October 3, 2025. They were part of an autonomous coalition of 100 protestors who stopped trucks delivering military cargo to the Port of Elizabeth bound for Israel on the Maersk Sentosa vessel. By August 5th, the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza will have gone on for 1,028 days, beyond three years.

Continue reading →

The Wokeness Threat is a Right-Wing Scam

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, moralism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, Princeton University, slices of life, War with Iran, West Orange

I did my annual DEI certification at work the other day. It’s the same one I’ve done here since 2022. The training video is produced by a company called KnowBe4, which specializes in workplace risk reduction: “15+ years of behavior data, 70,000 global customers, 12-in-production security awareness agents…1 of 3 full time US workers has been trained by us.” Not a fly-by-night operation, and not unrepresentative of corporate DEI training. Just the reverse. The norm.

The training took all of 15 minutes. What did I learn? Six woke lessons.

Continue reading →

Fact-Checking Holly Schepisi (2)

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, Fatwas, Health Care Series, migrant defense, Neutrality and Complicity

How to Fail an Intellectual Health Inspection

I’ve recently taken issue with New Jersey State Senator Holly Schepisi’s claims about Delaney Hall regarding who initiated force there, but here’s a post on a different topic. On June 9th, Schepisi posted an item on her official Facebook page claiming that a May 28 inspection by the New Jersey Department of Health (NJDOH) had “proven false” migrants’ complaints about health conditions in Delaney Hall. This is her verbatim statement from the June 9 Facebook post, which she doubles-down on several times in the comments of the same post:

There have been so many conflicting comments made by NJ representatives regarding Delaney Hall but most of the claims of egregious living conditions made by Senator Andy Kim continue to be proven false.  Here is the most recent example — if maggots were in food, if food was spoilt, the NJ Department of Health would not give Delaney a satisfactory health inspection.

To this end Schepisi cites a June 8 piece in Politico which links to the NJDOH report. The Politico piece summarizes the NJDOH report, and offers up some additional statements by Raynard E. Washington, New Jersey’s Commissioner of Health.

Continue reading →

‘New Brunswick Today’ Under Attack

Posted on by under activism, Activist Interviews, cancel culture, Neutrality and Complicity, Palestine

I’ve praised both New Brunswick Today and its editor Charlie Kratovil on this blog before. If, as I’ve put it elsewhere, “New Brunswick politics is an education,” Charlie Kratovil deserves an endowed chair.

New Brunswick Today was the newspaper that published the most extensive expose, back in 2024, of the outrageous scheme by Edison township officials (and the Edison Police) to intimidate Spanish-speaking migrants stopped at the Edison rail station, following their expulsion by Governor Greg Abbott from Texas. Kratovil was the only reporter to go out and sue to get body cam video of the entire incident, publish it in its entirety, and make explicit that what it showed was an extended civil rights violation. Subtract his reporting from the record, and the event falls between the cracks and vanishes.

Continue reading →

The Fire This Time

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, cancel culture, migrant defense

Scenes from Delaney Hall (5)
It’s a serious mistake to rely exclusively on the mainstream media for news of what’s happening at Delaney Hall. If you’re doing this, you’re being misled by omission: you’re systematically depriving yourself of information that’s relevant to getting a balanced picture of what’s happening there, or for passing a verdict on it.

To illustrate this, I want to work through a representative example of mainstream journalism, a June 4 article on Delaney Hall in The New York Times. My aim here is not to find fault with the author, or to condemn the article, but simply to point out as a matter of objective fact that whether fault is involved or not, the article systematically misleads the reader to the detriment of the protesters. It fails to supply necessary background context, fails to ask the right questions, fails to answer them, and misses salient points of detail. Again, my point is not primarily that the author should have included this or that, but simply that given what he excludes, he misleads, full stop. Why this is the case is a separate question. How it’s to be remedied, or whether it can be remedied within mainstream media at all, is also a separate question.

Continue reading →

Ian Austin, Outside Agitator

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, libertarianism, liberty and the left, migrant defense, moralism

Scenes from Delaney Hall (4)
Just a postscript to my June 3 post, “Nowhere to Hide,” featuring Ian Austin. I heard last night through the activist grapevine that Austin had been arrested. The arrest is obviously a case of targeting one of the most charismatic ground-level leaders of the migrant defense movement. He’s repeatedly been arrested in just this way across the country, most often to have the charges dropped. The point is not to sustain the charges in court but to intimidate and harass him with the intention of undermining the migrant defense movement.

Continue reading →

Sonia Sotomayor Smiles for Palestine

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, Princeton University, slices of life, War with Iran

Our Stop the Wars rally found its way into Princeton University’s Reunions celebration, where we spent several hours making our anti-war case to the approbation and disapprobation of the several thousand revelers marching in Princeton’s annual P-rade. Among those apparently expressing approbation was Princeton alumna Sonia Sotomayor, as revealed in this photo, in which she smiled directly at activist leader Sireen Sawalha, who was standing right next to me.

Continue reading →

Tomasi and Flier on “Commencement Neutrality”

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, moralism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, War with Iran

I recently attended a webinar on “commencement neutrality” sponsored by Heterodox Academy. In it, the presenters, John Tomasi and Jeffrey Flier, argue that

Students receiving diplomas while a speaker condemns their political values, whether progressive or conservative, are justified in objecting.

The graduation stage is not an op-ed page, a political blog, or a partisan rally, though some wish to make it one.

This claim extends the idea of “institutional neutrality” to commencement speeches, and is elaborated at further length in Flier and Tomasi’s recent Boston Globe piece, “Keep Politics Out of Commencement Speeches” (May 14, paywalled). The basic argument is that commencement speeches have a ceremonial or celebratory function which is incompatible with the discomfort provoked by sharp political commentary. 

Continue reading →