And Some Advice for the West Orange Election
My friend Matt Dragon has an excellent, timely piece on his blog about Justin Goldsman, a candidate for Town Council in West Orange and Favorite Son in local West Orange politics. Wherever Justin goes, adulation follows: he walks into every Council meeting to broad smiles and big hugs and “great to see you’s,” everybody’s little hometown hero. The scandal here is an open secret in West Orange, something that almost everyone, and surely everyone within the Council, knows. Justin has a decades-long history of plain, open, unapologetic social media bigotry, from the n-word to casual Islamophobia, to “I am going to kill this girl or castrate myself, whichever gets her off my dick sooner.” But work through it yourself via the bolded link above, if you have the patience. It’s an eye-opener, even if it’s all par for the course in West Orange.
Category Archives: cancel culture
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.
Continue reading“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)
Continue reading“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)
Continue readingThe Human Shields of West Palm Beach
The New York Times ran an article the other day that’s notable both for how ordinary and how extraordinary it is. The facts are extraordinary, the attitudes taken to it predictably complacent. It’s yet another addition to my running series here on the use of “Human Shields,” not in Gaza or Southern Lebanon, but right here at home. “The U.S. Start-Up Making Low-Cost Interceptors for the Iran War,” it’s called, describing a military start-up based in downtown West Palm Beach, Florida. Here’s the beginning:
Continue readingFor Florida-based Powerus, becoming a global supplier of counterdrone technology has meant involving the Trumps, a golf course and a new way of doing business.
In a small warehouse in the United Arab Emirates, workers spend up to 12 hours a day snapping together 3-D printed components to make interceptors capable of knocking Iranian drones out of the sky at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour.
The facility, which came online last month, is being used by Powerus, a start-up in West Palm Beach, Fla., to make inexpensive interceptors.
The factory is the company’s first foray into the Middle East, and part of its plan to become a global supplier. Factories affiliated with Powerus make roughly 3,000 drone interceptors a month, a spokesman said, and the company is trying to establish a network of factories that will increase production to 15,000 a month worldwide by mid-2027. It would not publicly disclose the identities of its customers or contract manufacturer in the Emirates.
Wake Up
True to form, Bret Stephens has an essay in yesterday’s New York Times in which, following AOC’s claims that “Woke 1.0” was “crazy,” he reiterates her point, then offers up a list of nine of Woke 1.0’s victims, and demands restitution for them. The common denominator of all of these victims is that they’re writers or intellectuals of centrist to conservative views, all of whom unjustly lost their jobs (or so we’re told) to the forces of Wokedom.
Continue readingSilicon Valley’s Human Shields
Consider this excerpt from a Guest Essay in today’s New York Times by Sharon Weinberger, editor in chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and author of a forthcoming book, Valley of Death: How Big Tech is Fueling the Future of War.
People seem to forget that Silicon Valley was largely born on the back of Pentagon funding during the Cold War. Fairchild Semiconductor, a company that became the wellspring of the computer chip industry’s growth, was one of those beneficiaries. Conventional wisdom held that, by 2016, many firms, not to mention their employees, found the idea of working on defense projects distasteful, if not unthinkable. Mr. Trump’s election that year seemed to widen the divide. In 2018, Google, under pressure from employees, pulled out of Project Maven, a Pentagon-funded A.I. project to advance drone warfare.
Continue reading
Who Kidnapped Najam Sethi? And Who Didn’t?
Originally published at the History News Network, March 15, 2004.
The letters section of The New York Review of Books for February 12, 2004 contains a heated exchange between Bernard-Henry Levy, author of Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (2003) and William Dalrymple, who reviewed Levy’s book in the December 4 issue of the NYRB (“Murder in Karachi”). As it happens, I have a document that settles a contentious issue between them. I reproduce it below.
Continue reading“Whataboutism”
Further Reflections on the Jason Arday Case
My post on the Jason Arday controversy, “Black Plagiarism Matters,” has gotten more-than-usual traffic for posts at this blog, much of it via Roderick Long’s Facebook page (thanks, Roderick), where there’s an extensive discussion of the post, much of it admittedly point-missing and pointless. One common criticism I’ve gotten there is that my bringing up the Martin Stone case (as a contrast to the Jason Arday case) is an instance of “whataboutism.” Like so much Internet slang, “whataboutism” is a package deal concept. One part of the package captures something real and significant; the other embodies a confusion. A criticism involving an uninspected package deal ends up committing a fallacy of equivocation, which is my response to all of these criticisms. All of them commit a fallacy of equivocation.
Continue readingAristotle vs. Institutional Neutrality
A bunch of us had a contentious discussion the other day about institutional neutrality, apropos of my then-upcoming talk about it at the Heterodox Academy conference. One topic that came up was how institutional neutrality relates to curricular decisions. Is there an institutionally neutral way of deciding, say, whether a given topic or discipline merits inclusion within the curriculum of a given institution of higher education? Or a neutral way of deciding whether a program, department, division, school, or university itself ought to set aside the resources to make something a formal subject of study? Since not everything can be studied, decisions have to be made about what gets included and what doesn’t. Can those decisions be made “neutrally”? Continue reading
Policy of Truth 