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.
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)
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.
People sometimes claim to be unable to decide between the claims of, say, DHS and migrant defense activists. Faced with conflicting stories, people sometimes retreat into a kind of Pyrrhonian skepticism: each side is incompatible with the other, they’ll say, but neither side’s claims can easily be rejected. So we’re left with an undecidable clash of equal and opposite positions.
What to do? The original Pyrrhonian skeptics believed that tranquility was to be sought in the undecidable clash of such equal and opposite claims.* So they lived their lives–or tried to–without having any settled beliefs at all. If belief leads to conflict (they thought), non-belief eliminates it, producing the calm equanimity of the perpetually uncommitted. I sometimes wonder whether this is the guiding ethos of our news media and its modal consumer. If “mental health” means tranquility, and tranquility demands perpetual agnosticism, maybe it’s safer (people seem to be reasoning) to give equal credence to every claim, even if the resulting tranquility is purchased at the price of cognitive paralysis.
Scenes from Delaney Hall (6) Here’s a first: I was at Delaney Hall last night for The Peoples’ Vigil, a quasi-religious event held each Monday at 7:30 pm. During the vigil, Shane Claiborne, a self-described Anabaptist and founder of the New Monastic Movement, made admiring reference to the Cato Institute, of all things. “Even the Cato Institute,” he said, “is against this building…” He was alluding to the research of David J. Bier, Cato’s Director of Immigration Studies and Selz Foundation Chair in Immigration Policy, and in particular, to Bier’s paper, “Immigrants Cut Victimization Rates, Boost Crime Reporting” (Policy Analysis 1003, August 2025), which argues that contrary to popular belief, comparatively few immigrants are violent criminals. You’re more likely to be killed by a falling vending machine or hit by lightning than killed by an “illegal immigrant.”
Scenes from Delaney Hall (3) In 1963, an outsider named Martin Luther King, Jr. traveled from Atlanta, Georgia to Birmingham, Alabama to protest injustice there by deliberately intensifying “tension” in that, to him, foreign city. His presence, as well as that of his followers, was questioned by locals:
However, we are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens, directed and led in part by outsiders. We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.
King unapologetically doubled down on being an outsider:
Soon after she took office, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill issued an Executive Order (EO-12) requiring that ICE officers have a warrant to enter “nonpublic areas of State property.” On March 19 of this year, however, NJ.com reported that New Jersey Transit “buses, trains and stations” remain open to ICE officers without the need for a warrant–on the grounds that buses, trains, and stations are public areas of State property, hence not covered by EO-12. Continue reading →
Other people’s thoughts, they ain’t your hand-me-downs Would it be so bad to simply turn around?
–The Spin Doctors, “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong”
Here’s the latest installment in my ongoing struggle to restore facticity to political discourse in Princeton. My last go-round with Princeton’s Town Topics concerned its misdescription, graciously conceded by the editor, of the municipality’s acquisition of Westminster Choir College. This one concerns the paper’s insistence on repeating the municipality’s PR to the effect that “the Princeton Police Department does not participate in federal immigration enforcement.” Yes, it does. Repeating this “does not participate” mantra doesn’t make it true, but that doesn’t stop either the municipality or its amen-corner at Town Topics from repeating it ad nauseam. Continue reading →
Last night was Clifton; tonight was Lawrence Township. The statement I gave in Lawrence was essentially the same as the one I gave in Clifton, so I won’t reproduce it. Just a few thoughts and some pictures tonight.
I spoke tonight at Clifton City Council in Passaic County, north Jersey. Thanks to Jeff Hoey for the invitation to speak, and to both Jeff and the folks at the Palestinian-American Community Center of Clifton for the camaraderie. There was a rather different atmosphere in Clifton than, say, Princeton, West Windsor, or Cranbury–a circus atmosphere, at times. “Viewpoint diversity,” I think the savants call it.
A couple of members of the public expressed the widely-held view that while their ancestors came here legally, they have no sympathy for those who’ve come illegally. “Illegals,” on this view, deserve whatever anyone, including ICE, dishes out to them, including indefinite detention, deportation, impoverishment, expropriation, family dissolution, and premature death.Continue reading →
Policy of Truth 