‘Angry’ NJ Gov. Murphy’s Cold Exploitation of the Texas School Shooting to Advance a Political Agenda

Like a lot of people, I am sick and disgusted when politicians’ launch knee jerk attacks on guns with every newsworthy shooting atrocity. On the Buffalo terror attack, we got Tom Moran, the editorial page editor of the New Jersey Star-Ledger. The Texas school massacre was no exception. True to form, we get Angry Murphy issues challenge for N.J. gun laws after Texas elementary school shooting. ‘Choose whose side you’re on’ by Brent Johnson and Matt Arco | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com.

Gee. The ruler, NJ Governor Phil Murphy, is angry. I guess we should be shaking in our boots. The laws referred to—there are 8 listed in the article—are pending before the legislature. So Murphy demands legislators circumvent the usual process to vote willy-nilly on these bills. 

“Let’s make every legislator choose whose side they have chosen to be on: the people of New Jersey’s on the one hand or the gun lobby on the other hand," an angry [Governor Phil] Murphy said.

So, I guess opponents of Murphy's laws can't possibly have rational, fact-based, constitution-minded, principled arguments worthy of  discussion, consideration, and debate. For that matter, even proponents, should they have any qualms about any detail[s] of any of these laws, are not worthy of getting a respectful hearing. They too will be targeted by King Murphy’s anger. Anyone, Republican or Democrat, political enemy or ally, who votes against any of these laws for any reason is ipso-facto a hack of "the gun lobby" (which, remember, represents not just gun manufacturers but millions of law-abiding fellow Americans who are their customers, and millions more—including yours truly—who do not own a gun but who value their right to own a gun). 

Murphy is a cold, calculating politician who is exploiting the Texas atrocity to bully his pet political agenda through the legislature.

One more thing worth noting.

Among the laws he wants immediate votes on is this "poison pill" gem.

• Amend the state’s public nuisance laws to prohibit the gun industry from endangering the safety or health of the public through its sale, manufacturing, importing, or marketing of guns. (A1765)

Any sale, manufacture, import, or marketing of guns can be said to fit the vague "endangering the safety or health of the public," since any gun can be mis-used to endanger someone. But the same can be said of cars, knives, or baseball bats. 

What legal gun manufacturer, or gun retailer, will be willing to take on the liability risk of producing, marketing, or selling a legal firearm in New Jersey under such an incredibly broad based liability law like A1765?  But that’s the point, isn’t it? This is just a backdoor attack on gun rights, which is a direct assault on the individual's right to self-defense, which derives from the individual's right to his own life. Such a law is not consistent with the rule of objective law, or with Americanism.

A1765 points to the ultimate strategy of Murphy, and of the Left, generally—to regulate guns out of existence without outright outlawing them, which the Constitution wouldn't allow.

Related Reading:

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’ Scary Attack on the Right of ‘Personal Self-Defense'

A New Jersey School Superintendent’s Anti-Educational Lesson–Only One Side to the School Shooting ‘Discussion’

Gun Control Should focus On Principles, Not Guns

It's NOT the Guns, it's the Rights

Banning Guns Punishes the Innocent and Violates Rights

Armed Self-Defense Saves Lives

Media Underplays Successful Defensive Gun Use, by Paul Hsieh

Human Volition, not Guns, is the Source of Gun Aggression

This Memorial Day, Remember that the Military Protects Our Borders, Not Our Freedom

American soldiers killed in action certainly deserve our gratitude and honor. But not for the usually recited reason. 

Memorial Day once again featured the mantra that soldiers died defending our freedom and individual rights. One popular song even includes the phrase, “At least I know I’m free, and I won't forget the ones who died who gave that right to me.” Yet today our rights are under attack on multiple fronts. We are just emerging from a wave of pandemic-related lockdowns imposed by politicians. The news is full of horror stories of business owners being fined and shut down, they and their employees’ livelihoods stripped away, price controls imposed under the guise of “anti-gouging, even their customers arrested, for defying orders by political leaders wielding “emergency powers”.Where’s the military? 

In the last 100 years, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers died on the battlefield. In that same 100 years, our general freedom, especially economic freedom, has steadily eroded due to the growth of the regulatory welfare state. While our First Amendment freedoms have fared somewhat better, they today face withering attacks on multiple fronts, as are the governmental checks and balances put in place by the Founders to protect us from tyranny due to concentration of government power. Bodily sovereignty is under attack, through vaccine mandates and abortion rights threatened. 

With our freedom and rights threatened or infringed in ever-wider ways, where was the military? Where is the military?

The fact is, contrary to Memorial Day propaganda, the military’s job is to protect our borders, not our freedom. The fight to establish, maintain, and defend freedom is a philosophical, not a military, fight. It is fought with words and ideas, not guns and tanks. It is fought within, not outside, our borders. It is fought among the civilian, not military, population. The fight for freedom requires, not military combat, but mind-to-mind combat. The Founding generation’s defeat of the British Army, heroic as that was, did not secure our rights. Our rights were secured afterward, on the battlefield of political philosophy and constitutional law. That battlefield—the one of ideas, not arms—is where our Founders took the first and most crucial steps toward fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence, the creation of a government “to secure these rights, drawing their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The enemies of freedom exist not only in foreign dictatorships, but among us right here in America. The military has done a fine job of protecting us from foreign enemies. We, the people of the United States, have done poorly in our job of protecting our rights. By the design of some, the neglect and complacency of others, and ignorance of many, we have granted our government more and more power to restrict our individual rights. We must abandon our false sense of security that we can rely on the military to preserve and restore our liberty. The U.S. military has given us a virtually impenetrable forcefield to live behind. But it did not give us those rights. And it won’t protect those rights. It is entirely up to we, as individual citizens, to secure and restore our freedom and make our rights inalienable.

The military protects our borders, giving us the protective wall we need to fight the moral and intellectual battle to preserve and protect our liberty rights.

Happy Memorial Day.  

Related Reading:

A Memorial Day Tribute

July 4, 1776: Words that Will Never Be Erased

The Declaration of Independence

Atlas Shrugged: America’s Second Declaration of Independence—Onkar Ghate

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of Independence

On This Veterans Day, Remember the Productive Americans Who Support the Greatest Military in History

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty – Timothy Sandefur

A New Textbook of Americanism — edited by Jonathan Hoenig

Tom Moran’s Cold Exploitation of the Buffalo Murders to Cancel America

In the wake of the Buffalo, New York supermarket shooting by a racist terrorist, Tom Moran chose to use the occasion to blame America first in a New Jersey Star-Ledger Editorial Board (aka SLEB) op-ed. 

In a 5/17/22 editorial, Confront the racists, including Tucker Carlson, who fuel the massacres, Moran called out “Great Replacement Theory”. This fringe crackpot collectivist theory, the French-originated theory adapted to an American faction, holds that America is a white nation and that there is a conspiracy to “replace” white America with people of other ethnic backgrounds. Moran also spent a lot of time attacking Fox News’ popular Tucker Carlson as a leading influencer behind this theory, and took a potshot (so to speak) at gun ownership in America.

I am here concerned with Moran’s take on Great Replacement Theory. And I will not defend Carlson, as I do not watch his show. I will however state that Moran and the SLEB have a habit of treating those it disagrees with with meanness and smears. So before I or anyone takes Moran at his word, it would be best from an objective perspective to find out what Carlson actually says before condemning the man.

That aside, my main problem is not with the details of Moran’s screed. He actually makes a few good points. My issue, and the thing that enrages me, is much deeper than Moran’s condemnations of a racist theory or TV personality. Under cover of the Buffalo attack, Moran goes after America’s very core and essence. Within his rant are passages that exposes the true point of Moran’s purpose—anti-Americanism.

But there is a sickness in this nation’s soul that lies at the heart of these murders, a deep-seated racism that won’t be cured by tougher gun laws and better mental health screenings. And we need to confront that sickness, and call out the charlatans and racists who keep fanning the flames.

“This nation’s soul”: Not the souls of particular racists. “The heart of these murders” is not the evil racist anti-American ideas of the shooter. It’s “a deep-seated racism” and “sickness” in America’s soul. We know racism exists among some Americans. But America’s soul. Let that sink in. What is America’s soul? I’ll get to that in a minute.

The truth is that America has never come clean with itself on the racism. 

Again, the collectivist smearing of America. This despicable lie ignores the Civil War that abolished slavery, the Civil Rights Movement of Martin Luther King that eradicated the progressives’ racist Jim Crow regime, and the tremendous progress in race relations and views that have occurred in the last 60 years. What about the nationwide George Floyd “racial reckoning?” The radical reactionary Left, of course, has a vested political interest in keeping alive the notion of a systemically racist America. To the Left, America will never, and can never, come clean with itself on the racism. Not until the foundational Enlightenment principles it was Founded on are repudiated.

Moran conludes by quoting a mourning Buffalo victim’s family member, which is then used for a pivot to his core purpose.

“The pain is in our DNA at this point,” Earlene Patterson, 64, told the New York Times. “It’s in my great-grandfather, my father. It’s in me.”

It’s in America’s DNA, too. And if we want to put and end to massacres like this, then we need to face that fact. [sic]

Racism is in America’s DNA, and America’s soul. But what exactly is America’s soul and DNA? Its soul is the Enlightenment principles of individualism—reason, free enterprise, moral equality, and the universal practice of unalienable individual rights—principles that embody the very antipode of racism and all forms of collectivism. America’s soul—its philosophy—is essentialized in the Declaration of Independence. It’s DNA—its political principles—is the radically new concept of republican government as constitutionally limited to protecting individual rights equally and at all times, and prioritizing the primacy of the individual and his liberty. The fight to fully implement these principles did not end in 1776. It has been ongoing, with advances and retreats, ever since. The fight goes on.

If Moran really cared about rooting out the ancient remnants of racism, a scourge that long predated America, and more broadly racism’s root, collectivism, Moran would embrace America’s soul and DNA. Instead, Tom Moran rejects all of that. The sickness is not in America’s soul and DNA. It is in the souls and DNAs of the Tom Morans and their reactionary ilk.

I knew Moran and his Star-Ledger Editorial Board were Leftist hacks. But I didn’t know, until now, how far gone they are. But now I know that Moran is a card-carrying member of the radical reactionary Left that hates America and what it stands for, and seeks to cancel not just the United States of America, but Americanism at the deepest philosophical—that is, its very soul and DNA—level.

At this point, I will continue to subscribe to the New Jersey Star-Ledger because it is my window into Left collectivist ideology. We genuine Americans need to know what our enemies are saying in order to effectively defend Americanism. But shocked as I am about Moran, at least I have learned what he really thinks of Americanism. I’ll leave off with this final reiteration to Moran:

Racism is not in America’s DNA. The answer to the remnants of racism in America is not to repudiate America. It is to fight for America. If we want to put an end to massacres like this, then we need to embrace and recommit to America’s Soul and DNA, it’s core Founding principles. 

Related Reading:

A New Textbook of Americanism — edited by Jonathan Hoenig

America: A History of Racism or the History of Individualism?

America: A History of Racism or the History of Individualism? - - 2

The Collectivist Left Appropriates an Inhumane Christian Doctrine to Obliterate Americanism

America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson.

Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of Independence

Great Replacement Theory Is a Grand Delusion by Ramesh Ponnuru for Bloomburg

U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, the Fed, ‘Diversity’, and Racism

N.J. 's Democratic Senator Robert Menendez recently voted against a second term for Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve Board chairman, saying the Fed has a “serious diversity problem.” As  Jonathan D. Salant (NJ Advance Media for NJ.com) reported in the New Jersey Star-Ledger,

In voting no, Menendez criticized the absence of Latinos from the top echelon of the nation’s central bank, which sets economic policy independent of the White House and Congress. It sets monetary policy and can raise or lower interest rates to help the economy or bring down inflation.

So Menendez would deny Powell his job because of his genetic lineage. This is textbook racism. But that's "diversity" in today's common usage—a disguise for pure racism.

If there was any doubt that Menendez, and the philosophy he adheres to, are racist, this next passage should remove that doubt.

“I have repeatedly sounded the alarm on the Fed’s serious diversity problem,” Menendez said. “Just last January, I expressed directly to Chair Powell how outrageous it is that the voices of one- fifth of the citizens of America are repeatedly drowned out when the Fed is making critical decisions on economic policy. Yet under Powell’s leadership, the Fed continues to miss critical opportunities to appoint Latinos at the highest levels of its leadership.”

The implication here is that all 62 million Latinos think alike, based solely on their common genetic lineage. But genetics doesn’t determine a person’s ideas or opinions. Each person’s reason and free will determine that. Who can claim to speak for one- fifth of the citizens of America, Latino or otherwise? The fact that there are 62 million American Latinos does not mean they all agree.  

There is no collective “voice”, because there is no collective racial brain. Those premises are again racist. People can individually agree on an issue, and a single person with a like opinion can be said to speak on their collective behalf, based on their individual volitional perspectives. 

But no one can be said to be the “voice” of any group based solely on their genetic lineage, skin color, or bloodline. There are plenty of prominent Italians out there. Indeed, Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito is Italian, like me. But does he speak for me? Absolutely not in that horrendous leaked draft opinion on Roe v. Wade, as I made plain in my post In SCOTUS’ Draft Opinion Overturning Roe Abortion Ruling: Double Standards of Left and Right Exposed. And the fact that he doesn’t represent my views, or if there were no Italians on the Supreme Court, does not mean my “voice” is “drowned out”—not so long as we have free speech in America. That I’m writing this is proof of that. My voice does not depend on the “diversity” of the members of any government board.

I’m disgusted and morally outraged at the depth to which the diversity fraud has penetrated American culture, politics, and discourse. It has made racial considerations on myriad issues almost ubiquitous. Politicians like Menendez feed that hideous trend.

America’s fundamental identity is individualism, which makes racial diversity as it is usually used today—that is, applied to thought and life outcomes—reactionary and anti-American—and racist.

Related Reading:

SEC’s Boardroom ‘Diversity’ Rule Is Racist, Unnatural, and Politically Motivated

The Racism of “Diversity” by Peter Schwartz for Capitalism Magazine

Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle

DelBarton Student’s 'Diversity' Initiative, Though Well-Meaning, is Based on Counter-Productive Premises

The Founding Fathers, Not ‘Diversity,’ is the Solution to ‘Our Racialized Society’

From 'Diversity Maps' to Forced Integration: Obama's Racist Housing Policy Masks the Real Problem—Lack of Free Markets

Don’t Allow the Left to Own ‘Diversity’

RELATED: The NJ Star-Ledger’s Racist Rant

The Self-Defeating Disingenuousness of Abortion ‘Rights’ Supporters

Support for Any Individual Right Requires Support for All Individual Rights.

In the wake of the real chance that Roe v. Wade will be overturned, this crucial principle is utterly lost on shocked reproductive rights advocates. And it completely undercuts their case against overturning Roe v. Wade.

One example of their damaging hypocrisy is their general support for legally imposed COVID vaccination mandates. What ever happened to “My body, my choice”?

Another is the conflation of abortion rights to abortion access. In a New Jersey Star-Ledger Guest Column, Let’s make abortion truly accessible in New Jersey, Kaitlyn Wojtowicz wrote:  

Earlier this year, advocates of reproductive health and rights won our long campaign to guarantee the right to legal abortion in New Jersey when Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law the Freedom of Reproductive Choice Act. But while abortion is legal in our state, many New Jerseyans face barriers to accessing abortion care. What good is a right to abortion, when you can’t actually access care?

Too many New Jerseyans are unable to access abortion care because of insurmountable financial barriers. Even for patients with insurance coverage, out-of-pocket costs, such as copays and deductibles, are a barrier to accessing this essential health care. Also, a number of community members, including people who are undocumented, have no access to insurance coverage.

We have much more to do in New Jersey to ensure that everyone — regardless of income, insurance coverage, or immigration status — can access the care they need to make their own personal decisions about their bodies and their lives. [My emphasis.]

Notice the switch. A “right to abortion” becomes a “right to access abortion” and other services. What good is a right to your property if the state can simply seize it to pay for someone elses’s abortion without your consent? What about the people who will be forced, through their taxes—or, in the case of insurance mandates, through their premiums—to fund this access? Don’t they get to make their own personal decisions about their money and their lives? 

Now consider Tom Moran, who writes for the Star-Ledger Editorial Board. In The Supreme Court throws Malinowski a lifeline, Moran writes:

So, if you want to find out what [NJ state Senator Tom] Kean thinks on abortion, you have to look at the paper trail. Many people in New Jersey think of him as pro-choice, but they may be mixing him up with his father.

Kean Jr.’s final vote in Trenton came in January, when he opposed a bill to protect abortion rights in New Jersey, a safeguard against the loss of Roe v. Wade. He voted repeatedly against funding for Planned Parenthood during Chris Christie’s governorship. And in his failed 2006 campaign for the U.S. Senate, the National Right to Life Committee spent more than $30,000 on his behalf.

How does opposing taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood, a private institution, equate to not being pro-choice? They are two entirely different, and opposing, issues. Termination of a pregnancy is a woman’s right. Taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood is a violation of the right of individual taxpayers to spend their own money as they see fit.

More importantly, the bill Moran refers to is NJ S49, which “Codifies [the] constitutional right to freedom of reproductive choice.” Sounds good. But the Bill Summary states: “Specifically, the bill codifies the constitutional right, which has been recognized by the New Jersey Supreme Court, to freedom of reproductive choice, including the right to access contraception, to terminate a pregnancy, and to carry a pregnancy to term.”]

My emphasis.

Once again, we see “access” equated to “right”. But this is wrong. A true rights advocate, including a supporter of abortion rights, would vote against this bill. This bill is poison for individual rights. There is no right to force others, through their taxes, insurance premiums, or other means, to pay for another’s contraception, abortion, or prenatal healthcare. Tom Kean Jr., being a Republican, is probably not a “ true rights advocate.” But he is right to oppose this bill. It does not contradict his pro-choice position. It is consistent with that view.

A right is not an automatic claim on the property or services of others. A right to abortion is not a right to pick others’ pockets, or to force healthcare providers to perform the procedure. A right is a guarantee to freedom of action to pursue your values. A right is not a guarantee that you will achieve your values. There is a right to abortion if you can acquire it through voluntary consent. There is no right to access abortion, or any value, by force. A right is not access. A right to access is a “right” to violate the rights of others. Such a “right” is not a right at all. It is a crime.

Wojtowicz, Moran, and their ilk are not genuine defenders of individual rights and thus not effective advocates for abortion rights. There is no right to abortion through the coercive non-concensual expense of others. No wonder abortion rights advocates are losing this fight. They haven’t learned that support for any individual right requires support for all individual rights.

Related Reading:

Rights vs. Privileges

HHS Secretary Nominee Tom Price Whiffs in Confrontation With Bernie Sanders Over a ‘Right’ to Healthcare

Sanders Pitches ‘Right’ to Healthcare: Cruz Checks Swing

Man’s Rights by Ayn rand

Constitutional Distortions: Free Speech vs. Freedom of Speech

Eco/Climate Doom: The Miseducation, and Mental Abuse, of the Young

The climate hysteria peddled by the anti-industrial Environmentalists and the statists of the political Left has gone beyond debate over energy or a choice between untouched nature vs. industrial progress and human flourishing. The hysteria is causing real psychological harm to young people. A Nature study found:

The survey — the largest of its kind — asked 10,000 young people in 10 countries how they felt about climate change and government responses to it.

The results, released in a preprint on 14 September1, found that most respondents were concerned about climate change, with nearly 60% saying they felt ‘very worried’ or ‘extremely worried’. Many associated negative emotions with climate change — the most commonly chosen were ‘sad’, ‘afraid’, ‘anxious’, ‘angry’ and ‘powerless’ (see ‘Climate anxiety’). Overall, 45% of participants said their feelings about climate change impacted their daily lives.

This unnecessary anxiety is causing real behavioral changes. In a propaganda-laced “news” article, CNBC reports that “A growing number of people are reluctant to bring a child into a world that’s set to be ravaged by climate change in the coming decades.” 

And it’s affecting people’s monetary choices, threatening their future financial security. The New York Times reports that, due largely to climate change fear, young people are saving less. One fearful individual said, “I’m not going to deprive myself some of the comforts of life now for a future that feels like it could be ripped away from me at any moment.”

This is the mental disaster that climate catastrophists have sown. And now young people are reaping the damage.

Psychologists coined a new term for this phenomenon—climate anxiety. This, in a period of history when human life has never never been safer from climate dangers and there has never been a more promising time in which to be a teenager. The present is amazingly good, and the future brighter than ever—unless the climate/environmental Chicken Little doomsayers manage to crush it. 

Despite the wholly unnecessary eco-anxiety (another term for it) being inflicted on the young, the climate catastrophists just keep piling on. In a Tampa Bay Times piece by Rose Wong, Climate change also affects mental health. Call it eco-anxiety, wrote:

Mental health professionals have a term for the stress and grief many feel about the planet’s future: eco-anxiety. The American Psychiatric Association defines it as “chronic fear of environmental doom.” It can lead to anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

This, from Rose Wong, the Times’s “mental health reporter”!  The sub-heading of Wong’s article reads, “Climate change doesn’t just threaten the planet. It also affects the mental health of those grappling with the consequences.” Can't this mental health reporter see that it's not climate change that is causing the young’s mental health problems? It’s the false "Climate change threatens the planet" Chicken Little catastrophizing that is causing the eco-anxiety she laments? Wong herself is part of the problem.

The title of this blog post is too mild. This is not mere miseducation. It is educational malpractice. More, it is child abuse. The constant barrage of environmental/ecological/climate doom mongering is causing real harm. The environmentalist/statist Left doom campaign must not be called out for what it is—a criminal conspiracy. It’s a campaign to frighten people, especially focussed on the young, into voting for the fascist political agenda of the Left. The conspiracy encompasses the political, education, media, and even the business fields. For some, it may be unintentional. But let’s be clear. Anyone who utters the term “climate crisis” or “save the planet” is guilty. This includes Rose Wong. 

Let’s also be clear about something else: panic mongering is wholly unnecessary. We can honestly acknowledge and deal with the negatives of climate change and other environmental problems without panicking the young into real mental health damage. Plenty of thinkers have documented and countered the false narrative being peddled that human flourishing is incompatible with successfully mitigating the challenges posed by economic and industrial progress to the climate or environment. The climate is not in crisis. The planet is not doomed. To the extent we encounter climate or environmental dangers, freedom, markets, Capitalism, science, and innovation is the answer. Not economic destruction; not political tyranny; not, as the U.N. asserts, a need to impose totalitarian top-down "unprecedented transitions in all aspects of society".

You don’t have to look too hard to get the whole truth. 

Related Reading:

My Quick Take on 'Opposing Views: Is Climate Change A Problem?'

New U.N. Study Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs

‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism

The 'Watermelon' Analogy is Real, and it is Dangerous

Environmentalists, Luddites, and Collectivism

Paris Climate Agreement Adopted: New Central Plan for the World’s Economy and Climate—Ronald Bailey for Reason.com

Is Climate Indoctrination Coming to NJ Government Schools?

The downside of doomism

The question of whether to seek political leverage by driving children to despair seems to be getting more and more negative answers these days. For instance Kelsey Piper, who as “a Staff Writer for Vox’s new vertical with a focus on the global poor, animal welfare, and risks affecting a stable future for our world” seems an unlikely candidate for a fit of sanity of any sort, just wrote:


“My 5-year-old daughter is now old enough to read a lot of books and magazines aimed at children, and it’s given me a whole new perspective on the discourse wars over how we talk about climate change, conservation, and the future of the planet. As I’ve written about before, climate change is going to be bad, and it will hold back humanity from thriving as much as we should this century. It will likely cause mass migration and displacement and extinctions of many species. What it won’t do, however, is make the Earth unlivable, or even mean that our children live in a world poorer than the one we grew up in. As many climate scientists have been telling us, the world is a better place to live in — especially for people in lower-income countries — than it has ever been, and climate change isn’t going to make it as bad as it was even in 1950.”