The NJGOP’s “Mainstream Media” Suppresses Gas Tax Reform.

Contributed by Jersey Conservative

FOX News became necessary when Mainstream Media had edited out alternative opinions to the point where what it presented began to seem predictable, even to those who agreed with the point of view being advanced. That’s bad journalism on top of being a bad business model.

Predictability is boring.

Good journalism isn’t overly curated. It is interesting because it presents the clash of ideas that is the essence of human experience. Didacticism may have a place in lectures to students or a willing religious audience, but it can become propaganda when incorporated into journalism.

Good journalism isn’t didactic and it isn’t afraid of words. Every writer has biases and sees the world through their own unique perspective. That’s why editors must find other writers with other perspectives for balance, lest their publications devolve into simply an unregulated means of communicating some interest group’s lobbying efforts.

The Mainstream Media gave rise to FOX News by creating the need for it. Of course, as soon as it dominated a national conservative audience, FOX News itself became a kind of Mainstream Media for that audience – didactic, propagandistic, shutting out opinions that disagreed with the agenda of its corporate masters.

Now the GOP establishment in New Jersey appears to be trying to coordinate its own “Mainstream Media” propaganda apparatus in advance of the 2027 elections. Like the goal of all such efforts, it wants to protect the status quo, in this case the remnant of legislative incumbents who make up the rump caucuses of their respective chambers.

All electoral victories are built upon the mathematics of addition. The politics of bossism – the kind practiced by the GOP establishment in New Jersey – depends on something else entirely. It is built around a theory of subtraction – exclusivity, the private club.

With this theory of subtraction, “winning” doesn’t mean victory on election day, it means the status quo staying in power. And why not? New Jersey’s part-time legislators just got a 67% pay raise (legislators saw the salaries for their part-time jobs jump from $49,000 to $82,000). Being a part-time legislator with a full-time salary is a pretty cush deal. Even more so if you are a member of a minority that can claim not being responsible for anything that happens in Trenton.

Electoral winners add to their circles. Electoral losers (but cash winners) exclude potential support from their circles – especially if they want to continue along with the well-paid minority status quo.

That was the first giveaway when a group of the state’s center-right players formed a group called NJ COC. It’s a private club that meets monthly to praise “elite Legislator[s]”. Yes, they use that term. NJ COC calls itself a “club” and its mission statement is to “celebrate, elevate, and platform” legislators who, in the opinion of the club, “demonstrate outspoken principled leadership on conservative issues.”

By the way, in addition to that 67% pay increase, Trenton legislators got an extra $50,000 to hire people to make them look good. NJ COC is there to help augment this increase in public relations funding.

The second giveaway has been the refusal by Save Jersey – NJ COC’s organizer – to acknowledge requests to consider publishing opinions that might run counter to the status quo playbook for the maintenance of incumbents at next year’s legislative elections. This has genuinely surprised many grassroots conservatives, who have always considered Save Jersey to be an ally. This extraordinary lack of courtesy has left many perplexed.

For example, the New Jersey Property Taxpayers’ Coalition has circulated a resolution to local governments that asks the Legislature to prevent an increase in the state tax on gasoline by calling for the repeal of the gas tax escalator. A decade ago, the Legislature passed a Transportation Trust Fund (TTF) bailout that allowed legislators to shirk their responsibilities by handing over the power to raise the tax on gasoline to Trenton bureaucrats.

New Jersey’s gas tax escalator is a spit in the face of our nation’s founders. 250 years ago, they fought a revolution over the principle of “no taxation without representation”. In New Jersey today, “taxation without representation” is uni-party policy.

Dozens of local governments have passed the “repeal the gas tax escalator” resolution.

Save Jersey once campaigned against the TTF bailout and higher taxes on gasoline. Now they have ignored grassroots efforts of local governments and groups like the New Jersey Property Taxpayers’ Coalition to prevent a gas tax increase. They won’t even return a telephone call or an email.

In contrast to spiking the “repeal the gas tax escalator” story, Save Jersey gave front page coverage to two local governments that adopted resolutions opposing “recent sanctuary statehood and anti-ICE laws signed by Governor Mikie Sherrill and urged their repeal.”

Why ignore dozens of resolutions and write about two?

Because the status quo loves the way things are and they don’t want to change anything. Status quo legislators like not having responsibility for supporting or opposing legislation to raise the gas tax. This way they can blame it on the Trenton bureaucrats that they empowered to raise taxes.

A 67% pay raise… for a lot less responsibility.

We hope the folks at Save Jersey will remember their former opposition to the TTF bailout and the successive gas tax hikes it has precipitated and those it will cause in the future unless the gas tax escalator is repealed. Voters don’t want higher gas prices – and higher gas taxes raise the price of gasoline.

But apparently average voters getting what they want isn’t high on the status quo’s list of priorities…

Now, remember what that Princeton University study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found in 2014:

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

If you want an answer to “why Donald Trump” or “why Zohran Mamdani”, you will find it in Gilens and Page. The reform group, RepresentUs, made a video that nicely sums it up:

Corruption is Legal in America – YouTube

Money isn’t speech. Corporations are not people. Money is a rude blunt instrument used to shout down ordinary citizens, to corrupt the Republic, and destroy the people’s faith in representative democracy.

50 years ago, at the time of America’s bicentennial, liberal reform movements like Common Cause were seeing success in hamstringing monied special interests by making the funding of elections more transparent. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) had been created by Congress in 1974 and officially opened its doors in April 1975. The New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission (NJELEC) was established two years earlier, in April 1973. It was a great era of public reform.

Concurrent with these reforms, there emerged within the Republican Party a revival of interest in the ideology of free market economics. Ronald Reagan and his “supply-side” economics won the day and his politics of addition won 49 states in 1984.

In recent years, the achievements of that era have been battered senseless by the political status quo of both major parties – both in Washington, DC, and in Trenton. Within the Republican Party, the political class has swapped the “free market” for subsidies for their favorite (the ones who fund them) industries and interest groups. In a word, crony capitalism. Establishment Democrats are no different and often share the same interest groups with Republicans.

Crony-capitalism is now the shared ideology of the status quo, of the Trenton uni-party. And when money and power use the political establishment to block the redress of grievances, when liberal reform fails, you get movements like rightwing populism and democratic socialism.

You can see the uni-party at work in the way status quo Republicans cheer on crony-capitalist Democrats:

If we are ever to rediscover our talent for political reform and reignite the engine of free market economics, we must break the stranglehold that crony capitalism has on the political establishment. In New Jersey, crony capitalism is the beating heart of Trenton’s uni-party.

Because no matter how loud some in the status quo might shout, crony capitalism isn’t “conservative”. It is simply corrupt.