Dear West Orange Town Council and Mayor McCartney,

I’m appealing to you about the planned “2nd annual Israeli flag raising at West Orange’s Town Hall in honor of ‘Israel's independence day’” scheduled for April 26th. I implore you to cancel it immediately! As the Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, I say, “not in my name.” I don’t celebrate the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) at the hands of ruthless Zionists with the support of the British colonial army. How do you think Palestinians feel when people want to celebrate the day their villages were massacred, their families were driven from their homes, and their land was stolen?

Ronald Rice, a revered, senior political leader and one of the longest-serving state senators in New Jersey passed away on March 15, 2023. He exemplified honor, resilience, and doggedness: an example for friend and foe.

He is remembered with great sadness across the state, but for Public Square Amplified advisory committee members, John Smith and Linda McDonald Carter it is a deeply personal loss.

Yesterday, upon learning of Senator Rice’s death, Linda McDonald Carter delivered raw and personal sentiments in real time at the Newark Municipal Council hearing.

Corporate media stirred up deep dread and apprehension whilst shaping the social and political response of how and what we are to understand and consume in this recent state killing of a human being – Tyre Nichols. 

Major corporate media outlets, including public radio, teased out the video of the latest killing of a Black man by police as they would a major blockbuster movie or a ride in a Bezos or Musk spaceship. The narrative braced us for an explosion of wanton and rampant destruction, as gatekeepers are never fully convinced that the participants will not bring down the "big top", in its relatively commonplace fashion.

With only a few days left before Election Day, you’ve likely seen flyers or door hangers, received texts or phone calls, and seen the same political ads tens if not hundreds of times. And so it’s important to step back and ask: Why are people pouring all this time, energy, and money into getting you to vote? Not the collective you, the singular you, the you reading these words right now.

Our Revolution was created out of Senator Bernie Sanders’ Presidential Campaign at the end of the 2016 election. It was created to bring together individuals who wanted to continue advancing progressive policies that Senator Sanders and others had been advocating for during the primaries. Advancing progressive policies nationally meant empowering and educating voters, supporting progressive candidates, and holding politicians accountable, both for their votes and how they’re influenced by corporate spending in politics.

In the past three decades, new questions about the integrity of the justice system have emerged as a series of convicted 'criminals' have proven their innocence.

The Innocence Project at the Cardoza Law School in New York, the National Registry of Exonerations, and other innocence advocacy groups have documented these exonerations and the dramatic impact DNA science is having on the criminal justice system.

May 1st is observed and celebrated worldwide as International Worker's Day, with 66 countries marking it as an official holiday outside the United States.

Across New Jersey, workers (employed in the formal and informal markets and the unemployed and underemployed) continue to organize for workers' rights, including the right to unionize.

Americans don’t often recognize authoritarianism at home because they don’t want to. They believe the U.S. is so exceptional that the checks and balances built into our system will protect our democratic values….Black Americans have never had a problem seeing the threat.

While the right to abortion is threatened around the country, the most urgent crisis for New Jersey is lack of access. High costs, limited access to providers, discrimination, and countless other obstacles currently prevent people from getting the care they are entitled to under the law. That’s why the Reproductive Freedom Act can’t stop at simply declaring the right to abortion in New Jersey. It must expand access to care.

Fear not, White supremacy, your justice system was not broken. The verdict is not that Ahmaud Arbery's life mattered, for the pre-trial hearings and trial proceedings confirmed it mattered not. Rather, the verdict says that "Whiteness as power" matters. For only in instances, and I underscore instances, of egregious tortuous actions intersecting at a critical social moment for more than a majority of citizens and necessitating some measure of admission will the system give. Only in such rare moments will it be pushed to allow for an appearance of balance, of empathy, of regard, of humanity. The records by the same system tell us such.

It is a reaffirmation that Whiteness as power is a thing that White-designated people will slaughter their own to maintain. The underpinnings and underbelly of America reared its head and walked out of the very annals of white supremacy into the sunshine of the morning that has never seen a sunset.