Something stinks in New Jersey. Gov. Phil Murphy is doing his best to style himself as the Gretchen Whitmer of New Jersey by initiating a series of capricious, absurd, lockdown diktats in the name of combating the coronavirus. ...
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Something stinks in New Jersey: The strange case of Gov. Murphy's selective drive-through tulip farm shutdown
By Monica Showalter
10-13 minutes
Something stinks in New Jersey.
Gov. Phil Murphy is doing his best to style himself as the Gretchen Whitmer of New Jersey by initiating a series of capricious, absurd, lockdown diktats in the name of combating the coronavirus. In reality, they help no one.
He's a stupid guy all right, given that his fiats are killing his state's economy, for one. And he was last seen trying to tell Fox News's Tucker Carlson that the Bill of Rights was "above his pay grade."
More disturbing, he seems to be trying to outdo Whitmer, who banned the sales of garden seeds to locals anxious to grow their own food, with an even stupider measure of his own.
Murphy banned drive-through tulip viewing from inside cars at a farm at the peak of the crop's limited growing season. And his goons threatened to arrest the owner if he did.
According to
Shore News Network:
CREAM RIDGE, NJ – Governor Phil Murphy’s administration today shut down the drive-through tulip farm in Cream Ridge, but allowed the owners to continue selling their tulips to their customers for curbside pickup. Owner Casey Jansen said his family owned farm makes about a one million dollar annual investment into planting tulips to operate the annual drive-through. This week, he was relayed a message from Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, “No drive through allowed”.
“We planted all these tulip bulbs in the months of October and November. That’s when we make the investment, and my investment is just about a million dollars,” Jansen said in an interview with NJ.com.
Instead of contenting himself with merely being Whitmer's New Jersey coeval in this truly bad ruling, Murphy even taking it a step beyond what's known so far about Whitmer's idiotic rulings in Michigan.
He's dictating the law selectively.
According to
Shore News Network:
Meanwhile, out in Gloucester County, the Dalton Farms tulip drive-through, which is booked solid through the weekend has given a pass by Murphy’s administration.
One drive-thru tulip farm at the peak of its limited season stays open.
One drive-thru tulip farm gets shut down.
It makes no sense to shut down either, given that driving through a tulip farm in the rural areas of New Jersey is no way to get the COVID-19 virus.
But one got shut down anyway. The other one got left alone.
Since capricious law enforcement has the stench of corruption, I went and looked into the political donations of the tulip farms. Could Murphy be shutting down one to benefit the other, or did one donate to his campaign while the other didn't?
New Jersey's
electoral website shows no evidence of it whatsoever. There isn't even any evidence of greenie ring-kissing on
either farm's website. Both appear to be working family farms which have figured out how to draw some extra income to keep their operations running by hosting 'drive through tulip farm' events, which delight visitors in the springtime.
Dalton Farms, out in Swedesboro, the farm that was left open, actually looks like it might be a conservative outfit, given its willingness to host Civil War reenactments on its land to help pay the bills.
It raises possibilities that other garbage could be going on.
New Jersey's election law enforcement website reports that among the top five occupations of his donors are real estate interests, which contributed about $191,000 to his last gubernatorial campaign.
We saw in San Francisco
here how lefties with likely ambitions of buying super-primo real estate can use the law to chase out residents occupying the prime space. Could something like that be going on in almost-as-blue New Jersey?
Both farms, as this
Google map shows, are in towns on important highway routes to big cities:
We see Philadelphia for each farm on one side, and New York for the targeted farm in Cream Ridge; Dover and maybe Baltimore for the untargeted farm in Swedeboro. One of these cities is bigger than the other.
Maybe even more significantly, land and housing costs are higher in the Cream Ridge area than the Swedeboro area. Real estate listings show that Cream Ridge houses have a median price of around $500,000, more than twice the $200,000 range of the Swedeboro houses. Clearly one is sitting on land that's more plum than the other.
Obviously, these are just pin dots and more investigation is needed on whether Murphy might just be hitting one farm to help a donor with designs on the prime land and an interest in driving the one farm out of business to buy it cheap, or else some other reason explains what's going on. This being New Jersey, you can bet they know all the blue state tricks for muscling through and getting what they want, so it's worth a stronger look.
Was it a 'nice farm you have there' issue to ban one and not the other? Was it a matter of killing off one business to provide asset buying opportunities to another? Or was it just plain stupidity?
Whatever it was, banning one and not the other, all COVID-19 risks being likely equal as well as nil from a car, is selective enforcement of law. At a minimum it ought to get Murphy a lawsuit. The local media ought to be all over this for evidence of corruption, too, because there is some inequality. Being there, they are the best people do do it. But where are they to get to the bottom of this lunacy?
Image credit: Pixabay public domain
