By: Daiman Teer for The Simpleton Star
It is a curious thing to witness a state like New Jersey-a place whose very atmosphere seems composed of equal parts industrial exhaust and legislative stagnation-attempt to posture as the environmental vanguard of the nation. The latest act in this ongoing, wretched drama is the state’s obsessive crusade against the plastic shopping bag. It is a policy that is not only a failure in practice but a masterpiece of performative hypocrisy.
While the “grifters” in Trenton preen for the cameras, eager to collect their “tree-hugger” accolades and whatever political favors circulate in the backrooms of the state capital, the reality on the ground is a crumbling, unkempt mess. They have banned the bag, they have inconvenienced every living citizen, and they have done so with a smug sense of moral superiority that is as thin as the paper substitutes they now force upon us.
Consider the sheer stupidity of the premise. In Florida—a state where, unlike the barren, concrete sprawl of northern New Jersey, one actually encounters a vibrant ecosystem of dolphins and sea turtles—you are still permitted to pack your groceries in a standard bag. These animals, miraculously, have not been wiped out by the existence of a plastic carrier. The state’s politicians, however, behave as if they have personally saved the planet by forcing a mother of three to juggle loose cans of soup and leaking detergent bottles in a parking lot. It is a classic move from the playbook of the “Shithole State”: impose a meaningless, burdensome regulation on the populace to distract from the fact that the state itself is a decaying, corrupt dumpster fire.
The governor, Mikie Sherrill, a dunce whose tenure seems dedicated entirely to the fine art of political posturing, clearly views this as a win. It costs nothing to ban a bag, and it provides a perfect, shiny veneer of “progress” that allows the political class to look like heroes. Never mind that the roads are crumbling, the taxes are suffocating, and the infrastructure is a relic of a more competent era. If you can make the shopper feel guilty about the environment, you don’t have to answer for the fact that the state is effectively a bankrupt, dysfunctional, and miserable place to reside.
It is the hallmark of the modern New Jersey politician: they are the kings and queens of a shithole, presiding over a landscape of corruption, yet they insist on lecturing the rest of us on our “moral duty” to carry a reusable, germ-infested sack to the grocery store. It is not about the planet. It is about control, it is about vanity, and it is about the desperate, pathetic need for the governing class to feel as though they are “doing something” while the state continues its slow, inevitable slide into irrelevance and decay.
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.” — Matthew 23:25
The Reason
This verse was chosen because it perfectly encapsulates the hollow, performative nature of New Jersey’s environmental policy. Like the Pharisees of old, the state’s leaders are obsessed with the appearance of righteousness—scrubbing the “outside of the cup” by banning plastic bags—while the interior of their institution remains, as you aptly put it, “full of extortion and excess.” It is a critique of a leadership that prioritizes the symbolic gesture over the hard, honest work of governance, and a rebuke of the hypocrisy that defines their administration.
A Prayer
May the residents of this shithole state find the strength to see past the curtain of virtue signaling that hides the incompetence of their leaders. May the scales fall from their eyes, allowing them to recognize that true dignity is not found in the compliance with arbitrary, performative laws, but in the restoration of a state that values competence over corruption, and common sense over the shallow, grifting mandates of the political class. Amen.
