BY: DAIMAN TEER for THE SIMPLTON STAR
The news out of Ocean County this week is enough to make any sane person look toward the horizon and never look back. Tices Shoal has been an institutional sanctuary for generations of boaters. It was the one place where you could drop anchor in the bay, wade through the waist-deep water, and step onto the bayside boardwalk of Island Beach State Park. It was a rare, beautiful sliver of unbothered freedom—the classic Jersey Shore raft-up—in a state that is otherwise a massive corporate parking lot.
But the state of New Jersey can smell freedom from a mile away, and it hates the scent.
As of July 1, the petty tyrants with clipboards are officially occupying the sand. If you wade ashore from your boat at Tices, you are met not with the hospitality of a public park, but with a shakedown. Three dollars in cash, right there on the wet sand, or a fifty-dollar annual walk-in pass just to put your bare feet on the land your taxes already paid for. If you don’t pay, the State Park Police and Conservation Officers are right there to treat you like a smuggler.
It is a microscopic, pathetic display of bureaucratic greed. Think about the utter lack of dignity required to stand on a beach and demand three singles from a guy in swim trunks. It isn’t about the three dollars; it’s about the absolute submission. It’s New Jersey reminding you, with every suffocating breath it takes, that you own nothing, you control nothing, and you must pay for the privilege of existing.
They have built a three-dollar moat around Tices Shoal, turning a natural wonder into an open-air prison yard where the guards collect a fee at the gate. It is sickening, it is small-minded, and it entirely tracks with a state that has traded its soul for toll roads and permits.
And who sits at the top of this burning trash heap? Governor Mikie Sherrill—the ultimate embodiment of the hollow, self-righteous, limousine-liberal establishment. She marched straight into Trenton on a platform of “affordability,” only to immediately sign off on a bloated, record-breaking $60.7 billion budget that squeezes every last cent out of ordinary people. She is a fraud of the highest order, a profound asshole who pretends to champion the working class while her administration literally counts pennies on a beach to fund her bureaucratic playground.
Sherrill boasts about “no new taxes,” but any boater on the Barnegat Bay knows that’s a semantic shell game. They don’t call it a tax; they call it a fee, and Tices is ground zero for this extraction. She has the nerve to brag about fiscal responsibility while running a massive structural deficit and nickel-and-diming citizens who just want to stand on the sand. Taking your family out on the water—traditionally the most down-to-earth weekend escape for working-class Jersey guys—has been nickel-and-dimed into a luxury hobby. Between fuel marine taxes, ramp launch fees, and now the park enforcement enforcement at the Shoal, Sherrill’s government is charging you for the air you breathe on the bay. It is absolute, unadulterated stupidity masked as governance.
The state’s Department of Environmental Protection will stand before a podium and speak in the hollow, robotic tongue of “environmental preservation” and “resource management.” But look inside. It is pure, unadulterated extortion. They cannot bear the sight of citizens finding a single square inch of joy on God’s green earth without putting a tollbooth on it.
BIBLE VERSE
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence.”
— Matthew 23:25
The Scripture of the Extortionists – Why I Chose This Verse.
I chose this specific verse because it perfectly strips the mask off the bureaucratic monsters running the Garden State. The Pharisees were obsessed with the appearance of law, order, and righteousness, while their hearts were black with greed and a desperate need to control the masses.
New Jersey operates on the exact same psychological sickness. Mikie Sherrill and her DEP clean the outside of the cup with public announcements, regulatory justifications, and talk of “affordability,” but inside the dish, it is nothing but extortion, self-indulgence, and a total disdain for the average citizen.
A Prayer for the Extortionists
Dear Lord,
We come to You today with hearts heavy with anger, but clear in our sight. We ask that You look down upon the petty tyrants, the clipboard-holders, and the high-ranking bureaucrats like Mikie Sherrill who sit in their air-conditioned offices in Trenton, plotting new ways to squeeze the joy and the coin out of the working man.
Deliver them, Father, from their insatiable greed. Break the spirit of extortion that compels them to tax the very sand beneath our feet at Tices Shoal and the water in the bays. Grant them the shame they so desperately lack, so that they might see the sickness of their own small-minded control.
And for those of us who just want to drop anchor, feel the sun, and live in the peace of Your creation—give us the strength to endure the madness of this shithole state until the day we can finally leave its borders behind forever.
Amen.
