Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic refusal to uphold any prior restraint against the press, a New Jersey judge has unconstitutionally silenced a local journalist to shield a school board from the consequences of its own lies.
There are moments in the life of a republic when the machinery of power grinds to a halt, not because of some foreign foe or natural disaster, but because those in charge have decided that the truth is simply too inconvenient to be tolerated. We find ourselves in just such a moment.
It began quietly enough on the morning of May 8. A 16-year-old student walked into New Brunswick High School and triggered a metal detector. Security officials surrounded him, pressed him against a wall, and recovered what appeared to be a handgun from his waistband. The school went into lockdown.
But parents were not told the truth. Instead, they were deceived in a message from the district: “Your child participated in a school security drill at approximately 9:15 am,” it read. “We routinely have school security drills as a means to prepare for a variety of emergency situations.”
A drill. A comforting fiction, delivered with the clinical certainty of a bureaucrat checking a box. The official story would change not once, not twice, but three times over the next month.
Superintendent Aubrey Johnson, who counts the lieutenant governor as a former classmate and close ally, first told the public it was a “toy gun” found in a student’s bag. Neither claim was true.
The weapon was a BB gun—an Airsoft pistol that, to the untrained eye, looks exactly like the real thing—and it was found on the student, not in a bag. Johnson later acknowledged to the New York Times that the initial alert “could have been clearer and more accurate.” A masterpiece of understatement from an official who had just spent weeks misleading the public.
Enter Charlie Kratovil, the editor and founder of New Brunswick Today. This local news outlet dares to cover the city’s government as though it were actually accountable to the people.
Kratovil obtained surveillance footage of the incident from a confidential source. On May 28, he published it. It was a straightforward act of journalism: a video showing what actually happened, a corrective to a string of official falsehoods.
The school board’s response was swift and, in the context of American history, alarming. Attorney George Hendricks demanded the video be removed and that Kratovil reveal his source.
Kratovil refused, citing New Jersey’s reporter shield law, which gives anyone connected to the news media absolute protection in civil cases, and qualified protection in criminal cases. So the school board sued.
New Jersey’s shield law (N.J.S.A. § 2A:84A-21) is one of the strongest in the United States, offering journalists the right to refuse to reveal their sources and unpublished materials, like notes and outtakes.
On May 29, Middlesex County Superior Court Judge Thomas Daniel McCloskey issued an order that would have made the architects of the Alien and Sedition Acts nod with approval.
McCloskey, a 68-year-old Republican from Flemington, in Hunterdon County, who was appointed to the bench by former Governor Chris Christie in 2017, ordered the video removed from YouTube.
He also barred New Brunswick Today from writing about the incident, and forbade the publication of even descriptions of what the video depicted.
Let that sink in: a judge in the United States of America, in the year 2026, told a newspaper that it could not tell its readers what it had seen.
When Kratovil’s attorney, Bruce Rosen, asked if the outlet could still write about the incident, McCloskey said no. McCloskey was effectively telling the journalist that reporting on a court case—a public proceeding—would be a violation of his order.
The reaction from press freedom advocates was immediate and withering.
The New Jersey Press Association, of which New Brunswick Today is a member, condemned the ruling as “one of the most serious threats to the free press that exists.”
“It lets those in power shape the story on their own terms, without scrutiny or challenge from reporters on the ground,” the association said.
Caitlin Vogus, a senior adviser for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, put it more bluntly: “Judges aren’t kings.”
Judge McCloskey, however, appears to have missed that particular civics lesson.
On July 9, he issued a 59-page opinion that partially walked back his initial gag order. He acknowledged that the original restraint was “overbroad.”
But then he did something even more audacious: he expanded the restraint to apply to all members of the press, not just New Brunswick Today.
The new order permits the outlet to republish the video, but only if it blurs the faces of every minor depicted. It must withhold the students’ names. And—here is the kicker—it must submit the edited video to the school board and the court for “review and approval” before publication.
The government, in other words, gets veto power over what the press can print.
Kratovil, to his credit, has pledged to appeal.
“The judge is now ordering us to seek and receive approval from the BOE before releasing the video that shows what actually happened that day,” he said. “That’s the kind of government censorship the First Amendment was intended to prevent.”
He is exactly right. The First Amendment was not written to protect polite conversation or uncontroversial opinions.
It was written to protect the kind of speech that those in power wish to suppress. It was written for moments exactly like this one, when a school board would rather spend $10,000 in taxpayer money on an outside law firm to silence a journalist than simply tell the truth.
The First Amendment was written to allow Americans to tell powerful people like Middlesex County Superior Court Judge Thomas Daniel McCloskey to go fuck themselves.
Judge McCloskey, President Donald Trump, and the Gestapo-like immigration agents who are summarily killing people on American streets are all part of a system that only exists because we the people allow it. It is time for citizens of this country to show up and speak out, because the silent majority is
One might ask: what is the school board so afraid of?
The video shows a student with a weapon. The public has a right to know that their children’s school was locked down for a genuine security threat, not a “drill.”
The public has a right to know that their superintendent lied to them, not once, but repeatedly.
But in New Brunswick, apparently, the public’s right to know ends where the school board’s embarrassment begins. And Judge McCloskey, in his infinite wisdom, has decided that he is the final arbiter of what the people are allowed to see.
The U.S. Supreme Court has never upheld a prior restraint against the news media. Not in the Pentagon Papers case. Not in any case. The legal scholars, the press advocates, and the common sense of the American people all point in the same direction: this order is an unconstitutional abomination.
Yet here we are. A local journalist, doing the job that local journalists are supposed to do, has been silenced by a judge who appears to believe that his courtroom is a fiefdom and his word is law. The school board, caught in a web of its own lies, has turned to the courts to do what honesty could not.
This is not a drill. This is a test of the First Amendment. And if the higher courts do not act swiftly to strike down this order, the lesson for every journalist in America will be clear: the truth is no longer a defense. It is a crime.
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