Daniel Penny’s Innocence—and the Shame of Alvin Bragg. Plus. . .

It’s Tuesday, December 10. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: Assad’s fall exposes Washington’s delusions, Norway’s crippling assault on free enterprise, the disaster that is “multilevel classrooms,” and more.

But first: Daniel Penny walked out of court a free man. But why was he ever prosecuted?

It’s been 19 months since Daniel Penny entered a New York City subway car as a college student and exited as a homicide suspect. But yesterday, a Manhattan jury acquitted him.

The Free Press has been covering the story since the very beginning. Our video team compiled a detailed play-by-play of exactly what happened between Penny and Jordan Neely on that fateful day on the F train. Olivia Reingold has reported from Penny’s hometown, on the police’s initial interrogation, and from the courtroom throughout his trial.

Olivia was in the courtroom when the verdict was announced. The words “not guilty,” she says, were followed by applause from Penny’s sympathizers. Penny walked out with a “smile on his face—the look of relief,” Olivia notes. Meanwhile, a black woman shouted “racist motherfucker” and was escorted out of the courtroom by a police officer. Outside the court just after the verdict, Hawk Newsome, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Greater New York, said: “We need some black vigilantes. People wanna jump up and choke us and kill us for being loud? How about we do the same?”

It’s a good thing that justice was delivered to Daniel Penny. But a just verdict does not erase this cynical, wrongheaded, and unwarranted prosecution.

In an editorial this morning, we argue that the case should never have gone to trial, and we take a close look at the man who brought it, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg.

Bragg’s approach to enforcing the law—or rather, not enforcing it—has been a disaster, as has been true of every city that voted in a so-called progressive prosecutor. As of November 2024, according to the New York Post, there were 27,122 reported felonies, up 16.9 percent from before Bragg took office. Meanwhile, rape has jumped 7.4 percent across Manhattan, robbery 8.9 percent, felony assault 16.8 percent, and grand larceny 29.8 percent. These are crimes that overwhelmingly affect the poorest New Yorkers.

The DA’s decision to prosecute Daniel Penny was no anomaly. Bragg’s tenure has been marked by priorities that don’t serve the public—like the decision to go after Trump on spurious charges of falsifying business records—and a nonchalant attitude toward actual criminals. This has had a predictable outcome: rising crime rates and an enormous amount of cynicism among New Yorkers.

“Next year, the Manhattan DA will be up for reelection, with the Democratic primary in June. He deserves a serious challenger,” we argue. “So does New York.”

Read our editorial, “Daniel Penny’s Innocence—and the Shame of Alvin Bragg.”

Assad’s Fall Has Humiliated Iran—and Washington

On Sunday, Joe Biden tried to take credit for the recent dramatic events in the Middle East. Assad’s biggest backers—Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia—“are far weaker today than they were when I took office,” he argued.

“Try not to laugh,” writes Eli Lake in his column today. “Syria has toppled its tyrant in spite of the Biden administration, not because of it.” And the fall of Assad, Eli says, is only the latest instance of foreign policy conventional wisdom in Washington being exploded by events.

Read Eli Lake on what really toppled Assad—and why it has nothing to do with the Biden administration.

Why I Left Norway

Why are so many entrepreneurs fleeing Norway? The simple answer: They are being taxed on money they don’t have.

Today in The Free Press, Fredrik Haga, the co-founder of a successful Norwegian company, Dune, tells the story of trying to build it in his native land, but ultimately having to leave Norway because of its “unrealized gains tax.” Unable to pay the tax, Haga left friends and family behind for Switzerland.

In one way Haga was lucky. He got out before the government imposed an onerous “exit tax” on entrepreneurs who try to take their companies elsewhere. “After shooting itself in one foot, the government is now aiming a bazooka at the other one,” warns Haga. Read his piece on the self-defeating logic of “tax the rich” ideology.

My School Experimented with ‘Education Equity.’ It Failed.

In the fall of 2021, Newton public schools in Newton, Massachusetts, introduced “multilevel classrooms”—combining students of all abilities in one class with a single teacher. The initiative was designed to help struggling students and in particular black, Latino, and low-income students, who were disproportionately represented in lower-level classes.

So, how did it turn out? Not well. Ryan Normandin, the Faculty Council chair at a Newton high school, writes that teachers and students alike view the experiment as a failure.

“Students—at all levels of performance, but especially our students who need the most support and for whom this model was intended to help most—aren’t having their needs met,” he explains. One teacher recounted finding a colleague crying in the closet over the multilevel approach. “The Faculty Council met with department heads all the way up to the superintendent, and what we found was shocking,” writes Normandin.

Read his full account of the failed experiment.

As some of you noticed, there was a faulty link in our plug for our upcoming live event about Jerusalem in yesterday’s Front Page. Our apologies. It’s now fixed! And this is going to be a fantastic conversation.

To reserve tickets to the event with Simon Sebag Montefiore and Bari on Wednesday, January 22, at the Streicker Center in New York City, click again here. Get them now before we sell out!

Abu Mohammad al-Jolani addresses a crowd at Umayyad Mosque in Damascus on December 8, 2024. (Aref Tammawi via Getty Images)

• Who is Abu Mohammad al-Jolani? Or, to use his real name, Ahmad al-Sharaa—the Syrian rebel who led the insurgency that toppled the Assad regime. On the one hand, he has been designated a terrorist by the U.S. government, has links to al-Qaeda stretching back to 2003, and has a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head. But on the other hand, he defied ISIS and broke with al-Qaeda in 2016. And he told PBS in 2021 that his insurgent group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, doesn’t want to fight with the West and intends to tolerate religious minorities. We’ll see soon enough.
  
  

• Police identified a top suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as an Ivy-educated former data engineer named Luigi Mangione. Authorities nabbed 26-year-old Mangione yesterday at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, with a ghost gun and a silencer as well as a handwritten manifesto and four fake IDs. Mangione was allegedly upset with the healthcare industry because of its treatment of his sick relative, according to the New York Post. Meanwhile, in January, he posted a book review of the Unabomber’s manifesto on a now-private Goodreads account, praising him as a “political revolutionary.”
  
  

• On Sunday, South Korean prosecutors announced they would investigate the country’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, for possible treason and abuse of power. The probe comes after Yoon’s use of martial law last week, which he declared after accusing the opposition liberal Democratic Party of attempting “to overthrow the free democracy.” Lawmakers voted unanimously against the measure, which was revoked in a matter of hours. On Saturday the disgraced leader survived an impeachment effort after his party boycotted the vote. The country’s justice department has banned him from leaving the country while the investigation is ongoing.
  
  

• Japan’s fertility rate reached a record low last year, at 1.2 births per woman. This week, in an effort to encourage parents to have more children, Tokyo announced that, starting in April, it will institute a four-day workweek for city employees. “We’ll keep reviewing our work styles flexibly so that nobody has to give up their careers due to life events such as childbirth and childcare,” said Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike. In a previous attempt at boosting procreation, Tokyo launched a state-sponsored dating app.
  
  

• Joe Biden has 40 days left as president, and he’s keeping a very low profile with the press, as Politico has noticed. Over a period of two weeks following Trump’s victory, Biden spoke a total of seven words to the media. (Alas, Politico doesn’t report what those seven words were.) One former White House official described Biden’s hands-off approach as “cavalier and selfish.” Another senior Democrat told Politico “There is no leadership coming from the White House. There is a total vacuum.” In Washington, he continued, “It feels like Trump is president already.”
  
  

• Taylor Swift’s economic powerhouse of a tour came to a close on Sunday in Vancouver. Her Eras Tour lasted almost two years and is estimated to have made over $2 billion, making it (of course) the highest grossing tour of all time. The three-hour–long, culturally defining show was seen by over 10 million Swifties in 21 different countries. Read Agnes Callard’s piece “A Terrorist Plot Canceled the Show. But We Swifties Found Each Other on Cornelia Street” for a Free Press dispatch from Swift’s tour.

Madeleine Kearns is an associate editor at The Free Press. Read her recent piece “Should a Government Help People Die?,” and follow her on X @madeleinekearns.