The Free Press
It’s Monday, October 21, and 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: Hezbollah hits Bibi’s house while the U.S. investigates its leak of Israeli war plans; Trump says China knows he’s “fucking crazy”; and much more. But first, Olivia Reingold and Kat Rosenfield weigh in on the trial of Daniel Penny.
On May 1, 2023, Daniel Penny, a 24-year-old former Marine, met Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man, on a New York subway car. When Neely began frightening passengers, Penny tried restraining him by placing him in a choke hold. Neely died minutes later.
Penny is white; Neely was black. Immediately, those facts were the only ones that seemed to matter in the court of public opinion.
Some people saw the Marine as a “Good Samaritan,” as Florida governor Ron DeSantis put it. Others, like Julia Salazar, a New York state senator, equated his actions to a “lynching.” Opinions seemed to depend more on preconceived assumptions about American life than on what actually happened on the F train that day.
Today, Daniel Penny’s trial begins in a courtroom in New York City. He has been charged with second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison.
We’ve been following the Penny case from the outset.
Weeks after Neely’s death, Olivia Reingold visited Penny’s hometown in West Islip, Long Island, to ask those who’ve known him longest what he’s really like. And a few weeks ago, Olivia attended an important pretrial hearing in which she heard the prosecutors present their case against him.
The case, Olivia writes, has become “a mirror that reflects not what you think of Daniel Penny but what you think of white men, black men, racism, policing, mental illness, and the thing that we call the system.”
Read Olivia Reingold on “The Trials of Daniel Penny.”
Our columnist Kat Rosenfield sees the Daniel Penny episode as “traceable to 2020, the year that cities across America were swept by progress that looked an awful lot like chaos.”
The coronavirus disrupted New York’s chronically understaffed mental health services, and those “who fell through the cracks all seemed to land” in the subway. Then came the summer of “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests, and of liberal commentators defending lawlessness in the name of social justice.
“When the social fabric of the city begins to unravel, it frays underground first,” Kat writes. Sure enough, between March 2020 and April 2023, no fewer than 27 people were murdered on the subway—shot, stabbed, or shoved in front of an oncoming train. Ten people were injured in the spring of 2022 when a gunman opened fire on a northbound N train in Brooklyn. The same month, a screaming man grabbed a woman by the hair and dragged her around the subway car; she mouthed help me as fellow passengers looked on in horror. The clip went viral.
And Daniel Penny? “One side sees racism everywhere; the other, the insidious influence of wokism. But on this one point, they agree: The system is broken, our faith in it misplaced,” writes Kat.
Read Kat Rosenfield on “Daniel Penny and New York’s Vigilantes.”
Is the Leak by U.S. Intelligence Meant to Sabotage Israel?
Things move fast when it comes to Israel news. Israelis barely had time to celebrate the death of Yahya Sinwar when, over the weekend, two stories broke: first, the leak of highly classified documents, following quickly on the heels of a Hezbollah drone strike on Benjamin Netanyahu’s private home.
In normal times, the attempted assassination would make headlines for weeks, but the leak is arguably more dangerous, considering the likely possibility it was done by Americans. Jay Solomon has the story:
Two factors are weighing on Israeli military planners as they decide how and when to strike Iran in retaliation for its recent missile attacks: the potential cost of inaction against Tehran and the political pressures from Washington to show restraint just weeks ahead of the U.S. presidential election. These two considerations now appear in conflict with one another.
On Saturday, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia, launched an explosive drone from Lebanon and struck Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s private home in the coastal city of Caesarea. The apparent assassination attempt was just the latest Iranian and Hezbollah aggression that Israeli officials have vowed to avenge. Netanyahu released a statement, saying that Iran had made a “bitter mistake.”
The drone attack coincided with a leak in recent days of highly classified U.S. intelligence documents concerning Israel’s potential attack plans on Iran, according to people who’ve seen the files. These documents were prepared by two U.S. branches of the intelligence community—the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency—and posted on the Telegram social media platform. One person who’s seen the documents said they point to a likely breach of operational security between Washington and Jerusalem, and could force the Israel Defense Forces to either reassess its plans for striking Iran or delay them.
The Biden administration’s Middle East policy has already been rocked by the suspension last year of Robert Malley, the State Department’s special envoy to Iran. The FBI is currently investigating whether the diplomat illegally downloaded classified information onto his personal devices, which may have been accessed by the Iranians through a hack. Administration officials were alarmed last summer when they detected sensitive U.S. documents appearing in Iranian state media, including some of Malley’s own.
Congressional investigators told me earlier this year that they’re also trying to learn if Malley may have shared some of his documents with a network of academics—some of them his former colleagues—who’ve kept close ties to the Iranian government through a Tehran-backed program called the Iran Experts Initiative.
Israeli officials have told The Free Press in recent weeks that they’re concerned that elements inside the U.S. national security establishment could use leaks to try and limit the Jewish state’s range of actions against Iran. President Joe Biden has already stated that he’s against Israel hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities. And the latest leak could cause Netanyahu’s government to decide to share even less of its military planning—a major step given the implications for the U.S. of any Israeli attack on Iran.
Current and former Israeli officials have told me that they view the U.S. presidential election and the ensuing political transition in Washington as a potential window to move ahead with its strike plans on Iran. Part of the reason, they say, is that they’re unsure of what Vice President Kamala Harris’s position will be if she wins in November. She’s made some statements on the campaign trail criticizing Israel’s ongoing war against the Palestinian militant group Hamas—also an Iranian proxy—in the Gaza Strip. The Democrat Party presidential candidate again called for a ceasefire in Gaza on Saturday.
With just 15 days to go until the election, national polls show Donald Trump leading Kamala Harris. And Trump has also crept past Harris in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia, three swing states Joe Biden won in 2020. Harris may be on track to win the popular vote, but the Electoral College bias favors Republicans by roughly two percentage points. So says Nate Silver, who adds, “In an era of intense partisanship and close elections, this is inherently difficult for Democrats to overcome.”
Related: Donald Trump is more popular at this point in his campaign than he was at the same stage in either of his previous runs for office. As of October 17, Trump had an approval rating of negative 9 points. True, that means more Americans disapprove of him than approve of him. But that’s better than his approval rating in October 2020 when it was negative 12 points, and it’s much better than his negative 27 rating when he actually won the presidency. For what it’s worth, Kamala Harris’s approval rating is negative 1.
More than half of Americans feel worse off today than they did four years ago, a new Gallup poll shows. The survey’s response most resembles that of the 1992 election year, when Bill Clinton beat incumbent George H.W. Bush.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board asked Donald Trump if he would use military force against a blockade on Taiwan. The former president said he “wouldn’t have to” because China’s president Xi Jinping “respects me and he knows I’m fucking crazy.” Trump spoke similarly of Vladimir Putin, with whom he said he has “a great relationship,” but who he claims to have warned that if Russia went into Ukraine, “I’m going to hit you right in the middle of fricking Moscow.” Trump added, “You’re going to be hit so hard, and I’m going to take those fucking domes right off your head.” It’s rare for the “good cop, bad cop” routine to be played by the same person.
Every day between now and the election, tech billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk will give $1 million to a randomly chosen voter who signs his super PAC petition “pledging to uphold the rights to free speech and to bear arms.” The first lucky winner collected his check on Saturday at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro, the Keystone State’s Democratic governor, questions whether the Musk giveaway is legal, saying on Meet the Press that it “raises serious questions that folks may want to take a look at.”
Is The New York Times getting religion on DEI? First came a lengthy investigation last week by star reporter Nicholas Confessore into the DEI practices at the University of Michigan. It is withering in its description of Michigan’s powerful, massive—and largely pointless—DEI bureaucracy and how it’s done far more harm than good. Then, on Sunday, David French devoted his op-ed column to a thoughtful assessment of why university DEI programs are so closed-minded. “In my experience, the more ideologically. . . pure an institution becomes, the more wrong it is likely to be,” he writes. To which we can only say: Welcome aboard, New York Times!
Next month, New Yorkers will vote on Proposition 1. The amendment purports to be about enshrining abortion rights into the state constitution, which is odd given that New York’s abortion laws are already among the most permissive in the country. In reality, Democrats are using a popular issue “as a vehicle” for a radical agenda, warns Maud Maron in Tablet. The law would add anti-discrimination provisions related to “age” and “gender identity” to the state constitution, which “should set off alarm bells with parents” as it can be used to transition children’s gender without parental consent.
North Korea has sent 1,500 troops to eastern Russia for training ahead of a likely deployment in Ukraine, South Korea’s spy agency reported on Friday. On Thursday, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky said his government has evidence that 10,000 North Korean troops are preparing to fight against Ukraine.
In better news: Data from the CDC shows drug overdose deaths fell 12.7 percent between May 2023 and 2024 to 98,820. (It marks the first time in three years the yearly estimate has fallen below 100,000.) Experts aren’t sure what’s behind the sudden improvement. “I wish I knew so I could bottle it,” an emergency physician told NBC News.
Writers at Nature magazine have recommended the global science community move away from “region-specific seasonal markers” like summer and winter, after they received invites “to events that speak of fall or autumn” despite being based in the Southern Hemisphere, which is currently experiencing spring. They write: “It leaves us wondering: are we invited at all into this season different from our own?” Which leaves us wondering: Is this what scientists actually think about these days?
Watch: The Brave Youth Who Took Hezbollah to Court
Previously on Hezbollah’s Hostages, our weekly animated series featuring brave opponents of the terror group, we introduced you to a Hezbollah fighter turned voice of resistance, victims of the group’s sex trafficking and drug trade operations, and an Arab man who risked assassination to advocate peace with Israel. Last week, we took you inside the group’s shadow capital, one of the most terrifying suburbs in the world.
Our sixth episode tells the story of Ali, a young Lebanese Shi’ite, who dared to go for a peaceful walk in the woods with four friends. There, Hezbollah fighters began throwing rocks at them, and brutally beat Ali with clubs. Later, while recovering in the hospital, Ali resolved that no one should be above the law and risked everything to sue his terrorist attackers. Watch Episode Six of Hezbollah’s Hostages below, and for more information on the series, click here.
Madeleine Kearns is an associate editor for The Free Press. Follow her on X @madeleinekearns.
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I'm not in NY City nor have I ridden one of its subways in a long time. I am in neighboring N. Jersey and glance at the two City tabloids every day - Post & Daily News. That's where several times a week at the time of Neely's death we saw stories of assaults, stabbings, people being pushed onto the tracks, shootings, rapes etc. Subway crime had to be REALLY bad for Gov. Huchul to send in the National Guard to police the subways. I would want to hear from the two individuals who both helped hold down Neely. If they speak favorably on Penny's behalf, it would be NOT GUILTY from me.
"Harris may be on track to win the popular vote, but the Electoral College bias favors Republicans..."
What? So running up the score in California and New York is completely unbiased. The EC is fundamental to our constitution designed to prevent the tyranny of the majority. WO it Presidential candidates would only campaign in 4-6 states (27-35% of the population).