David Marcus

Tensions ran high this week after Jordan Neely, a homeless street performer with a record of violence, was killed by Daniel Penney, a twenty-four-year-old Marine. Penney placed Neely in a chokehold on a New York City subway train. The usual suspects, such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, swung into action, calling the incident “murder” and a “lynching” respectively. Conservative media was alive with dire warnings of potential violent protests in response to this death of a black man at the hands of a white man. But a funny thing happened on the way to the riots: they didn’t occur. So what makes this situation so different from incidents of racially tinged violence in the recent past?

It was supposed to be so different. Sturdy old Scranton Joe Biden at the helm. Honesty, decency, unity. What a joke. Lawyers for Biden have now all but confirmed that he illegally possessed classified material. The American people have serious questions — and if Biden can’t or won’t answer them, he should not be president of the United States. It would be one thing if Biden proclaimed his own innocence, but he doesn’t. He hasn’t said he was never holding America’s secrets in his garage: his lawyers admit it. If a mid-level Pentagon employee played so fast and loose, they’d be saying a tearful goodbye to their kids before a prison stint. What’s going on here?

It's been a bumpy month or so for newly elected Congressman George Santos, if that is his real name. Shortly after his upset win in November that flipped a key New York district from blue to red, reports began to surface showing he had told a few wee lies to voters on his way to Capitol Hill. He had not attended the prestigious college he said he had, he hadn’t worked at the big Wall Street firm, and, in the most humorous example, he had to admit he wasn’t Jewish but rather "Jew-ish." Politicians have always been known to have a tenuous relationship with the literal truth, but they used to be creative, even talented at it. Today they resemble a toddler claiming he did not steal the cookie from the jar as he’s chewing it.

In the Quaker denomination, they have a term: “bloody-minded objector.” Because the Society of Friends requires consensus on all matters concerning their meetings, they make exceptions for those who are needlessly gumming up the works for personal or wrongheaded reasons. Today, Florida Man Representative Matt Gaetz is leading a band of twenty bloody-minded objectors who refuse to vote for Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House — and that's not all. He and they are also making Donald Trump look like an absolute fool. McCarthy and Trump have a good relationship and Trump has endorsed the GOP leader for the speakership. As a presidential candidate, Trump needs his endorsements to matter; he needs to show that he is still the leader of the MAGA cause.

Start spreading the news. As party leadership for the upcoming 118th Congress shapes up, we now know that Democrats will have not only New Yorkers but Brooklynites as their top men in both the Senate and the House. Chuck Schumer is poised to maintain his position as Senate majority leader after Republicans’ miserable results in the upper body. And with the departure of Nancy Pelosi as House head honcho, it will be Representative Hakeem Jeffries taking her place and hoping one day to be speaker himself. So what will an all-Empire State Democrat leadership mean for the rest of the nation? To get a sense of this, it's worth looking at the unexpected and outsized role that New York played in the recent midterm elections.

Well, it was quite a Thanksgiving week at Mar-a-Lago. For those just waking from their food comas, the Cliff Notes version of events is that Donald Trump hosted for dinner not just Kanye West, who of late has appeared utterly out of his mind and uttered deeply antisemitic comments, but also Nick Fuentes, a quite literal Holocaust denier who has compared Jews slaughtered by Nazis to cookies baking in an oven. I guess David Duke must have been busy. When news of the Tuesday night dinner broke, it unleashed a chorus of justified outrage. Trumpworld went into immediate damage control. First, it was claimed that Fuentes was not a participant at the dinner, then that he was but Trump didn’t know who he was.

The walls are closing in on Donald Trump. Again. But this time it’s different. Again. In the wake of the Republicans’ performance in the midterms, which ranges from lacklustre to biblically awful depending on how many drinks the GOP consultant you’re asking has had, Trump is taking all the blame. There are two problems with this. First, it’s not really true that it’s all Trump’s fault. And second, it is very likely to backfire and empower an otherwise somewhat floundering Donald. As to the issue of blame, yes, Trump promoted some primary stinkers. Dr. Oz and Don Bolduc in the Pennsylvania and New Hampshire Senate races respectively performed particularly odiously. But he did get a win with J.D.

Always give it three days. This is a golden rule of journalism that requires reporters and commentators to wait when speculating on big salacious stories. It's a rule that works, but not when it's ignored, as it has been by both sides of the political spectrum in the case of the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the Speaker of the House. Democrats pounced, as usual, on their claims of MAGA extremism; meanwhile, too many on the right have indulged in disgusting conspiracy theories about the assault. On Sunday morning, less than two days after the news of the assault broke, the new Twitter head honcho Elon Musk weighed in. Responding to a tweet by Hillary Clinton alleging a political motive, Musk tweeted that there was a tiny chance that something else had prompted the violence.

They walk among us. The last of the Covidians. We see them every day, masked while walking their dog in the park, or alone in their car. We have that friend or loved one who badgers us about vaccines and boosters like a mid-level PR executive at Pfizer. There is also the social media warrior who will never admit they got anything wrong about lockdowns, that even with our economy and education system in shambles, we should be grateful. Let’s not forget the public health officials like Holy Saint Fauci, who we recently learned had a mega-millions windfall while Americans’ purchasing power plummeted into the poorhouse. “Oh no,” they warn, “don’t get complacent now! Winter is coming!

New York attorney general Letitia “Tish” James has a lot on her plate just now. Sadly none of it has anything to do with fighting the surging crime throughout the state and the nation’s largest city. Instead James has her sights narrowly set on a civil lawsuit against Donald Trump and his family. She even found the time last week to fire off a tweet angrily complaining that a Yankees game was not being broadcast live. Clearly keeping New Yorkers safe is not on James’s agenda. In fairness, James’s persecution of the Trump clan is a campaign promise kept. On the night she won the AG race in 2018 she told her adoring crowd that, “I will be shining a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings, and every dealing, demanding truthfulness at every turn.

Mayor Eric Adams has found himself stuck between a Texas rock and a New York hard place as thousands of illegal immigrants have been bused to the Big Apple by Lone Star State Governor Gregg Abbott in recent months. Now, a decades-old New York City policy called “right to shelter” has Adams's hands tied as he tries to find beds for the city’s new arrivals. The result is a crisis for the homeless shelter system, mostly of the city’s own making. This week, as Gotham began turning away dozens of homeless New Yorkers from its facilities, the Adams administration suggested it was time to revisit the “right to shelter” policy, which guarantees a bed to anyone in New York City who wants one.