But New York acts like it is a place apart from time immemorial. Everything here is beholden to a belief system that no longer applies. New York was America first, a Dutch loosening of the Puritan tie, and it will also be America last. When there is nothing of any substance around it, it will become a museum to excess. A small town can divest itself of the past, wipe the slate. But a city remains.
~Alex Carnevale, “In Which The City Has Ceased Its Singing”
I didn’t watch the election results come in last Tuesday or even check what happened until the day after. Instead, while the results were still coming in, I sat down with Bret, the host of NYC Crime Spot and 52 Topics with Frank Fiordilino to discuss something more dear to me than institutional politics: the Daniel Penny trial.
Now that we know the results of the election, everyone is throwing out their spin, detailing which things backfired for Democrats and which groups should be shamed for disloyalty. We’ll get a few weeks of shallow, performative introspection but it remains to be seen how many will admit the real story is not so much about who won but who lost. The institutions that run us and the mediocrities they run cover for, those who shout pieties as you advocate for policies that fight chaos while they instantiate it, they lost. They lost in the formal headcount that decides who the formal head of our government will be, but also the unofficial vibes that dictate so much of the experience people have day to day in this fine hamlet known as the United States.
Both within and without our borders, Penny’s case is woefully underreported, with its national interest bearing all the marks of a profitable news cycle but none of the attention which, makes me wonder if there isn’t a disjunction between market demand to hear the truth and the press’ willingness to supply it.
My companion piece to this Blahcast is here and worth a read to get the context behind my argument:
Topics discussed include:
Individual vigilanteism vs. group vigilanteism
Urban decay, squatters, street violence
Salt life
Levantine ramen hair
1970’s New York
Joker, Taxi Driver, Death Wish
Days of Rage and Status 451’s summary (HIGHLY RECOMMEND)
Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels
Christian Inga
Bernard “Bernie” Goetz
Deputization vs. disempowering citizens
The monopoly on violence
Post-Covid New York
Terry Sciavo
Nicholas Sandmann and the Covington Kids
Kyle Rittenhouse
HR culture
Is J.D. Vance white Bill Cosby?
- theory that you can’t red pill Bill Gates.
Stacey intel assets infiltrating Thaddeus Russell’s Renegade University
How to shut down pretty women in public
Pete Quinones
Those who packed it in
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