It’s Wednesday, November 20. 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: Why Yale students envy their conservative peers, Andrew Doyle on The Guardian’s misinformation hypocrisy, Olivia Reingold presents gripping evidence from Daniel Penny’s trial, and much more.
But first: Reihan Salam on how to fix our immigration system.
It’s easy to think of immigration—one of the top issues this election—as an unsolvable problem, with chaos at the border, millions of illegal immigrants now settled in America, and toxic political debate on the issue. But that’s too pessimistic, says Reihan Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute and author of our lead story today.
Reihan knows the issue can inspire strong feelings. The son of Bangladeshi immigrants, he wrote a book on immigration published during Trump’s first term that was labeled “completely off the rails” by progressive critics. But, in fact, he’s one of the most level-headed experts on the issue.
As Reihan writes, “I have spent much of my adult life thinking about how to balance the economic and cultural dynamism that comes from immigration against the need to control ethnic tensions, protect American workers, assimilate newcomers, and maintain an orderly process that commands legitimacy and respect.”
He lists ten priorities for the incoming Trump administration in his essay, “Immigration Is a Mess. Here’s How to Fix It.”
Bluesky’s the Limit
Last week, I wrote about a sudden outbreak of Trump Derangement Syndrome: sex strikes, women shaving their heads, Harris voters calling ICE on the family members of Trump-supporting Latinos, and more. But what happens once the postelection freakout subsides? What do TDS sufferers plan to do for the next four years? Will they lock themselves in a padded cell, convincing each other that they are just too good for this rotten world? Or will they take the shock of this election as a wake-up call about the bubble they’re living in?
Morning Joe hosts and longtime Trump critics Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski appear to be taking the latter route. On Monday, they revealed they had visited Mar-a-Lago last week to “restart communications” with the president-elect. Behind the Nixon-to-China tone, it was hard to tell whether it was a genuine olive branch, a ploy to avoid retribution, or even a desperate bid for access to the Trump White House. Whatever their motive, many of their viewers and guests aren’t happy about it. Washington Post columnist and MSNBC contributor Jennifer Rubin is promoting a boycott. And one anonymous MSNBC staffer told Fox News that the “rank and file” are now “largely disdainful” of the network’s morning stars. In other words: Stay in your liberal bubble, folx!
More signs of staying in the bubble: Many anti-Trump X users have left the platform and joined Bluesky in the days since the election. Bluesky, which was created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, is positioning itself as a digital sanctuary for people horrified by Trump and his new best friend, X CEO Elon Musk. About 115,000 X accounts were deleted the day after the November 5 election alone. At the same time, Bluesky has seen a surge of at least four million new accounts, according to the site’s CEO Jay Graber. Celebrities such as Stephen King, Barbra Streisand, and even Flavor Flav have flocked to the platform.
And so has one of the biggest liberal papers in the English language: The Guardian. In a statement explaining the reasons behind the move, the British paper cited “the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism.”
But, as Andrew Doyle points out in our second story today, The Guardian has produced plenty of nonsense on its own: from claiming that a flashing incident by a sex offender at an L.A. spa was a transphobic lie to misinformation about Doyle himself. Nonetheless, Doyle thinks the paper leaving X will only make things worse. “Online echo chambers are, of course, largely to blame for the escalation of political tribalism that we have seen in recent years,” he writes. “And also for the sense of shock that many experience when elections don’t go their way.”
Read Andrew Doyle on “The Guardian’s Retreat from the Battlefield of Ideas.”
Yale Students: We’re Jealous of Conservatives
But not everyone has their heads in the sand. In a piece we’re publishing today, a group of students at Yale admit they feel intellectually stifled by the homogeneous ideas on their campus. They even go as far as to say they are jealous of their conservative peers.
Why? Because conservative students are “forced to square their opinions with the progressive supermajority.” That may be challenging, “but it cultivates resilience, critical reflection, and the capacity to find community amid disagreement,” they argue. Ivy League campuses are supposed to be the most out of touch liberal bubbles of all, so this missive from the future leaders of the liberal elite is a reminder that all is not lost.
Read the full op-ed from a group of Yale students who say “We’re Jealous of Our Conservative Peers.”
Daniel Penny’s First Interrogation: “I’m Not Trying to Kill the Guy”
On May 1, 2023, Daniel Penny became a national lightning rod when he placed Jordan Neely, a homeless black man widely described as “threatening” by witnesses, into a chokehold on the New York City subway. Neely died within hours, and the case quickly became a political Rorschach test, with Penny seen by some as a hero and by others as a racially motivated murderer. Eighteen months later, Penny is on trial for manslaughter and Olivia Reingold has been covering the courtroom drama for The Free Press. Today, she brings us a piece of video evidence that gets to the heart of why this case has captivated America. Here’s Olivia:
A few hours after the incident on the F train, Daniel Penny accompanied police back to their Chinatown headquarters. In footage of his interrogation, shown as part of the prosecution’s case in his ongoing manslaughter trial and obtained by The Free Press, Penny seems to think he’s at the police precinct to tell them about the “lunatic” who “started threatening people” on the train. The conversation starts out in a friendly tone. But as the questioning continues, Penny appears to realize that these aren’t just any police officers. And they don’t consider him a Good Samaritan, but a criminal suspect.
“Some guy came on, and he, like, whipped his jacket off, and he’s like, ‘I’m going to kill everybody,’ ” Penny tells the officers in a tiny, windowless room. “He was acting like a lunatic, like a crazy person.”
Penny, then 24 years old and a former Marine, even waives his rights to an attorney and to remain silent, ostensibly because he thinks he has nothing to hide. But then the questions begin—and they’re not about Neely, a schizophrenic with a long arrest record. They’re about him.
We have distilled the interrogation, which spanned nearly thirty minutes, into an eight-minute compilation that shows the central tension of the case Penny now faces: Is he a hero who stepped in to rescue a train full of mothers, teenagers, and children—or a dangerous vigilante who attacked a black homeless man “because he felt like he could,” as a woman who’s been watching the trial every day recently told me? Penny doesn’t know yet that Neely, who paramedics transported to a nearby hospital, has died. But one senses that he understands his life has changed forever. Watch for yourself:
Vladimir Putin lowered the threshold for Russia’s use of nuclear weapons Tuesday, two days after the Biden administration approved Ukraine’s use of American-supplied long-range missiles. The new doctrine allows for a nuclear response by Russia to a conventional attack by an adversary, if that adversary is supported by a nuclear power. “If the long-range missiles are used from the territory of Ukraine against the Russian territory, it will mean that they are controlled by American military experts and we will view that as a qualitatively new phase of the Western war against Russia and respond accordingly,” said Russian foreign minister Segei Lavrov. Moscow also said yesterday it had shot down four America-supplied missiles in Russia. An anonymous U.S. National Security Council official told the AP that the White House was not surprised by Putin’s decision and that the U.S. sees no change to Russia’s nuclear posture.
Trump has picked Howard Lutnick as his nominee for commerce secretary. The CEO of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald and co-chair of the president-elect’s transition team had been talked about as a treasury secretary contender, with Musk backing him for that job last week. Commerce will be an especially big job in the next administration, with tariffs at the top of Trump’s economic agenda. And Lutnick has been a loyal defender of Trump’s plans—both on Wall Street and in the media.
When progressives use “woke” language, most Americans have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s a point some moderate Democrats have made since their electoral shellacking, and it’s backed up by a new poll by YouGov. A majority of adults say they have never even heard the term BIPOC, and just 5 percent of people say they use the term Latinx. The survey also finds that just 15 percent of black Americans use the term anti-racism, while only 47 percent have heard the term at all.
The Berlin chief of police warned Jews and gay people to hide their identities in Arab neighborhoods. “There are certain neighborhoods where the majority of people of Arab origin live, who also have sympathies for terrorist groups,” she said. Almost 90 years after the terror of Kristallnacht, physical threats toward Jews and gay couples have surged again in Germany.
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has called on Donald Trump to increase pressure on her country and reinstate sanctions undone by the Biden administration, in hopes of ousting President Nicolás Maduro. Machado, known as the Iron Lady, is currently in hiding somewhere in Venezuela, but has said that if Trump were to help oust the leftist authoritarian, it would be “an enormous foreign policy victory in the very, very short term.”
Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong have been sentenced and jailed—some up to ten years—for the role they played in holding an unofficial primary election in 2020. The 47 people arrested—two of whom have since been acquitted—are among the most prominent figures standing up to Beijing’s crackdown on political dissent. Hours before their sentencing, one protester published a statement that she had been punished for taking part in “the last free and fair election in Hong Kong.” Read Bari Weiss’s 2021 essay on Jimmy Lai, the imprisoned newspaper owner and a hero of Hong Kong democracy: “When a Free Society Becomes a Police State.”
An “unknown and unauthorized third party” has gained access to two dozen depositions related to various investigations into former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s nominee for attorney general. The hacked materials include the sworn deposition of a minor who allegedly had sex with Gaetz. Earlier this year, the House Ethics Committee investigated allegations that the former congressman engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, among other accusations. Their findings have not yet been released, but the Justice Department declined to bring charges against him last year.
Just months after failing to stop a mysterious weirdo from shooting Donald Trump in the ear, the Secret Service has deployed a creepy robot dog to patrol Mar-a-Lago. Created by Boston Dynamics, “Spot” is unarmed but can be used to surveil the property either remotely or automatically so long as the route is preprogrammed. Still unclear: How is this canine Roomba better than an actual dog?
River Page is a reporter at The Free Press. Read his recent piece “The Smearing of Gay Republicans,” and follow him on X @river_is_nice.
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