By trying—and, fortunately, failing—to convict Penny in the death of Jordan Neely, a homeless drug addict with a long rap sheet who yelled out, “I don’t care if I die. I don’t care if I go to jail,” before being subdued, New York authorities signaled that they are more committed to social justice than genuine justice.

Violent criminals who have committed their lives to villainy will be given endless second, third, fourth, and 37th chances. They are victims of oppression, racism, and societal transgressions, according to the Left.

But if a good man individually steps in to help others in a moment of crisis, he will be punished. So, good men, if they are around at all, do nothing.

Like clockwork, several new violent and horrifying incidents took place on the New York City subway in the days before Christmas. One made national headlines.

On Sunday morning, a woman was lit on fire by an assailant while apparently sleeping on the F train. She later died from her injuries. A few viral videos emerged from the incident showing the woman being consumed by fire while the suspect in the attack literally fans the flames.

I won’t link to the videos here. You can find them yourself if you wish, but be warned, they are disturbing.

The videographers provided commentary, but no aid. In fact, nobody seemed to be doing anything to help the woman. In one of the videos, a police officer appeared to be standing near the burning victim, but made no attempt to rescue her from the fire.

The New York Police Department said the officer’s behavior was correct protocol, but it’s hard to imagine watching calmly as someone burns to death.

To make the incident even more heinous, the arson suspect is a 33-year-old illegal alien, Sebastian Zapeta-Calil. He had been staying at the Days Inn hotel on 36th Street, one of the city’s numerous taxpayer-funded “migrant” shelters.

Zapeta-Calil illegally crossed the U.S. southern border in 2018 before being deported by the Trump administration. He had since made his way back into the country.

Yet, somehow, this wasn’t the only serious incident in the past week.

On Christmas Eve, two people were stabbed at Grand Central Station.

The suspect, identified by police as 28-year-old Brooklyn native Jason Sargeant, began repeatedly yelling at a female victim, “What’s your problem?” He is said to have then lunged at her and slashed the 26-year-old’s throat.

“I wish I could be able to travel to my livelihood and not be attacked,” the victim said, The New York Post reported. “I wish there were cops in Grand Central when I was attacked. There were none. I was running for help, and there was no one there.”

She further said that no passersby even called 9-1-1, and that it was her neighbor who she was on a FaceTime call with when the attack happened who made that call.

These incidents are prime examples of why the “crime is actually plummeting” narrative we’ve heard from the media the past few years isn’t being bought by the public. There may be city and FBI data that show statistical declines in some crimes since it began skyrocketing in 2020, but our cities still feel chaotic, and these incidents are too frequent to be just random chance.

“The immolation was the 11th subway murder in New York City this year, surpassing this century’s high point of 10 in 2022,” the City Journal’s crime expert, Rafael Mangual, wrote on Monday. “Between 2000 and 2019, the NYC subways saw an average of 2.2 murders per year. Since 2020, the city has averaged eight murders a year—a nearly fourfold increase—despite significantly lower ridership, which means that the risk of such incidents is even higher than the raw numbers suggest.”

Somehow, tone-deaf Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul posted on social media just hours after the subway immolation, celebrating how she had made the subway safe and increased ridership.

Two hours ago, Kathy Hochul took a victory lap for making subways “safer.” She congratulates herself on the same day two subway riders were stabbed in Queens (one in the face and one in the chest) and another was barbarically burned alive.

Has there ever been a more tone-deaf… pic.twitter.com/KIPujqpKa3

— Ritchie Torres (@RitchieTorres) December 22, 2024

Incredible.

The party of Big Government doesn’t want to actually govern; it merely wants to rule. Its members insist on lecturing, coasting on vibes, and handing over policymaking to their ideologically fanatical activist class that thinks men can be women, no person is illegal, and criminals are the real victims.

The Regime says all is well: “Don’t trust your instincts or your lying eyes.” It has dubious government-approved (and later stealth-edited) stats and selfies to prove us wrong.

Yet, Americans can find plenty of evidence on social media and in their own lives that proves the entire lot of farcical, force-fed narratives to be bunk. Penny’s story resonated because, when a decent man had to intervene because of the failure of authorities to deal with street crime, those same authorities tried to turn him into the villain.

Now, everyone is paying the price because the justice system turned justice on its head.

Americans—even many New Yorkers—want the chaos and crime to stop. They want order restored. They don’t want to hear about illegal aliens killing subway riders and young girls. They don’t want to live in fear while commuting to work or going on a jog or visiting friends in the city.

Maybe now, as the evidence of failure becomes undeniable, something will change.

According to a number of reports, President-elect Donald Trump will be creating a commission to review leaders in the military with the assumption that many of the top brass will be fired.

Trump will be using a “warrior board” of retired officers, The Hill reported, to review our current crop of three- and four-star officers and will weed out the ones the commission disapproves of.

That’s not all.

Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth—an Army veteran who has been awarded two Bronze Stars, and who served in Iraq and Afghanistan—said in past interviews that it’s necessary to remove “woke” senior military officials who have left the U.S. armed forces in a sorry state.

“First of all, you’ve got to fire [the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and obviously you’ve got to bring in a new secretary of defense, but any general that was involved—general, admiral, whatever—that was involved in any of the DEI woke s—, has got to go,” Hegseth said in an early November interview on “The Shawn Ryan Show” podcast. DEI is shorthand for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Pete Hegseth is ready for day one as Defense Secretary.

'All the woke Generals must be fired immediately.'pic.twitter.com/ai9cqoImj4

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) November 13, 2024

Trump and Hegseth—the author of “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free” and “Modern Warriors: Real Stories from Real Heroes”—clearly intend to shake up the military at the top.

The Left, however, isn’t taking it well.

Legacy media is reporting on that development as if it’s some kind of ominous sign that Trump will “politicize” the military. They are even calling it a “purge.”

One left-wing podcaster, Fred Wellman, who includes “democracy advocate” in his X bio, even posted that removing generals is “truly fascist.”

This is truly fascist. The idea is they'll review and fire generals is chilling beyond measure and will damage our military for a generation. You don't make generals overnight. It takes decades. The good ones will leave early instead of waiting to be destroyed. (gift)…

— Fred Wellman (@FPWellman) November 12, 2024

Ah, yes, civilian control of the military, so fascist.

For a quick history lesson, a president’s removal of generals and other high-ranking military leaders—especially after years of relative “peace”—has often been a significant boon, not a hindrance, to the military.

Peacetime militaries—and I only use that phrase loosely to refer to our own era of near-constant, low-level asymmetrical conflicts—frequently calcify. Leaders who successfully navigate the bureaucratic treadmill to make it to the top ranks in those times are frequently not the best wartime leaders.

Militaries need to be shaken up from time to time.

In the War of 1812, many American military officers were holdovers from the American Revolution. Many had grown old and ineffective. The crucible of war allowed junior commanders like Winfield Scott to emerge as a brilliant young general who would prove instrumental in that war and future conflicts.

In the Civil War, there was a tremendous shake-up of the senior ranks on both sides.

Marginal officers like Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who was almost entirely overlooked at the Virginia Military Institute, proved himself to be one of the most astoundingly gifted military commanders once he had a chance to prove himself in battle.

Abraham Lincoln suffered through far too many mediocrities at the top before finding war winners like Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. Almost none of the top commanders at the beginning of the war ended up in the same place by the war’s end.

Right now, the United States clearly needs a shake-up at the Pentagon in the worst way.

The world is in turmoil, thanks in no small part to the Biden administration, and we are closer to seeing an actual peer-to-peer conflict than perhaps at any point since World War II.

Yet, many on the Left are hyperventilating about the move. Why? It’s a pretty good sign that they know they’ve made serious inroads into military institutions that are historically traditional and conservative. They don’t want to lose their grip on the military, just as they fear losing control of any other institution they dominate.

The primary issue, beyond typical military calcification, is that our current military leadership appears to be filled with those who have floated to the top amid the general woke-ification of American society and government.

It’s not Trump who will be “politicizing” the military; it’s the military itself that has been politicized. DEI, critical race theory, and other radical ideologies have been force-fed into military institutions, and the Biden administration was only too happy to accelerate that transformation.

They justified DEI by saying that it would create a better, more cohesive military and deepen the pool of recruits. That was the same unproven, bogus argument corporate America made when it went whole hog on “diversity” to the point of climbing aboard the discrimination bandwagon.

But much like the corporate DEI push—which proved a financial liability, rather than a boon—the military DEI advocacy has failed to “succeed” by even the most basic measures.

Nearly every branch of the military now faces a historic recruitment crisis, not to mention a surge in worrisome incidents that suggest a decline in competence and warfighting capability.

To make matters worse—and this is why Trump’s shake-up is almost certainly necessary—the military has failed to hold anyone at the top accountable for notable failures on the international stage.

Those failures have significantly weakened this country’s prestige and credibility abroad.

Most notably was the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan. After that failure, nobody at the top got fired. The Biden administration and the military moved on, as if nothing had happened.

If we can’t handle our business against the Taliban, isn’t it worth questioning our ability to counter far greater potential adversaries, such as China?

To underscore the notion that the military has lost all accountability at the top, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin disappeared for nearly a week early this year to take care of a health issue before notifying the president.

If these are the sorts of “invaluable” leaders we may lose if Trump gets his way, it’s hard not to see the president-to-be’s “warrior board” as a net positive. This country should expect a lot better of its military.

This seems like an important moment for a “democratic” correction to a military that has seen a sharp decline in public trust.

Under Biden, the buck stopped nowhere. With Trump, maybe more capable leaders will have a chance to rise to the top and get our military back to focusing on preparedness and defending the American people.

A recent survey by Scott Rasmussen called “Elite 1%,” which was a project of the polling firm Napolitan Institute, reveals that there’s a stark divide between the viewpoints of ruling elites and the rest of the American people on a wide range of questions.

The report, released Friday, not only found wide differences in opinion between the American people and the elites, it also concluded that the gap in ideology and power between the groups may be leading to America’s fraught political situation.

The research categorized Americans into several groups, but focused on the gap between a small subset of elites and the rest of the country, which it defined as “Main Street Americans” who represent “70-75% of the U.S. population” and have none of the attributes of those categorized into the “elite” groups.

“They do NOT have postgraduate degrees, do NOT live in densely populated urban areas, and earn LESS than $150,000 annually” is how the survey defined so-called Main Street Americans.

The findings on the differences between the elites and the rest of America clearly represent an unmistakable political split between institutional insiders versus outsiders.

According to the report, “members of the Elite 1% have very favorable opinions of university professors, lawyers, union leaders, journalists, and members of Congress.”

While the elites leaned strongly toward the Democratic Party, those who were Republicans tended to be much more similar to their partisan counterparts rather than to Main Street Americans.

The elite insiders are typically more socially liberal, less likely to trust citizens to govern themselves, and—perhaps unsurprisingly—tend to be far more trusting in institutions to make the right decisions for the country (without much or any input from people outside their class).

They are also far more comfortable with censorship and regulating the lives of ordinary people.

On social issues, the poll found that there’s an enormous gap between most Americans and the elite on the issue of transgenderism and whether biological males should be allowed to participate in female sports.

“If a biological male identifies as a woman, just 17% of Main Street voters believe that person should be allowed to compete in women’s sports,” the research found. “Among the Elite 1%, 29% believe such athletes should be allowed to compete in women’s sports.”

It’s not just women’s sports on which there’s such a wide gap in opinion on the transgender issue.

“Only 9% of voters favor a regulation being developed by the Biden administration that would make misgendering a co-worker a fireable offense,” the study found. “Seventy-five percent (75%) of voters are opposed.”

The elites are also far more likely to announce their pronouns when introducing themselves.

“Only 10% of voters have introduced themselves by expressing their preferred pronouns,” the polling found. “Among the Elite 1%, more than 4 out of 10 have done so. Among the Politically Active Elites, 61% have introduced themselves by expressing their preferred pronouns.”

The elites are suspicious of the Second Amendment and even the First Amendment. Those amendments to the Bill of Rights protect the right to bear arms and the freedom of speech and assembly, respectively.

The polling divide between elites and average Americans on speech is stark:

Voters, by a 59% to 34% margin, believe that letting the government decide what counts as misinformation is more dangerous than the disinformation itself. Among the Elite 1%, the numbers are reversed: by a 57% to 39% margin, they see letting the government decide as the lesser problem.

The elites don’t just want to censor speech, they want to disarm Americans, according to the polling data.

“Seventy-two percent (72%) of the Elite 1% would prefer to live in communities where guns are outlawed,” the report found. “Most voters (51%) take the opposite view and would prefer to live in communities where guns are allowed.”

The research found that 77% of the elites polled want to ban the private ownership of firearms.

On the concept of self-government, elites were far more likely to not only make arbitrary decisions for society, but also to be OK with rigging the system to ensure they stay in power.

“If their campaign team thought they could get away with cheating to win, 7% of voters would want their team to cheat,” the polling found. “Among the Elite 1%, the support for cheating rose to 35%. And, among the Politically Active Elites, 69% would want their team to cheat, rather than accept voters’ decisions.”

Perhaps most surprisingly, the polls found that most elites had no idea that their ideas were so different from those of the mainstream.

The report found that “two-thirds (65%) of the Elite 1%—and 82% of Politically Active Elites—think most voters agree with them on important issues. As has been documented throughout this report, that is far from an accurate assessment.”

The creators of the project noted that while there is nothing wrong with there being large gaps in opinions on serious questions in a society, the Elite 1% “hold tremendous institutional and media power that amplifies their voices at the expense of the American people.”

This power is enhanced, they wrote, by the alliance between the elites “and the unelected managers of the federal government.”

They concluded that the views and overwhelming influence of out-of-touch elites “may be the root cause of the political toxicity in our nation today” and that their “underlying attitudes reflect an implicit rejection of the founding ideal that governments derive their only just authority from the consent of the governed.”