john petry

Since you named me, I want to respond directly.  Claire, you have a habit of treating “AIPAC” as a magic word that explains away every political setback. Lost support? AIPAC. Criticism? AIPAC. Voters disagree? AIPAC. You just suggested that undisclosed funding behind Real Fight NYC was tied to “pro-Israel” interests because I donated to your opponent. It wasn't. The PAC was funded by labor unions, a correction even Ryan Grim felt compelled to make. That is the problem with conspiracy-minded politics. The conclusion comes first, the evidence comes later, and reality is expected to fit the narrative rather than the other way around. People who pride themselves on fighting prejudice should be especially careful about prejudging others. This isn't a politics of substance or depth. It isn't even original. It is the same shallow conspiracy politics used by people across the political spectrum when they lack facts, evidence, or a more convincing argument. Frankly, it’s disappointing to see. Democrats spent years criticizing Donald Trump for weaponizing conspiracy theories whenever reality did not go his way. We should not be adopting the same playbook simply because it is politically convenient. Conspiracy thinking is corrosive whether it comes from the right or the left. Not every Jewish organization is AIPAC. Not every donor is part of a coordinated plot. And not every candidate who struggles politically is the victim of some grand scheme. Yet Claire, you seem determined to flatten every disagreement into the same simplistic story. The irony is that people who claim to oppose exclusion often seem perfectly comfortable treating Jewish participation in politics as uniquely suspect when it becomes politically convenient. You can disagree with Israel. You can criticize AIPAC. What you cannot do is suggest that Jewish donors, Jewish organizations, or people who hold different views should somehow be excluded from the democratic process. The problem may be that governing and politics are more complicated than you want them to be. Serious issues require serious analysis. They require the ability to distinguish between different organizations, different motivations, and different people. Not everything fits neatly into a slogan. I am proud to have supported Democratic candidates across America, and I will continue doing so. No amount of name-calling, conspiracy theories, or attempts to delegitimize my participation in the political process will change that. As for this race, I am happy to support your opponent because I believe he would bring the judgment, seriousness, and effectiveness that New Yorkers deserve from their representative in Congress. It is really that simple. No conspiracy required.

Tonight's NYC election prediction: Mamdani 50% Cuomo 40% Sliwa 10%

Dems are hiring the killers to do an autopsy ... of course.

Dumb and dumber, the message and the messenger:

This great, give it a try.

An encouraging start that is hopefully followed up with real consequences.

@RezaC1 @WhitneyTilson A debilitated Mayor who is fighting for his own survival is not an effective adversary to the City Council. An outsider Mayor changes the political dynamics and even the City Council would notice that. Not every member, but certainly some.

@WhitneyTilson How will your mayorship be successful if you still have radical leftists in the city council? I’m rather confident the current mayor doesn’t support this bill either.

It would be hard to find a better example of why I’m running for mayor: to drag my party back from left-wing extremists who pass legislation that goes way too far, endangering us all – and costing us elections. The far left is pushing a bill in the city council to ABOLISH – not reform or improve – the database the NYPD uses to track gangs/gang members. It would permanently delete all the information the NYPD has been collecting over many years on many of the most dangerous criminals among us. This bill is an especially bad idea at a time when New Yorkers feel increasingly unsafe, and for good reason: the seven major felonies are up 52% in the past five years and felony assaults are at a 25-year high. If you think such an obvious misguided bill would attract only fringe support, think again: the bill has 24 sponsors, nearly half of the 51 members of the city council, so it might pass, despite efforts this afternoon by the NYPD to talk some sense into the supporters (see: NYC Council, NYPD brass duel over bills to eliminate gang database, testing teens for DNA, yahoo.com/news/nyc-counc…). I understand concerns that the database may include too many people who have limited contact with gangs/gang members, but the NYPD has been addressing them. In fact, according to testimony this afternoon by Michael Gerber, the deputy commissioner for legal matters, there are more controls in place and the database now only has 13,000 names in it and just 160 teenagers, down from 18,000 and 440, respectively, five years ago. In addition, the primary finding in a comprehensive 98-page report in April 2023 by the NYC Department of Investigation was that it “was not able to find evidence that inclusion in the database has caused harm to any individual or group of individuals.” (nyc.gov/assets/doi/rep…) The report, however, did make 17 recommendations to “strengthen the policies and practices around the use and operation of the database,” most of which seem reasonable. But that’s not what the current bill will do. Peter Moskos, author of Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop, in this X thread (x.com/petermoskos/st…) writes that the city council: “…could write a law with oversight of the list, or scrubbing after x number years, or notifying minors they're on it and allowing them to contest. Reasonable reform. The latter was even proposed in 2019. But the goal isn't improvement. The goal is police abolition. I mean, read the text! Do we want police from being prohibited to keep a criminal group database?! That is what the bill does. You could not give a better gift to criminal groups. This includes the mob and right-wing terrorists, let's not forget.” The Manhattan Institute’s Rafael Mangual in this X thread (x.com/Rafa_Mangual/s…) adds: “The push to do away w/ the city’s gang database is based on a dorm room cocktail of bad arguments and hyperbole. I ran those arguments down back in 2019 (A Serious Threat to New York, city-journal.org/article/a-seri…), when activists published a “report” (in coordination w/ LegalAid) calling for the database’s erasure. As I said then, the report (like the broader case against the database’s maintenance) is based on a ‘collection of unsubstantiated claims—leveled, often anonymously, by the friends and families of a handful of convicted criminals and members of the criminal-defense bar—innuendo, factual misstatements, and misguided ideas about the ‘root causes’ of crime...’” Democrats must not repeat the mistakes that Trump and Musk are making with DOGE, using a grenade when a scalpel is called for.

Old footage of NYC is priceless!

Whitney, won't be unknown for long!

@WhitneyTilson I'm nominating the Windward School @Windward_school, which is a specialty school in NYC that has helped many families that I know.

For the sixth $5,000 charity donation, please nominate a NYC charity that supports students with dyslexia, preferably in underserved communities. Don't forget to pitch your recommended charity to the community! Poll to follow nominations.

This is ungodly idiocy – and exactly why I’m running against my own party in NYC. If you want to know why we Democrats are losing support in every corner of the country among every demographic group – and will continue to do so until we wrest control from the extremist left – watch this: x.com/bonchieredstat… And read this – Jonathan Chait nails it: The Democrats Show Why They Lost At a meeting of the DNC, the party seemed to be at pains to demonstrate that it learned nothing from its 2024 defeat. By Jonathan Chait February 2, 2025, 6:40 PM ET theatlantic.com/politics/archi… Speaking to the Democratic National Committee, which met to select its new leadership this weekend, the outgoing chair, Jaime Harrison, attempted to explain a point about its rules concerning gender balance for its vice-chair race. “The rules specify that when we have a gender-nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced,” Harrison announced. As the explanation became increasingly intricate, Harrison’s elucidation grew more labored. “To ensure our process accounts for male, female, and nonbinary candidates, we conferred with our [Rules and Bylaws Committee] co-chair, our LGBT Caucus co-chair, and others to ensure that the process is inclusive and meets the gender-balance requirements in our rules,” he added. “To do this, our process will be slightly different than the one outlined to you earlier this week, but I hope you will see that in practice, it is simple and transparent.” The Democratic Party, at least in theory, is an organization dedicated to winning political power through elected office, though this might seem hard to believe on the evidence provided by its official proceedings. The DNC’s meetings included a land acknowledgment, multiple shrieking interruptions by angry protesters, and a general affirmation that its strategy had been sound, except perhaps insufficiently committed to legalistic race and gender essentialism. The good news about the DNC, for those who prefer that the country have a politically viable alternative to the authoritarian personality cult currently running it, is that the official Democratic Party has little power. The DNC does not set the party’s message, nor will it determine its next presidential candidate. The bad news is that the official party’s influence is so meager, in part because the party has largely ceded it to a collection of progressive activist groups. These groups, funded by liberal donors, seldom have a broad base of support among the voting public but have managed to amass enormous influence over the party. They’ve done so by monopolizing the brand value of various causes. Climate groups, for instance, define what good climate policy means, and then they judge candidates based on how well they affirm those positions. The same holds true for abortion, racial justice, and other issues that many Democrats deem important. The groups are particularly effective at spreading their ideas through the media, especially (but not exclusively) through the work of progressive-leaning journalists, who lean on both the expertise that groups provide and their ability to drive news (by, say, scolding Democratic candidates who fall short of their standards of ideological purity). The 2020 Democratic primary represented the apogee, to that point, of the groups’ influence. The gigantic field of candidates slogged through a series of debates and interviews in which journalists asked if they would affirm various positions demanded by the groups. That is how large chunks of the field wound up endorsingdecriminalization of the border, reparations, and other causes that are hardly consensus positions within the Democratic Party, let alone the broader electorate. It is also how Kamala Harris came out for providing free gender-reassignment surgery to prisoners and migrant detainees, which became the basis of the Trump campaign’s most effective ad against her. The ongoing influence of the groups can be seen in a new New York Times poll. Asked to list their top priorities, respondents cited, in order, the economy, health care, immigration, taxes, and crime. Asked what they believed Democrats’priorities were, they cited abortion, LGBTQ policy, climate change, the state of democracy, and health care. That perception of the party’s priorities may not be an accurate description of the views of its elected officials. But it is absolutely an accurate description of the priorities of progressive activist groups. The poll is a testament to how well the groups have done their job. They have set out to raise public awareness of a series of issues their donors care about, and to commit the party to prioritizing them, and they have done so. Democrats in public office may be mostly engaged in fighting about the economy, health care, and other issues, but they lack the communications apparatus controlled by the groups, which have blotted out their poll-tested messages in favor of donor-approved ones. Over the past year or so, and especially since Harris’s defeat, some centrist commentators have begun to question the groups’ influence. But the DNC meetings offered no evidence that their thinking has gone out of style. If Democrats learned from Harris’s campaign that they should try to stop holding events that are easily repurposed as viral Republican attack ads, they showed no sign of it over the weekend. When activists repeatedly interrupted speakers, they were met supportively. “Rather than rebuff the interruptions,” observedthe Wall Street Journal reporter Molly Ball, “those onstage largely celebrated them, straining to assure the activists they were actually on the same side and eagerly giving them the platform they broke the rules to demand.” Neither Harrison nor his successor, Ken Martin, has questioned Joe Biden’s decision to run for a second term, nor any of the messaging or policy that contributed to his dismal approval ratings. When MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart asked one panel of candidates if they believed racism and misogyny contributed to Harris’s defeat, every panelist agreed. “That’s good, you all pass,” he said. (Note that this diagnosis of the election result has no actionable takeaway other than that perhaps the party should refrain from nominating a woman or person of color.) The most sadly revealing outcome of the meeting may be the elevation of David Hogg as vice chair. Hogg, a 24-year-old activist, rose to prominence as a survivor of the Parkland, Florida, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, and then quickly assimilated the full range of progressive stances—defund ICE, abolish the police, etc.—into his heavily online persona. And despite the horrific experience he endured, he does not seem to be notably wise beyond his years. After the far-right activist and pillow peddler Mike Lindell gained prominence as an election denier, I joked online that progressives needed their own pillow company. (The joke, of course, is that there is obviously no need for your pillow company to endorse your political views.) The next month, Hogg went ahead and turned this joke into reality, founding Good Pillow before resigninga few months later. Hogg’s takeawayfrom the 2024 presidential race is that Democrats lost because they failed to rally the youth vote with a rousing message on guns, climate, and other issues favored by progressive activists. Polling, in fact, showed that young voters had similar issue priorities as older voters, but Hogg’s elevation was a tribute to the wish masquerading as calculation that Democrats can gain vote share without compromising with the electorate. Some Democrats observed the events of the weekend with wry fatalism. At one point, a protester in a Sunrise Movement T-shirt interrupted by shouting, “I am terrified!” She was not alone.

@WhitneyTilson I'd like to nominate @GOSONYC - Getting out and Staying out, which focuses on the Three E’s: Education, Employment, and Emotional Well-being.

For the fifth $5,000 charity award, please nominate a NYC charity helping our formerly incarcerated population. Don't forget to pitch your charity to the community! Poll to follow nominations.

@WhitneyTilson I'd like to nominate @TheNYFoundling, which provides mental health resources into public schools to help students through periods of crisis.

For the fourth $5,000 charity donation, please nominate a NYC charity helping to improve mental health in our City. Don't forget to pitch your recommended charity to the community! Poll to follow nominations.

Columbia University has a new "naming opportunity"' for donors: "We will name the new toilets after you, if you send us $100k"

Toxic mix of a failed criminal justice system and subways overrun with dangerous criminals. abc7ny.com/post/subway-cr…

See brave New Yorkers protecting one another in the chaos of our subways.

Excellent thread on rule of law.

To crooked cop Jeffrey Maddrey covered his tracks by turning off location tracking. "zero tolerance" means nothing without severe and public consequences. Mayor Adams: what are you going to do about this?

In a world where $15 AirTags are highly effective at tracking location, a $65B upgrade to track trains in tunnels sounds like a crazy price tag. gothamist.com/news/driving-b…

This story sums up the current state of subway violence and bail reform - found with blood on his shoes and armed after head-stomping victim, a suspect is shocked that there is cash bail. How long until the DSA creates a GoFundMe for the suspect ? amny.com/news/violent-m…