No-bail release in New York hits the Times!

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2024

All praise to the Internet Archive: In this morning's print editions, last week's no-bail release of the Gotham cop-beaters has appeared in the New York Times.

Andy Newman is the lead reporter. Print edition headline included, the report begins like this:

Grand Jury Set in Assault On Officers In Times Sq.

As he prepares to present evidence to a grand jury on Tuesday against a group of men charged with assaulting police officers in Times Square, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, is under pressure over his handling of the case.

In all, seven men were arrested following the Jan. 27 assault, in which an officer and a lieutenant sustained minor injuries. All of them were migrants, according to a law enforcement official.

Prosecutors decided not to ask the judge to hold most of the men on bail, and after they were released from jail last week, four of them fled the city, according to the official.

Mr. Bragg quickly became the subject of unusual public criticism from the police. In response, he expressed concern that all the perpetrators might not have been correctly identified.

The report begins to fill in some of the basic factual information about this high-profile series of incidents. Newman cites Governor Hochul's reaction during this later passage:

The case and the outcry over Mr. Bragg’s handling of it touch on several hot-button issues. Among them are criticism of New York’s bail-reform laws, which bar judges from setting bail in most nonviolent crimes, and many New Yorkers’ declining patience with footing the bill for the care of the nearly 70,000 migrants housed in city shelters.

Most of the men arrested in the attack were charged with felony assault, a crime that remains eligible for bail even under changes in New York State bail law. Nevertheless, they were released without bail.

The firestorm recalled past episodes in which Mr. Bragg did not proactively address politically charged cases and policy decisions, including a 2022 case in which a bodega clerk who killed an attacker was initially charged with homicide. He has faced backlash from both Democrats and Republicans in such instances, often responding some time after criticism has begun.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, Democrat of New York, said at a news conference on Wednesday that she was “looking to judges and prosecutors to do the right thing” in the Times Square case. On Thursday, she said of any migrants found responsible for the assault: “Get them all and send them back.”

As we noted last week, Hochul has called for deportation of the assailants, who attacked the pair of police officers in a group of roughly twelve. For the record, "the firestorm," "the outcry" and "the unusual public criticism" of Alvin Bragg hasn't simply come "from the police."

The outcry concerning this matter has occurred all over the Fox News Channel, with the Times arriving on the scene perhaps a week too late.

Governor Hochul has actively called for deportation. As we noted last week, Al Sharpton has said, on several occasions, that violent assaults of this type are not the kinds of events bail reform was ever meant to address.

On this morning's Morning Joe, Sharpton took his language concerning this incident quite a bit further. On at least two separate occasions, he referred to the influx of migrants into northern cities run by black mayors as a type of "invasion." 

In that way, Sharpton echoed the kind of language which has fueled commentary about the southern from the political right. During the past few years, our own blue tribe has largely persisted in pretending that the southern border, with its attendant problems, doesn't even exist. It's been all about Trump Trump Trump Jail!

We can't yet link you to Sharpton's new statements; for unknown reasons, the Internet Archive tends to be slower in posting videotape from Morning Joe than from all other MSNBC programs. 

With that said, let us also say this:

All praise to the Internet Archive and to its almost wholly unutilized public service!

Good lord! The Internet Archive actually posts minute-by-minute videotape of all programs on all three of our major "cable news" channels! In principle, this permits a full examination of what's being said, to millions of people, on these high-profile networks.

Having said that, we'll add this:

We don't think we've ever seen anyone ever offer a link to any of the video content made available through this remarkable service. Especially in the case of the astonishing content now being churned on primetime shows on the Fox News Channel, the finer people have thereby normalized the astounding degradation of the public discourse being engineered on Fox.

For ourselves, it has worked like this:

We only began to watch Fox programs with more regularity when the offerings on MSNBC became completely unwatchable. Since we began watching Fox with more regularity, we've been surprised by the extent of the change in the channel's long-standing partisan bombast format—but also by the absolute, undisguised stupidity the channel now provides during the bulk of its primetime hours.

Fox's turn to a "comedy"-based delivery system may well make for more effective tribal propaganda. During the course of this election year, we're going to make sure that this conduct is memorialized, though we can assure you that career players within our blue world will not be discussing this conduct by Fox, except in the general, softer-soap ways our tribe enjoys and admires.

Starting in March 1999, we documented the ways the mainstream press corps make a 20-month joke of Campaign 2000. That said, what was happening in the mainstream press corps stayed within the mainstream press corps, and it still basically does:

The liberal world is still almost wholly unaware of what was done to its interests during that remarkably stupid press corps campaign—what was done by the mainstream press, not by "the right-wing machine."

We're going to document the events of this campaign too. Tomorrow morning, we'll start by looking at the ship of fools assembled to chat about "President Poopy Pants," the "vegetable in chief," on the astonishingly stupid Gutfeld! program last Friday night.

Your tribe's career players will almost surely avert their gaze from what we post at this site. It's hard to believe that these are the ways "the rational animal" actually works, but this is the way that animal works—first within the marauding red tribe, then also within the self-protective blue.

We'll link you to Sharpton's comments when they become available. This isn't what bail reform was intended to do, he instantly said last week—and now, rightly or wrongly, he seems to have said much more.

Many blue voters are convinced that our blue tribe figures are constantly upright and pure. Red voters tend to think the same thing about their tribal figures. Until we train ourselves to be wiser, we're wired to react in such ways.

That no-bail release is costing us votes. The Times arrived on the scene a week later. Few other figures from our tribe have made it there at all!