Opinion
By Jeff Childers
12/7/24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Today marks the anniversary of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, and is known by that date, which as FDR proclaimed, is a date that shall live in infamy. Our roundup is a trio of high-profile news: Daniel Penny’s case takes an unexpected twist confounding court watchers; 60-page blockuster report lands on lazy federal workforce; and a new lawsuit takes aim at the trans establishment’s top doctor.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
🔥 Daniel Penny’s trial, now reaching its electrifying conclusion, has fully captured the nation’s imagination. The heroic former marine’s unjust persecution lies at the three-way intersection of two-tiered double-standards; a bizarre, funhouse-mirror distortion of racial grievance politics; and the moral sinkhole swallowing New York’s state’s justice system. It raises profound questions about civilization’s will to continue existing. Yesterday saw a thrilling twist in the Danny Penny story. Shortly after C&C predicted it yesterday, the jury declared a deadlock. The judge’s shockingly unfair response was reported in a Washington Post story confusingly headlined, “Manslaughter charge in Daniel Penny trial dismissed, jury resumes next week.”
Props to the courtroom sketch artist for carefully recording Juror No. 2’s double mask situation.
Manhattan Attorney General Alvin Bragg and his team of prosecutors filed two counts against Daniel Penny, after the courageous veteran briefly threw a headlock around chronic offender, drug addict, and domestic terrorist Jordan Neely, to hold him from hurting innocent passengers on their shared subway car. By the way, none of those facts have ever been disputed.
The state’s two counts included Count one, now dismissed, for manslaughter. Remaining Count two is for negligent homicide. Both crimes involve accidentally killing someone. Manslaughter offers a higher sentence —25 years— but requires proof of aggressive recklessness. It is often charged, for instance, in fatal DUI cases.
Negligent homicide is a lesser offense needing proof only of dangerous carelessness, like leaving a drunk, 86-year-old congresswoman in a hot car. Under New York Law, negligent homicide carries a maximum sentence of only four years. (Still far too long, but not long enough for some New York leftists.)
As predicted, yesterday morning the jury issued its note declaring a deadlock — but on Count I only. Because they didn’t also declare a deadlock on Count II, the judge and Bragg’s prosecutors had a last-ditch chance to dream up a creative and almost certainly unconstitutional solution.
Facing the jury’s deadlock declaration on Count I, Bragg’s prosecutors essentially said fine. We’ll just dismiss Count I and bingo, bango, bongo, problem solved. No more deadlock. Ta-da! They can’t deadlock Count I because we dismissed it first.
Danny’s lawyers hotly objected. They rightly argued that, if this tactic works, prosecutors will always overcharge cases, knowing they can just dismiss any counts that offend the jury if a deadlock looms. But the judge overruled them, deciding instead to breathe new life into the dying case by giving the jury the weekend to cool off and ordering them to start re-deliberating again on Monday morning. This time, on Count II only.
It was absurd. The judge’s decision transformed the case into a legal and procedural train wreck, as well as a mockery of justice.
The biggest problem arose from the good reason the jury only declared a deadlock on Count I. Everyone involved understands why. Only we and the public remain in the dark, thanks to useless corporate media.
The reason the jury only declared a Count I deadlock is that the jury instructions carefully and explicitly say the jurors must first decide Count I and only then move on to Count II. Carefully reading the jury instructions, the jury logically concluded that, since they were deadlocked on Count I, they could not move on to Count II. The instructions won’t let them.
According to reports on X —I couldn’t find any part of the transcript in corporate media— prosecutor Dafna Yoran (MUST be a fake name) whined to the judge, “It would be a crazy result to have a hung jury just because they can’t move on to the second count!” Here is Karen, I mean Dafna:
According to other reports, Judge Maxwell Wiley responded, “I am taking a chance and granting the People’s motion” to dismiss Count I and let the jury consider Count II anyway.
Taking a chance?? He’s taking a chance all right.
I’m not a criminal lawyer, and I don’t practice in New York. But to my legal eye, what the judge did yesterday was verbally rewrite the jury instructions. He told the jury they should move on to Count II, without deciding Count I, even though the jury instructions do not allow that. To me, this seems like a wild travesty of justice and an unforgivable violation of Penny’s due process.
In short, judges can’t just change the rules in midstream to suit their own personal bias or political agenda. I get that, once Count I was dismissed, the instructions fouled everything up, since Dafna never imagined this possible outcome. Well, too bad. The prosecutors should have requested more flexible jury instructions.
In short, any confusion over the jury instructions was created by the prosecutors when they dismissed Count I. It’s not Danny’s fault. The judge’s mistake is so awful and so obvious it makes me wonder whether the judge is secretly trying to help Danny, by sabotaging the case with reversible error. Or maybe he panicked.
Either way, that’s how technically bad his decision was.
This jury is smarter than the judge. They won’t take the bait. I bet they will just deadlock again. They’ll deadlock the less serious Count II. (Deadlock, rather than acquittal, seems inevitable, most likely thanks to the looney double-masked juror.) For several reasons, it looks like this jury has a strong foreman, and they already deadlocked on Count I.
Meanwhile, as the case continues to curry the country’s fears, hopes, and dreams of justice, Fox ran an encouraging story yesterday headlined, “Daniel Penny to be tapped for Congressional Gold Medal by House GOP lawmaker.” The sub-headline added, “Mr. Penny bravely stood in the gap to defy this corrupt system and protect his fellow Americans, says Rep. Eli Crane.”
Whether or not the excellent resolution ultimately passes, and they should pass it, it’s still a bat-signal to Danny, from the people: we see you and we get it. Stay frosty, marine.
Finally, the WaPo’s story’s comments were very encouraging. Comments from WaPo’s far-left readers are running about ten-to-one in Penny’s favor. Assuming the jury is of similar composition (comparing WaPo readers to New Yorkers seems fair) Danny Penny is in great shape.
🔥🔥🔥
Speaking of issues electrifying the nation, yesterday Fortune ran a followup story headlined, “Elon Musk is planning a rude awakening for 94% of federal workers by monitoring their every move.” Hopefully. Creaky corporate media reporters are suddenly re-discovering their duty to criticize the government — for criticizing the government. (We won’t let them get away with it, but that is a side issue.) Fortune found outrage even though Musk is only an advisor to a future government. Whatever, Fortune.
The headline —Billionaire takes over government!— was incredibly deceptive. The story barely involved Musk, who’d only tweeted about the story. The news was Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) did two things this week. First, she released a 60-page report on how few government workers even show up to work these days. It’s a hoot, written tongue-in-cheek, and it’s astonishing how badly managed the federal government is.
Read Joni’s report, at least the executive summary. Here are its first few paragraphs:
Secondly, not accidentally timed with her report, Senator Ernst sponsored a bill titled the REMOTE Act, which among other things would allow mild monitoring software to be installed on federal workers’ computers, and would require agencies to “assess” the “impact” of remote work. In other words, meh.
But Fortune breathlessly labeled Ernst’s bill DOGE-related.
That’s it! The story does not claim that Musk was involved, with either the report or the bill. Fortune didn’t even claim Musk had ever spoken with Senator Ernst. The space billionaire tweeted about Ernst’s report, and Ernst tweeted that she looked forward to working with him. Yet Fortune placed Musk into the headline’s first two words. And then used him as a prompt for a bunch of Marxist, anti-billionaire fearmongering included in the article.
In a very cowardly fashion, Fortune turned off the article’s comments section. Mark my words, this story is red-pilling even more Democrats.
💉💉💉
The far-left Economist ran a surprisingly sane story yesterday under the deceptive, passive-voice headline, “America’s best-known practitioner of youth gender medicine is being sued.” It should have read, “former child patient sues America’s best-known gender doctor.” Hyphenated doctor Johanna Olson-Kennedy is the Medical Director of the Center for Transyouth at Los Angeles Children’s Hospital. She is also the president-elect of the United States Association for Transgender Health. Now, along with two other so-called “doctors,” Johanna is staring at a serious lawsuit from her former child patient.
The Economist called Johanna “among the most celebrated youth gender medicine clinicians in the world.” Celebrated is one way of putting it. She’s scooped up tens of millions in grants from the National Institutes of Health. The dashed doctor also coined the ugly quote that you’ve probably seen circulating online: “If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.”
Johanna thinks she’s a pioneer. Current transgender guidelines strongly “suggest the importance of conducting a careful, in-depth assessment prior to starting a young person on puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.” But the Economist explained that “Johanna has emerged as a critic of what she views as undue and unnecessary ‘gatekeeping.’”
And that trademark, the lack of ‘gatekeeping,’ making sure her patients are actually suffering from gender dysphoria before prescribing life-changing procedures, is exactly what Dr. Olson-Kennedy is now being sued for. You might recall Johanna from this story back in October:
Johanna was the lead researcher on a fabulously expensive, government-funded study (she got about $10 million dollars). But it didn’t turn out like she’d hoped. When her best efforts to wring a positive result from her study of kids on puberty drugs failed, she buried her own study.
Refusing to publish unfavorable results —after taking public money!— is the worst kind of academic abuse and widely considered unethical.
In one widely-circulated, secretly recorded presentation, Dr. Dash told other doctors that puberty blockers are as reversible as a haircut, toys, clothing style, a new name, and pronouns. She also said, “some surgeries are partially reversible,” presumably referring to her insane notion that “going and getting” breast augmentation “reverses” a double mastectomy.
Accepting for purposes of argument that puberty blockers and mastectomies are reversible (they aren’t), Johanna’s moronic argument still fails. Any child who transitions —involving their extended family, school, church, and social groups, and makes profound, life-altering decisions to undertake painful procedures rife with side effects ranging from inconvenient to deadly— that child faces inconceivable levels of psychological pressure to stay the course.
How is that “as reversible as a haircut?”
It is unimaginable how much strength of will and personality would be required for a hormone-addled child, who put herself, her parents, her family, and her friends through the pain and suffering of the first gender change, to destransition. After all that, who is possibly courageous enough to recognize her mistake and change back? That is why detransitioners usually don’t desist till their 20’s — after they’ve escaped their parent’s baleful influence.
💉 Johanna is married to Aydin, a female-to-male transgender, licensed social worker, and trans activist.
I’m going to respectfully, and delicately, suggest Johanna probably suffers from her own mental health challenges.
Dr. Olson-Kennedy will never be accused of being an intellectual superstar. Listening to one of Dr. Olson’s lectures, one is most reminded of an over-excited woman in a bar after her third Cosmopolitan. Yet she is considered one of the “elite,” a trans “thought leader.” She somehow graduated from medical school, wrung millions in grants out of the U.S. government, became a large-hospital medical director, yet argues with the strength of a tipsy drunk.
CLIP: Johanna Olson-Kennedy tries to make some kind of argument (1:00).
The lawsuit’s plaintiff, Clementine Breen, 20, first saw Dr. Olson-Kennedy when she was 12. After a short, 30-minute intake, Dr. Olson-Kennedy took Clementine’s parents aside and privately, off the record, informed them the poor girl was suicidal, and the only thing that could save her life was to immediately begin aggressively transitioning. A year of testosterone later, Dr. Olson-Kennedy referred Clementine for her irreversible double mastectomy.
In her lawsuit, Clementine says she was not suicidal. Indeed, there is nothing in her voluminous medical record that even hints the girl ever considered taking her own life. To the contrary, she was often described as happy, “smiling,” and outgoing. In short, Dr. Olson-Kennedy lied —the worst, most despicable kind of lie— to Clem’s parents to terrify them into medically savaging their daughter’s healthy body.
Clem stopped taking testosterone about a year ago and began detransitioning in March. She now says she is much happier, even with the permanent side-effects of her unneeded treatments. This week she sued Dr. Olson-Kennedy and the surgeon who performed the double mastectomy, along with the gender therapist who rubber-stamped Dr. Dash’s recommendations, and twenty as-yet-unnamed “Doe Defendants” who conspired with the doctors to defraud Clementine.
I’ve described but the barest minimum of Clementine’s horrific ordeal. Read her complaint for more of the ghastly detail: Link to lawsuit against Olson-Kennedy and her co-conspirators.
The threat to the trans establishment is not the potential for a large money judgment. Presumably, Children’s Hospital would cover it. More threatening is the potential discovery. As stone-dumb and mixed-up as she is, Dr. Olson-Kennedy is somehow a cornerstone of the transgender high-rise. Discredit her, and the whole horrific edifice might soon topple over.
The lawsuit’s timing is remarkably prescient. It appeared both in court and in the media the same week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over Tennessee’s ban on the very same medical procedures Dr. Olson-Kennedy prescribed for Clementine. The Economist’s tone was subtly sympathetic to Clementine.
Clementine and her parents gave the Economist a long interview and tons of documents to review. Dr. Dash and Children’s Hospital refused to comment. So.
An unstoppable momentum is building behind the locomotive of sanity, which is hurtling down the tracks toward a final endpoint of our long national trans nightmare. It can’t come soon enough.
Have a wonderful weekend! I’ll see you back here Monday morning to kick the week off right.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
