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It’s official: New York City is MAGA country.

I state this without qualification and without having to check the facts because Amanda Marcotte, who has never been wrong about anything before, has decreed it to be true.

Before a shred of corroborating evidence was in, Marcotte, who has the most masculine jawline I’ve ever seen this side of 1960s bubblegum star Tommy James, used her powers of righteous divination to discern that when a black stripper accused three white males of raping her in 2006’s Duke lacrosse rape scandal, she wasn’t lying:

Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.

As things turned out, the black stripper, Crystal Mangum, was lying. Mangum then proceeded to stab her boyfriend to death and get convicted of murder.

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Undaunted by reality and boldly impelled to project her confirmation biases onto the world, Marcotte also knew that when Rolling Stone magazine published a 9,000-word feature in 2014 about how a woman was gang-raped amid bloody glass shards by a group of frat boys at the University of Virginia’s “overwhelmingly blond” campus, the woman who wrote the article was telling the truth.

Don’t pay one bit of mind to the fact that the whole article was a hoax, just like the Duke lacrosse fairy tale.

Marcotte, you see, is fighting the good fight. She’s on the right side of history. And people who are convinced beyond all doubt that they represent the good side refuse to be deterred by facts.

So when stories recently started emerging that suggested men in New York City were randomly running up to women and punching them in the face, Amanda Marcotte was on the case. She knew not only exactly what was happening, but why it was happening.

“Men punching random women in NYC: A desperate last gasp of the male rage fueling MAGA” reads Monday’s reality-eclipsed headline in Salon, where Marcotte is listed as a “Staff Writer”:

Men are punching random women on the streets of New York City. As usual with these kinds of diffuse and chaotic stories, there’s much that is unknown, including how often this is happening, how many people are involved, or whether it’s at all coordinated. . . .

Unleashed by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, there’s an upswell of loud male entitlement shouting at us from every corner . . . We see it in the male fans of Jordan Peterson, who clamor to his events to hear him croak out a just-so story about how lobsters justify their faith in male dominance. Or the rise of “tradwives” online who make a living pretending they’re unemployed and housebound. Or Ben Shapiro setting fire to a Barbie doll because he can’t stand that a blockbuster comedy starring a woman is about anything but her quest for male affection. Or MAGA pundits telling lies about birth control, in hopes of tricking women into having babies before they’re ready. Or conservatives writing op-eds that blame women for male loneliness, telling women they must self-sacrifice to relieve male pain by marrying Donald Trump voters. . . .

The rise of MAGA is fueled by misogyny. But it’s less a backlash than a tantrum, a rage explosion by men who want to restore their dominance but fear that, this time, women won’t buckle to their bullying. This rash of men punching women in New York City captures this moment in a dark way. We don’t even need to know their names or faces. . . .

Well, here’s one of the suspects’ faces. And here’s another. And another. And, for your viewing pleasure, yet another. Their faces definitely all seem to be capturing the moment “in a dark way.” And here are the faces of some of the women who claim they’re being sucker-punched. And here’s another. And another. And, well, oopsie-daisy, another.

I command ye to pay no mind to the fact that some of those who’ve been arrested are registered Democrats. Nor to the fact that voters in Manhattan, where most of the reported attacks have occurred, leaned toward Biden 85%-15% in 2020’s election.

The only arrestee so far who can be described as the least bit Trump-sympathetic is the 40-year-old Skiboky (pronounced “Skuh-BOO-key”) Stora, who’s a registered Republican and, like many of the victims, a “TikTok influencer.” Skiboky is one of those “aspiring rappers” and claims to be Marcus Garvey’s great-great-grandson. Last year he ran for the New York City Council but lost to Yusef Salaam, who initially garnered fame as one of the accused rapists in the “Central Park Jogger” case. Supporting Amanda Marcotte’s contention that the recent spate of street attacks is a MAGA thang, here’s a video of Skiboky standing shirtless in front of a TRUMP: Make America Great Again flag and warning that “the whole world would be in darkness without the black man.”

On March 17, a woman named Olivia Brand (she’s the one in the lower left corner) filmed herself claiming that she’d been punched for no apparent reason while walking her dog. Other women soon followed suit, and suddenly you had yourself a trending topic. It seems as if all of the women making these claims pepper their language with endless “literallys” and “likes” — like, they literally do, like, literally all the time — and combined with Skiboky Stora’s numerous TikTok videos of him harassing women on New York streets, I suddenly found myself pondering whether it might indeed be ethical to randomly start punching TikTok influencers.

this is so nuts there are a bunch of women getting punched in the face in nyc rn all over tiktok. i don’t know if it’s all the same guy some of the stories seem slightly different but some of them seem similar pic.twitter.com/2rE7iEudCH

— youngmi mayer (@ymmayer) March 26, 2024

We’ve seen this sort of thing many times before. There was the “Knockout Game,” in which black youths filmed themselves randomly approaching strangers and cold-cocking them just for fun. The official narrative about the “Knockout Game,” despite all the recorded evidence, was that it was only a racist myth. In 2019, gay black actor Jussie Smollett falsely claimed that a pair of MAGA chuds assaulted him one frosty night on Chicago’s streets and placed a noose around his neck. Then there was 2021’s trend of Asians getting sucker-punched on the street, which was blamed on “white supremacy,” despite, yet again, nearly all of the videos revealing that the assailants were overwhelmingly black.

One story that’s not getting much traction is that a 40-year-0ld New York City woman named Lydia Weil has been arrested for a pair of incidents in late March and early April where she allegedly pressed a lit cigarette into one woman’s face and kicked another woman in the leg at a train station. Another story that’s getting lost amid the moral panic about the woman-punching MAGAts of Manhattan is the video of a man assaulting a woman on 14th Street and 7th Avenue, only to be set upon by a large group of other men, all of whom appear to be black, that swarms the assailant and knocks him out as one of them escorts the woman away to safety.

The idea that there’s a sudden trend of women randomly being sucker-punched on Manhattan’s streets may only be due to TikTokers creating a warped and skewed impression through social media. Unless you’re as dumb as Amanda Marcotte is, everyone already knows that New York City is a violent place. The problem is that most people, regardless of their political leanings, are also like Amanda Marcotte in the sense that the ideological blinders that are hard-welded onto their skulls will always dictate “reality” to them far more than facts ever will.