We're Not Supposed To Live Like This
Wanting to live in a clean, safe society is something only a privileged bigot would say. Is that what you want to be, a privileged bigot?
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Settle in - we’ve got a lot to talk about.
I wanted to comment on this incident much earlier than I am, but again, not being a full-time blogger isn’t the worst thing in the world, as it forces you to wait and see what more comes of the story before sharing your thoughts with the world and potentially getting it wrong.
As summer approaches, the Regime has once again decided to highlight the plight of criminals, this time 30-year-old Jordan Neely. Neely was killed in an altercation that took place on the New York City Subway on May 1; here’s a summary of the incident as reported by NBC 4 New York:
The NYPD said it was called to the NoHo station around 2:25 p.m. Monday after a report of a physical fight in a northbound F train.
Witnesses and law enforcement sources said Neely got on the train and started acting very aggressively toward other riders, threatening to harm them. Police sources told NBC New York that Neely told riders on the train that he wanted food, that he wasn't taking no for an answer, and that he would hurt anyone on the train.
"The man got on the subway car and began to say a somewhat aggressive speech, saying he was hungry, he was thirsty, that he didn't care about anything, he didn't care about going to jail, he didn't care that he gets a big life sentence," said Juan Alberto Vazquez, who was in the subway car and recording part of what happened afterward. "That 'It doesn't even matter if I died.'"
Vazquez said he was scared, and believes others on the train were as well. It was then that a 24-year-old rider came up behind Neely and put him in a chokehold, holding him on the ground. Two other men stood over them and also helped subdue him, video showed.
"If there was fear, the people who...were there where he separated everything, moved from their place. I stayed sitting in my place because it was a little further away, but obviously in those moments, well, one feels fear. One thinks he may be armed," Vazquez said.
He said that the chokehold lasted about 15 minutes as they waited for police to respond, and it was held even as the train stopped at the subway station and the doors opened. That's when Vazquez said most of the people who were inside the train car left, with a few exceptions, including the three who had been working to subdue Neely.
It was not clear why passengers had moved to restrain Neely. One witness, Vazquez who was on the train and recorded Neely becoming unconscious as he was restrained, said that while Neely was acting aggressively and threw his jacket, he hadn’t attacked anyone.
Neely was unconscious on the car floor when officers arrived, and died at the scene.
Vazquez said no one thought the man would die, even after he went limp.
First, as always, let’s discuss the personal safety angle. The 24-year-old who subdued Neely has since been identified as Daniel Penny, a Marine veteran. As of this writing, he has yet to be charged, though a grand jury will convene to decide if charges are warranted. I’ll begin by saying that the facts of the case, including the video taken aboard the train, lead me to give Penny the benefit of the doubt concerning his actions. If you didn’t watch the video, other passengers were attempting to assist Penny in subduing Neely and there doesn’t appear to have been a whole lot in the way of objections from everyone else. People generally have an adverse reaction to violence in public spaces and if they felt Penny’s actions were unwarranted, I think you would’ve seen much more in the way of opposition.
As a general guideline, however, I cannot recommend anyone do what Penny did. Rule #1 of personal safety is to avoid trouble - I don’t know if that was an option here, but I’ll never tell someone to intervene unless your life or that of another is in imminent, obvious danger. There’s still a lot more detail to come concerning the events on that train, so I won’t say any more than that.
That said, I cannot blame what the passengers, even Penny. Public transport, particularly in New York, can be a dangerous setting, filled with unsavory, unseemly characters. It’s not a new problem, but it’s arguably become a bigger problem in recent years. Just a few months ago, there was a viral video of Black man harassing a White family with a toddler on a New York City subway train in a highly menacing, threatening manner, leading to discussions about both public safety and the true nature of the race problem in the U.S.
Then there’s incidents like these, which occur quite with alarming regularity in the city’s transit system:
https://twitter.com/ploughmansfolly/status/1653426012401664003
Whenever these incidents occur, everyone asks: why didn’t anyone intervene? Well in this latest incident which has got so many up in arms, someone finally did. It’s too late for buyer’s remorse, don’t you think?
As for Jordan Neely himself, as a person, it’s hard not to feel a small bit of sympathy for the man:
As a teen, Neely lived in Bayonne, New Jersey, just south of Jersey City, according to reporting on his mother’s death in 2007. More than four years later, he testified at the murder trial of her killer — an abusive boyfriend who strangled her to death and dumped her body off a Bronx highway. Neely told the court he realized something was wrong when his mother did not wake him for school as she usually did and when her boyfriend blocked him from entering their bedroom, NJ.com reported at the time.
But that sympathy is overwhelmed by the fact Neely, by the time of his death, had become a dangerous, menancing individual. From 2013 - 2021, a span of eight years, Neely was arrested 42 times. The media has attempted to downplay this fact, citing many of these arrests as the result of low-level offenses, but his other crimes are nowhere near as innocent.
At the time of his death, a warrant was out for his arrest, stemming from this brutal crime:
Neely was arrested 42 times across the last decade, with his most recent bust in November 2021 for slugging a 67-year-old female stranger in the face as she exited a subway station in the East Village, cops said.
The senior citizen suffered a broken nose and fractured orbital bone when she was knocked to the sidewalk, along with swelling and “substantial” head pain after hitting the ground.
Neely eventually pleaded to felony assault and received 15 months in an alternative-to-incarceration program that, if completed, would have allowed him to plead to misdemeanor assault and get a conditional discharge.
But a warrant was issued for his arrest on Feb. 23, when he skipped a court compliance court date where a judge was to be updated on whether he was meeting all the requirements of the program.
Violence very much appears to be part of Neely’s repetoire:
On June 27, 2019, Neely was arrested for punching a 64-year-old man in the face during a fight in a Greenwich Village subway station, cops said.
And he was busted in August 2015 for attempted kidnapping after he was seen dragging a 7-year-old girl down an Inwood street. He pled guilty to endangering the welfare of a child and was sentenced to four months in jail.
Most of his other arrests were for low-level crimes, many of them for turnstile jumping.
I agree with what a lot of people have said: the system failed. The system failed to keep an obviously unwell and dangerous man off the streets, despite proving time and again he was unfit to live in civil society. Really, what was he attempting to do a seven-year-old? Does he sound like just an innocent Michael Jackson impersonator trying to find his footing in life? Does he sound like someone you’d want to share a subway car with?
In the wake of his death, it was revealed that someone had made a post about Neely on Reddit, warning other users to exercise caution if they saw “the Michael Jackson impersonator.” A decade later, the same person (I’m assuming) muted the thread because, given our priorities, policing right-wing speech is more important:
Neely was a problem, there’s no denying it. His problems all added up and finally got to him.
As an aside, let me also say that downplaying most of his offenses as “low-level,” while factually true, is an attempt to distract from and obfuscate Neely’s true nature. Most people don’t engage in turnstile jumping or drink alcohol from open containers. People like to pretend otherwise, but there’s a correlation between committing low-level offenses and committing higher-level ones, with Neely being a perfect example. Very few people go from being totally innocent one day to being a full-blown felon the next day. It always begins with lower-level crimes and big-time criminals also have a litany of misdemeanors that go along with their felonies. Regardless, having that many low-level offenses, even in the absence of higher-level ones, isn’t a good thing. Someone who habitually breaks the law probably shouldn’t be out and about amongst the general population.
A lot of people have said Neely’s criminal history doesn’t matter since nobody on the train knew about it. That’s true and it’s also not the point, which is that Neely’s record proves, retroactively, that Daniel Perry and the other passengers on the train were more than right to feel the way they felt about Neely. Besides, even if Neely’s criminal history is of no relevance, it still doesn’t change the nature of his behavior in the moment. How Neely ended up where he did in life and how the system failed to keep him off the streets are important parts of the discussion, but what matters most is what Neely was doing at that moment in time which led passengers to decide an intervention was needed. I don’t think the past makes a difference there. His behavior was problematic, whether he’d been an upstanding citizen up until that point or whether he was a multiple-felon.
I’ve remarked previously how far too many people think criminals are people who just had a bad day, made some mistakes, and were unfairly punished as a result. For the most part, this isn’t true. Humans are creatures of habit and routine. Neely was behaving the way he was the day he died because that’s who he was and his record proves it. Either way, it makes no difference, because nobody’s entitled to have a bad day and to take their frustrations out on others.
I don’t envy Neely’s life, but I still believe what happened that day on that train was that he finally ran into people who took his threats seriously, weren’t cowed by them, and acted. Callous as it sounds to say, Neely ultimately met his match.
As Richard Hanania points out:
The real story, unquestionably, has been the reaction from the Regime - the leftist-controlled intelligentsia and power central. Academics, activists, the commentariat, and politicians are working overtime to make Jordan Neely the next George Floyd. I don’t want to share it here - you can find it all easily throughout the Internet and social media - because so much of it’s nonsensical and stupid. However, I do want to post this bit of commentary from a left-wing commentator because it underscores the insanity so many harbor:
https://twitter.com/SunnyMarmalaid/status/1654174102381264901
Question: what use is civil society if that society is so uncivil? What sort of pathology leads supposedly educated people to think we should force people to tolerate unsafe people and behavior for… what, exactly? We should have free college and healthcare, but we shouldn’t have public safety and clean streets? We shouldn’t expect everyone, supposedly our equals, to conform to a baseline standard of behavior of any kind? Do these people know what they’re saying, or are they saying anything to the point of sounding stupid just to virtue-signal to the rest of us?
In his excellent Substack, Rod Dreher makes mention of the comments made by the leftist commentator I linked to above, quoting scholar Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry (credit both screencaps to Rod Dreher):
The Left’s thinking can be distilled to this: having violent, mentally-ill individuals harass, attack, or even kill you is bad, but that’s also why it’s a good thing when it happens to you. If it happens to you, it’s because you’re a bad person who needs to be dispossessed of their “privilege.” But you can become a good person by tolerating it and surrendering to the violation of your person. This all sounds insane and it is, but that’s what they’re saying. Wanting to live in a clean, safe society is something only a privileged bigot would say. Is that what you want to be, a privileged bigot? Is it worth losing your job over?
Dreher explains the stakes:
A civilization that will not defend itself will cease to exist. Hannah Arendt’s great line about those who paved the way for totalitarianism of the Left and the Right ought to be chiseled in stone:
The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.
Why do so many liberals reflexively sympathize with a lunatic who violently threatens people on the subway? To be clear, it is right to pity poor Jordan Neely, whose life went badly off track due to untreated mental illness and drug abuse. It is a pity that he lived in a society that did not take suffering people like him off the street and institutionalize them, where they could get food and medicine, and no longer be a danger to themselves and others. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Of course, as I explained a few posts back, the same people who think you ought to put up with attacks by those not fit for civil society also used to wonder why America couldn’t be more like Singapore or Japan: more “civilized.” Cosmopolitan leftists lament the fact American children nor women can ride public transportation without wondering if they’ll make it home in one piece, viewing our country as backwards and caring too much about our individual rights and not enough about our collective well-being.
But as I explained in that same post, such a society doesn’t come cost-free. American cosmopolitan leftists think a shift in mindset is all that’s needed: Americans need to become “kinder,” think less about themselves and their families, and more about the world. Yet that’s not why places like Japan and Singapore are what they are. When these places see Jordan Neely, they don’t see someone who’s been failed by society and needs the world to come running to them. They see a problem that needs to be removed for the best interest of society. In some ways, these types of societies can be a lot crueler (Singapore especially) because they simply don’t tolerate deviancy the way American society does. Our openness and acceptance of so many different types comes with many upsides, but many downsides as well. It means we let people like Jordan Neely loose to roam freely.
A society can be open and accepting while still drawing a line somewhere, however. This is the problem in the U.S. - we either cannot draw the line for fear of violating someone’s rights, or we convince ourselves lines don’t exist, nor should they. In either case, a society cannot function without a well-defined sense of what’s permissible and what’s not. People like the woman who think being attacked on a subway by a mentally ill vagrant is something you just need to put up with lest you be a bad, fragile person, are anti-social and anti-civilization. They’re the ultimate cancer - living off the benefits of what others have created, while destroying it in the process.
You think I’m being too hard on these people? Look at them protesting by going onto the tracks and halting train service:
https://twitter.com/RebsBrannon/status/1654973123916095488
Personally, I could care less if these protesters got fried by the third rail or run over by a train. Don’t do dangerous, stupid things, and expect to get away with it. What blows my mind, but should no longer surprise anyone, is how they always pick the worst possible people to panic morally over. Jordan Neely, a guy who dragged a child down a street to do who-knows-what, who had an active warrant out for his arrest stemming from an assault on an older person, this is the guy they’re going to protest on behalf of? The Neely-types will hurt or kill you over the small amount of money you have in your pocket or any other property you might have. This is the problem with the “it’s just property mentality” - if they’re willing to hurt or kill you for it, maybe it means more than you think?
But I digress. It’s always criminals or others who make life dangerous for others they choose to climb mountains for. We never see this kind of reaction on behalf the real victims of crime. Last year, I spoke of Michelle Go, a 40-year-old Asian woman who was shoved in front of an oncoming train. If there’s anyone worth risking getting fried by a third rail or hit by a train over, it’s her. Instead, it’s always the violent savages they defend. How come?
It’s long since been forgotten, but the purpose of the government isn’t to provide individual rights nor welfare. Those are benefits government can provide, but the first reason we have authority is to establish order and, through order, public safety. A state which cannot provide that isn’t capable of doing anything else and is undermining it’s own legitimacy through dereliction.
What the state cannot provide, others will attempt to and I think that’s what we saw on that train in response to Jordan Neely’s behavior. I think New Yorkers are aware that, no matter what the statistics say, disorder has once become more the norm and the state is either unable or unwilling to do anything about it. It’s absurd for anyone, namely progressives who make up our country’s power base, to think people will stand by indefinitely and just take it the way they have. Humans have a built-in survival instinct; it’s those who retain that survival instinct who are more normal, not those who think being attacked by violent crazies is just a part of daily life (notice they don’t have the same attitude towards “gun violence”).
If it’s not apparent already, it’s not the crime and disorder that’s the problem in the eyes of the Regime: it’s that some of us dared to do something about it. And that’s the whole point: set loose the barbarians to create anarchy, then persecute those who attempt to protect themselves and others, the most fundamental of rights we have as people. The result: anarcho-tyranny. Read this early entry of mine to learn more if you’re not familiar with the concept, but all that needs to be said here is that the crime and disorder, plus all the cruelty that comes with it, is the point. This is the new order they’re seeking to establish. There’s no overthinking it, no looking for a deeper meaning, etc. This is all about power and punishing those who refuse to go along with the insanity by exercising independent action and thought.
Here’s something Stella Morabito, author of the recently-released The Weaponization of Loneliness, said in the wake of Neely’s death:
https://twitter.com/Stella_Morabito/status/1654867031806582789
We’re not at the point where the prisons are being opened up and inmates released en masse. The point is that crime has a political purpose and has been weaponized throughout history. This is what anarcho-tyranny is. Crime is a national security issue because it’s a built-in method of destabilizing society requiring no outside intervention. All it takes are people, like leftists, who, like Hannah Arendt says, hate the country and its people enough that they’re willing to risk a complete undoing, even their own lives, to see terrible things happen. Humans aren’t naturally good, unfortunately.
Things are getting hot and heavy, so I’ll wind this down. Myself, along with others, wondered when the current moment’s Bernhard Goetz incident would happen. Looks like it did. Again, there’s only so much crime and disorder that can be allowed to take place unchallenged before someone who doesn’t wear a uniform or occupy a position of authority will decide, “Enough.” Authority abhors a vaccum and if the people in charge won’t use it, someone else will establish it.
What comes of Daniel Penny will send a message to the entire country. If they elect to charge him, which I fear they will, it’ll say that not only are the authorities unable or unwilling to maintain order, they won’t tolerate attempts by citizens to do so. This would be as close to an official acknowledgement of anarcho-tyranny as we’ve ever gotten from the government. If they won’t protect us, but we’re not allowed to protect ourselves, either, I’m not sure where that leaves us, except on a road to becoming like Brazil and South Africa - trapped in a spiral of chaos and violence that keeps going and going until, one day, it just runs out of momentum.
For now, the silver lining is that the case has divided the public. Unlike the George Floyd killing, which saw early consensus on the injustice of his death and lead to a nationwide moral panic, Americans across the political spectrum appear to have taken a more nuanced approach to Neely’s killing, even with an abundance of insane takes about how the dangers of riding the New York City Subway aren’t a big deal. Reaction from public officials most responsible for handling the aftermath, specifically Mayor Eric Adams, has been measured and responsible (don’t know why they can’t always be like that) and, thankfully, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have kept their big mouths shut about the incident. It’s telling that even the usual suspects don’t want to touch this one.
In closing, this is what the otherwise clean, efficient, and safe South Korean subway looks like, even with a crazy person riding the train. Notice that not only do people stand up to the crazy man (who seems otherwise harmless), nobody seems to have a problem with citizens intervening. This is what social order looks like.
UPDATE: As many anticipated, Daniel Penny has been charged:
Penny, 24, will turn himself in at the NYPD’s 5th Precinct in Chinatown on Friday morning, high-ranking police sources said Thursday. He will be arrested on a criminal complaint charging him with second-degree manslaughter, which could carry a jail term of up to 15 years, according to prosecutors.
“We can confirm that Daniel Penny will be arrested on a charge of Manslaughter in the Second Degree,” a spokesman for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement. “We cannot provide any additional information until he has been arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court, which we expect to take place tomorrow.”
The DA’s office had faced pressure to bring charges as its investigation into the May 1 encounter progressed.
Honestly, I’d have been surprised had the DA not brought charges against Penny. Citizens using deadly force, even against criminals, is so frowned upon by authorities, especially in places like New York City, that it’d be setting an entirely new precedent had they not brought charges against Penny. There was also the political pressure, which left-wing authorities are under tremendous influence of, as we all know.
It’s worth noting DA Alvin Bragg is the same person who brought charges against former President Donald Trump over “hush-money” payments, an indictment even Trump’s critics view as flimsy. This is also the same Bragg who charged convenience store clerk Jose Alba after he stabbed his attacker to death in self-defense, a case I wrote about last summer. Bragg was ultimately forced to withdraw the charges after public outcry against what was viewed as an unjust prosecution of someone who was a clear and obvious victim.
The small bit of silver lining here is that Penny has been charged with manslaughter, not murder, which would’ve been a wholly unjust charge. However, the fact it’s a lesser charge means, according to conventional wisdom, it ought to be easier to convict him. It’s also true that the fact he was charged with manslaughter versus murder is certain to disappoint the Left, since they see any such killings as murder, the facts be damned.
It ought to be clear Bragg is doing what he’s there to do: uphold anarcho-tyranny. We can only hope the public once more mobilizes, this time on behalf of Daniel Penny, and force Bragg to back down once more. But they’ll need to drown out the formidable voices of those calling for Penny’s head. May justice prevail in Penny’s favor.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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