Jordan Neely

It was a gray May afternoon in New York City when a thirty-year-old homeless man named Jordan Neely — who had dozens of encounters with law enforcement, suffered from schizophrenia and other mental health issues and was under the influence of synthetic drugs — boarded the F train and began ranting and raving at the straphangers on board. He said he was ready to die, that someone would die today, screaming that he didn’t mind going to jail or getting life in prison. Scared passengers backed away, with one young mother barricading her five-year-old behind a stroller. Witnesses attest to what happened next: a young man headed to the gym, an ex-Marine named Daniel Penny, did what others wouldn’t be brave enough to do in this situation.

Daniel Penny is heading back to a New York courthouse today to face charges for the murder of Jordan Neely. Penny, with the help two other bystanders, held Neely, who had a criminal history and mental health issues, in a chokehold after Neely made repeated threats to other passengers on a subway car. Neely died during the incident — and Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg chose to indict Penny for second-degree murder, despite downgrading over 50 percent of felonies to misdemeanors in 2022. Crime has risen in New York City since 2020, and the city has done precious little to address it, though Mayor Eric Adams has been slightly more proactive than his predecessor, Bill de Blasio. Go back a few decades, however, and you find the Big Apple in an almost unimaginably worse situation.

Jordan Neely was given a hero’s funeral in Harlem last Friday, eulogized by New York’s most prominent race activists before an audience of the city’s Democratic elite. Neely died on May 1 on a New York City subway car, after being restrained by a Marine veteran who was trying to protect his fellow passengers from Neely’s psychotic outbursts.   Neely has been turned into a symbol of a racist system of law enforcement and of civilian values that exaggerate the threat of mentally ill vagrants to keep minorities down. Three weeks after Neely’s death, on May 21, another homeless man in New York City slammed a woman’s head into a subway car, likely paralyzing her for life, if she even survives.

New York City seems like a gag that’s gone too far. "First, we’ll release all the criminals because too many black bodies are in prison! Then we’ll denounce the police as Nazis and refuse to prosecute any suspects they arrest. The city will be overrun with violent criminals — raping robbing, assaulting and killing at will... But if anyone steps up to protect the citizenry from the mayhem that’s been intentionally inflicted on them, well, gentleman, then we’ll prosecute the hell out of that douchebag." This exactly how things are playing out right now with twenty-four-year-old Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who subdued a deranged lunatic on the F train at the Broadway-Lafayette Street station in Manhattan on May 1.

Since the death of Jordan Neely on the New York City subway, the media elite have rushed to maintain that he died not just from a chokehold, but the systemically racist, capitalist, selfish system that regularly fails homeless people. The headlines: "Jordan Neely Was Already Dead: New York reckons with a homeless epidemic and a killing." "How New York City failed Jordan Neely." "Jordan Neely’s death reflects the inhumane consequences of being homeless, experts say." Ah, those experts, who are always right and never wrong. Except, of course, when they are provably wrong.

Most of those who follow the news have already seen the distressing video. A black man, Jordan Neely, walked onto a New York subway train screaming obscenities and ranting about his own destitution. Another passenger, a former Marine called Daniel Penny, came up behind him, took him to the ground and placed him into a chokehold. Neely lost consciousness and died. A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist could not create a better scenario that perfectly exemplifies everyone’s societal meta-narratives, a Rorschach test onto which we can map our assumptions and biases. It resembles a “what do you see? Two women or a wine glass?” kind of picture. Is this a black man, destroyed and choked by oppression, or the inevitable result of societal decay?

Tensions ran high this week after Jordan Neely, a homeless street performer with a record of violence, was killed by Daniel Penney, a twenty-four-year-old Marine. Penney placed Neely in a chokehold on a New York City subway train. The usual suspects, such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, swung into action, calling the incident “murder” and a “lynching” respectively. Conservative media was alive with dire warnings of potential violent protests in response to this death of a black man at the hands of a white man. But a funny thing happened on the way to the riots: they didn’t occur. So what makes this situation so different from incidents of racially tinged violence in the recent past?