Daniel Penny and moral inversion

Almost everything that's wrong with progressive groupthink, encapsulated in a single story

On May 1, 2023, Daniel Penny, a former US Marine, was on a crowded New York City subway train when, quote: ‘Jordan Neely, a homeless black man…began screaming... According to witnesses, Neely said he was “ready to die”, and that he would “kill a motherfucker.” The other riders were scared.’¹

Neely had an extensive criminal record. He’d been arrested dozens of times, including for theft, petty larceny, unprovoked assaults, and most recently for punching a 67-year-old woman. Passengers describe his behaviour as ‘erratic’ and ‘threatening’. After Neely allegedly shouted “I’m going to kill you!”, and in what he claims was an attempt to protect other passengers, Penny put Neely in a chokehold to restrain him. This lasted a number of minutes and resulted in Neely, who was reportedly high on drugs at the time, being rushed to the hospital and declared dead. Penny is currently waiting to find out whether he has been convicted of criminally negligent homicide, which carries a maximum sentence of four years in prison.

The legal process should be allowed to run its course, but from the start it has been characterised by what some are claiming is politically-motivated interference and inconsistency. Take DA Alvin Bragg, for example, who reduced 60% of all felony cases last year to lesser charges², yet is now accused of seeking to ‘strong arm’³ the jury in an effort to secure a conviction in this case. Or the prosecutor currently throwing the book at Daniel Penny who, to quote one commentator, ‘in 2019, gave a reduced sentence to a black man who murdered an Asian college professor as he was withdrawing cash from an ATM, said that it was under the guise of “restorative justice”, and ended up giving him 10 years for manslaughter after he was originally charged with murder. She’s now seeking a harsh sentence for a man who protected a group of people on the subway.’⁴

Beyond the legal specifics, however, it’s the response in woke quarters that I want to focus on. In my view, the immediate and consistent efforts to portray Penny as a racist murderer, and to excuse and deflect focus away from Neely’s conduct, might possibly be the single best example of the type of ‘moral inversion’ that characterises so much of modern progressivism, and that the silent majority rightly detest.

Where better to start than with ‘AOC’, doyenne of the dumb-left, who without waiting for the full facts to emerge, much less for the jury to deliberate, declared ‘Jordan Neely was murdered’ - so much for due process - and then asserted that he was ‘killed by the demonising of the poor’. Er, what? The ‘poor people’ I know don’t generally assault pensioners or run around threatening commuters for no reason. It’s almost as if they’re rational human beings with agency, not feckless droids whose every fault can be blamed on someone else.

Liberal outlets released think-pieces proclaiming that he was ‘killed for the crime of being hungry and unhoused’. BLM has declared it a ‘lynching’. Activists and major news publications call it ‘white supremacy’. All without any evidence, before the jury have reached a verdict, and despite the fact that black people on the train who witnessed events referred to Penny as a ‘hero’.

Compare and contrast it with the response in far-left quarters when, a few weeks ago, another mentally ill homeless man - Ramon Rivera - who had been let loose on the streets under a progressive-endorsed ‘early release scheme’, stabbed three people to death in New York. There was no outrage, no confected fury, no demands for policy change. Yet when a citizen takes action to protect others from a mentally ill homeless man with a criminal record who bystanders claim was acting in an intimidating manner, they’re up in arms about it.

This case has a significance that extends beyond the outcome of the trial itself — it speaks to a sickness in parts of the liberal psyche. To sympathise more with the convicted criminal on a train threatening to kill others than with the guy who puts his own safety at risk to protect his fellow citizens from that man; to express far greater indignation when your fellow city dwellers take action to defend one another from an aggressive man with a history of violence than when people are killed by a maniac who should have been locked up but was released under the sort of ‘justice equity initiative’ liberals supported - this requires the ideological distortion of almost innate concepts of right and wrong. It rests on the flipping of values that, across time and across societies throughout history, have been near-constant. Most people find it hard to fathom, or stomach.

The predictability of it all is what’s so awful. As soon as the story broke we all knew that moral entrepreneurs on the left would use the case to try and whip up racial grievances. We knew that the same activists who claim to want ‘justice reform’ and who routinely seek/gain reduced sentences for brutal killers would demand the harshest sentence possible in this case. We knew that parts of the media would paint the bloke who got restrained as a poor, unfortunate soul and probable victim of racism, and would seek to avoid frank discussion of his appalling behaviour.

The cynicism, the hypocrisy, the almost faith-like commitment to ideology over basic decency - all the worst aspects of progressive cultism encapsulated in a single story. If you want to know why Trump was elected, this sort of thing is a great place to start.

This is an adaption of a Substack note that I published yesterday and that has gone quite viral. You can find it here. A modified version of this piece has been published by Spiked-Online here.

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PS. I put out articles like this as often as I can, but I also regularly write ‘notes’ that show up on the Substack app. Check them out if you’re interested by clicking on the ‘notes’ tab on my page. At the moment I’m writing around 6-7 of these per week. Anyone can read them. If you’re a paid subscriber, you can also comment on them.

1. WATCH: What Really Happened Between Daniel Penny and Jordan Neely

2. https://x.com/greg_price11/status/1864035309232533716

3. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14169491/Lawyer-Manhattan-DA-Alvin-Bragg-strong-arm-Daniel-Penny-jury.html

4. https://x.com/greg_price11/status/1864035309232533716