About two weeks ago, a man named Daniel Penny rendered another man, Jordan Neely, unconscious in a New York City subway car. Mr. Neely did not awaken. Knowing only one other detail about the situation lead many to protest and protest violently. The one other detail was race. Mr. Penny is white, and Mr. Neely was black. This detail was enough to cause some race-mongers to encourage the protests and call for murder charges against Mr. Penny. They got their protests, and they nearly got the murder charges. Late last week, Mr. Penny was charged with manslaughter in the second degree.
To many leftist observers, race is the most important fact of the case. To them, nearly all other facts of the case are irrelevant. But they are not irrelevant. We need to know why Mr. Penny put Mr. Neely in a chokehold before we pass judgement. There is, and will always be, a natural right to self-preservation. If Mr. Penny was acting in his or others’ defense, then his actions were justified. And based on first-hand accounts and video of the incident, it appears that Mr. Penny was perfectly justified. Mr. Neely was a homeless man who was reportedly yelling at and threatening the people locked in the subway car with him. He reportedly said that he was willing to “go back to prison” if he did not get something to eat while he swung his arms aggressively and dangerously. At the time, Mr. Neely had an active warrant out for his arrest on assault charges, so his threats were credible.
Mr. Penny and the other passengers were confined in a subway car with a man who was threatening violence and acting in a way to support his threats. Mr. Penny decided to restrain and subdue the threat, to protect himself and others. Further, video shows that immediately after Mr. Neely lost consciousness, Mr. Penny released him and helped put him into a recovery position so that he could regain consciousness. This shows that Mr. Penny was not acting recklessly. Despite these well-established facts, the Manhattan district attorney’s office is charging Mr. Penny with second degree manslaughter, accusing Mr. Penny of acting recklessly and unjustifiably. It seems that, like the race-mongers, the Manhattan district attorney’s office cares little about the facts of the case.
Even if we look at race, there is another inconvenient truth for Mr. Penny’s unreasonable accusers. There were at least two other men assisting Mr. Penny restrain and subdue Mr. Neely during the incident, and neither appear to be white. One of the men appears to be Latino and the other is black. The latter actively helped restrain Mr. Neely’s arms during most of the recorded incident. Due to the inconvenient nature of this fact, most left-wing media has not mentioned it at all. Neither of the other men have been charged, nor have any left-wing politicians called for them to be charged. Instead, they vilify Mr. Penny and Mr. Penny alone because he is white.
The reason the left is fixated on Mr. Penny’s race is because it furthers their desired narrative. The narrative is that there is a large segment of white Americans that actively despise and wish harm on black Americans. There are no statistics supporting this claim, so its supporters must latch onto any anecdote they can find, no matter how poor the anecdote is. It is classic Marxian theory. According to the theory, in order to trigger a socialist uprising, there have to be two well-defined groups: the oppressors and the oppressed. In Marx’s time, those two groups were the working class and the landlord class. These classes are not clearly defined in the United States, so leftists have, for some time, decided to rally around race instead. To them, straight, white people are the oppressors and everyone else are the oppressed. In an attempt to force this narrative onto us, they latch on and lie about cases like Mr. Penny’s.
Thankfully, at least this time, it seems that the left has latched onto a losing case. All evidence, including video, points to Mr. Penny’s innocence. Barring any surprise information, Mr. Penny should walk free, anything else would be a miscarriage of justice. Many people are coming to the same conclusion and financially supporting Mr. Penny for the upcoming trial. Hopefully, this awakening will give us a healthy dose of skepticism the next time the left cries racism without evidence.