The Fever Breaks

Daniel Penny was acquitted Monday of the charge of the criminally negligent homicide of Jordan Neely after a New York jury was unable to come to an agreement on the more severe charge of manslaughter. The trial itself was a farce, a case that under normal circumstances would never have been brought. Neely, a mentally-ill criminal and drug addict with more than 40 arrests to his name, entered a car on the Manhattan F train and threatened the passengers, screaming that he was going to kill someone and that he was ready to go to prison for life. When the danger that Neely posed to the passengers became apparent, Penny, a former U.S. marine, stepped in and restrained him with a chokehold, with two other passengers assisting him. Penny continued restraining Neely for six minutes until the police arrived, and the unconscious Neely died shortly afterwards.

In a functional society, Penny would not be a hero, because this event would never have happened. Public transportation would be safe from the depredations of criminals and the degradation of the drug-dependent and the mentally ill. In our less-than-ideal society, Penny is a hero, and ought to be recognized as such: Of his own initiative, and at significant risk to himself, he defended innocent bystanders—including mothers and young children—from the actions of a deranged and violent individual. (Neely had recently been released after spending 15 months in jail for assaulting an elderly woman and breaking her nose).

In New York, however, because Penny is white and Neely was black, they tried to make him a scapegoat, a racist, and a murderer.

The gears of the American racial animosity–industrial complex began to hum almost as soon as the events were publicized. Al Sharpton, the perennial provocateur, delivered the eulogy at Neely’s funeral, blaming his death on systemic racism. Protestors jammed the subway system, demanding that Penny be charged and accusing him of murdering Neely out of racial animosity. Mainstream media outfits published articles equating Neely’s death with lynching. This was yet more proof that black people could be “murdered like animals in public spaces,” one such article stated. Neely’s estranged father, who had apparently not provided him with a place to live during his long years of chronic homelessness, suddenly appeared in front of the cameras to lament his son’s death and demand that prosecutors hit Penny with a murder charge. Everything was set to make Neely yet another undeserving avatar of racial grievance and to tar Penny with the collective sins, real and imagined, of “White America”.

The Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was more than happy to play his own part in the familiar drama. Bragg, a Democrat, was elected on a promise to lighten the prosecution on theft and shoplifting in order to promote “racial equity.” 

“These cases do not belong in criminal court. The punishments are disproportionately harsh, and fall disproportionately on the backs of people of color,” Bragg stated on his website. “This makes them morally indefensible.” He ultimately charged Penny with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, declining the murder charge for potential lack of evidence.

The prosecutor he placed on Penny’s case was of the same ideological cast: In 2019, Dafna Yoran requested a reduced sentence in a felony murder case where the defendant had assaulted and killed an elderly Korean professor during a robbery. 

“I really felt incredibly sorry for him that he had gotten to that point in his life where he felt there was no choice but to commit this robbery,” she said in an online seminar where she discussed race and “restorative justice.” During the prosecution, Yoran played up the racial angle in court, referring to Penny as “the white man” and “murderer” and framing the situation as yet another racially motivated killing, evocative of George Floyd, Michael Brown, and the various other cases that have inflamed American racial tensions in the 21st century.

The playbook was the same as the one that left the country in flames in 2020. This time, however, the sparks fell on less forgiving fuel. The country has learned a few things since the Summer of Floyd, it appears. The pseudointellectual nonprofiteering of Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and Patrice Cullors has been exposed as a rapaciously self-interested sham. The public became first disenchanted and then outraged with progressive attempts to pare back policing: Furious with rising crime and generalized public disorder, even the left-wing strongholds of San Francisco and Los Angeles kicked out their progressive prosecutors. Parents, discovering with horror the maliciously racialized curriculum propagandizing their children in public schools, reacted sharply, driving activists from school boards and propelling a wave of successful school-choice initiatives. The backlash even reached academia: Subtle frustration with the politicization of scientific journals broke out into a public outcry by academics against requirements that all research papers submit explanations of how their contents advance diversity and equity in society at large.

By the time the trial had drawn to a close and the time for a verdict was reached, perhaps the most unkindest cut of all had been struck against the progressive race consensus: the election of Donald Trump with the greatest proportion of minority support received by a Republican candidate in 20 years. One of the defining factors in that election was the weakness of Kamala Harris, an accidental candidate whose arrival at the top of the Democratic ticket was the result of Joe Biden’s capitulation to the progressive racial grievance wing. The country as a whole had rendered its own verdict: out with the politics of racial division, out with the perpetual ritual denunciation of America and Americans, out with the insatiable demands for abasement and self-flagellation.

As the jury contemplated the verdict, progressive protesters packed the courthouse, as they have many times before. This time, however, the outcome was different. There would be no more humiliation. Daniel Penny was acquitted, but it was America that was freed.

The expected litany of execrations and calumnies has followed, but even those seem perfunctory. Their speakers seem to recognize that they are merely parroting the performances of a bygone era; whatever power over the American imagination they might have once had has disappeared.

In contrast with the progressive politicians and Twitter revolutionaries, Penny himself is remarkably circumspect about the ordeal. “All this attention and limelight is very uncomfortable…. I didn’t want any attention or praise, and I still don’t. The guilt I would have felt if someone did get hurt, if he did do what he was threatening to do, I would never be able to live with myself,” he said. “I’ll take a million court appearances and people calling me names and people hating me, just to keep one of those people from getting hurt or killed.”

In a certain sense, that’s really all there is to it. People were in danger, and a brave American veteran stepped in to protect them. The story never needed to be more than that.

But in another, very real sense, the Penny case marks a momentous turning point in American life. The dead hand of racial ressentiment that has gripped this country has lost its strength. It has done immeasurable damage, institutionalizing itself across the broad swathe of American private and public life, and its undoing will be a generational project. But the fever is breaking.

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