HEATHER MAC DONALD: New York’s Government Is the Real Villain in the Daniel Penny Trial.
Americans who have never ridden a subway can only imagine the fear that grips someone sealed underground when a deeply disturbed person starts to act out. The near-universal reaction is to put one’s head down, avoid eye contact, and rush out of the car when it pulls into the next station. But on May 1, 2023, something archaic occurred: a passenger put his own well-being at risk to protect his fellow riders. Daniel Penny, now 26, stepped up to the screaming Neely, wrapped his arms around him, and took him to the subway floor, with Neely’s body on top of his, until help could arrive at the next station. Neely, who was high on a large dose of synthetic marijuana, subsequently died. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg—he who seeks not to “destroy lives through unnecessary incarceration”—charged Penny with second degree manslaughter—i.e., with recklessly causing the death of another person—and with criminally negligent homicide.
The Penny proceeding was more than a travesty of justice, however. It exemplified two intertwined traits of our time: government’s abandonment of law-abiding citizens in favor of the dysfunctional and antisocial, and the hatred of values associated with white males and the Western civilization that they created.
The Penny-Neely incident was racialized from the onset. News coverage invariably led with Penny’s whiteness and Neely’s blackness. (By contrast, black-on-white attacks are presented in a colorblind fashion on those rare occasions when the media report on them at all. Blacks commit 76 percent of all non-lethal interracial violence between blacks and whites despite being just a fifth of the white population.) New York’s leading race-baiters—Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Al Sharpton—demanded that Penny be prosecuted.
Jamaal Bowman Blames Daniel Penny’s Acquittal on ‘the Evil of White Supremacy.’