In the matter of Daniel Penny

I agree with those Americans who regard Daniel Penny as a hero. The man he accidentally asphyxiated, Jordan Neely, was a multiple repeat criminal, a psychopath who terrorized innocent people on that New York subway car. Penny, an ex-Marine, was the only one courageous enough to stop Neely. The jury that found Penny innocent is to be commended.

Neely’s family is, predictably, now going to sue Penny for wrongful death or some equally bogus charge. Free money! And just as predictably, Black Lives Matter (yes, they’re still around) is trying their best to instigate street riots in protest. BLM insists that America is a racist country. But BLM has had their 15 minutes of fame. Nobody cares about them and their hysteria anymore. Their pathetic urge to rioting went nowhere.

What has this to do with Oakland? Plenty. For one thing, we have a subway too—BART. As a frequent BART rider, I’ve seen plenty of atrocities on the train when I wished that someone big and strong, like Daniel Penny, would interfere with some a-hole who was acting out and threatening passengers. So even though the New York events happened 3,000 miles away, I felt a sense of relief and validation, knowing that there are virtuous people around who believe in heroism.

It has to do with Oakland also in the sense that race was at the heart of this issue. The media already is portraying Neely as some sort of victim: a Black, homeless, mentally ill person whom America’s racist healthcare system refused to help. We hear this all the time from radicals in Oakland. They complain that we need to devote endless money to services for poor people of color, including criminals. There are several reasons why this belief is wrong. For one, society does not have a financial obligation to reward wrongdoers—and even if we did, it would be unconstitutional to base it on race. If anything, society has an obligation to stop wrongdoers from their sociopathic behavior. And two, even if we agreed that people need psychiatric intervention, shelter, medical treatment and food, where is all the money supposed to come from? America has devoted trillions of dollars over the decades to various forms of welfare for the poor, and I don’t think anyone can say that the money has been well spent. It’s been wasted—our precious tax dollars thrown down a rabbit hole. At some point, we have to insist that people behave appropriately, and if they don’t, they’ll suffer the consequences. There is also, I will add, no small degree of anti-White racism in all this: Carroll Fife is infamous for openly expressing her hatred of Caucasians, and that perversion runs in the veins of Oakland-style “progressivism.”

It used to be, throughout human history, that badly behaved people like Jordan Neely were dealt with through being ostracized, banished from polite society, and shamed, if not actually thrown into confinement. These forms of punishment worked well; they kept sociopaths at bay, which is society’s right and duty. However, due to the peculiar American obsession with civil liberties, for some time now we’ve been prevented from dealing with bad people in an effective way. Instead, forces on the political Left have convinced too many of us that criminals and evil-doers have civil rights just like the rest of us. Well, maybe they do have certain rights—but no one has the right to invade a subway car and intimidate innocent passengers. That should be obvious even to the simplest mind. And yet, we have these BLM activists who insist that brutes like Neely have “rights” that include ranting, screaming and threatening on a subway car. There is no such right.

I don’t believe the people who defended Daniel Penny cared one bit about the race of the thug he choked. It didn’t matter to them that Neely was Black; he could have been Puerto Rican, Vietnamese, Palestinian, Jewish or—like Penny himself—a blue-eyed, blonde-haired European. The only thing that mattered was that a dangerous lunatic had to be stopped. This issue has nothing at all to do with “racism” and everything to do with law and order.

It would be so refreshing to see Black activists say, “You know, Neely was a bad person, and while we’re sad to see him dead, in a way he really did get what he deserved.” Of course, we’ll never hear such honesty from the likes of Carroll Fife, Pamela Price and Nikki Bas. Their ideological blinders prevent them perceiving truth, much less publicly acknowledging it. But every now and then, we—the good people of America—score a victory on behalf of truth and justice. Daniel Penny has achieved something he never set out to do on that fateful day: he has given us hope.

Steve Heimoff