Against Moral Inversion

Functional, sane societies depend on people like Daniel Penny.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, notorious for de-prosecuting entire categories of crimes and slashing sentences for the sake of “Achieving Fairness and Safety,” needlessly had Daniel Penny arrested — even though Penny had been released after questioning, the police knew exactly where he was, he was not a flight risk, and his legal team was in regular contact with the authorities. Bragg could have just proceeded to present the case to the grand jury, but he wanted the spectacle of putting Penny through the arrest process and having $100,000 bail set, in order to signal solidarity with the race-obsessed Bolshevik lefties that elected him. | BBC News

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During my second year at West Point, I managed to earn one of ten slots to Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS), a rather hellish experience involving a variety of performance and behavioral assessments. It was absolutely miserable. And it was fucking awesome. Much of the focus was on physical fitness and suffering through some truly sadistic evaluations mixed with exhausting team events in which your ability to work effectively with others and accomplish absurd tasks was closely observed. But we were also required to take several psychological tests, including a mind-bending battery that was 720 questions long. I’ll always remember that particular test because I scored “off the charts” in “protective instincts.”

So, to say that I identify with Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who defended the occupants of a New York City subway car from a psychotic vagrant last summer, would be an understatement.

The guilt I would have felt if someone did get hurt, if — if he did do what he was threatening to do, I would never be able to live with myself. And I’ll — 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. — Daniel Penny, in an interview with Fox News this past weekend

That resonates with me. A lot. But it also makes me sad, because that kind of courage and selflessness has become increasingly rare. The vast majority of people in this country are less concerned with the common good than self-advancement. As David Foster Wallace wrote in The Pale King, “Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality.”

Yes, it’s tragic that Jordan Neely died after being restrained in a chokehold by Daniel Penny. But the left-wing chattersphere’s insistence on calling his death a “modern day lynching,” a characterization driven by media coverage that invariably emphasizes Penny’s whiteness and Neely’s blackness,¹ is disgusting.

An article published Monday by The Nation takes the cake.

Dave Zirin, who’s apparently the “Sport Editor” at The Nation despite mostly churning out anti-Trump content, writes that Daniel Penny “became a right-wing, white-power folk hero” after using a “coward’s choke” to kill “an unhoused Black man,” “a slender 30-year-old street performer with preexisting mental health concerns.”

Zirin says that it’s totally accurate to call this a “lynching” because it occurred in public and was thereafter celebrated as “an act of necessary social and racial discipline.” He equates widespread agreement with the verdict among those of a conservative nature as the “digital equivalent of the old black-and-white Jim Crow lynching postcards, where a sea of white faces and white smiles surround a Black man’s body—neck twisted obscenely—hanging from a tree.”

Woven into the article is Daniel Penny’s attendance at the Army-Navy football game, with Zirin snidely noting that “Penny never fought on a battlefield nor killed anyone overseas; he only fulfilled his military training on the New York City subway.” The piece ends with this: “As for the game, Navy won in a romp, 31–13. After their victory, the players for the Midshipmen cheered, hugged, and cried. They are true and worthy victors. Many of them looked like someone that Penny—or someone inspired by his fame—might decide to kill one day on the subway.”

Absolutely incredible.

I suppose it’s hardly surprising that woke clerics like Joy Reid, Al Sharpton, and Rep. Jasmine Crockett, none of whom ever pass up an opportunity to condemn “whiteness” (the modern-day equivalent of Augustinian original sin), have spent the past week hyperventilating about how the Penny verdict validates “white vigilante justice.” But it’s no less false than calling Neely’s death a lynching.

Merriam-Webster defines vigilante as “a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily.” There can obviously be loner vigilantes, “self-appointed doers of justice,” but there’s zero evidence that Daniel Penny considered himself some kind of avenging angel motivated by racial animus. Rather, Penny and his fellow passengers sincerely believed that Jordan Neely, clearly suffering from untreated mental illness exacerbated by heavy synthetic marijuana use, was a threat to people on the train…because he repeatedly announced himself as a threat to people on the train.

During the subsequent trial, a woman who witnessed the incident on the F train stated she felt threatened by Neely’s erratic and menacing behavior.

“There was a moment where I thought I was truly going to die,” the woman testified, describing Neely as having entered the train in soiled clothing. “He said, ‘I don’t care if I die. I don’t care if you die. Lock me up for life.’ Very, very, very aggressive threats.”²

Another witness, a retiree, testified that nothing in three decades of riding the subway had ever “put fear into me like that.”

In a phone call to 911 at the time of the incident, dispatchers were told that Neely was “trying to attack everybody.” A video presented to the jury clearly shows that Daniel Penny only acted after Neely lunged at a woman cowering behind a stroller.³

The passengers on that subway car were terrified, and understandably so. In recent years there’s been an uptick in unprovoked, unpredictable violence across New York City, leaving far fewer people willing to assume that a vagrant behaving erratically on public transit was harmless. Crime data shows that assaults on the Manhattan subway system have risen by half since 2019,⁴ part of a broader trend of disorder across Blue cities that even The Washington Post admits is due to progressives treating anarchy as a form of welfare, ignoring antisocial behavior lest the enforcement of rules harms “marginalized people.”

Note the date.

And yes, Jordan Neely really was a dangerous psychotic capable of hurting others. The dude had 42 prior arrests.

If Neely had not killed anyone by May 2023, it was not for lack of trying. In 2019, Neely punched Filemon Castillo Baltazar in the head as the 65-year-old waited for a subway in Greenwich Village. In June 2021, he walloped Anne Mitcheltree in the head inside a deli in the East Village; she was in her late sixties. In November 2021, Neely broke the nose and fractured the eye socket of a 67-year-old woman as she exited a subway on the Lower East Side. When he was not assaulting the elderly, he was terrifying other New Yorkers. In June 2019, Neely banged on the door of a subway ticket agent’s booth and threatened to kill her. Yet Neely was still allowed his freedom. — City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald

Yet, many of those on the Left continue to ridicule the possibility that anyone might have been reasonably frightened on that subway car. “These imaginary monsters in your head are addressable with therapy,” sneered Elizabeth Spiers, a New York Times contributor and NYU journalism professor. And there’s been no shortage of cerebral speed bumps arguing that it’s people like Daniel Penny who pose the real threat to your safety.

The defining feature of the progressive Left has become epistemic hubris, a righteous self-certainty so inflexible that it compounds the consequences of ignorance by disabling the parts of the brain armed with the capacity for reason.

As products of a radically closed and homogenized information system, these naive, neurotic, comfortable shut-ins live in a laptop class bubble where delusion is a source of pride, admission of complexity is considered a threat to the cause du jour, and a wildly quixotic prism is used to turn evidence of civilizational decline into the colorful stuff of romance. They fight tooth-and-nail against any attempt to dissuade them that their worldview might need to be adjusted based on reality. Even when presented with incontrovertible evidence that their preferred policies (i.e. - “restorative justice”) are inextricably linked with all sorts of major negative externalities, they simply shrug it off because “Progress™ has its price.” It’s only when they’re the ones personally affected that they change their minds; it’s only when reality hits them in the face with all the force of a runaway semi-trailer that their selfish utopian worldview collapses in on itself like a kicked tent.

When progressives experience a healthy dose of reality it has a way of cracking open what’s become brittle with certainty while cauterizing their silly, abstract, romantic ideas.

The campaign to portray Daniel Penny as a racist murderer who “strangled” a “celebrated Michael Jackson impersonator” speaks to a moral inversion sickness in parts of the left-liberal psyche that’s been contaminated by the postmodernist bullshit underpinning wokeness.

According to postmodernism, truth is a function of identity. Not individual identity, mind you, but collective identity as perceived by other collective identities. While certainly influenced by Marxism, postmodernists replace the Marxian prioritization of class and economic disparities with an “intersectional” focus that favors a conceptualization of group identity as the prism through which all analysis must be filtered, with particular emphasis on a form of standpoint epistemology that asserts there are multiple “ways of knowing” and that the “lived experience” of the marginalized takes precedence over empirical or scientific methodology.

This is all predicated on the Foucauldian notion that society operates on the basis of invisible power structures privileging “whiteness,” which must be remedied by way of a cultural revolution guaranteeing equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. Paramount value is placed on identity markers like race, and conflict is judged not according to facts or evidence, but power dynamics. The person with the perceived least power is exempt from criticism. It is the greater victim argument.

Hence why so many on the Left have become comic-book thinkers who only understand things in binary terms, forever preoccupied with cramming people into a highly abstract philosophical framework consisting of oppressors and oppressed; and hence why so much media coverage of the Penny/Neely case portrayed these two individuals as if they were one-dimensional caricatures in a grand political drama. The goal is always to reduce such incidents to childlike stories in which the “oppressed” can do no wrong (and have no agency) and the “oppressors” can do no right (and are all-powerful). Essentially, minorities are no longer seen as individual moral actors who bear responsibility for their actions and are instead treated like idolatrous untouchables who, because of their positioning within a hierarchy of oppression, cannot be held morally culpable for the occasional, regrettable excesses. And the Daniel Pennys of the world — heterosexual white males with a military background, the nightmare of every Women’s Studies major — get the book thrown at them. As Eric Kaufmann puts it, “Unbounded kindness toward the marginalised entails hostility to their supposed oppressors, ratcheting toward extremism.”

Suffice it to say that reorienting American society away from the niceties of the liberal tradition and encouraging people to divide the world between oppressors and oppressed does not bode well in the long run. Conventional notions of right and wrong, good and evil will fade into oblivion, paving the way for “anarcho-tyranny.” Indeed, as Marc Andreessen points out, Penny’s prosecution is a perfect example of anarcho-tyranny, an approach to government in which disorder is allowed to proliferate because the authorities decline to carry out basic public-safety functions, abandoning the law-abiding and hardworking in favor of the welfare-dependent, anti-social, and criminal classes.

I’m obviously very glad that Daniel Penny was acquitted, and grateful to our Founding Fathers for understanding that a panel of ordinary Americans could serve as the last line of defense against a tyrannical and overweening government. But the in terrorem effect remains. Future potential Daniel Pennys are now on notice that they risk a homicide indictment if they step into the breach when innocent people around them are threatened. This will no doubt lead similar young men to suppress the heroic male virtues of chivalry, self-reliance, and initiative that all functional, sane societies depend on.

1. This is par for the course. A Washington Free Beacon review of hundreds of articles published by major papers found that the media intentionally buries the race of non-white criminals. Black-on-white attacks are presented in a colorblind fashion on those rare occasions when the media reports on them at all, even though blacks commit 76% of all interracial violence despite being just a fifth of the white population. Blacks have killed 103,000 more white people than white people have killed black people since 1959. And please don’t mistake my realism for “racism,” folks. The only time you ever hear about black people being killed — the only time there’s national media coverage — is when the killer is white. Today in the U.S. a young black man has fifteen times the chances of dying from violence as his white counterpart. Violence takes more years of life from black men than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined. And it’s not because of white people.

2. Worth pointing out that a self-described “woman of color” who witnessed the incident told police that Penny was a “hero,” while another woman said he “literally saved the train.”

3. Hence my disgust with grievance artists like Rep. Jamaal Bowman who argue that Penny's decision to intervene wasn’t based on courage or selflessness, but rather a desire to satisfy a long-suppressed urge to “publicly execute a black man.” When a threat is detected, the amygdala initiates the commonly known “fight, flight, or freeze” response (also called the hyper arousal and acute stress response), which in turn activates the hypothalamic, pituitary, and adrenal glands that flood us with adrenaline and cortisol. Faced with physical conflict or confrontation, most people choose “flight.” Penny didn’t personally know any of his fellow passengers but still chose to intervene because he rightly understood they were more vulnerable than himself. Bucking self-preservation — the most basic and tyrannical of all instincts — in favor of defending others is no small thing and should be commended.

4. In the three years before the Daniel Penny/Jordan Neely incident, 27 people had been murdered in the subway, shot or stabbed or shoved onto the tracks as a train roared into the station.