A couple of weeks ago, after a brief trip back to New York City (where I’d lived for more than forty years, and where my wife and children grew up), I wrote:
I’m glad to be back on my little dirt road in the woods — NYC this time around seemed, in its accelerating degeneracy, to be a human zoo, an absolute freak-show, and the whole place now completely reeks of weed.
Well, by now you’ve probably heard about the incident on the F train in Manhattan yesterday: Jordan Neely, an angry, deranged, homeless black man, with at least forty prior arrests for crimes including violent assault, began menacing passengers, saying that he had nothing to lose and was ready to die. Several other passengers, reasonably concerned that he might be about to attack someone, moved to subdue him. One of them, a young white ex-Marine, applied a chokehold, and maintained it until Neely stopped resisting.
Neely died. The young man who had choked him was released by the police — who, I suppose, must have believed him to have acted bravely and justifiably.
If we had been looking for a spark to ignite yet another racial conflagration — which, of course a great many people always are, including public officials and those in charge of our media – we couldn’t have found a better one. Mr. Neely, whose beatification is already underway, will follow the holy George Floyd to canonization in saintly martyrdom, while the young Marine — whose name I do not know — will almost certainly go to the stake.
Summer’s coming! Looks like a hot one.
3 Comments
I live in NYC, and have been a resident of the Rotten Apple since 1988, so I’ll throw my two cents in.
While the Left is doing everything in its considerable power to weaponize this incident and use it to ignite another Summer Of Floyd, My gut tells me this one doesn’t quite cross the threshold necessary for ignition.
Part of the problem is that the Marine was helped by several other bystanders, including an official POC, an Hispanic man.
Hispanic man also confirms that the black guy was agitated and potentially violent.
These facts will not stop the Left, and the racist grifters who masquerade as local politicians, like Adams, from trying to destroy the Marine’s life, but the details are not stark enough to weaponize as easily as Floyd.
If the marine had been a cop, or had been armed, then the situation is easier to manipulate. As it stands, not enough to start the conflagration the Left is so desperate to spark off.
I will fully admit my error if this indeed blows up to Floyd levels of chaos, but I doubt it.
AD,
Hope you’re right. We’ll see. Even if this doesn’t spark Floyd-level jacquerie, I’ll be very surprised if Alvin Bragg, egged on by the likes of AOC, doesn’t charge that Marine – and as we all know, the process is the punishment.
AD,
I should add that the accelerationist position would be to say “bring it on!” – but another summer of riots is still not a thing I can bring myself to wish for.