Heather Mac Donald is a phenomenon, a long-time essayist and author, senior writer at the Manhattan Institute, and a lot more.  She has always been an effective and eloquent advocate writer, debater and public speaker for the police and law enforcement, the rule of law.  With that inadequate introduction, I attempt here to summarize and highlights of her 4000 word-plus discussion of the Neely-Penny struggle on the F train in Manhattan and her analysis of the culture/street/racial problems that brought us to this point of conflict and legal insanity.   

She commences:

Neely died on May 1 on a New York City subway car, after being restrained by a Marine veteran who was trying to protect his fellow passengers from Neely’s psychotic outbursts.  

Neely has been turned into a symbol of a racist system of law enforcement and of civilian values that exaggerate the threat of mentally ill vagrants to keep minorities down….  All the pathologies afflicting American cities were present in that earlier fatal encounter and its aftermath: the grotesque parody of compassion that is conventional homeless policy; government’s elevation of the supposed interests of the anti-social and dysfunctional over those of the law-abiding and hard-working; anti-white race-baiting and racial bathos.

But the May 1 confrontation between the ex-Marine Daniel Penny and the mentally ill Neely stands for more than failed policy. Reaction to Penny’s intervention illuminates as well the war on manly virtues and their attempted replacement with an emasculated dependence on bureaucrats and social workers. 

YouTube screengrab (cropped)

Neely was a crazed and violent man who had a long rap sheet including his forte, violent assaults on elderly women.

…while vagrants have a right to shelter, they have no obligation to use it. They are free to continue colonizing public and private spaces if they prefer….  [A]n army of feckless “outreach workers” pads around after the vagrants, politely inquiring as to whether this time, they might deign to accept services and shelter….   [in early April] Several outreach workers had come across Neely in a subway car at Coney Island, flashing his genitals and urinating on the floor.

Ms. Mac Donald provides much more. She discusses the May 1 arrival of Neely, the well-known time bomb, after he no doubt jumped a turn style and showed up in an F train car. 

…at the Lafayette and Broadway station in Manhattan’s SoHo, threw his jacket on the floor, and screamed that he was hungry, thirsty, and willing to die. . . . (there were various versions about what he said) The Daily Mail reports a third version from another eyewitness: “I would kill a motherf***er. I don’t care. I’ll take a bullet. I’ll go to jail.”

Well, here’s what Penny, a Marine (once a Marine, always a Marine) did:

Penny and his fellow Good Samaritan held Neely down for several minutes and then rolled him over on his side in a recovery position. The video does not suggest that Neely was in a chokehold during that entire time. [A chokehold applies pressure to the carotid arteries in the neck to induce temporary unconsciousness.] Rather, Penny appears to be restraining Neely with a bear hug until the police can arrive. [emphasis added]

Derick Chauvin didn’t strangle or asphyxiate George Floyd, either, but the racialist mob and loudmouths, the media, blew the thing up, in the Chauvin/Floyd case calling the prone restraint an asphyxiation  murder hold, and in the Penny/Neely matter a choke murder hold. Yell, and repeat murder, chokehold, chokehold. Ms. Mac Donald comments on the calm and impassive nature of the accused Penny; I would also point out Neely was similarly obviously not struggling in the head lock like a man being strangled. 

I have previously shown in an essay with an embedded video demonstration here at AT that George Floyd died of a cardiac arrest because of excitement and a very bad heart, a load of fentanyl and methamphetamine, not being restrained on his stomach.  The widely used prone restraint taught to Minneapolis Police and parts of department policy that killed Saint George is not a killer, it was his heart.  George Floyd died of a cardiac arrest, not asphyxiation.   

Now I have to put up with another scared medical examiner who will declare Neely a victim of homicide by strangulation.  The lesson to be learned is: white boy, don’t lay a hand on an oppressed minority person, he or she might die and you will be prosecuted as a white supremacist murderer, conviction assured in a big blue city in America.  

I know what a choke hold is, and Penny didn’t have a choke hold on Neely.  He had a head lock with no evidence on the video of the key elements of a choke hold. The right hand and arm were not in the lever/crank position for a choke hold.   One more time -- look at the videos -- Penny isn’t cranking on a choke hold, he was holding the man’s head to restrain him; Chauvin was not bearing down to asphyxiate a 224 pound man, he was at 170 pounds with gear added, not capable of asphyxiating George Floyd.

Floyd and Neely both died of cardiac arrest from excitement and exertion and that could have been aggravated by drugs on board.  People die suddenly and quietly, sometimes just dropping to the ground when they have a cardiac rhythm disturbance.   

In modern day blue city racialist social justice prosecutions, the DA applies the Red Queen approach from Alice in Wonderland -- sentence first, verdict afterwards.  The prosecutors are ready to trash the innocent till proven guilty principle as prosecutors run their updated and politically correct version of lynching by unethical, politically-motivated government prosecutors.   

Ms. Mac Donald details the performances of the racialist hustlers and poseur academics and professionals who jumped to the microphone; then she discusses how we got to this -- and I have lived it and assure you her narrative is accurate

The Deinstitutionalization Movement

Best to quote the Mac Donald:

This status quo is the result of two upheavals in social policy, one regarding mental illness, the other regarding the proper focus of government. Civil libertarian Thomas Szasz argued in the 1960s that mental illness was an arbitrary concept designed to snuff out nonconformity to bourgeois norms of behavior. While Szasz’s deconstruction of the distinction between sanity and insanity was not widely embraced to its full radical extent, he did succeed in making the standard for long-term involuntary commitment nearly impossible to meet. Mental institutions were shut down and their inhabitants released to “the community,” a movement aided by those facilities’ high cost and sometimes inhumane conditions…. All this for the privilege of walking around with feces in one’s pants, while raving at demons.

If it weren’t for politics, the deinstitutionalization movement could not have survived a short experiment, but it continues till today.   

Mac Donald asks:

Meanwhile, hardworking taxpayers are treated simply as ATMs for funding the rights revolution.
When government abdicates its responsibility to maintain public safety, a few citizens, for now at least, will step into the breach. Penny was one of them. He restrained Neely not out of racism or malice but to protect his fellow passengers. He was showing classically male virtues: chivalry, courage and initiative. 

A homicide charge is the most efficient way to discourage such initiative in the future. Stigma is another. 

Ms. Mac Donald brings us the benefit of her research:

Contrary to the anti-white narrative, white on black homicides are almost nonexistent. Blacks commit 87 percent of all non-lethal interracial violence between blacks and whites and whites and blacks; blacks are roughly thirty-five times more likely to commit violent offenses against whites than whites are to commit violent offenses against blacks.

Existing while black is more dangerous than existing while white, but not because of white supremacy. In the first eighteen months of the pandemic, black juveniles were shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles. (That shooting spike began only after the George Floyd race riots.) Had any of those black juvenile gun victims been shot or killed by whites, we would have heard about it. Instead, the rule for deciphering crime reporting is as follows: if the race of a crime suspect is not provided, the suspect is black. That rule applies when the victim is black and even more so when the victim is white. 

If a crime suspect is white, however, that fact will usually be reported and it will always be the lead in any story in the rare instance when the victim is black. 

Ms. Mac Donald is a genius and an inestimable analyst of the current social scene and domestic political environment, with particular expertise in matters of law enforcement.   

John Dale Dunn is a retired emergency physician and inactive attorney in Brownwood, Texas.