Daniel Penny: subway killing of Jordan Neely opens new front in culture war

It has been three years since a 17-year-old from Illinois shot dead two protesters during an anti-police riot in the Wisconsin town of Kenosha, said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times.

A court eventually decided that the gunman, Kyle Rittenhouse, had been acting in self-defence. But what troubled me at the time was the “jubilant reaction of conservative media” to the news that someone had taken the law into their own hands, and meted out “lethal violence against a perceived antagonist”.

Now, we’re seeing that “bloodlust” all over again, in the case of Daniel Penny. A 24-year-old former US marine, Penny was on the New York subway earlier this month when a homeless man, Jordan Neely, began acting erratically. At some point, Penny placed Neely in a chokehold, which ended up killing him. Last week, Penny was charged with second-degree manslaughter – prompting a furious outcry from conservatives. The decision to charge him, said Fox News host Greg Gutfeld, was “pro criminal” and “anti hero”.

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‘A public execution’

Horrible right-wingers support “vigilantism” because it’s “a bulwark of white supremacy”. That’s what progressives want you to think, said Rich Lowry in National Review. But it’s nonsense. For a start, Penny wasn’t a vigilante. He wasn’t prowling the subway, looking to wreak vengeance. He intervened to protect himself and others from someone who was acting menacingly. Had Neely been white, this tragic incident would have passed without comment. As it is, left-wingers have rushed to cast Penny as a racist murderer. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even referred to Neely’s death as “a public execution”.

What happened on the subway that day is still not clear, said Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman in The Washington Post. And if right-wingers were merely anxious to remind people that justice must be allowed to run its course, and Penny is innocent until proved guilty, that would be fine. But some are going further than that: they’re insisting that Penny self-evidently did nothing wrong, and should not be facing charges. The case has become a new front in the culture wars, said Timothy Bella in the same paper. A fund to pay for his defence has raised over $2.7m; right-wing media have dug up Neely’s arrest record; and the likes of Ron DeSantis are busy using Penny’s case to rally their supporters. With his next court appearance scheduled for 17 July, we can expect this battle to rage long into the summer.