 So, you probably all heard about the Jordan Neely's, you know, death, what happened on the subway. I'll go through, I guess, the main events to bring everybody up to speed, and then we'll talk about kind of what's been happening. But as you probably know, you know, Jordan Neely, a man with significant mental health issues and a history of violence, somebody who had been arrested 42 times in the past, a convicted fellow with a history of brutal assault, but really bottom line is somebody who was clearly mentally ill, mentally disturbed, starting harassing people on the subway in New York City. Now, we still don't have a lot of details on exactly what happened on that subway and the nature of the harassment and everything else that was going on. We do know that some people, some of the people on the subway were calling 911, 911, we do know that Neely was saying things like he'd had it and he was ready to die and things like that, that he was acting in threatening ways towards people. We do know that the police were not present, and again people dialing 911, trying to get police attention. And then what we also know is that another passenger on the train, Daniel Penny, landed up restraining Jordan Neely, putting him in a headlock with the help of two other passengers who I guess held Neely down and inadvertently killed Neely in the subway car. Since then, New York's District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, has decided to prosecute Daniel Penny for manslaughter and Penny has been arraigned and is going to appear in courts I guess on July 17th, so nothing's going to happen very quickly, but he is being prosecuted for manslaughter. I think the straightforward kind of what we know of the facts of the case, I mean there's not a lot of controversy and a lot of issue here, we know that Alvin Bragg is about as leftist and liberal as it gets. We know that Jordan Neely is black and Daniel Penny is white, so the guy who died was black and the guy who restrained him was white. We know that Alvin Bragg, given how leftist he is, I mean if you remember there was that kind of grocery store, it's not a grocery store, I forget what they call it, the little grocery store thing where a guy was defending himself and used a knife and Alvin Bragg was all ready to go after him and also for manslaughter. And then they ended up, I think if I remember right, dismissing those charges. In this case, I don't know if manslaughter is the right call, probably not, probably you could argue that he didn't intend to kill him, but he was restraining him because the guy was a threat to other people and inadvertently killed him and it's not obvious to me that he should be tried for manslaughter, but it's not obvious to me that he shouldn't. That is I think this is why we have a court system and this is why we had a justice system and again I think all of that would probably come out in trial and my guess is that ultimately you'd get a reasonable outcome from something like this. Nobody's claiming that murder was committed here and nobody's claiming yet that this is somehow a race crime and racially motivated or anything like that. It's pretty, it's just a question of is manslaughter is a prosecution of manslaughter completely unreasonable, completely nuts or is it reasonable to go to trial and something like that. And the reality is most of us don't have the facts. I think we should be legitimately suspicious given that the district attorney is Alvin Bragg and he's such a leftist and so progressive, so motivated by these kind of issues and not a big believe in self-defense, but we don't know. I think the story here is not so much what happened and even the prosecution itself. It's how all of this has become hyper super politicized and how this has become all about politics and scoring political points and your opponents and how everybody feels like they have to take sides. This is kind of the left-right divide, right? You have to, in every criminal case before you have the facts, you have to decide. And if a white man kills a black man, if you're on the left typically, well, I mean go after him. I had a quote here from AOC. What did AOC say? I mean, AOC said that Neely was executed for the crime of being homeless. So AOC goes completely nuts, berserk, and this is an execution, this is the problem. This is an instance of systemic racism. This is the big problem of white versus black criminality and black people are afraid of white people because they do this kind of stuff, which is bizarre because if you look at the statistics, there's very, very little white on black crime. There's relatively speaking little black on white crime, but much more black on white crime than white on black. Most crime is black on black and white on white, but the reality is that this has become a BLM-like issue. This has become a racial issue for the people responding. We don't know that it's a racial issue for the prosecutor, but it certainly is a racial issue for the people responding. And of course, the flip side is that the right is, I mean, Neely's a hero. And let's celebrate him. And Ron DeSantis is going to score political points by going all in on Penny's defense fund. And let's give him money and let's support everything this guy does because he's a hero. Because he stood up to, well, maybe it'll turn out he's a hero. Maybe it'll turn out that he overreacted. It's very hard to tell. New York Subways can be a very scary place, particularly for women. And if you went all out against everybody who was scary on the New York subway, you'd be putting in headlocks a lot of people. So the question is, was it justified in this case? Maybe it was. Probably was. It certainly, you know, if I had a guess right now, I'd say Neely probably did the right thing. But we don't know. You need facts. You need evidence. We still haven't heard from the people in that subway car with Neely. We haven't heard from the two people who helped restrain Neely, right? So we don't know if he overreacted, but politically it doesn't matter. Politically, somebody like DeSantis is going to jump on it because everything now is politics. Everything is a cultural issue. Again, AOC doesn't need facts. A white man killed a black man on a New York subway. That's enough for her. Whether their skin color is relevant, whether anybody who's motivated by the skin color doesn't matter. Or for her, it's about, you know, they're now homeless is considered a non-PC word. You're not allowed to say homeless anymore. Now it's houseless. I don't quite have to do a little bit of research to figure out why this is. But now it's houseless. So AOC actually, you know, rather than race, it's just because this guy was houseless. And that's why he was executed because we don't like houseless people. So we go after them. Where does that come from? I mean, I know exactly where it comes from. We'll get to that. I mean, really what we're seeing here from the left is just this emotionalist altruistic response. Here's a guy who was homeless, struggling, clearly, you know, mentally ill, you know, in bad shape, bad shape on the interse... and black. So on the intersectionality graph, he's pretty high up there as by definition virtuous. And then you get a white former Marine killing him. Well, obviously the guy who's suffering, obviously the guy who was lower down in the social hierarchy but higher up in the hierarchy of virtue is in the right and the guy who killed him is in the wrong. I mean, how can you even argue with that? Sacrifice the able, the strong, the healthy, to the homeless, the mentally ill, the unhealthy and tell with the facts. This is... It's determined completely by your suffering hierarchy. I wonder if it was two homeless people, one choked the other one to death. This would make the news. Nobody would care. So you know, this is playing constantly on Neely's suffering, Neely's horrible condition, the fact that the city didn't help him, the fact that he wasn't housed or sheltered or whatever they want to call it these days. And the fact that in spite of his illness he was allowed to roam through the streets, it all plays to that. It's all about the altruism. It's all about they are the people, you know, the people who suffer the most in our society who are the lowest in our society from the perspective of suffering, they are the ones we should care about. They're the only thing we should care about. They're the standard of what we should be sacrificing to and if they're suffering and if they're being killed, whether justifiably or not, doesn't matter. What matters is we have not sacrificed enough to them. We have not sacrificed enough to them. This is just an indictment of the fact that we live in a selfish culture that doesn't care enough for the people who are suffering in the world. You know, Neely, the city was fully aware of Neely. He'd been in and out of treatment. He'd been, you know, the city had dealt with him. Again, he'd been arrested 42 times. He was often helped hundreds of times. He was often forced to take the help. Recently, he had shattered the bones of an elderly woman's face. I mean, this is a violent, horrible, you know, mentally ill human being. So why are we making him into martyr? It turns out his family's all upset. Well, what was his family in trying to treat him? Where's his family in trying to solve these issues that he obviously had? You know, he has been in care facilities. He's been out of care facilities. There's been a warrant issued for his arrest. All of these things. Multiple run-ins with social workers and police. And now he's dead and you can blame the system. I don't see how the system seems to have really tried to help this guy. Obviously, this guy was in trouble and was doing threatening things and somebody responded. And again, we don't know the exact evidence. You know, we don't know the details of whether, in this case, vigilante justice, if you will, was justified. But the reality is that nothing good was going to come of this guy's life. It doesn't mean he's justified to kill him, but he's not some saint that we should, you know, that the left wants us to worship and who now is the standard of goodness and the standard of what is right and the standard of what is good and determines all of this, right? Yeah, and the fact that it's politicized and the fact that the right is using this as an all-in, why can't we let the justice system work if when it's worked, when we get the evidence, when we get all the facts, we think it's wrong, there are appeals, you know, we can get involved. But why assume that everything is politicized and political? If it is, deal with it. But stop making this about politics, both on the left and right. And again, all of it, you know, the mayor of New York has made this about race. And again, people who are trying to make this about race beware because once we start looking at crime statistics based on race, they might not be too happy with what actually comes out of it. Another angle in this, which I read, this is in the Free Press, an article by Kate Rosenfield who was, by Kate Rosenfield, anyway, this is Barry Weiss's publication. She wrote, this is a, watch how she says, Me Too flips here. During the Me Too revolution, they called it, I don't know if it's a revolution, but anyway, during the Me Too movement's peak, the whole idea was women should not tolerate men harassing them. They should stand up, they should fight it, they should zero tolerance. They should shut them down. And if a male did harass a woman or disrespected her, he should lose a job, he should, his reputation should be destroyed. You know, any kind of harassment from just a few words to a hug to an inappropriate hug to an inappropriate, too much worse. But all of it was out. Women should have, and when older women said, well, you know, show some resilience. You know, this is the world we live in. Men are going to be like this. They're going to say these things. Old women said, why should we know zero tolerance? What's interesting is that the same women who said zero tolerance about men in the workplace and Me Too, in this case, are saying, oh, come on, people. So this crazy guy was harassing people in the subway. Come on, give it a break. Crazy people harass people in the subway every day. Why can't you show a little bit more resilience? Well, why should we? You're the one saying we shouldn't show that resilience in the workplace. We should have zero tolerance. Why should we not have zero tolerance in the New York subway? Why shouldn't we stand up and stop this? Why shouldn't we deal with it? And you know, and what she identifies, and I think she's right, is that the standard is flipped. The standard used to be Me Too, but Me Too is out. What's in now is BLM. What's in now is skin color. What matters now is skin color. If it was a white man harassing these women and another white man had strangled him, again, probably not making the news. But the fact that it was a black man, the fact that a white man strangled him, that you relevant, those irrelevant facts, as far as we know, irrelevant facts, they changed the equation. So if you're a white woman, or a black woman, any woman, I guess, you should tolerate, you should be, and I think it's deeper than BLM, we'll get to, it's this intersectionality. You should be willing to tolerate abuse from somebody who is of a skin color that is being discriminated against in the past. You should be willing to accept abuse from somebody who's homeless, who's worse off than you. You should be willing to accept abuse from somebody who on this hierarchy of intersectionality is more oppressed than you are. That is, at the end of the day, what the left is obsessed about is this idea of group power, power of people over, all relationships are power relationships, they will tell you. All power relationships, according to them, are determined by identity, whether it's skin color, whether it's sexuality, whether it's all ultimately determined by your group identity and by past sins against your group. And mentally ill, that's a group that's clearly discriminated against because their life kind of sucks. So the more oppressed you are, the more you can harass other people, they should show resilience. But if you're in a position of what they would consider power, if you're a white male, you can't harass anybody because you're already in a position of power. So it's all about where you are on this hierarchy of suffering, it's all driven by this weird, you have to say sophisticated, weird complex, maybe not sophisticated, you know, structure of suffering, structure of oppression that has basically been created and basically being pushed out there by the culture, by the left, by the left. And this is, you know, only academics hold this nonsense, I mean this is not something that is common people even hold. So it's who harasses you that determines what kind of response, whether you should be resilient, whether you should turn the other cheek, or whether you should stand up and fight and destroy his life. And in this case, because a white man was the one who stood up to them, to a black man, that's unacceptable. So what this case is really all about and what this case is really revealing is the state of our culture and how corrupt the left has become. And of course this is all in the context of rising crime in New York, this is all in the context of rising crime, particularly in the subway in New York, video showing crimes of Coying in New York, a woman dragged by her hair on a YouTube video, just horrible situations like that. Now remember, I'd like to say this, crime in New York is still relatively low, relative to other cities in the US and relative to what it was in the 90s and the 80s, but it's higher and it's rising. And it's bad, it's much worse than it was three, four, five years ago. So we will see. One of the things this woman writes, I like the way she ended it, she said, look, the Me Too generation demanded vigilance, constant vigilance, constant vigilance, you can't tolerate any offense. Well, when you demand vigilance, what you usually get is vigilantes. And here we got a form of vigilante, again, we don't know all the details. And somebody took action. But then this is not what you want, what you'd want is, I mean, what I think we need right now in New York is a lot more policemen in the subway, a lot more police presence, a lot tougher stance on crime. And with rising crime, you're going to see people taking the law into their own hands in a sense, or taking their own self-defense into their own hands, which is valuable or defending other people themselves. And things like this will happen where somebody is killed. All right. So I thought that was a great, great, this was a good illustration of the whole issue of altruism and the whole issue of intersectionality and how it plays out. We'll keep watching this case. It'll be interesting, particularly if it goes to trial, what exactly happens. And again, this becomes one more chapter in this cultural wars on top of everything else. But in this case, it's become a cultural war issue because the left has turned it into one. I mean, it is ridiculous. It's a simple case. It should just be viewed as a straightforward case was what he did justified or not in from the perspective of defending himself or defending the other people in the carriage. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to youronbrookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star, locals, and just making an appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe, press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.