Declaration of Intent
Daniel Penny's appearance at the Army-Navy game was a signal: law and order is back on the menu
Call it a declaration of intent, if you will.
On Saturday, Daniel Penny, the brave young man who refused to sit idly by on the New York subway, attended the annual Army-Navy football game, in New Jersey. He did so as a free man. He also did so as the special guest of incoming vice president JD Vance, who contacted Penny and his lawyer to congratulate them after Penny was cleared, on Monday, of negligent homicide and second-degree manslaughter for his part in the death of Jordan Neely. Also in attendance were the president-elect himself, Tulsi Gabbard, his pick for head of national intelligence, and Pete Hegseth, his pick for secretary of defense, among others.
An erstwhile Michael Jackson impersonator, by the time of his death Jordan Neely had degenerated to the level of a frothing, angry bum—just one of so many that make navigating New York’s train tunnels such a frightful experience. (Just how frightful I discovered for myself last week when I visited the city for the very first time. Every dollar I spent on Ubers, helicopters and SpaceX rockets felt justified after I’d spent barely five minutes on an F train…)
No longer content to harass travellers by moonwalking up and down the platforms and carriages, occasionally stopping to grab his crotch and scream “EEE-HEE!” Or “CHAMONE!,” Neely now resorted to the oldest trick in the book, naked intimidation, as he panhandled for change.
On the day of his death, Neely was being unusually aggressive, even for a frothing angry bum in a city that’s full of them. After Neely began threatening all and sundry in the carriage Penny was riding in, including women, and declaring that he was willing to go to jail for what he was about to do, Penny knew he had to step in to prevent a tragedy. He did. He put Neely in a restraining hold from behind until the authorities arrived.
Neely, still conscious when paramedics attended him, later died. Like George Floyd, he was loaded up on drugs.
If Penny prevented a tragedy for one of his fellow passengers, he brought down a calamity on his own head. Soon he was on trial for his heroism, thanks to notorious Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. Outside the courtoom, BLM and America’s vast apparatus of racial grievance-mongering revved up, just like during the trial of Derek Chauvin, to ensure the “right” decision was reached.
Penny’s fate—a young white man accused of killing a young black man in New York—seemed all but certain.
And yet, somehow, it wasn’t.
Truth won out.
No, Penny was not a rampaging “white supremacist” looking for a black man—any black man—to terrorise and kill. To “lynch,” as a theater kid would put it. Penny was, and is, a civic-minded young man who, like I say, refused to sit idly by as a desperate thug threatened the kind of people civic-minded young men, by instinct, want to protect. The jury could see that, plain as day.
If more men behaved like Daniel Penny, America would be a better place. We all know that. Of course, the treatment afforded to Daniel Penny is designed to deter precisely such behaviour, in the same way that the prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse—as clear-cut a case of self-defense as could be—was designed to deter Americans from exercising their God-given rights as Americans, not least of all the Second Amendment.
But all of that drama must have seemed a million miles away from Saturday’s star-studded, star-spangled event in New Jersey.
Vance could easily not have invited Penny. He didn’t even have to pick up the phone and congratulate him personally. Most of America’s craven political class would have weighed the options and the potential outrage and said no, good on him, but I’ll go to the Army-Navy game without that baggage.
But JD Vance is not like most of America’s craven political class. He has a backbone (he was a Marine himself). He also knows gestures matter, and this, I think, was a very clear gesture, with a very clear message—especially the photographs taken of Penny with Vance and Trump, all three men smiling from ear to ear.
Here’s the message.
Law and order is coming back. The many, the law-abiding, will no longer be subject to the violence and intimidation of a minority of criminals who have taken on, for reasons we could discuss at length, the status of a protected pet class. (Criminals aren’t just indulged to make liberals feel better about themselves and more compassionate. They’re indulged because crime—chaos, strife—is an effective means of social control, something Aristotle knew and wrote about 2,300 years ago.)
More than that, this is a message about rigged justice, about the way leftists have put their fat thumb on lady liberty’s scale to tip it in their favour.
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