“Despite the violent and erratic behavior exhibited by Jordan Neely on a New York subway Monday night that led to a violent and ultimately fatal altercation, Governor Kathy Hochul said that the man was simply “killed for being a passenger on the subway trains.” “Before we get started answering your questions,” Hochul told reporters on Thursday afternoon, “I do want to acknowledge how horrific it was to view a video of Jordan Neely being killed for being a passenger on the subway trains.”
…Asked by one journalist what the appropriate response should be when “somebody’s acting erratically, [and] threatening people,” Hochul deflected. “I think it’s a case-by-case situation. This was an unarmed individual who had been on the subway many times, known by many of the regular travelers.
And you know, sometimes people have an episode where they’re displaying their feelings in a loud and emotional way, but it became very clear that he was not going to, you know, cause harm to these other people. And the video of three individuals holding him down until the last breath was snuffed out of him. I would say it was a very extreme response.”
…Neely’s manner of death has been a ruled a homicide, the New York Medical Examiner’s Office told National Review. But District Attorney Alvin Bragg has not yet made a charging decision.
That didn’t stop Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from declaring “Jordan Neely was murdered.” “But [because] Jordan was houseless and crying for food in a time when the city is raising rents and stripping services to militarize itself while many in power demonize the poor, the murderer gets protected [with] passive headlines [and] no charges. It’s disgusting,” she wrote on social media.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, however, struck a different cord in responding to the controversy, suggesting it was “irresponsible” to determine fault before all the facts are known. “Any loss of life is tragic. There’s a lot we don’t know about what happened here, so I’m going to refrain from commenting further,” Adams said. “However, we do know there were serious mental health issues in play here which is why our administration has made record investment in providing care to those who ended it and getting people off the streets and subways, and out of dangerous situations.”
Ocasio-Cortez responded by calling Adams’s comments a “new low” in a Twitter post. “This honestly feels like a new low: not being able to clearly condemn a public murder because the victim was of a social status some would deem ‘too low’ to care about,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “The last sentence is especially rich from an admin trying to cut the very services that could have helped him.”
On the one hand, both Hochul’s and Ocasio-Cortez’s comments are not just “irresponsible”, but INCREDIBLY irresponsible. On the other hand, they’re simply following the example The Great Divider himself set early in his presidency:
And the literal lies, malicious misrepresentations and deliberate divisiveness never ceased to emanate from his mouth. We’re hard-pressed to think of a time the man has ever told the truth.
In a related item, Andy McCarthy exposes the falsehoods Obama claimed as facts as he correctly concludes…
“Pace drama queen AOC, Jordan Neely was not murdered. Yet, he did die at the hands of another man. The circumstances under which that happened are complicated. Of those circumstances, the dangerous setting that Neely further imperiled before his fateful confrontation is probably the most consequential: an under-policed New York City subway system that is regressing to late 20th century mayhem — except with the add-on of a mental-health crisis decades in the making.
The least consequential of the circumstances, at least in the decisive moments, was race.
The manic 30-year-old Neely was black. The young man who placed him in a headlock, a 24-year-old former Marine identified Friday as Daniel Penny, was white. In a sensible world, the happenstance of the racial difference would go unmentioned because, objectively, it was irrelevant. Psychotic and suffering, Neely was not discriminating about the racial and ethnic composition of the passengers he harassed and frightened on the F train as it crawled through Manhattan on a Monday afternoon. Penny obviously did not hop on the subway thinking, “Good day to hunt down young black men.” Nor did the other passengers who helped subdue Neely, at least one of whom appears (from video of the incident) to have been a young black man.
The happenstance of racial disparity made no difference, except to the demagogues who carp their way to control of our public debate — to whom it is now the only thing that matters.
We need to learn to ignore them. Of course Jordan Neely’s life mattered. But so did the life of the 67-year-old woman he punched in the head on November 12, 2021, fracturing her orbital bone and breaking her nose — as a result of which he spent over a year in Rikers Island. Neely’s life also mattered when he was repeatedly arrested and left untreated, despite the patent danger he had become to himself and those around him. Notwithstanding the indifference then of the agitators to whom he suddenly matters, his life mattered as much then as it did on the subway Monday afternoon. And as for the subway, as Nicole Gelinas observes, the lives of the 27 other people violently killed on trains and in stations since March 2020 matter too — though you haven’t heard about them because their circumstances don’t advance the Left’s race-mongering.
Year in and year out, about 90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by black assailants, overwhelmingly young and male. Comparatively speaking, incidents of interracial homicide are rare enough to dispel the absurd depiction of America as a racist dystopia — indeed, in the majority of such killings, the perpetrator is black, and the victim is white.
I offer these cold hard factsnot to make a racial point. Quite the opposite. The point is that when we obsess over race, as the Left would have us do, we miss violent crime’s critical causative factor — recidivism.
The fact that young black males, as a class, offend at a rate disproportionate to their percentage of the overall population should not obscure the more salient fact that a disproportionate amount of crime is committed by repeat offenders — and too many of those recidivists have mental-health problems.
This is not a black issue. Yes, if we’re going to think in group terms, then a disproportionate amount of crime committed by one demographic means that demographic will have more than its share of recidivists. But contrary to the Left’s insistence on pitting group versus group to divide us, crime is an individual phenomenon. As judges instruct juries, guilt is personal — you may not be convicted of a crime based on the racial or ethnic group you happen to be a part of; there has to be evidence that you personally committed the charged offense. The toxic notion of group proclivities has no place in the law.
…What happened on the F train Monday did not happen because of race. It happened because race has become an excuse not to deal with what actually ails us.
So . . . what should happen? What should always happen when someone’s life is taken by another person: a thorough investigation.
…Until more of the facts are disclosed, I can’t pretend to know what should happen here. I do know that distorting a tragedy that had nothing to do with race into another episode of the Left’s tragically divisive race-baiting will only make a bad situation much worse.”
Meanwhile, in news you won’t find the MSM covering, FOX reports a…
“…Carlton Gilford allegedly shot and killed two men to whom he did not have any connection on April 18, according to the Tulsa Police Department. Police said Gifford, who according to jail records is homeless, went inside the Rudisill Library around 9:40 a.m., walked up behind a man sitting at a desk, and shot him in the back of the head. The victim, 35-year-old Lundin Hathcock, was rushed to the hospital where he died.
After the library shooting, police said, Gifford went to a nearby QuikTrip convenience store and shot 55-year-old James McDaniel in the back of the head. When the victim fell to the ground, the suspect shot him again. McDaniel died at the scene. Police said that surveillance video showed Gilford also fired shots at a security guard and another person outside the QuikTrip. When officers arrived, Gilford was standing outside the store and admitted that he shot two people, according to the department.
Gilford was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of shooting with intent to kill, and one count of malicious intimidation or harassment. The latter charge is Oklahoma’s version of a hate crime. Under Oklahoma law, there is no specific hate crime statute, but malicious intimidation or harassment includes targeting someone based on their race.
According to Tulsa County District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler, the evidence suggests Gilford, who is Black, shot both men because they were White. The prosecutor didn’t elaborate…”
Here’s the juice: Make no mistake about it, Progressives will represent Daniel Penny as a racist killer, and Carlton Gilford, an actual racist killer, as the victim of systemic racism.
In the meantime, like Mr. McCarthy, we’ll wait to hear all the facts; Not as selectively presented by a MSM which, as this chart forwarded by Nick highlights…
…helped artificially fabricate an issue which heretofore didn’t exist, but at Penny’s eventual trial, which, if we were a betting man, will be not be for murder but rather involuntary manslaughter. After all, he choked the life out of a Black man on the NYC subway:
All of which proves the wisdom of the late, great Winston Churchill as forwarded by our beautiful sister-in-law Jackie:
Which we guess means, at least if Winston was right, we, like the Tin Man, are heartless. Still, that beats the shortcomings of these three:
“For too much of this young decade, social isolation was presented as a virtue — an “ethical duty” even. This week, the horrible consequences of what should have been an option of last resort are being met with some urgency by the very public-health establishment that implored you to keep to yourself.
An 81-page report released this week by Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy warned of a crisis of loneliness afflicting the American public. His office maintains that, beyond the psychological drawbacks associated with loneliness, solitude contributes to negative health outcomes, too. “Widespread loneliness in the U.S. poses health risks as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes daily, costing the health industry billions of dollars annually,” the Associated Press reported.
…The public-health imperative to withdraw from physical social settings exacerbated what was already a measurable decline in the number of Americans who engaged regularly in communal activities with a reliable group of friends and acquaintances.
Robert Putnam’s look into the declining social capital among the American public in his seminal book Bowling Alone was published in the year 2001. He measured Americans’ detachment from one another by the declining memberships of PTAs, churches, social organizations, and youth groups such as the Boy Scouts. In the middle of the last decade, the Wall Street Journal tracked the decline and fall of workplace-sponsored sports teams, observing that the tradition had fallen out of fashion and was on a path toward extinction. The paper was joined that year by liberal columnist E. J. Dionne, who chronicled the lamentable decline of “the neighborhood” and, with it, “neighborliness.” With the rise of streaming services and the proliferation of entertainment venues, Americans have access to fewer and fewer shared cultural moments even within our social silos.
And then came the pandemic(Or, as we’ve always preferred, “scamdemic”, a moniker the facts have proven accurate.) with all its attendant miseries. One study cited in Murthy’s report linked the rise of crippling loneliness to the technological tools that mimic socialization — tools that are marketed as reasonable facsimiles of community. But those tools proved woefully insufficient to the task not long into the pandemic. Indeed, they may even invite worse psychological consequences than being truly alone does. No one should have needed a surgeon general’s study to at least have the sense that social disaggregation would have lasting consequences for us all. But so many of the Americans who set public policy during those years and to whom policy-makers looked for affirmation were not troubled by the isolation of the pandemic era. They welcomed it.
…In April 2021, the Washington Post insisted that roughly “half the population” is “dreading the return to normal.” The pandemic proved to be an introvert’s paradise. Gone was the “emotional labor” of engaging with human beings. No longer were the psychologically anguished compelled to put on a “happy face” for the benefit of others. The need to maintain relationships with friends and extended family went out the window. “Unpopular opinion: I don’t have zoom fatigue and I miss zoom happy hours and game nights,” wrote one 30-year-old software engineer profiled in the New York Times. “I feel more isolated now than I did when friends all took time to chat online at the beginning of the pandemic.” She wasn’t alone in her nostalgia. The Times featured the responses of several young adults who preferred the à la carte communitarian experience available online. “Studies show they [social-media and digital substitutes] meaningfully benefited people’s mental health during a historically isolating period of human history,” the Times insisted.
In this period, policy-makers were bombarded with messages from media professionals that it was reckless, irresponsible, racially suspect, and hopelessly selfish to prioritize social reintegration over extended — seemingly indefinite — pandemic-related mitigation measures. Those messages were coming from a class of Americans for whom socialization is apparently a burden. Almost overnight, their social anxiety became a species of probity, and they were reluctant to let that go. Even when we had ample evidence to suggest that self-isolation was only being selectively observed and was, therefore, useless, the arbiters of American discourse prosecuted the case for loneliness for as long as they could.
Now, however, the loneliness epidemic will be written about as though it is a fatherless phenomenon. The conditions that exacerbated it will be written off as though they were no one’s preference, but that is not true. If only for posterity’s sake, there must be an accounting so that the experience of the pandemic is never repeated — regardless of how much elite opinion misses the sequestration and solitude in which its mouthpieces thrived.”
If not in this world, then most certainly in the next.
“Is this what it felt like to be a progressive during the Great Society?
Today, the Florida legislature concludes its 2023 session. And good Lord has it made the most of it. In the space of just three months, Governor DeSantis and the Republican supermajority have created the largest school-choice program in American history, banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, made Florida the 26th constitutional-carry state in the nation, forced unions to abide by the Supreme Court’s Janus decision, cut taxes by $2 billion, banned sex-change operations from being performed on minors, barred DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives in universities, expanded the use of mandatory E-Verify in the state, achieved a previously unthinkable collection of tort reforms, declared driver’s licenses issued to out-of-state illegal immigrants invalid in Florida, prohibited state and local governments from considering ESG (environmental, social, and governance) factors in their contracting and investing decisions, extended last year’s Parental Rights in Education law through twelfth grade, made it illegal for financial institutions to discriminate on the basis of “religious, political, or social beliefs,” and prevented credit-card companies from tracking their customers’ gun purchases.
In recent weeks, Governor DeSantis has been keen to point out that politicians who wish to effect change must first win their elections. The GOP’s achievements within this legislative session underscore his point. Florida is not Florida by accident. It is Florida because, for the last 28 years, the Republican Party has controlled the state’s legislature, and, for the last 24 years, it has controlled the governor’s office. This, not posting memes on Twitter, has allowed it to prohibit the taxation of any form of income, to require any tax or fee increases to receive the blessing of a supermajority of both legislative houses, to create the top fiscal and economic environment in the country, to ban affirmative action, to reject Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, to appoint six out of the state’s seven supreme court judges, to provide the sane response to Covid that attracted hundreds of thousands of émigrés during 2020 and 2021, and to accumulate all of the other policy wins that, frankly, are just too numerous to list.
I do not like every last thing that Republicans have done in Florida, and I have been happyto sayas much. But that is not my point here. My point — the sine qua non point, really — is that Florida provides a remarkable example of a political organization having conceived of, and then executed, a coherent vision. Until 1999, Florida had elected only two Republican governors since Reconstruction. Since then, voters have refused to elect a single Democrat to the mansion. Better still, Republicans have been rewarded for their efforts. From the end of the Civil War until 2021, there were more registered Democrats in the state than Republicans. Today, the Republicans have an advantage of 454,918, the Republican governor has a 59–39 approve–disapprove rating, and the legislature has so many Republican legislators sitting in it that it could pass any legislation it wished to over a gubernatorial veto.
This should matter. It should matter when other state GOPs are looking for a model to follow. It should matter when conservative organizations are thinking about how to achieve their goals. And, yes, it should matter when the national Republican Party is looking for a nominee to lead it into 2024. The current evidence suggests that there are only two men who could plausibly be chosen as that nominee next year: Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. That being so, it seems perfectly obvious to me that DeSantis should be the pick. Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and gave us Joe Biden; then helped Republicans to lose the 2021 Georgia runoff, which made it difficult to check Joe Biden; and then helped Republicans to struggle in the 2022 midterms, which made it impossible for the Senate to block Biden’s terrible nominations to the judiciary and federal agencies. Ron DeSantis won his reelection by 19 points, and then set about presiding over a whirlwind of conservative policy reforms that have prompted voters in swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and elsewhere to tell pollsters that they prefer him to both Biden and Trump. When DeSantis announces his campaign in a few weeks, he will be able to point to a record of political achievement that is unparalleled in recent memory. If they’re smart, Republican primary voters will take note.”
All of which leaves us scratching our head over would lead anyone to support a proven loser with a myriad of liabilities over a candidate with DeSantis’s resumé and track record.
In a related item from American Thinker via by Balls Cotton, Jay Valentine suggests we’ll only…
“RINOs, psyops, controlled opposition like Breitbart and Fox and the grifter consultant class are selling the narrative that Trump wins the nomination bigly — then takes the Electoral College. Joe Biden is on wobbly knees, at the edge of the actuarial life chart, leaving America with the most ridiculous replacement president. His own party doesn’t want him to run — but the party owners are stuck with him. That too favors Trump.
Blissfully count the new Senate majority, the expanding House majority, and the keys to a White House that will finally drain the swamp. Then, have a coffee, sit down and remember 2022. That felt great too — until the day after the election.
To become president, Trump must win a bunch of swing states. To win each state he needs more ballots in his pile than the other guy. It’s baked into the data — which we look at every day — that Trump is not going to win those swing states. None of them. It’s not his fault. He will probably get more votes, just not more ballots.
Walk with me through the swing state landscape and let’s count them together…
…What do these states have in common — except they determine the next president? Each is a hotbed of election fraud — either from election commissions or phantom armies or both — and in every case the RNC and the Trump campaign are ignoring the dinosaur in the kitchen. Voter fraud will screw you on election day!
Why? Political consultants make money on ad placements and retainers — not by dealing with baked-in fraud. If the RNC spent as much on election fraud remediation in each swing state as it did on flowers and booze, Trump might win some of these states. If the Trump campaign paid attention to the election integrity teams and took seriously the threat of election commission-instigated fraud, it could make a difference.
Unfortunately, the RNC is about raising dough and having elaborate meetings with mediocre minds. The Trump campaign thinks rallies, flags, and red hats can overcome the Left’s complete control of election apparatus.
It’s like France in 1939. Trump is France.”
There’s a reason Republicans are known as the Party of Stupid. We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: You CANNOT fight election fraud AFTER the election. Courts, from the Supremes on down, are LOATHE to be seen changing the results of an election, particularly when the plaintiffs offer little or no evidence of said fraud. The GOP has to have a plan to mobilize and fight fraud prior to it happening. After the fact is far too little, far too late. We hope and pray Team DeSantis is paying attention.
Forging on, here’s another septet of special selections certain to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:
(1). Rather than shortening their constantly lengthening response times, the Chicago Police Department has advised local businesses to install ArmorPlast, a type of invisible shatterproof shield installed over existing glass, though the CPD isn’t offering to cover the cost.
“It’s hard to think of people who had more options when it comes to financial expertise or philanthropic support. They are surely some of the most well-connected people in the country. Did they need to do business with Epstein?…Perhaps the Epstein circle was composed of trusting and forgiving people who wanted to give him a second chance. Are there other convicts with whom they developed similar relationships?”
“…A ProPublica investigation has revealed that billionaire real-estate developer Harlan Crow paid the bills of a personal acquaintance of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas in an arrangement that has set off alarm bells for experts in government ethics. In an undisclosed meeting between Crow and Thomas on Easter weekend in 2005, Thomas mentioned that, through family friends, he had learned of a widowed elderly woman living near Pin Point, Ga., in a leaky tar-paper shack.
Claiming that he was moved by her plight from his own experience with childhood poverty, Thomas had begun sending her food deliveries and paying a home health aide to check in on her. Then, Crow wielded his massive fortune to take the arrangement to another level. At Crow’s own suggestion, people familiar with the deal say, they moved the woman to an apartment for three months until a local charity could be found to help her get better, more permanent housing. Crow paid the rent for all three months.
ProPublica interviewed the property manager of the Community Gardens Apartments, who recalled renting to a woman who matched the description of the widow, and found in old records a check from Crow’s company for $475.25 marked “June rent.” Similar payments were noted in a Community Gardens ledger for July and August of that year.
The Crow largesse came to a total of $1,426.05. A ProPublica calculation found that if Crow had paid for the woman to live in a luxury apartment for the entirety of her life, with her extended family living in nearby apartments, the Crow expenditure would have come to more than $10.5 million…”
We’ve since concluded it was a spoof. We report, you decide.
Rochelle’s sudden resignation couldn’t have anything to do with the fact 35 of her subordinates contracted COVID at a CDC confab, despite many of the participants still wearing the useless masks they helped force upon the country.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from the lovely Shannon…
…Speed…
…Balls Cotton…
…Major Jon…
…and, with apologies to the great Thomas Sowell, this random thought on the passing scene…
…along with this from Andy Meyers, who’s worried…
…now that he likes looking at plumber’s crack, it can only be a matter of time until he “transitions”!
Finally, since we’re on the subject of alcohol, we’ll call it a wrap with yet another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, as Black Enterprise reports a…
“Tempers flared and reached a boiling point after Spirit Airlines employee Jasmine Rhoden informed 29-year-old pregnant passenger Que Maria Scott that she would not be allowed to board a flight due to her aggressive behavior toward a gate agent. An all-out brawl began with Scott tackling Rhoden to the floor, where the women threw several punches at one another.
In a statement given to the Atlanta Police Department, Rhoden claims that Scott’s frustration grew from a flight delay. Rhoden told police that the pregnant passenger “made a statement to other passengers around that she will beat a b—h up if she does not get on the plane,” the report said.
Video of the altercation, which occurred late last month, shows the two women violently attacking each other after the initial exchange. Onlookers yelled for them to stop before airport security eventually pulled them apart. According to the New York Post, Rhoden claimed to “clearly smell alcohol” on Scott, who claimed to be six months pregnant.
After being detained by officers, the pregnant passenger made one final threat to Rhoden, saying, “I didn’t do nothing to nobody. You really just got me booked. It’s cool. I’m going to remember your face in my head forever,” according to the statement. Scott was arrested and booked into Clayton County Jail on a $1,500 bond and was placed on the “no-fly” list for the foreseeable future. Spirit Airlines did not comment on whether or not Rhoden will face disciplinary actions for the fight.”
There was a fight yesterday at Atlanta Airport. They were both added to the no fly list. 😳 pic.twitter.com/svK2fKj9AZ
We can honestly say, though we’ve on occasion been frustrated, we’ve never had the slightest inclination to physically assault an airline employee over a flight delay. Such drunken anger bespeaks a larger problem which is also the product of the same Progressive propaganda and misinformation which has created our current racial divide.
Magoo
P.S. As we’ll be playing in a charity tournament benefitting Frederick County, MD firemen with our eldest on Monday followed by a round at Merion on Tuesday, we’ll likely be radio silent until Friday, possibly next Monday. So ’til then…
Video of the Day
Neil deGrasse Tyson demonstrates why he’s not a serious SCIENTIST, but a Progressive PROPAGANDIST. You have to love his use of voice inflection in the place of factual evidence.
Tales of The Darkside
Larry Kudlow and guests Andy McCarthy and Greg Jarrett detail the potential travails of the Biden criminal cartel.
On the Lighter Side
Sheldon Whitehous gets a well-deserved b*tch-slap; Ouch!
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