"I really felt incredibly sorry for him..." Could this be a civilizational epitaph, a total summation of modern liberalism or both?
The Social Justice faith, which is part Christian heresy and part Marxist permanent revolution, subordinates the rule of law, the will of the voters, and the health and safety of society to what it sees as larger moral and spiritual concerns: Justice and Equality, as defined in their terms as the Parable of the Good Samaritan combined with a transformation of Marx's "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" into "From each according to his privileged identity, to each according to his marginalized identity."
And in modern America the most popular arena for this spiritual warfare is our unfortunate racial history and the black/white divide that has defined us for so many centuries. America's racial wound is also our Achilles' Heel and there is an infinite line of lost souls, crusaders, charlatans, and various opportunists all waiting their turn to squeeze it for their benefit—whether they're seeking legal, financial, career, or spiritual and emotional rewards.
Absolutely yes, as the supply has decreased the need has become more urgent and desperate.
White Guilt/White Saviorism is the foundational sacred belief of all Western liberals, from your idealistic college kids to your local politicians to almost our entire media, cultural and academic classes: and without any black/brown people to save, how are they going to be (publicly) save and defend them!? (And they will try to save them whether they like it or not.)
Black/brown pain is a luxury good for our age of conspicuous compassion—people are willing to pay top dollar for it!
Ah, but why do you need actual racist incidents when your stated goal is racial equity and restorative justice? Those prosecutorial concepts appear to create the ability to classify any incident involving a white person and a person of color (though the darker the better) as a racist incident justifying restorative justice.
In addition to "Christian heresy" and "Marxist revolution" (which I agree with), let's also add what nobody wants to say out loud--destructive Jewish leftism, which never misses an opportunity to bring down pillars of Western civilization.
Sorry I can't bring myself to join you in a ritual denunciation of the Jews.
While I can't deny there's a rich vein of destructive transgression (often inevitably self-destructive) in modern Jewish intellectual history—Marx and the Marxists, Trotsky and the Trotskyites, then the Frankfurt School (all Jewish) and their modern American descendants, Chomsky, Zinn, Alinsky, Sanders etc—I also try to put this in context.
Jews were (are?) a universally despised and hunted minority and all of these brilliant yeshiva boys and rebbe's sons were trying in some way to gain some peace, safety and breathing room for their people. If any group had a justifiable reason to try to use their enormous brainpower to undermine this thing we call "Western Civ", the Jews certainly did.
I don't support the supposedly humanitarian universalist faiths concocted to replace Christianity, tribalism and nationalism (Marxism, Social Justice etc), but I understand why Jewish intellectuals believed these were worthy, even life-saving, projects.
Thanks for a reasoned reply. I certainly don't mean to imply all or even most Jews are a part of this, any more than the author meant to say most Christians are a part of this. Jewish leftism, in my opinion, perverts the concept of social justice to destroy Western institutions.
I disagree with your belief that historical persecution justifies destroying the West. Ironically, from a Jewish standpoint, it's Western culture (with all its problems) that remains the bulwark against another massive attack on Jews--it's impossible to imagine a Muslim-led world, an African-led world, or an Asian-led world feeling any desire to protect Jews.
A wonderfully weird example of this is the Jews in France, demanding massive third-world immigration, then complaining about the antisemitism it has generated!
I am not Jewish but my wife is, for whatever that's worth, and maybe that's helped me to try to view all this in a more generous, compassionate way. (I think I prefer it this way, esp after going down a few Kevin MacDonald rabbit holes!)
I think of Jewish Leftism as another golem that certain Jews created as a way to fight and defeat their enemies, which of course inevitably turned on them (like the Soviet Union, Soc Justice, liberal immigration).
And while I agree that the Jewish history of persecution doesn't "justif[y] destroying the West", I still understand or at least contextualize why these movements arose and were so alluring to Jews—humans have always been susceptible to messianic utopianism and that goes double or triple for the people of the book and their prophetic tradition.
Jews seem both blessed and cursed, the eternal scapegoat, and maybe I'd feel differently if I hadn't married into a Jewish family—even though they're always trying to "improve" how we celebrate Xmas! lol—but I guess I try to love the sinner and hate the sin, the sin being intellectual subversion.
Regarding your stunning and brave naming of the Jew, I can help with this. Dafna Yoran sounds like an Israeli name. I assume her parents are Israeli immigrants, although I don't know. I looked her up, she is also a lesbian who is married to a female Peruvian artist.
Dafna Yoran is the type of Jew who, if she lived in Israel, would be a member of the small minority of deep state operatives who run the Israeli deep state and are against Israeli self defense against terrorists, against judicial reform, which was supported by the majority of Israeli voters, and against Netanyahu, also supported by the majority of Israeli voters.
The situation is somewhat similar in the USA, although not as obvious, as the numbers aren't as stark, maybe because American Jews haven't had to deal with the constant terrorism from their neighbors, which helps people attain political maturity. Maybe the answer here is that Not All Jews, more like Visible Jewish Lesbians who work for the government, i.e. deep state.
As of 12/6, jury is deadlocked. A stronger case for jury nullification I have never seen. ANY white person on the jury should vote "not guilty" in every vote.
Mr. Steele makes very valid observations, but it might be more to the point to compare Daniel Penny to Jordan Williams who stabbed a threarening man to death on the subway shortly after the Penny incident. Williams was treated as a hero and had all charges against him dropped. Stabbing a person to death is quite different from putting a person in a chokehold, with the former action most likely having homicidal intent. Also, mention of Emmitt Till elicits comparison to teen Jessica Chamber's Mississippi burning, which no one has ever been convicted of despite heavy suspicion and evidence pointing to a man, Quinton Tellis, also under suspicion of previously killing another, a young Asian woman, Meing-Chen Hsiao, whose credit card he was using after her death. Tellis's cousin also said Tellis admitted killing Hsiao, but then recanted. Quinton Tellis has never been convicted of either murder, but served sometimefor theftof Hsiao's credit card. He had staunch support from his family and community. There was no open coffin for Jessica Chambers who died from being burned to death. Comparisons are a helpful method of flushing out biases and hypocrisies when analyzing social and political phenomena.
White Guilt was one of the first books I read when 'educating' myself on my whiteness. I am forever grateful to both Eli and Shelby for their thoughtful insights into these crazy times.
(Edit: This is Leslie, not Susan. Substack gets us mixed up.)
I was thinking that if I had been in the jury pool, I would have done my best to convince the prosecutor that, despite my visibly white race, I was open-minded and not biased in favour of the accused, willing to listen to all the evidence impartially.
While all the time resolved to hold out for Not Guilty no matter what. (In Canada, no juror may ever divulge a word of what was said in the jury room. So we could all sit down and say, "You know there's no way in Hell we're gonna convict this guy, right? Lets just play three tables of euchre for a couple of hours for appearances sake and then go back with an acquittal." No one except us 12 would ever know. No interviews with CNN.)
This is the kind of case that makes me, as a foreigner, less quick (in retrospect) to judge those "all-white-jury" tropes about supposed miscarriages of justice in the Jim Crow South. That sounds like a terrible thing to say, but, hey activists, you brought this on yourselves.
This really isn't that difficult to understand, despite the author's attempts at obfuscation. If you're at a bar, and the guy next to you says, "I'm so mad right now I could kill somebody. I don't care if I go to jail," can you pull out a gun and shoot him dead?
Essentially no, not according to American law. The man would have to at the very least swing at you, and then you would have the burden to prove that your use of lethal threat was proportionate to the threat. Shooting someone fatally is not a proportional response to someone's words. Has anyone made the argument here that the victim in question advanced upon someone, and even drew back an arm, or grabbed for a weapon?
Certainly, Case was in his rights to restrain the man. But once the man was restrained, Chase had no right to kill him. What is so hard to understand about this? If this confrontation had not happened on the subway, with a black homeless man involved, but had instead involved two middle class men out on a hunting trip, or outside their work, etc., this would have ended with a guilty plea months back.
Sure, Penny very well may be guilty of a crime. However, as the author stated, "Whether Penny is guilty of manslaughter should be decided on the evidence, not as a referendum on America’s racial history."
So the issue is not that we necessarily think Penny is guilty or innocent, but that framing the trial in terms of systemic racism is the wrong way to go about achieving real justice.
Who's Chase? Do you mean Penny? My understanding is he perceived Neely as a threat to himself and fellow passengers, and was only trying to subdue Neely, not kill him.
"I really felt incredibly sorry for him..." Could this be a civilizational epitaph, a total summation of modern liberalism or both?
The Social Justice faith, which is part Christian heresy and part Marxist permanent revolution, subordinates the rule of law, the will of the voters, and the health and safety of society to what it sees as larger moral and spiritual concerns: Justice and Equality, as defined in their terms as the Parable of the Good Samaritan combined with a transformation of Marx's "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" into "From each according to his privileged identity, to each according to his marginalized identity."
And in modern America the most popular arena for this spiritual warfare is our unfortunate racial history and the black/white divide that has defined us for so many centuries. America's racial wound is also our Achilles' Heel and there is an infinite line of lost souls, crusaders, charlatans, and various opportunists all waiting their turn to squeeze it for their benefit—whether they're seeking legal, financial, career, or spiritual and emotional rewards.
At this time in our history, there is a critical need for actual racist incidents. They are few and far between.
Absolutely yes, as the supply has decreased the need has become more urgent and desperate.
White Guilt/White Saviorism is the foundational sacred belief of all Western liberals, from your idealistic college kids to your local politicians to almost our entire media, cultural and academic classes: and without any black/brown people to save, how are they going to be (publicly) save and defend them!? (And they will try to save them whether they like it or not.)
Black/brown pain is a luxury good for our age of conspicuous compassion—people are willing to pay top dollar for it!
Ah, but why do you need actual racist incidents when your stated goal is racial equity and restorative justice? Those prosecutorial concepts appear to create the ability to classify any incident involving a white person and a person of color (though the darker the better) as a racist incident justifying restorative justice.
In addition to "Christian heresy" and "Marxist revolution" (which I agree with), let's also add what nobody wants to say out loud--destructive Jewish leftism, which never misses an opportunity to bring down pillars of Western civilization.
Sorry I can't bring myself to join you in a ritual denunciation of the Jews.
While I can't deny there's a rich vein of destructive transgression (often inevitably self-destructive) in modern Jewish intellectual history—Marx and the Marxists, Trotsky and the Trotskyites, then the Frankfurt School (all Jewish) and their modern American descendants, Chomsky, Zinn, Alinsky, Sanders etc—I also try to put this in context.
Jews were (are?) a universally despised and hunted minority and all of these brilliant yeshiva boys and rebbe's sons were trying in some way to gain some peace, safety and breathing room for their people. If any group had a justifiable reason to try to use their enormous brainpower to undermine this thing we call "Western Civ", the Jews certainly did.
I don't support the supposedly humanitarian universalist faiths concocted to replace Christianity, tribalism and nationalism (Marxism, Social Justice etc), but I understand why Jewish intellectuals believed these were worthy, even life-saving, projects.
Thanks for a reasoned reply. I certainly don't mean to imply all or even most Jews are a part of this, any more than the author meant to say most Christians are a part of this. Jewish leftism, in my opinion, perverts the concept of social justice to destroy Western institutions.
I disagree with your belief that historical persecution justifies destroying the West. Ironically, from a Jewish standpoint, it's Western culture (with all its problems) that remains the bulwark against another massive attack on Jews--it's impossible to imagine a Muslim-led world, an African-led world, or an Asian-led world feeling any desire to protect Jews.
A wonderfully weird example of this is the Jews in France, demanding massive third-world immigration, then complaining about the antisemitism it has generated!
I am not Jewish but my wife is, for whatever that's worth, and maybe that's helped me to try to view all this in a more generous, compassionate way. (I think I prefer it this way, esp after going down a few Kevin MacDonald rabbit holes!)
I think of Jewish Leftism as another golem that certain Jews created as a way to fight and defeat their enemies, which of course inevitably turned on them (like the Soviet Union, Soc Justice, liberal immigration).
And while I agree that the Jewish history of persecution doesn't "justif[y] destroying the West", I still understand or at least contextualize why these movements arose and were so alluring to Jews—humans have always been susceptible to messianic utopianism and that goes double or triple for the people of the book and their prophetic tradition.
Jews seem both blessed and cursed, the eternal scapegoat, and maybe I'd feel differently if I hadn't married into a Jewish family—even though they're always trying to "improve" how we celebrate Xmas! lol—but I guess I try to love the sinner and hate the sin, the sin being intellectual subversion.
Hope this makes sense!
Regarding your stunning and brave naming of the Jew, I can help with this. Dafna Yoran sounds like an Israeli name. I assume her parents are Israeli immigrants, although I don't know. I looked her up, she is also a lesbian who is married to a female Peruvian artist.
Dafna Yoran is the type of Jew who, if she lived in Israel, would be a member of the small minority of deep state operatives who run the Israeli deep state and are against Israeli self defense against terrorists, against judicial reform, which was supported by the majority of Israeli voters, and against Netanyahu, also supported by the majority of Israeli voters.
The situation is somewhat similar in the USA, although not as obvious, as the numbers aren't as stark, maybe because American Jews haven't had to deal with the constant terrorism from their neighbors, which helps people attain political maturity. Maybe the answer here is that Not All Jews, more like Visible Jewish Lesbians who work for the government, i.e. deep state.
Daniel Penny is a hero. Full stop. Alvin Bragg is an ideological tyrant. Full stop.
As of 12/6, jury is deadlocked. A stronger case for jury nullification I have never seen. ANY white person on the jury should vote "not guilty" in every vote.
Absolutely! It's good to know at least 1 or 2 New Yorkers are resisting "White guilt."
Mr. Steele makes very valid observations, but it might be more to the point to compare Daniel Penny to Jordan Williams who stabbed a threarening man to death on the subway shortly after the Penny incident. Williams was treated as a hero and had all charges against him dropped. Stabbing a person to death is quite different from putting a person in a chokehold, with the former action most likely having homicidal intent. Also, mention of Emmitt Till elicits comparison to teen Jessica Chamber's Mississippi burning, which no one has ever been convicted of despite heavy suspicion and evidence pointing to a man, Quinton Tellis, also under suspicion of previously killing another, a young Asian woman, Meing-Chen Hsiao, whose credit card he was using after her death. Tellis's cousin also said Tellis admitted killing Hsiao, but then recanted. Quinton Tellis has never been convicted of either murder, but served sometimefor theftof Hsiao's credit card. He had staunch support from his family and community. There was no open coffin for Jessica Chambers who died from being burned to death. Comparisons are a helpful method of flushing out biases and hypocrisies when analyzing social and political phenomena.
Hung jury, it is being reported.
White Guilt was one of the first books I read when 'educating' myself on my whiteness. I am forever grateful to both Eli and Shelby for their thoughtful insights into these crazy times.
Outstanding piece! Cases heard before the Court should be decided ONLY by the evidence presented!
Fortunately, the 'white guilt' era may be about to come to an end. Full stop.
Screw "racial justice."
Get violent blacks in jail and keep them there.
Daniel Penny did nothing wrong.
You've got a typo in the essay. Unless, of course, Yoran found a time machine.
> In 2109, she sought and received a reduced sentence for Matthew Lee
(Edit: This is Leslie, not Susan. Substack gets us mixed up.)
I was thinking that if I had been in the jury pool, I would have done my best to convince the prosecutor that, despite my visibly white race, I was open-minded and not biased in favour of the accused, willing to listen to all the evidence impartially.
While all the time resolved to hold out for Not Guilty no matter what. (In Canada, no juror may ever divulge a word of what was said in the jury room. So we could all sit down and say, "You know there's no way in Hell we're gonna convict this guy, right? Lets just play three tables of euchre for a couple of hours for appearances sake and then go back with an acquittal." No one except us 12 would ever know. No interviews with CNN.)
This is the kind of case that makes me, as a foreigner, less quick (in retrospect) to judge those "all-white-jury" tropes about supposed miscarriages of justice in the Jim Crow South. That sounds like a terrible thing to say, but, hey activists, you brought this on yourselves.
Thank you for your work. Good to hear news of hung jury. I hope Penny’s actions are vindicated.
This really isn't that difficult to understand, despite the author's attempts at obfuscation. If you're at a bar, and the guy next to you says, "I'm so mad right now I could kill somebody. I don't care if I go to jail," can you pull out a gun and shoot him dead?
Essentially no, not according to American law. The man would have to at the very least swing at you, and then you would have the burden to prove that your use of lethal threat was proportionate to the threat. Shooting someone fatally is not a proportional response to someone's words. Has anyone made the argument here that the victim in question advanced upon someone, and even drew back an arm, or grabbed for a weapon?
Certainly, Case was in his rights to restrain the man. But once the man was restrained, Chase had no right to kill him. What is so hard to understand about this? If this confrontation had not happened on the subway, with a black homeless man involved, but had instead involved two middle class men out on a hunting trip, or outside their work, etc., this would have ended with a guilty plea months back.
Sure, Penny very well may be guilty of a crime. However, as the author stated, "Whether Penny is guilty of manslaughter should be decided on the evidence, not as a referendum on America’s racial history."
So the issue is not that we necessarily think Penny is guilty or innocent, but that framing the trial in terms of systemic racism is the wrong way to go about achieving real justice.
Who's Chase? Do you mean Penny? My understanding is he perceived Neely as a threat to himself and fellow passengers, and was only trying to subdue Neely, not kill him.