The False Jordan Neely Narrative
During a street-canvassing job in college, I was once involved in a fight with Chicago’s Michigan Avenue Tin Man.
While setting up positions for the guys on an outdoor sales/fundraising team, as a “field manager” back in perhaps 2010, I placed my buddy “ZB” in a spot that was close to one of the many colorful hustlers who populate the Magnificent Mile in Chicago. Neither of us thought much of this, until the street performer — who was painted from head to toe in silver Krylon and wearing what looked like a drain-pipe on his head — told Z that he “had better move his ass on” and stop distracting potential customers or “get his head cracked to the white meat.” Z, a wiry guy but a military brat and no joke in a scuffle, responded in kind, and the Tin Man started screaming at him. I eventually got involved, narrowly avoided getting pulled into an ugly brawl, and ended up calling the police.
Then, things got way less funny. When Chicago’s Finest turned up to arrest the Wizard of Oz character, we found out that his legal name was something like “Anfernee,” and he had an outstanding warrant for a fairly serious violent crime. The classic Chicago cop who ran lead on the arrest, whom we’ll call “O’Leary,” took a few minutes after cuffing the cheerful-looking felon to give me some game about Windy City street hustlers. “What you have with most of these [entertainers],” he said, “is a mentally ill homeless. They make four–five hunnerd every day, but it all goes to the dope man.”
It was hard for me not to recall this got-dark-fast incident when I heard about the Jordan Neely case. As we all by now know, on May 1, 2023, the 30-year-old black man was killed in a fight on a New York City subway train — choked out by a young Marine during a violent struggle. Mainstream-media coverage largely presented this as an act of abuse against a colorful but harmless big-city character.
USA Today referred to the deceased Mr. Neely as a “beloved subway performer” who hailed from “a whole family of musicians.” The spin from CNN was that he was a “Michael Jackson impersonator,” known for dressing up as the King of Pop and performing unsolicited but charming dance numbers on the train. To a citizen casually observing, the impression might well be that Neely was a harmless jester, killed by a brutish (and possibly racist?) white man for dancing.
Of course, this is not at all what actually happened. In reality, the tragic struggle that killed Neely began when he went nuts on a subway car packed with riders, screaming violent threats: “I will hurt anyone on this train . . . I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison!” He was restrained by three men who stepped forward — not simply the one whom major news outlets seem grimly intent on making famous — including a black guy.
Placed in a “rear naked choke” hold, which is generally but not always nonfatal, he tragically died. Although it is too early to say for sure, drugs may well have played some role in Neely’s death: He was a regular user of powerful designer synthetics like K2. In any case, what we saw on that New York train could theoretically be a manslaughter-2-level case of excessive force, but was rather obviously not the unprovoked “lynching” of an urban icon by a bigot.
And, speaking frankly, it probably was not manslaughter. The subway riders’ perceptions of danger — including those of at least one highly trained fighting man — were in all likelihood not only real but dead-on accurate. Thanks in large part to citizen journalists online, we now know that Jordan Neely had 42 previous arrests, many for subway violence.
At the time of the fatal struggle, he had an active criminal warrant, earned for punching a 67-year-old grandmother, breaking her nose and fracturing her orbital bone. On another occasion, and for God only knows what reason, Neely tried to kidnap a small child, briefly snatching a seven-year-old girl. Almost unbelievably, there exists a decade-old Reddit thread — recently discovered by the street reporter Andy Ngo — that consists of New York taxpayers documenting the subway crimes of Jordan Neely. The title? “Try to stay away from the Michael Jackson impersonator.” Simply put: Neely was seen as a disturbed and dangerous man — because he was.
Importantly, not only is the mainstream narrative surrounding Neely’s final days almost totally false, so is the broader narrative underlying — well — the entire Black Lives Matter movement. This statement, while controversial, is accurate to a truly remarkable degree. Contra what has become an almost daily MSM through-line (“There is nothing more frightening in America today than an angry White man”) there is no epidemic of interracial crime at all — and certainly no epidemic of white-on-black crime — in the United States today.
Per recent Bureau of Justice Statistics reports from the National Crime Victimization Survey (BJS-NCVS), violent crime involving both blacks and whites constitutes less than 5 percent of serious “Index” crime annually . . . and is 80–90 percent black-on-white rather than the reverse. Elon Musk recently drew some heat for acknowledging on Twitter this fact: In 2018, a not-atypical year, there were 547,948 violent black-on-white crimes versus only 59,778 white-on-black crimes. That’s out of well over 10 million total crimes, to be sure — but still a real-life ratio of 9.2 to 1.
Even leaving aside the character and behavior of most individual BLM martyrs (Jacob Blake? Michael Brown? Alton Sterling?), it is a plain fact that spotlighting cases like Jordan Neely’s as somehow typical of crime in America requires ignoring more than 99 percent of actual crime. There have been 27 murders and dozens of forcible rapes just on the New York City subway system and just since the second quarter of 2020. Almost no American citizens know the names of a single one of the victims in any of these cases.
Okay: Why is that? Why is an absurdly false narrative of constant (and white-led) racial conflict so ever present in American upper-middle-class life? My honest answer, as a cynical former businessman, is that many people benefit so richly from it. The major Black Lives Matter organizations raised $10.6 billion — yes, that’s with a “b” — over the past few years. Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) alone raised close to $100,000,000 tax-free. In an unrelated note, founder Patrice Cullors recently bought five houses.
It goes on and on. Probably the United States’ best-known lawyer, Benjamin Crump, is the author of Open Season: The Legalized Genocide of Colored People — and the attorney who brings virtually every truly prominent case against a police department. And, such young-ish guns hardly stand alone. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and the Reverend Jesse’s Rainbow-PUSH are still around and still take in likely tens of millions annually. The constituency in favor of amorally publicizing white-on-black crime is just a lot bigger than the constituency for publicizing black-on-white crime or general police crime. That’s why you’ve heard of George Floyd but very probably have no idea who Tony Timpa is.
You never have an ethical duty to join any “constituency” whose platform is based on lies. Facts and hard numbers simply are as they are — and, to steal a line, they really don’t care about your feelings. Jordan Neely was no hero, the man who tragically killed him is no villain, and no real race war exists or is coming.