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Daniel Penny Was the Scapegoat of a New Fanatical Religion

By John Zmirak Published on December 11, 2024

The attempted legal lynching of Good Samaritan Daniel Penny can be unpicked from many angles. Yes, it’s a human tragedy that this young man was ever even arrested, much less hounded by activist mobs and charged with manslaughter for restraining a drug-addled lunatic who was threatening to murder subway passengers in New York City. Not to mention that it also was a gross perversion of justice, exposing the racist identity politics, callous elitism, and moral hysteria of our corrupted, mediocre elites. And a rare win for the good guys, thanks to a courageous New York jury.

Many sensible commentators, from Christopher Rufo to Jeremy Carl, have explored the implications of this case, in which a government that had both neglected and coddled the madman tried to imprison the hero, and race hustlers tried to make a violent felon a martyr. (It worked with George Floyd; why not throw another perp at the wall and see if he’d stick?)

The case matters to me personally, as a native New Yorker who loves the place.

Escape from New York

I grew up in the squalid 1970s when liberal welfare policies and pseudo-compassionate crime policies combined with uncontrolled Third World immigration, and reckless government spending had hollowed that great city out. The city actually went bankrupt, and it seemed almost past saving. A major studio could make a futuristic film, Escape From New York, which imagined once-glittering Manhattan turned into a prison island — and nobody laughed. It seemed all too grimly plausible.

As I wrote back in 2007:

The city center, Times Square, was … a repellant cesspool of “adult entertainment,” with luridly obscene advertisements, hawkers giving handbills for strip clubs to school kids, and sex toys on display in shop windows. Drivers stopped at red lights were terrorized by “squeegee men,” strapping derelicts who’d run wet, filthy sponges over windshields and loudly demand payment for this “service.” Street crime, while already declining, was grave enough that women feared to ride subways or walk the streets at night. All the trains and stations were coated with graffiti. No one was fixing the broken windows, or arresting the urban youths who brazenly jumped turnstiles. It seemed that every second heat grate or subway car featured an aggressive mental patient who stank of human waste. ATMs, then a recent and welcome invention, had been colonized by pushy, filthy panhandlers who slept inside and cadged for handouts from scared young women at night.

Some people used to call New York in this period “the Wild West,” but it had none of the wholesome, raw energy of a frontier town where order was slowly being imposed. Instead, the place was much more like Rome in the sixth century, when the last vestiges of ancient order had disappeared, and the citizens skulked behind ruined columns, hiding from the Visigoths. (For a vivid picture of New York in its decline, rent Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver, or Spike Lee’s brilliant, underappreciated Summer of Sam.) No wonder so many New Yorkers made folk heroes out of thugs like John Gotti, who while they pumped drugs into the ghettos, made it seem that they “kept their neighborhoods safe.”

Enter the Hero

Then came Rudolph Giuliani, a heroic prosecutor who’d faced down the seemingly untouchable Mafia crime families of New York and won. He ran on law and order, on fixing public spaces and protecting ordinary people of every race and creed. Finally, liberal Jews who’d gotten mugged by reality were willing to vote alongside working-class Catholics to set aside the pious bromides they’d been indoctrinated in since birth and vote for their own survival.

I’ll admit that in his 1993 election victory over the addled tribalist liberal David Dinkins, I wasn’t one of Giuliani’s voters. Why? After narrowly losing in 1989,

Giuliani read the tea leaves, and reinvented himself in 1993 as a pro-gay, “pro-choice” reformer. He beat Dinkins by almost exactly his previous margin of defeat, some 53,000 votes. George Marlin, the principled pro-life businessman who ran third party, picked up a mere 14,000 votes, including mine.

Can you see the parallel with Donald Trump in 2024? A candidate who’d embraced socially conservative positions prudently shed them and won. He won because leftists had grown so unhinged, so bent on civic suicide, that ordinary people could smell their flop sweat and spot them as crackpot fanatics.

In 2024, I did hold my nose and vote to save my neck instead of preening about my principles. And I’m deeply, profoundly relieved that Donald Trump won — as I was quietly glad that Giuliani had. There were no prophets or saintly statesmen on the ballot in either race. In each of those elections, voters faced an imperfect choice: between ordinary sinners and the seemingly possessed.

We Are All in Jonestown Now

Make no mistake, the Left today is a full-on religious movement, one with many parallels to the Rev. Jim Jones’s pro-Soviet, post-Christian cult which ended up committing mass suicide in Guyana. There is no rational case to be made for castrating kids, opening the borders, risking nuclear war with Russia, asserting that there are 47 genders while praising fanatical Islam, or driving our country to the brink of Weimar-style bankruptcy. The Left has stopped bothering even to argue for these positions, and instead relies on terrorizing people, seizing their bank accounts, and trying to send them to prison. In the U.K., the socialist government actually imprisons people for criticizing its immigration policies. Canada’s proposed hate crimes bill hopes to do the same.

There is no rational case to be made for the decisions of Penny’s prosecutor, an Israeli-born lesbian radical leftist, to go easy on real violent felons and persecute Penny instead:


That is not the face of someone with bad ideas who needs to hear better arguments. It’s the visage of an inquisitor, who long ago dropped any pretense of the free contest of ideas. She burns with the righteous certitude of the witch-hunter or the Maoist Red Guard leader, eager to purge impurities and exterminate the dissident.

You can’t beat something with nothing. The false religion of post-Christian social justice has been wildly successful at providing our spoiled, lazy elites with a substitute for Jesus and movements that replace the Church. Losing an election here or there won’t cause these zealots to lose their faith any more than the spectacle of Christians being eaten by the lions led the Church fathers to start worshiping Caesar.

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We must win elections and fix election fraud. We must restore basic public order and dismantle the Deep State. We must deport illegals and cut off all their benefits. When you’re bleeding, you need a tourniquet — but you also need to heal. Only a rebirth of faith in the God of the Bible, in His authorship of Creation and the Natural Law that pervades it, can compete with the doctrines of demons.

Like every sane New Yorker, I was grateful for Rudy Giuliani. Like any patriot today, I am grateful for Donald Trump.

But the madness that Daniel Penny had to risk his neck and his freedom to restrain on the New York subway didn’t begin with Jordan Neely, the drug-wrecked mental patient who died that day. The chaos on the streets began with the chaos in our bedrooms and the violence in the womb. It began with the New Left’s preaching of “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” which gave spoiled preppies a few years of fun but devastated the ghetto. Poor people (such as my parents, who were malnourished during the Depression) can’t afford such Oscar Wilde hedonism. They don’t have trust funds that can cover a stint in rehab. If their lives get broken, they often stay that way. And they end up on subway cars, threatening weary straphangers with death.

We must rebuild an orderly life for Americans brick by brick — and we can’t do that on a foundation of sand, even if it’s colored red, white, and blue.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.