The Rebranding of Jordan Neely
The story of Jordan Neely seems, at first glance, straightforward. On May 1, Neely, a homeless man, was up to his usual pastime: harassing New York City subway passengers. In the morning, he had been throwing garbage at people. Later on in the day, things escalated.
“I want food!” Neely began shouting. “I’m not taking no for an answer!” He loudly proclaimed that he “would kill” people and didn’t care if he had to “take a bullet” or “go to jail” for it. “I’m ready to die!” he shouted, as he stalked frightened passengers.
It was at this point that one passenger, Daniel Penny, took the initiative and placed Neely in a choke hold while another man held his wrists. Fifteen minutes later, police arrived and pronounced Neely dead.
To the objective observer, it’s very clear what happened. One man was threatening passengers, and a violent outburst appeared imminent. Another man stopped him—cause and effect.
However, because of the racial contrast, the picture has been muddled. Neely was black; Penny is white. Thus, the now usual oppobrium has risen: Another black man has been killed by another white man.
The Cut wrote that the murder of black people is “the cost of white discomfort.” Donald Grant, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles, California, said, “This vigilante activity is really a reminder of the dangerous conditions that black Americans exist in now.” Penny acted out of a feeling of “white superiority,” he said. Meanwhile, Tayo Bero wrote for the Guardian that Neely’s “lynching—along with the subsequent justifications of it—have revealed how low the bar is for justifying black death in America.”
In 2021, Jordan Neely punched and seriously injured a 67-year-old woman as she left the subway. In 2019, he punched a 64-year-old man in the face at the Greenwich Village subway station. In August 2015, he was arrested for attempted kidnapping of a 7-year-old girl he was seen dragging down a street. These are three of a total 42 times Neely was arrested. Though he was in and out of jail, he was never sentenced to prison.
These race-based articles are painting a fictional picture.
Since his death, Neely has been reborn as a tragic hero. He has been called a “gifted” and “beloved” Michael Jackson impersonator. It was really society that failed Neely, a homeless, mentally ill drug addict who would share money he made with other kids from foster care, they say. He was a black man “simply in distress and in need of a meal,” Bero wrote.
Meanwhile, Daniel Penny, a marine veteran, stepped up to stop what he perceived to be an imminent threat. He took a position of strength and leadership. And yet Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is charging him with manslaughter.
Thus the picture changed rapidly. This swift rebrand of the parties involved yielded quick results. Black Lives Matter protests began soon after. Some protesters threatened to “tear the city down” unless there was justice for Neely. Other protesters have been flooding subways, preventing passengers from entering or exiting trains.
One of the groups organizing protests is Warriors in the Garden, which started in 2020 after the death of George Floyd. One of its leaders said that “people who devalue black bodies have become more and more brazen in expressing that.” They have 15 more protests planned for the month of May.
What really happened is that Jordan Neely was one of countless black Americans from a broken home. In all the reports about his family life, his father is never mentioned. His mother was murdered by a boyfriend when he was 14 years old. Ever since, he was homeless and addicted to drugs.
No one is mentioning that Neely is yet another victim of the epidemic of fatherlessness and an unstable family. No one is blaming drug use and abuse. But these are the simple, root causes of this tragedy. We live in a society that is casting aside the father as irrelevant and family as unimportant, while glorifying the very chaos that enveloped and ultimately destroyed Jordan Neely’s life because he didn’t have a father or a stable family.
It’s a similar story for George Floyd. His father left when he was 2 years old. And he also grew into a life of crime and drug abuse.
These are inconvenient truths that the leaders of Black Lives Matter refuse to acknowledge. In fact, they consider them irrelevant in the face of white supremacy, institutional racism, genocide, “sanism,” law enforcement, lack of investment in mental health and homelessness, and a myriad of other woke shibboleths.
That’s a chaotic picture. And it’s exactly what the radical left wants: chaos. Because in the midst of chaos was an opportunity to rebrand these two men and paint a new picture while blurring out their backgrounds. Through a combination of lies, marketing and manipulation, the radical left brands troubled criminals as saints on par with the innocent children murdered in Uvalde, Texas.
What happened with George Floyd was just the beginning, a blueprint for the radical left: Take a young, fatherless, junkie criminal, ignore the real reasons that led him to a tragic end and instead blame racism. Blame racism at every possible opportunity. To what end?
“Racism is not dead,” wrote Thomas Sowell. “But it is on life-support, kept alive mainly by the people who use it for an excuse or to keep minority communities fearful or resentful enough to turn out as a voting bloc on election day.”
Floyd’s death and rebranding was the blueprint. Its sole purpose was to accomplish Barack Obama’s goal of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” This makes one thing certain: The protests that George Floyd’s death sparked are coming back. The only reason there hasn’t been as much outrage around Neely as there was with Floyd is that Neely’s death wasn’t in an election year.
This also shows that the left doesn’t really care about people like George Floyd and Jordan Neely. They don’t care about homeless people, whose numbers increased by 16 percent between 2020 and 2022. They don’t care about the 200,000 mentally ill, drug-addicted New Yorkers. They don’t care about the fatherlessness that likely caused those conditions. Because if they did, they wouldn’t work so hard to rebrand these men as heroes. They wouldn’t brand the good as bad and the bad as good. They wouldn’t rebrand the Judeo-Christian values on which this country was founded—the values of family, religion and hard work—as antiquated, constricting, racist, backward, primitive, defunct, irrelevant and burdensome. They wouldn’t rebrand fatherhood and patriarchy as oppression. They wouldn’t rebrand the Constitution, as Barack Obama did, as “a charter of negative liberties.”
Those on the left care only about their ideology. Jordan Neely and George Floyd were nothing more than sacrifices to the altar of ideology.
The ultimate goal is to fundamentally transform America from its Bible-based foundation to a Communist state. To do that requires immorality, division, hatred and violence. And because of the left’s masterful branding, these evils are all common today, rebranded as good.
The murder of unborn babies—“pro-choice.”
The mutilation and castration of children—“love is love.”
Racial violence, hatred and upheaval—“equality.”
All of this is made possible by the lack of solid, stable families—which has been rebranded as old-fashioned. Fatherhood and masculinity are in jeopardy. Traditional family is under attack.
Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in “When Family Falls, Society Falls” that children who “grow up in strong families learn respect for authority and obedience” and become law-abiding citizens in adulthood. He continued:
God created human reproduction so that every child has a father and a mother. Both roles are crucial, and they are different. The two-parent household—children growing up in a home with their own two biological parents, who are married—has been the best way to rear children all over the world, for all of man’s history! This is irrefutable.
But in our “enlightened” thinking today, people want to pretend that this isn’t true. They insist that divorce doesn’t hurt children, or that it’s perfectly normal to have two mommies or two daddies. The transgender movement talks about “pregnant people” rather than mothers, because they insist women who think they are men are in fact men! Some birth certificates now read “Parent 1” and “Parent 2” rather than father and mother! This is how insane our thinking has become.
We live in a culture that constantly undermines the role of the father. (You can learn more about the attack on fatherhood by requesting a free copy of Conspiracy Against Fatherhood.) Throughout history, mankind understood that children need fathers—but now psychologists are trying to tell us that the father is unnecessary for rearing healthy children. The history of Rome teaches that these people have no idea what they’re talking about!
Actually what these studies and the pervasive anti-father movement are telling you is how to DESTROY families and destroy nations.
By rebranding Jordan Neely and George Floyd and rebranding evil as good, the radical left is really trying to bring about the collapse of society. They want to create a new one out of the ashes made in their own Communist image. They think they know better than God, who created family and is the one who decides what is evil and what is good.
Get ready for more race-baiting and violent riots that are either justified as necessary or rebranded as “peaceful protests.” As we draw closer to another election, watch for an upsurge in martyrdoms and rebranding of fatherless men. Prepare for more lies about the evil of America’s history and institutions. Watch for more calls to upend society, rise up against fictional black genocide, and rise up against fictional endemic white supremacy.
Watch for calls to address every single possible issue while ignoring the real cause and the solution that will actually solve problems: promoting and setting up a traditional, religious and stable family.