Everyone Failed Jordan Neely, Even His “Allies”
Progressives Keep Letting Ego Get In The Way Of Protecting The Vulnerable
I am away for two weeks, cruising in Alaska. Even here, it’s impossible to disconnect totally from what’s going on in the world. The news of Jordan Neely’s death reached me in Juneau on Tuesday, and a few people I met on this boat who knew I’m from New York asked me about it. I didn’t know what to say.
First off, the entire event disgusts me. Jordan Neely was sick. He needed help. Regardless of his alleged criminal history, it was clear he was disturbed. He did not deserve to die like he did, and the man who killed him deserves to be held accountable. Mental health is a personal cause for me, having suffered from mental health issues and have friends and loved ones struggle. I get how it robs a person of his or her humanity and takes control of a person’s life. It requires intervention and care. It’s a complex situation because in a world where we want everyone to be responsible for their own actions and own their own life, mental illness makes those waters murky. Whether or not Jordan Neely was fully responsible for his actions will be an ongoing debate in whether or not the man who killed him is punished or exonerated. It will also once again challenge the very founding principles of our society.
Social media and modern political discourse make it hard to explain what happened to Neely without it seemingly like an endorsement. There are people out there while believe he deserved to be killed, I am not one of them, but I recognize that their mere existence puts mentally ill people without housing and care in grave danger. We live in a society built around the idea that we earn success and failure is the consequence of laziness or lack of grit. It doesn’t matter whether we as individuals think it’s true or not, our society functions in part due to that belief and it would take dramatic social change to cast that aside. Knowing that - and knowing that conservative do not care if people like Neely live or die like common animals - it is up to progressives to ensure that the poor and mentally ill are taken care of, so they are not left at the mercy of those in society who are inclined to treat them as subhuman leeches. We have failed miserably at that. All of us, leftists included.
The problem isn’t lack of resources. New York spends billions on mental health resources. Under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, mental health programs were expanded through a $1 billion initiative initially called ThriveNYC, created by de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray. The program became a lightning rod of criticism from the anti-de Blasio press because of accusations of wasted money and was rebranded as an executive agency in 2021. It vastly expanded resources, but what it did not do is actively try to connect people to those resources, especially the poor and homeless. There is no effort on the left to connect the most vulnerable people with the resources they need because doing so might require use of state coercion and leftism today dabbles too much in anarchism. They simply will not use the power of the state to compel those who need care but are not in a position to get it. It goes against their conscience.
Consequently, progressives have no answer on how to solve this that doesn’t align with their unrealistically rigid “values,” so they just hope everyone stops bringing it up. They hope people just grow content to live with mentally ill people screaming and acting aggressively on the subway. Jordan Neely was arrested over 40 times for various infractions and was the person of interest in an investigation into a subway pushing incident last week, and at no point was any type of mental healthcare offered, or mandated, to him. I understand wanting to keep him out of jail, but we’ve gone beyond keeping people out of jail; we're doing all this at the expense of the care he needed and now he's dead. Progressives today seem content on treating the homeless and mentally ill like stray dogs only slightly less inhumane than conservatives. When New York City Mayor Eric Adams cleared out homeless encampments under the BQE and instructed city officials and the NYPD to take emotionally disturbed people directly to psychiatric wards, progressives protested. They argued that the homeless and mentally ill deserved the right to make that decision themselves, even though in many cases they are not in a position to do so. One state legislator, Emily Gallagher of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, referred to the people living in a homeless encampment as her “constituents,” which she probably thought seemed compassionate, but reeks of entitlement. The message she and other legislators sent was this: Living under the BQE in dangerous conditions is more acceptable than having then state come in and get them help and care.
Neely deserved better than what he got, not only from the man who killed him and the bystanders who stood by, but from the city and state pols who now chant his name as a newfound justice cause but didn’t know or care who he was a week ago.
New York is crowded with nameless, faceless people like Neeley, how many will have to die, either at the hands of vigilantes, or mother nature, or their own, before progressives put aside their egos and actually make the hard decisions to get them help?