Editor's Note: Predictably, in the wake of tragedy, activists are agitating for a race war. Great, thanks, I’m going to go ahead and pass this time. What the country actually needs are comprehensive mental health services, and conservatorship. River Page explores for Pirate Wires.

-Solana

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Yesterday, a 24-year-old Marine strangled a 30-year-old mentally-ill homeless man named Jordan Heely to death on the F train in Manhattan. Heely was screaming at other riders and threatening to harm some of them, according to reports. As Heely ranted about how he didn’t care if he went to jail, or got a life sentence, or died, the 24-year-old former Marine put him in a chokehold, and held him in it for 15 minutes according to media reports — although some online are questioning the veracity of the 15-minute claim based on a video circulating on Twitter. Two other men stood over the pair and helped subdue Heely, who was reportedly kicking as he was held down. An eyewitness named Juan Alberto Vasquez said nobody thought Neely would die, even when he went limp. Police questioned the 24-year-old, but released him. As anger and protests erupted over the killing, the city medical examiner ruled Neely’s death a homicide, but the man who held him in a headlock has still not been charged.

Yet.

Heely is black and the 24-year-old Marine is white, as the press and social media have nevertheless been quick to point out. This is an irrelevant detail, as there’s no indication that the altercation had anything to do with race, and indeed, one of the men who helped the Marine restrain Neely was himself black. Rev. Al Sharpton invoked the name of Bernie Goetz — who shot four black teens on a subway in 1984 — in a statement about the incident. Like many tweets and articles over the course of the day, a sign at one protest called Neely “a black man killed by a white man.” There is an explicit and desperate attempt to make this a racial issue. It’s possible that by the end of this all, some portion of the public won’t even be aware that Neely was homeless, mentally ill, or that he was threatening people on the train. All they will know is that he was a black man who was strangled by a blond white guy.

The move toward a racial narrative is happening not only because it is easy, but because it is politically convenient. The left knows how to react to a white man killing a black man — they don’t know how to deal with the issue of mentally ill homeless people who threaten people in public. You can tell because of the way the story has been framed. According to Twitter, Neely is a lynching victim whose threats to other passengers were simply “aggressive speech” and who was murdered for asking for food and water. AOC said he was murdered because he was “houseless and crying for food in a time when the city is raising rents and stripping services to militarize itself while many in power demonize the poor, the murderer gets protected w/ passive headlines + no charges. It’s disgusting.” 

Ignore AOC’s baffling use of the non-word “houseless” and consider her explanation of Mr. Neely’s tragic demise and what led to it. If you only got your news from AOC, you wouldn’t even know that Neely was mentally ill, or that he wasreportedly threatening people on the train. You’d think he was a “houseless” man who’d fallen on hard times and was unable to to afford rent and crying out for food when he was cruelly strangled with impunity. A poor person, neglected by the city and murdered by a cruel, sadistic psychopath who didn’t want to hear the cries of the hungry. For this fictional scenario, AOC and people with her politics have a solution — more subsidized housing, better wages, more welfare. For the type of homeless person who is merely down on his luck, such a solution would probably even work. But Jordan Neely wasn’t that type of guy. Pretending he was excuses AOC and people like her from explaining what we should do with the type of person who wouldn’t benefit from higher wages because they are too mentally ill to work, who wouldn’t benefit from welfare because they are too mentally ill to know how to manage money, and who wouldn’t benefit from public housing because they are too mentally ill to live alone. As for the city stripping services to “militarize itself,” Jordan Neely died with an active warrant for felony assault and was wandering the streets despite been previously arrested 44 times for assault, disorderly conduct, and fare evasion. Militarized by whose standards? The Swiss?

All of the left’s creative writing about Mr. Neely’s untimely death stems from their unwillingness to address an uncomfortable reality — some people are simply too mentally ill to live in society. With treatment, some might be capable of re-integrating into society, others simply never will be able to. Since we live in a civilized country, these people could be cared for in either case — but that can only happen in an institutionalized setting. We are told that people on the streets suffering from extreme delusions, caused by schizophrenia, drugs, or whatever else — like Jordan Neely — just “need some help.” There is help. They can’t access it. Are we really supposed to believe that the homeless man screaming “I don’t care if I go to jail” in your face on the train is showing up on time to doctor’s appointments and remembering to pick up his medications from CVS — things that normal middle-class people in the suburbs sometimes neglect to do? Outpatient care is not an option for people who do not live in reality. Any other solutions?

The spin from supposed professionals has been equally unserious. A social work professor at Juanita College told the New York Times, “had someone simply offered the homeless man a bottle of water or a snack he might have been able to calm down, re-engage his rational brain and would still be alive today.” Here, individuals are responsible for the failings of the state. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of good old-fashioned Christian charity, of course, but the suggestion that a Dasani water bottle and a Fig Newton could have instantaneously fixed the broken mind of an aggressive man with a history of violence sounds more like a good old-fashioned Christian miracle. In any case, the unseriousness of this solution is beside the point. Even if it did work, what happens when nobody has a snack, or a bottle of water, or the generosity of spirit it takes to give up your lunch to the unwell stranger screaming in your face on the subway? How much time does a bandaid on a bullet hole buy you?

To its credit, the New York Working Families Party acknowledged Neely’s mental illness and said he “needed help.” The truth is, there is help out there. The NYC Department of Homelessness Services says psychiatric services and mental health counseling (as well as primary healthcare and substance abuse care) are available at 15 sites across the city. For people well enough to commit to voluntary outpatient care, that’s great. For people like Jordan Neely, this is useless. The sort of person who screams and menaces strangers on a train, who has been arrested nearly four dozen times, and who has an open felony warrant does not have the cognitive capacity to commit to an outpatient treatment program and does not live a lifestyle that could support one. The only alternative is a dirty word: institutionalization.

How dirty? Well, according to Twitter right now, I sound “fascist AF” and want to put the mentally ill in internment camps for saying that if Jordan Neely had been committed to a mental hospital for treatment, he’d still be alive. I’ll take it. A year ago, the last time I similarly suggested certain segments of the mentally ill or highly addicted homeless population would be better off in long-term residential care, I was called a Nazi, sent numerous death threats, countless DMs encouraging me to commit suicide, and subjected to a coordinated sexual harassment campaign that started when an anonymous account I had never interacted took a photo from my media tab and photoshopped cum on my face, complete with photoshopped DMs suggesting I’d sent the picture to the person who photoshopped it. It was the most hilariously disproportionate response to a lukewarm take you can imagine. All this is to say that to a certain portion of the left, institutionalization is outside the bounds of acceptable discourse, and if you support it so are you. 

Essentially, I have been told, in a million different ways, that because state mental hospitals were sometimes bad in the past, this means that they cannot be good in the future. They are beyond reform, somehow.I never got a straight answer as to whether or not it was crueler to allow hopelessly mentally ill, drug-addicted people to suffer on the streets rather than be committed temporarily for detox and mental healthcare for those who can be effectively treated, and life-long residential care for those who can’t be. Those who attack institutionalization online the most aren’t run of the mill liberal Democrats, but rather people who consider themselves Marxists, which I’ve long found hilarious. Have they read him? I have. Marx considered “tramps” part of the lumpenproletariat, a group that he described in The Communist Manifesto as 

The “dangerous class”, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

Despite leftist demands that we never return to the days of the insane asylum, Neely's arrests were so numerous that he was effectively institutionalized (in jail) for what must have been a significant portion of his life. Such is the case for many in his situation. The emptying of state mental hospitals, on ongoing social experiment which began in the 1950s, was bipartisan — you can call it austerity masquerading as reform or reform masquerading as austerity — the result is the same. The state has abandoned mentally unwell people, and left them to fend for themselves in a society in which they cannot function. For the only mildly or temporarily disturbed homeless, perhaps the patchwork of buffet-style social services offers a pathway to treatment and social reintegration. But for the rest, the asylum has merely been replaced by a jail cell. For such people, institutionalization never really ended, it just changed, became more erratic — the pretense of care and rehabilitation, however flimsy, completely dropped. In its place, hamster wheels of crime and punishment which today roll endlessly through the streets of every major city running over businesses, governments, neighborhoods and people — including the ones on the wheel.

Jordan Neely had an awful life. His mother was murdered, stuffed inside a suitcase and thrown onto the side a highway when he was 14 years old. His aunt told the NY Post that the situation broke him, and that he suffered from schizophrenia and PTSD. She said she pleaded with judges and doctors to get her nephew the help he needed, to no avail. The City of New York didn’t care about Jordan Neely a single day of his life until somebody else took it. He didn’t deserve to die. He’d still be alive if New York had committed a facility where he could be treated, if possible, or cared for if not. 

Allowing people like Neely to roam the streets in a state of psychosis is not only dangerous for other people, it is dangerous for them. When confronted with threats, their instinct is fight, flight or freeze. Flight is the typical option, and probably the best one whenever its possible, which isn’t always. It is dishonorable and cowardly for a group of grown men to freeze, and defrost only to turn on their phone cameras when a lone woman is physically attacked by a psychotic male on a train, as shown here. Fighting, when it concerns someone not in their right mind, should be a last resort, but if one feels it is necessary to protect themselves and others, he has a right to do it. The Marine, and the men who helped him, did nothing immoral by restraining a man they felt was threatening them. If it is revealed that the Marine meant to kill Neely, a claim I see no evidence for, that goes beyond the bounds of removing a threat and becomes a moral travesty, and in all likelihood, a crime. If he didn’t intend to kill Neely, the fact that he has done so must weigh on him — taking another human life should weigh on a man, regardless of the circumstance, and if it doesn’t, there is something wrong with you.

I’ve seen no evidence that the man who killed Neely is a villain, but he isn’t a hero either. From the outside, he just looks like a guy who choked a homeless guy out because he was reasonably afraid he, or someone else, was about to be attacked. That’s not heroism, that’s an instinctual reaction, particularly for someone with a military background. Jordan Neely didn’t deserve to die. He deserved to be taken in as ward of the state and treated until he was able to integrate into society, if possible. If not, then cared for the rest of his life. That is how a civilized country deals with those who cannot care for themselves. With regard to Neely’s death, the empty gestures and spin of the left is implicit cruelty, and it’s matched by the explicit cruelty of the right — barely concealed callous glee at the death of a man who, through no fault of his own, was too fucked up in the head to control his own life. They couldn’t even wait a full 24 hours to call him “Bum Floyd.” They really wish it had been them on the train, you can tell, and it’s really fucking sick.

There’s nothing left to say.

-River Page