It seems that any organized society needs some widely accepted narrative to reassure citizens that the world is stable across time. State religions used to do that. To reinforce the narrative there would be occasional reports of miracles, heavenly visitations, or heroic martyrdom.

We no longer have a state religion, but something similar has widespread appeal. Within our narrative, the most cherished story of all—cherished by millions of Americans, and even by American-influenced populations in other countries—is the narrative of helpless, unhappy, or unfortunate black people suffering and dying at the hands of leering, heartless white persecutors.

This narrative, like those older ones, needs constant reinforcement. When an event occurs that can, with a bit of stretching and media manipulation, be taken as reinforcement to the narrative, that event is pumped up into a nationwide sensation, with believers moved to passion, their faith confirmed.

Some sleight of hand is usually necessary. A medical examiner may need to be leaned on, a prosecutor replaced, a judge carefully chosen, a jury intimidated…

It’s all easily done, although for guaranteed success it’s best done in big-city jurisdictions with progressive judges and jurors eager to help reinforce the narrative. In lesser locales, the necessary manipulations may not work.

The current candidate for the title Major Narrative Reinforcement Event is the May 1st death of Jordan Neely on a New York City subway train. Neely was thirty years old, black, indigent, and crazy. He had a long rap sheet—more than forty arrests.

Neely was, in short, one of those people—invariably black—who make riding the New York City subway a miserable lottery, with the lottery prize being that you emerge from the subway at your destination alive, uninjured, un-insulted and un-robbed.

Neely was screaming, yelling, threatening other riders and throwing garbage around in his subway carriage until a young white guy, 24-year-old Daniel Penny, overpowered him and held him in a neck hold.

When police eventually arrived Neely was lying on the floor of the car unconscious. He was pronounced dead in hospital; the city medical examiner ruled his death a homicide from neck compression.

“What we know about Dem run cities and the disingenuous MSM” is a better headline.

We know innocent people aren’t allowed to defend themselves against “P.O.C.” or LGBTQ attackers, and that those cities & MSM will always take the side of these attackers.https://t.co/Fx4PgzaP20

— Terrence Simpson (@TerrenceBeBack) May 7, 2023

I’m not clear at what point he died.

Now all the race racketeers—Al Sharpton, Benjamin Crump, the Black Lives Matter mob—are up in arms, staging protests and demonstrations. Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s black communist D.A., has had the white guy arrested and charged with manslaughter in the second degree, a-a-a-and we’re off…

Celebrities will be chiming in, I’ve no doubt, and big corporations will reach for their checkbooks. With a Manhattan judge and a jury of blacks and progressive whites, young Daniel Penny—a Marine veteran—will get a stiff jail sentence. And the narrative will have been reinforced.

Neely, the deceased, was well-known to New York City authorities, and not only the police. The city’s Department of Homeless Services, we have learned, keeps a list of the top fifty street people most in need of attention. Neely was on the list.

The news and commentary on this case, even the more intelligent sort, talks about Neely’s fate as a failure of public services—a failure to provide him with the treatment he obviously needed. You can Ctrl-F pretty much any story about the case for the words ”treatment” and ”help,” and you’ll get a hit.

I’m skeptical. We don’t actually have any effective treatments for madness. We have no help for these poor souls. I covered this whole issue a year ago here on Radio Derb.

As I said back then, psychiatry is mostly a bogus pseudoscience. There are psychoactive drugs that can give some relief in some cases; but, as I also said, quote: ”Most psychiatric medicines are either placebos or mild narcotics. None of them cures anything.” End quote.

And, of course, the patient has to be functioning well enough to take the drugs voluntarily, which crazy people mostly aren’t.

What we can do is shut crazy people away from the rest of us: incarcerate them, humanely but firmly, where they can’t do harm to normal citizens. We used to do that. Then, starting back in the 1950s, we stopped doing it. That was a mistake.

Jordan Neely belonged in an asylum, along with the other 49 people on that Department of Homeless Services list.

Steve Sailor: "the number of egregious random attacks on pedestrians and transit passengers in Manhattan could be lowered significantly just by rounding up a few hundred of the most well-known psychos and putting them in a lunatic asylum."https://t.co/wwu5YcB7Q8

— Hector Drummond (@hector_drummond) May 8, 2023

New York City has found accommodation for sixty thousand foreign scofflaws, but they can’t provide humane incarceration for fifty citizen lunatics? Are we really that deep into social failure?