On journalism's dishonesty and moral rot

Did insurance company executive Brian Thompson deserve to be murdered? The New Yorker can't quite decide. But Jordan Neely - a violent psychotic criminal - is a “subway dancer.”

The subway dancer strangled by the ex-marine.

Every so often, a few words open a whole world, and worldview.

On Saturday afternoon, the New Yorker weighed in on the killing of United Healthcare chief executive Brian Thompson with this headline: “A Man Was Murdered in Cold Blood and You’re Laughing?”

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(Reading the New Yorker so you don’t have to. Danger pay!)

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I figured the question mark was accusatory: How can you mock this man’s death? Vultures.

I was wrong.

The New Yorker could not quite bring itself condemn the “progressives” who joked about the assassination of a 50-year-old man on a Manhattan street.¹

The question mark is more a cocked-head observation: Hey, I know people who think this guy Brian Thompson deserved to die. Maybe they’re right? Should having a high-paying job at an insurance company be a capital crime? Let’s talk about it!

Jia Tolentino, the piece’s writer, is too sly to come out and and actually support the killing. (Unlike, say, Taylor Lorenz, formerly of the Washington Post and New York Times, who reposted the comment “Hypothetically, would it be considered an actionable threat to start emailing other insurance CEOs a simple ‘you’re next’?” But Taylor is desperate to get attention for her flailing new Substack. Desperation is ugly.)

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(The face of desperation. The face of Taylor Lorenz.)

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Instead Tolentino cluck-clucks a bit about the “lawless” reaction to Thompson’s assassination while making clear she understands it all-too-well.

She repeatedly equates the killing to the “violence” of Thompson’s job running an insurance company that, yes, sometimes delays or denies claims for payments for medical procedures. To wit:

It’s just a matter of where you locate the decay—in the killing, or in the response to it, or in what led us here.

In the last lines of the piece - what reporters call the kicker, the place where they can leave readers a taste of what they think even in supposedly objective news articles, Tolentino writes:

It’s hard not to be curious about what, if anything, might happen to UnitedHealthcare’s claim-denial rates. I was at a show in midtown Manhattan on Thursday night, and when the comedians onstage cracked a joke about the shooter the entire place erupted in cheers.

Yes, Tolentino’s kicker is “the entire place erupted in cheers.”

I’m just telling ya what I saw, see. I wasn’t cheering myself. Or maybe I was? You’ll have to guess!

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(Did he deserve to die? Well, on the one hand, he was a human being, a father, a husband. On the other he was a white man in a fleece who made a lot of money in an industry a lot of people don’t like. So. Who can say, really?)

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Tolentino’s crafty stance on Thompson’s murder is disgusting, for lack of a more euphemistic word.

But it isn’t the most disgusting part of her piece.

No, that comes in a throwaway line about the Daniel Penny case.

Penny is the Marine veteran now on trial for the May 2023 death of Jordan Neely, a violent and mentally ill criminal who was menacing riders inside a subway car when Penny put him a chokehold. In the previous decade, Neely had been arrested 42 times, including for punching a 67-year-old woman in November 2021.

Did I mention Penny is white and Neely was black? And so the usual suspects tried to nail Penny to the usual cross after Neely’s death. There were even a few protests last year.

But anyone who has ever been on a subway train when a mentally ill person is yelling and demanding money - that is, just about anyone who’s lived in New York and isn’t a billionaire - knows how unpleasant the experience can be. Does the guy have a knife? A gun? Are those flecks of spit from his mouth going to land in mine? There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do but put one’s head down and feel a mix of shame and relief when the vagrant moves along to bother someone else.

This hard reality has even penetrated post-woke Manhattan. Nobody’s protesting for Neely anymore. And the jury hearing Penny’s case said Friday that it was hopelessly deadlocked on the manslaughter charge he faced. The judge dismissed the manslaughter count, leaving only the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide, which the jury will consider next week. (It’s not clear the judge is allowed to do this, but if the last year has taught us anything, it’s that New York state court judges pretty much do what they like.)

But that’s not Jia Tolentino described the case. Here’s how she described it.

the subway dancer strangled by the ex-marine.

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(Hold me close, subway dancer!)

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Subway dancer.

Because years ago, before drugs and trouble rotted his brain and turned him into a walking, talking mental health crisis for cops and social workers and unlucky commuters, Neely sometimes panhandled in a Michael Jackson outfit.

He was still begging, still a pain in the ass, still bothering people who were just trying to get to work. But at least he wasn’t violent back then.

Subway dancer. As if Neely was part of a local arts troupe before the bad white man killed him for no reason.

And of course Penny is reduced to “ex-marine.” The New Yorker’s famous copy editors apparently do not know that Marine is ALWAYS capitalized. (“Ex” is wrong too, he’s a Marine veteran, there’s no such thing as an “ex-soldier” or “ex-Marine.”)

Again, Jia, for future reference: “Black” can be upper or lower case - just as “white” can be - but Marine, that’s capitalized.

So, yeah, the progressive worldview in a single sentence.

The words aren’t quite a lie. They’re worse, they’re the truth twisted until it screams, all context removed, the honest fear of those subway riders leached from the scene, so all that’s left is a black victim and a white perpetrator.

That’s all Tolentino can see. Make no mistake, if those colors were reversed, she would surely be asking us not to judge Penny too harshly for protecting his fellow passengers.

Tolentino probably doesn’t even know what she’s doing at this point, how dishonest she’s become. Like Emily Witt, her fellow drug-loving New Yorker scribe, she’s just smart enough to put a clever sentence together. Sadly, though, she has forgotten her job - which is to see the world for what it is and tell the truth about it, even when that truth doesn’t match her ideology.

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(Those people, the ones I used to work with at the Times and the New Yorker, they don’t like me anymore. I don’t care. I’d rather be able to tell the truth.)

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The good news is that places like the New Yorker have lost their monopoly on the news, the culture, the conversation. On Saturday afternoon, I pointed out the ugliness of “subway dancer” on X, writing:

Here’s how the New Yorker refers to the Daniel Penny case: No matter how much you think they lie, you’re wrong. It’s worse.

As of 24 hours later, that post has received almost 600,000 views and 10,000 likes.

No wonder the left hates Elon Musk so much.

1. The piece pretends the support for Thompson’s killing extends “across the aisle,” but that is an exaggeration, at best. The cheers and jokes were loudest on the new social-media platform Bluesky, a fast-growing progressive alternative to X.