Jordan Neely, Tucker Carlson, and ‘rooting for the mob’ as America unravels

Once upon a time in America, Jordan Neely was that quintessential New York character who acted out life’s mixtures of dreams and disappointments on that giant stage underneath Broadway: the city’s subway system and its 2.4 million bedraggled commuters. As a young 20-something a decade ago, Neeley’s Michael Jackson’s shtick — moonwalking in the Thriller-era military jacket, “Billie Jean” blasting from a boom box as an express train barreled under Manhattan — brought bemused smiles and an occasional whoop from jaded straphangers.

But Neely was 30 now, still calling the subway his home as the music faded in a city where, as his idol once sang, “there’s demons closin’ in from every side.” A Queens subway rider named Emon Thompson told the New York Times she saw Neely a couple of times recently as she took the Manhattan-bound F train, and he seemed highly distraught. She recalled: “He said he needed help and kept repeating the words, ‘food, shelter, I need a job.’ ... I could tell he was at his wit’s end, you know?”

That end came quickly on Monday afternoon. Aboard a crowded F train underneath the East Village, Neely reportedly declared: “‘I don’t have food, I don’t have a drink, I’m fed up ... I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.” The rider who related those words to the Times, freelance journalist Juan Alberto Vazquez, filmed the shocking moments that came next after Neely reportedly threw his black coat onto the floor.

A young man, unnamed but described as a 24-year-old ex-Marine, grabbed Neely and — possibly drawing on his military training — placed Neely in a choke hold. The homeless man could not speak but flailed his arms, and another passenger intervened — not to free Neely, but to hold him down. Other passengers watched. Vazquez later posted a video that runs for four-and-a-half minutes — although he claimed the encounter lasted as long as 15 minutes, which, if true, would be nearly six minutes longer than when Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin infamously suffocated George Floyd with his knee.

Neely lapsed into unconsciousness, and the EMT responders who arrived at the Broadway-Lafayette station were unable to revive him. On Wednesday, the New York medical examiner stated what was clear to anyone who watched the video: Neeley’s death was a homicide. And yet the cops of Mayor Eric Adams’ “tough-on-crime” New York City questioned Neely’s killer and then allowed him to go home and sleep in his own bed.

Police haven’t released the name of the man who committed this homicide, but then they haven’t officially released Neely’s name, either, in this incident that much of official New York seems to have hoped would fade away, like music from a boom box. But too many outraged Americans are already saying his name — Jordan Neely — and wondering why this man, whose behavior was clearly disturbing but had done nothing violent, was summarily executed as no one intervened to help.

In spite of initial silence and inaction, and then the predictable twisting by politicians and the media into their prewritten narratives about urban homelessness and crime, Jordan Neely is fast becoming one of those names — like Emmett Till or Kitty Genovese or Bernhard Goetz or Trayvon Martin or George Floyd. In some way, these names become shorthand for how we as Americans treat our fellow Americans, tainted by all the toxic ingredients of prejudice, fear, and misguided rage that drag us down as a society, again and again.

There are many, many layers to the murder — yes, murder because I’m not sure what else to call the strangulation homicide of a nonviolent human being — of Jordan Neely. These include the utter failure of a police-state approach to a mental health crisis not just in New York but in American cities writ large, and New York’s two election cycles of over-the-top fearmongering around subway crime (which, despite some horrific incidents, is declining from its pandemic spike).

» READ MORE: In frightened, paranoid, gun-crazed America, the real ‘stranger danger’ is to strangers | Will Bunch

The highly charged rhetoric from the likes of Adams, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, or her 2022 opponent Lee Zeldin, amplified by “if it bleeds, it leads” TV news and sensationalistic crime coverage not only in the tabloids but the allegedly staid New York Times, undoubtedly prejudiced “the jury pool” of subway riders who sentenced Neely to death. And there is a lot that can and will be said about the increased criminalization of homelessness, amid a housing crisis, exacerbated by Adams, who has dispatched a mini-army to rip down tents and who has flooded the subways with so many officers that F train civilians apparently felt deputized. Twitter trolls are making much of Neely’s reported more than 40 arrests, but that feels more a comment on the morality of the arrestors — in a city that responds to mental health crises with guns instead of aid — than the arrested.

But here’s what’s even scarier about the death of Jordan Neely: the rapid downward spiral of how Americans are judging and treating the people we don’t know, or the ones we pretend to know. A civil society truly depends on the kindness of strangers, and as our pandemic-fueled isolation rots into dangerous paranoia, with our politics at an 1861 level of distrust, we see the people around us not as neighbors but as targets for our rage. At the doorbell. In the parking lot. At the property line. And now in the underground melting pot of New York City.

That’s why, when I thought about Jordan Neely, I also thought about Tucker Carlson, the man who’d been America’s most-watched cable TV news pundit before he was abruptly fired in the swirl of controversy around his employer, Fox News. At almost the same moment that Neely was fighting for his last breath, Carlson’s enemies were leaking one of his texts to offer some insight into the poisoned mind that came into a few million living rooms at 8 p.m. to make sure that angry white Americans channeled their rage onto that night’s target, whether it was refugees or transgender people or the unhoused.

In what Carlson thought would remain a private text to a Fox producer after watching Trump supporters beat up a left-wing protester in late 2020, he wrote: “Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: This isn’t good for me.”

The text made news for its obvious racism, but there’s even more going on here. Whatever qualms Carlson expressed at the end, the reality is that he thrived in 2020s America as the TV voice for millions because he made “rooting for the mob” socially acceptable, telling his viewers that it’s OK if you “wanted them to hurt the kid.” That poison is permeating our society, even in a blue-city subway car where probably few had ever watched Fox News. In New York’s left-coast, allegedly liberal twin city of San Francisco, the city’s ex-fire commissioner was caught on video spraying mace on homeless people minding their own business. It’s past time to ask ourselves, “Is this what we’re coming to?” It’s time to start asking, “Why?”

Meanwhile, for folks still clinging to a conscience, it’s hard to say what is more stunning: the mob mentality that strangled Neely to death, or the cops and the mayor and the governor and the New York Times editors who have gone completely numb to just how unspeakably awful that was.

We can’t bring Jordan Neely back, but we don’t have to live like this. The delayed justice of treating a homicide as a crime when the victim was a Black, homeless man would be a start. But we can also start taking seriously the handful of candidates — in elections as early as this month — who believe a mental health crisis in our cities means spending money on skilled responders and not more overtime for armed and poorly trained cops.

America’s newsrooms can also start asking themselves whether it’s the pursuit of clicks or just laziness that leads to printing stereotypes and police lies about homelessness or crime, rather than investigating the truth. And maybe it would help if all of us took a second to ask ourselves what we would have done on that F train on Monday. Even Tucker Carlson knew rooting for the mob “isn’t good for me.” But what it’s doing to America is much, much worse.

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