The Daniel Penny Vibeshift

His exoneration shows an America recovering from the George Floyd hangover

The subway vigilante Daniel Penny was exonerated on all charges Monday. It was a major victory for America. It’s arguably a bigger win than Kyle Rittenhouse’s exoneration and nearly in the same league as Donald Trump’s election victory. The verdict signals that ordinary Americans no longer sympathize with criminals over law-abiding citizens. Even Manhattanites will favor a Good Samaritan over a dangerous vagrant. Jordan Neely, Penny’s alleged “victim,” was black, but the racial factor failed to triumph over common sense.

Penny’s victory should hearten us and give us hope that better times may be ahead. The trial may mark the end of the era where America fell for dubious stories of black victimhood at the hands of police or white citizens.

Penny represents the best of this country. He was a well-respected former Marine who took action to protect his fellow citizens from a dangerous maniac. His fellow passengers knew he did the right thing. The jury fortunately decided he did the right thing. Only local politicians, prosecutors, and “activists” thought he did the wrong thing.

Penny should’ve never been charged in the first place, but we should at least be thankful he’s not going to jail. If his trial had taken place closer to the aftermath of the George Floyd revolution, he would’ve likely been convicted. His chances in court looked grim when he was charged in the spring of 2023. A white guy taking down a black vagrant on a New York City train was not the best optics for a Manhattan jury. Many in the media rushed to condemn him as a white racist who brutally murdered a lovable Michael Jackson impersonator (journalists ignored Jordan Neely’s long rap sheet). Eyewitness testimony was always on Penny’s side, but it might not have been enough if a different public mood reigned over the country.

Ever since Trayvon Martin’s death, there’s been an insatiable appetite for black martyrs as cudgels against “systemic racism” and “police brutality.” Sometimes the “villains” in these stories,such as George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson, were exonerated. Others, such as Derek Chauvin and the McMichaels, were not. Regardless of the verdicts, these men were all cast as scapegoats for the sins of white America and symbols of its demonic evil. Even when overwhelming evidence proved these “bad guys” were actually in the right, the myths remained strong as ever. Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown are still remembered as gentle souls shot in cold blood and their violence that brought on their deaths is forgotten.

This social trend culminated in the George Floyd Revolution. A criminal having a bad episode with drugs turned into a searing indictment of white America and inspired riots nationwide. The overwhelming majority of Americans backed Black Lives Matter and accepted the false notion that there is an epidemic of police killing unarmed black men. Any one who ran afoul of the new paradigm were subject to harsh penalties. Ordinary citizens who wanted the riots to be suppressed by force or dared criticize BLM risked job termination. Republicans all had to pay their respects to Floyd as a fallen martyr. And no one was allowed to get in the way of rioters.

Just ask Kyle Rittenhouse, Daniel Perry (not to be confused with Penny), and Jake Gardner. All three confronted rioters who threatened their lives. All three were charged for defending themselves. Only Rittenhouse was exonerated by a jury. Perry was convicted, but was pardoned. Gardner took his life before his trial took place. All of them were in the right, yet they were all demonized in the media for their actions. They stood as villains in the public conscience and signaled that self-defense against protected classes was a grave offense.

Some may contend that Rittenhouse’s exoneration in 2021 indicates Penny would’ve received a fair trial at the same time as well. They are wrong. Rittenhouse’s case was arguably the most obvious case of self-defense in recent history. All three of his “victims” were on camera assaulting him. The one survivor approached him with a gun before being shot. Any person who watches the footage would know Rittenhouse is innocent. The video footage for Penny wasn’t as clear. He was saved by eyewitness testimony. But Rittenhouse was nearly convicted. He had the good fortune of never shooting a black person and having a conservative judge oversee his trial. If one of his victims had been black and the judge a liberal, he may be in jail right now.

The times were much darker in the Fall of 2021. Right now, Daniel Penny is an absolute hero in conservative media. Fox News basically wants to award him the Medal of Honor for his act. It’s hard to find a single conservative who would slight him. They all valorize him in the most enthusiastic terms. Rittenhouse was a different case. While nearly all conservatives felt he was not guilty, there was less enthusiasm to celebrate him as a hero. There were many who felt it necessary to castigate the young man for showing up to the Kenosha riots armed and implied he asked to be attacked. There was also far more media hostility toward Rittenhouse than there was towards Penny. Some of this was due to the false impression Rittenhouse was a white supremacist who killed three black men (I had a news-following relative who expressed shock at finding out during the trial that the “victims” weren’t black). People who contributed to Rittenhouse’s defense fund were at risk of losing their job and getting nasty hit pieces. No one who contributed to Penny’s defense fund faced the same consequences.

The best example of how different 2024 America is from the America of 2021 is the Jonathan Pentland case. Pentland was an Army sergeant who confronted a black youth who was harassing girls in his neighborhood. All Pentland did was yell at the perp and shove him. The neighbors all backed up Pentland’s actions and felt he was a Good Samaritan for confronting a threat to their community. Even though Pentland’s actions clearly didn’t amount to a crime, he was subject to a social media hate campaign, charged with assault, and suffered a riot outside his own home.

Pentland was convicted for merely confronting a black male in his South Carolina neighborhood. Penny was acquitted for physically taking down a black male on a New York subway. That’s progress.

The Penny verdict, delivered straight from the heart of Blue America, illustrates how the public is no longer in the throes of peak woke. The nation has recovered in many ways from the hangover of George Floyd. If Penny had been exonerated in 2021, there would’ve been riots. Now all we get are a few black women screaming outside the courthouse.

America is in a much better place now. The right to self-defense has been upheld against BLM’s racial blackmail. Enough Americans recognize the upstanding Marine vet is the good guy, not the violent vagrant.

We still aren’t out of the woods yet, but things look much better than they did when Americans were required to post black blocks in solidarity with George Floyd. We’re now in an era where Americans can post in support of Daniel Penny and not worry about losing their job. That’s a definite whitepill.