Jordan Neely was a person.

Our society left him stranded, and, because of his desperation and our warped priorities, his existence filled people not with sympathy but with fear. Then he was killed, and that is a tragedy, because he was a person.

I’m saying obvious things, because they’re clearly not obvious to everyone.

Not just that Neely’s death was a tragedy, but that he was a person.

These are controversial propositions.

I know, because there is a controversy.

https://armoxon.substack.com/p/jordan-neely-was-a-person

There are people outraged at any suggestion that Neely’s death was a tragedy, an outrage that seems born out of a reaction to the inference that he was a human, because the things these people say only make sense if they have decided that he was not a person.

I notice that many of these outraged people are the exact same people who seem to think every daily police lynching or vigilante act against a marginalized person is justified, and get outraged at every suggestion that the latest atrocity was tragic or unjustified.

This outrage is validated in our halls of power and our media as one of many equal competing perspectives, which means that instead of serving as a shocking revelation of collective cultural inhumanity toward one another, it becomes a debate instead—a *controversial* debate.

So, to repeat: Jordan Neely was a person, a human, and his death was tragic because he had the same measure of humanity as his killer, or you, or me, and observing these facts is one side of a controversy.

Also controversial is any attempt to establish the humanity of anyone who our society has marginalized, which is a word that means “this human’s humanity has been systematically ignored.”

To briefly change the subject somewhat, I’ve been told that I ought to make more of an effort to understand other points of view and perspectives.

That’s interesting, because I am not unhoused or marginalized, so I thought that this is what I was already trying to do.

However, "understanding the perspectives of unhoused or otherwise marginalized people" isn't what is meant.

What’s meant is that I should try to understand the perspectives of others, who refuse to understand any perspectives other than their own.

Anderson Cooper is the most recent person to tell me this, which he did after his network platformed our previous president and filled their studio with fans of our previous president, so that the previous president could defame E. Jean Carroll, a human being who he at the very least sexually abused (her claim, which I find entirely credible, is rape).

Sexual abuse is a crime, and it is the habitual practice of the former president, according to none other than him, for which (along with defamation) a civil jury had just found him liable.

And he also tried to murder Congress and overthrow democracy in the United States.

And he is guilty of many other crimes as well, some of which we watched him do and brag about, others of which we must only presume. And he once took out a full page ad in New York newspapers calling for the execution of some Black kids for a crime they didn’t commit, and so on.

When pressed about doing this years later, he pointed out that there is still disagreement on the matter.

So there's another controversy for you: whether those kids, who killed nobody, killed anybody.

Anyway, mere hours after being found liable to the tune of $5 million for defamation and sexual abuse, the former president and lifetime criminal was given a town hall by CNN, and he immediately proceeded to defame the victim of his sexual abuse.

And his crowd of supporters that CNN picked to clap and cheer everything he said clapped and cheered, which only seems possible if they don’t consider E. Jean Carroll to be a person.

This is the sort of behavior American conservatives really seem to love.

And I’m told by Anderson Cooper that this represents an important perspective for us to listen to and understand.

So I’m going to do that now.

I’m going to try to understand the perspective of people who think that a former president found liable for sexual assault is funny and good, or who believe that Jordan Neely’s killing was a good or at least necessary and justified thing, and who maybe think both things at once.

I’m told that Jordan Neely was scary.

And I’m sure sometimes unhoused people are unnerving, even scary, and sometimes do pose a threat, maybe even one requiring self-defense.

Desperation makes people desperate, is something I’ve sometimes noticed.

And I’m often scornfully asked if I would like to share a train car with a desperate person who is behaving aggressively and shouting in a threatening manner.

And I must confess to you: no, that does not sound like fun.

Being the desperate person sounds like less fun, though.

I might make the point that it seems to that it is a chronic and society-deep desperation that seems the problem most in need of a solution, not the people experiencing desperation … but I’m trying to understand different perspectives, so let’s focus on the scariness.

That Jordan Neely was scary would be a hard thing to disprove. All you have to do in order to be scary is to scare somebody, and all that has to happen for you to scare a person is for that person to be scared.

And people are scared of a lot of things these days, and more and more of them think being scared justifies immediately and summarily killing the thing that scares you—and I say “thing” purposefully.

Nobody making this argument seems to be thinking of Jordan Neely as a person.

With each extrajudicial killing of each marginalized person I’ve noticed an unusual rhetorical project immediately begins, in traditional and social media, in conversation, and in people’s internal structures of belief.

The project involves convicting the victim with a crime.

It's crime that retroactively convicts them of some crime worthy of death, some crime that makes them the perpetrator of their own killing.

This can be any crime at all.