The inner life of an authoritarian age. One of the main things, as I see it, is this tendency to reduce everything and everyone. This failure to see across any kind of divide. It's not just — I'm not talking about left and right, or you loving your MAGA uncle. It is every time you walk past a homeless person and invent a story instead of trying to understand what it's like to be them.
Hello and welcome to Why Is This Happening? With me, your host, Chris Hayes. You know, there's certain stories, certain news stories, particularly they tend to center on a crime, right, that have something in them that sort of captures the imagination and the zeitgeist and the cultural moment. And there's been a few of those, you know, probably the biggest of my youth was the O.J. Simpson trial, which was, you know, the sensation and also seemed to have every intersecting sort of line in America from sports to celebrity to race to policing to gender-based violence, like everything running together in one story.
And there's been others, you know, through the years. When I was a kid in New York, there's a shooting on the subway by a white man named Bernie Goetz, who shot a number of black teenagers that approached him on the subway some way. This also became a national story. It also seemed to have like — just to sort of contain so many complex aspects of the city. And I think the story — the recent story that fits in this category was the choking death in May of 2023 of a man named Jordan Neely, who was a young black man who was living on the streets and who was also a Michael Jackson impersonator who had been struggling with some real mental health issues.
And he was strangled to death when he came on a subway train, subway car on the F train, acting — you know, acting in a manner that was very unsettled. He was yelling at people on the train. Someone on the car, a man named Daniel Penny, a white man who was a former Marine, approached him from behind, put him in a chokehold, held him in that chokehold until he died.
And in that one moment, this horrible, tragic encounter, all of these through lines of what New York City is about, but also America — America in this post-Black Lives Matter, post-COVID moment, the moment of backlash to the progress of social movements that had happened in the early parts of the decade, the sort of rise of the kind of Donald Trump right. Daniel Penny becomes this kind of cause célèbre among the right. Protesters take the street demanding justice for Jordan Neely, the intersecting lines of questions about policy at the street level, at the city level, at the national level, about prosecution, about cops, about jails, about mental health, about housing.
It's a remarkable and very sad and very illustrative story. And there's this just incredible new book out. I hope that you have seen it because it's been getting, I think, rightful amount of buzz in the New York Times from Scott Turow. It's called "The Man in the Mirror." It's by a friend of mine, Anand Giridharadas, who spent two years chronicling this story in as rich, nuanced, textural way as you can imagine.
The book — you will fly through this book. It reads like a novel. It invites you into so many characters. It's this kind of kaleidoscopic look at the city, at us, at what our society is, what it could be, who it fails and who it doesn't fail. And it's really an incredible work. And you could talk about this for hours. I mean, you could do an entire college course about all the things that show up in this book. But it's my great pleasure to invite Anand onto the program. Welcome.
I'm so happy to be with you, Chris.
It really is. I think I said this to other people before. I think the greatest compliment you can give a writer is that I was jealous when I was reading it that I didn't write it. I was like, "God damn it." It's really an incredible piece of work.
Very, very, very sad story, I have to say. Like, you know, there's hope, and there's incredible hope and solidarity and bravery, and there's these amazing characters who come through with tremendous empathy, but, you know, the fundamental story at the heart of it, which is the story of this young man, Jordan Neely, is a sad one.
Maybe let's just start with how you found your way into this story.
I have a very good friend who called me one day and said to me the thing that at least I as a writer am always hoping to hear, which is, "I've got your next book for you." Because I struggle. I'm good at writing books. I struggle to figure out what book I should be doing. That's the thing that takes me so long. And so I was surprised by this call, and he said, look, there's this case that had happened, and I had very, just vaguely followed it. He said, "This is a story that is an incident, seems like a small incident, one subway car, one city. It is really a story about everything."
And for those of us who live in New York, we know when they say, "Stand clear of the closing doors," and those doors close, there's what I have come to think of as a kind of temporary country of people in that subway car. There's a group of people who are now, until the next stop, unto themselves. There's no one coming in, no one coming out. There's no law that can sort of get in there.
Things happen. There are cultures — subway cars have different cultures. I had a friend who lived here a long time ago, was a brilliant writer, and she said, and you'll appreciate this, having lived in different parts of the city and grown up here, that the subway underneath takes on the kind of character of the places above it as it moves. And she said, you'd be in the subway in Manhattan and it would kind of cross 125th Street and the way people relate to each other, the kind of comfort, the conversation, the vibe changes, almost like a reverse chameleon of what's above it.
And so in that subway car was that temporary country of people that day. And in that subway car, inescapably, was a lot of the country. Was the many system failures that had led a profoundly psychiatrically distressed Jordan Neely to that precipice. Were the many enmities and hostilities that have flourished in this era. In that subway car was the climate of a kind of permission of violence and taking matters into your own hands that has thrived under a president of the United States for whom those are profound and important ideas and pillars of his program.
So in that subway car were the inequities of this country. In that subway car, I think most significantly, was the sense of abandonment, the sense of neglect, the sense that the cavalry's not coming, the system is not seeing us or coming for us, that is endemic above ground everywhere. And so when those doors closed and this incident of erratic behavior and then a chokehold and then a death happened, I became convinced through my friend Sam's generous kind of suggestion that this would be a way of doing a thing I love to do.
And I did this — this is my fifth book — but I became convinced that, I mean you do it night after night so skillfully, but it is really difficult, as you know, to talk about the big things as big things and make people move, make people see in some new way. We are all so baked right now.
Not in the good sense of being baked.
We are all so intellectually baked.
So like immigration, pretty big important topic. There is literally no one left in America who is still thinking, cogitating on the issue of immigration. Everybody is in their place. Right, like in those board games where the pegs go in the — like everybody's in their peg. So I thought maybe if you tell a story where you zoom all the way in to a small situation, a handful of lives, a crime as you say, which generates a lot of paperwork and legal files where you could really go deep, maybe I'd be able to tell an everything story of this country that yes, would tell a sad story, that yes, would reflect us back to ourselves in all these ways, but that I hope to do one more thing, which is show us that the culture of reduction of other people, of dehumanization of other people, of flattening of other people that has become our culture is part and parcel of why we're in an era that feels the way it does.
And that if we want to get past that, it starts with other ways of considering each other, seeing each other across the many, many chasms.
Yeah, one of the things I think you do very skillfully in the book is you tell the story and you also tell the story of the story that gets told about it and the polarization machine that ramps up about it. And no one is acting in bad faith, really. I mean, that's actually what's interesting. The machinery of politics and polarization that start winding up around it are, I think there's some people who are being sort of somewhat cynical in how they're sort of using the incident, but a lot of people are just super upset or angry about it in either direction, angry that Daniel Penny is getting prosecuted and that there's all this sort of disturbance on the subway and people are left to kind of deal with themselves, angry that a young black man who was asking for help is killed. So like everyone, you can have a lot of people acting in good faith and still sort of the machinery gets very ramped up in which it becomes very hard for people to see each other across that divide.
And understandably so, because the cost here was a young man's life.
Maybe let's just start with a little bit about who Jordan Neely was. Even that, I think, was like a little... One of the revelations of the book was, it was, again, necessarily because I'm a journalist and you're a journalist, so like part of what we do is reduce things because we can't help but to. I mean, I only have so many minutes in a show. Like, it's just part of what we do. Like, you know, first draft of history, all that stuff. There's certain parts of it that are unavoidable. But it was a revelation to me that, like, Jordan's life was more, even more tragic than I realized. Stranger in some ways than I had quite realized. Like, his movement through the sort of Michael Jackson impersonation community and what that community was. And also, like, more disturbed, I think, than I also realized. I think there was a simplified version of the story that didn't quite credit how deep the trauma was for him and the demons he was wrestling with. So maybe tell us a little about who he was.
Yeah. And, you know, I would say to start with, there's a reason maybe that you didn't know some of those things, and it has to do with what kind of the narrative making how it functioned, right? And so what I would generally say is, most of what you consumed, if you weren't going deep in the story, was A, a narrative about Jordan Neely, that he was kind of a dangerous career criminal vagrant hobo, whatever, danger to society, menace to society, was rightfully put down, or he was purely a victim of systemic injustices and American cruelty and white supremacist vigilantism. Those were the kind of two stories. And what is lost in that is, of course, an actual life. So I tried to spend time, among other things, recovering some of that actual life.
So this is someone who grew up between Uptown Manhattan, the Bronx a little bit, and Bayonne, New Jersey, mostly. Mostly, was very, very close to his mother, precarious life, in and out of shelters, his mom is kind of in and out of abusive relationships by all accounts, not an easy life, but they were very close, they had a bond, a lot of people would kind of describe her as a best friend as much as a mother, she worked in telemarketing at a certain time, and when he was just barely an adolescent, sort of in the territory of our kids' ages, he wakes up one day and can't find his mom in the bedroom across the hall, and his mom's boyfriend won't let him into the room, and is acting kind of mysterious, and it turns out that his mother has been murdered by that boyfriend.
And remarkably, one of the things I found in the reporting is that her cause of death listed on the autopsy provided by the New York City Medical Examiner's Office was the same cause of death that would appear in the death certificate of Jordan Neely, her son, you know, a decade and a half plus later, compression of the neck, chokehold. She was strangled, stuffed in a duffel bag head first, left on the side of the road, in the Parkway in the Bronx. And this was obviously a giant trauma, as you would imagine for any child. I mean, it's sort of the kind of thing that your life is never the same.
Life defining, yeah, yeah, I think.
And Jordan, after that, actually, it was after that that he sort of got into, really into Michael Jackson community. And he was a fan, and then he became a super fan, and then he became like a guy who did an impression and was doing it in public and started to acquire costumes and was like a Michael Jackson impersonator. And one of my main characters in the book is one of his friends, Moses Harper, who was kind of a major mentor to him. Mentor in the Michael Jackson impersonator community. And I asked her, I said, "Maybe is it too simple to say that kind of the Michael Jackson world and all these people and all these rituals and these outfits sort of not replaced his mother but obviously provided when he was grappling and now suddenly quite deserted gave him kind of a new organizing principle of life." And she said, I wouldn't say that it, you know, you couldn't have replaced her anyway, but it was a way in which he chose to be active in his healing, right, instead of just waiting to heal.
He entered a world where as in any kind of world, there's like a way. And there's a, if you do this, then you get this. And just like, there's a logic and a coherence. And also a community from the book of people who are, you know, it's an interesting subculture who are generally, I think a lot of people with some real emotional trauma and hurt and abuse and things they've lived through.
Pulled towards Michael Jackson as like almost kind of, almost religious figure, I think it's fair to say.
Yes, and a lot of these were younger, right? I mean, Jordan Neely was born in 1992, right? So I grew up with Michael Jackson music, but I grew up with Michael Jackson, the singer and the performer, right? This was a generation, and there are people even younger than Jordan Neely was, who, I mean, some of these people came into Michael fandom when he died. Like, his death was an entry point. So it's a slightly different thing for some of these folks, where it was very much the music and the culture, but it was also, there was a kind of martyrdom element.
I will say this is a community where no one believes, as far as I could tell, any of the child molestation, you know, sex abuse stories. They think that is, you know, racism, people wanting to pull a great man down, et cetera. And so this was a community that embraced him, and as you said, attracted a lot of people who found a salve in Michael Jackson for their own pain.
And that was probably the most positive period in his life. By all accounts, there were European tourists prowling the streets around Times Square looking for the Michael Jackson guy, and they met Jordan Neely. There are YouTube videos where people feel very excited that they found this guy. He was, at some point, a beloved New York City street performer. And then as he kind of got into his 20s and got a little older, mental illness really got the better of him. Schizophrenia, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, among other things. And it just became, you know, less of Michael Jackson performer, more a guy in real trouble on the same streets where he had once entertained crowds, and in the subway system where he'd once entertained crowds.
And by May 2023, you know, I should say it went from minor brushes with the law when he was younger, turnstile jumping on the like, to more serious. They committed assault more than once to himself. At one point, he was, you know, decompensating, as they say, in that field of social work. So he was in real trouble. And in the last part before this happened in May 2023, he was at Rikers awaiting trial for some of these assault cases. And he was offered a kind of deal as part of these new alternative to incarceration things.
Diversion programs, right? Things that I think you and I would say are very healthy, positive new directions in society.
Right, does it help anyone to have Jordan Neely like in a prison prison, you know what I mean? Unclear that helps him and helps society, but.
And then he's put in this thing in a facility that's a, it's a kind of residential rehab facility, and he's allowed to just kind of walk out the door.
So it's kind of like Rikers.
Or just like a place where you can walk out the door and nothing in between.
And, you know, a few months later, he's dead on the subway floor. And, you know, one of the abiding themes in the book, and this comes up from his family members, his father was not that involved in his life, but who is speaking, you know, afterwards after his death and some other more extended family that they had sort of wanted, wished he had been essentially involuntarily committed. And you trace this question through a whole bunch of different lenses from different policymakers, from the head of the health commissioner about that. And I'm curious, well, I want to sort of stay there for a second before we get to Daniel Penny and then we can talk about the case and stuff.
But like, I was reading your book over the last few days, I was reading it on a subway while a woman two seats down from me was having an incredibly aggressive and profane monologue to a person I think she was imagining in her head. Everyone who's on the subway has seen this. You know, it was disturbing, everyone's clocking her, but never felt like... But she's like... It was really obscene, like truly profane. In a way that was a little like your ears kept pricking up.
And very agitated. At first, you wanted to be understanding as someone who also delivers monologues every night. You know?
You had a certain empathy.
It's like, "Whoa, that's really... She's working really blue here." And again, that kind of thing that happens, I think, with folks that are experiencing a delusion, like in a clinical sense, of kind of like eyes cast towards a person who's not there, right? So she's directing it.
And, you know, there's that energy that fills in the little nation that is the subway car. And so here's the thing that I was thinking. I've lived in different places in my life. I was just visiting Japan. We went to Japan, right? Like, schizophrenia, acute mental illness, right? SMI, so severe mental illness, right? Serious mental illness that we talk about in the sort of, you know, policy sense, is fairly easily distributed throughout the world. There are people who are schizophrenics in Japan, in Brazil, in wherever, right?
Like, I rode a lot of Japanese subways, you never saw a person like that there. Other places in the world, like there are poor rural areas, right? Where people have this, they have substance problems and serious mental illness or a combination and it's not the same, right? There's something distinct about the way that like large urban America is constituted. And this sort of unique question of like, what to do.
And the what to do has two sides and you really trace these, right? There's the, like, there's the kind of non-compassionate, but totally understandable question of like, this is my space too, and I don't want this person here. And that's not the most like large-hearted or charitable, but it's also not an insane or despicable thing for a person to feel.
It's I think perfectly natural. Life is, life is hard enough.
That's a natural feeling. I mean, I don't, you know, you could take that too far, but, and then there's also like the truly compassionate of like what to, like in the sense of getting back to Jordan Neely, it's like, what, what should we do? What? This is not an easy thing. He doesn't. He's refused treatment. (LAUGHS) But he is also very, very ill. And there's like a few thousand folks like that at any given moment in the city. I mean, you have some numbers in there, right? It's not a huge population, but it's like... And you have outreach workers who see the same folks over and over again who were in the subways at three in the morning getting refused. And it's just like, it's a real hard problem.
Yes. And it is a moral conundrum, right? So many of the problems that you and I might otherwise talk about in American life, we know what to do. It's just there's no money. This senator doesn't want it or this interest group blocks it. But but but 90 percent of people want it. That's that's the sort of narrative structure of like most issues you when I talk about this is a different kind of issue.
