MS NOW does not care how much PoliticsNation host Al Sharpton destroys any distinction between journalist and activist. He's an activist with a TV show.
Last week, Reverend Al declared he would not let the grand jury decision in the Nolan Wells case go unchallenged. This past Saturday, Sharpton again blurred it entirely during a segment on Jordan Neely, who was inadvertently killed by former Marine Daniel Penny, in May of 2023, while defending his fellow subway riders.
Sharpton began the segment and immediately announced his bias and conflict of interest on the subject.
SHARPTON: It's been more than three years since the killing of Jordan Neely on a New York City subway. Neely, a 30 year old homeless man and a former Michael Jackson impersonator was experiencing a mental health crisis on a subway train in New York City when former Marine Daniel Penny put him in a fatal chokehold chokehold.
Sharpton omitted some vital facts right off the bat. Neely was indeed a 30-year-old homeless man, but as Fox News had reported, "with schizophrenia who had an active arrest warrant at the time, had barged onto the train shouting death threats while high on a type of synthetic marijuana known as K2."
Sharpton continued.
SHARPTON: Penny was later acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in a case that would spark a national conversation about race, mental health and public safety. In my capacity as head of National Action Network, I was personally involved in fighting for justice for nearly. And I delivered the eulogy at his funeral.
Interestingly, Sharpton also revealed that he gave the eulogy at the funeral of Nolan Wells during his segment on the grand jury verdict last weekend. He then went on to introduce Anand Giridharadas to promote his new book on the Neely case -- after repeated book promotions on Morning Joe.
SHARPTON: You spent nearly three years doing research for the book. You and I have spoken extensively as part of your reporting. Why did you feel this particular story demanded that kind of deep dive. And what, what did you think the public and the media missed in the initial coverage?
Giridharadas then revealed that it was Sharpton's eulogy that set theme for his book.
GIRIDHARADAS: I was struck when I was first covering the case at your line in the eulogy where you said, and I'm paraphrasing, he wasn't just choked by one man in this one moment, he'd been choked much of his life, and he'd been choked by a whole city. He'd been choked by agencies. He'd been choked by hospitals, he'd been choked by so many systems.
And so I, taking that cue from your eulogy, I almost wanted to take that idea as my reporting prompt. If we understood the choking to not have begun that day, May 1st, 2023, but much earlier, what was the story of that choking? That long choking, in which eight million people were involved?
Yes, according to Sharpton's eulogy and Giridharadas's book, Neely had been choked by all of New York City, who had apparently failed him. After presenting his versions of the different backgrounds of Neely and Penny, Sharpton turned to the murder of Neely's mother, something Giridharadas would address in a most bizarre fashion.
GIRIDHARADAS: When his mother was murdered by her boyfriend, the cause of death on her autopsy was compression of the neck chokehold, which would be the identical cause of death for her son a decade and a half later. A reminder of the way mistreatment metastasizes and is passed down through generations.
Then it was back to Sharpton's eulogy, praising Neely, and adding his own analysis, blaming Penny's upbringing, along with his military training, which he says he got a first hand look at, after obtaining permission, for what happened on the subway in 2023.
GIRIDHARADAS: You said in your eulogy this was not someone trying to deal drugs. This was someone trying to, you know, make tourists smile and earn tips on the street....They (the Marines) are trained in a kind of hypervigilance.... And so I think there was a collision of a Long Island version of what safety looks like a Marine Corps hypervigilance, and then a situation that, you know, many that did really scare many people on that train.
Needless to say, Jordan Neely was black and Daniel Perry is white. Sharpton, having succeeded in getting MS NOW to sign off on yet another race-hustling segment documenting his activist work, concluded with, "Thank you for the book. Thank you, Anand, for bringing this discussion out."
