Daniel Penny vs. the Morlocks

Serving as a US Marine from 2017-2021, Daniel Penny missed what might be called “the mass submission of 2020.”

When Penny returned to New York City to finish his education, he had to be as wide-eyed as H.G. Wells’s Time Traveller was when he landed in the year AD 802,701.

The Eloi, the people the Traveller meets, are childlike vegetarians who seem happy and carefree but who lack curiosity or discipline. They had decayed into a state, writes Wells, of “mere beautiful futility.”

The Eloi lived in increasing fear of the Morlocks, creatures that inhabited the “Under-World” and feasted on the defenseless Eloi. “The nemesis of the delicate ones was creeping on apace,” writes Wells.

The Time Traveller could only speculate about the “evolution of man” that led to this state of permanent surrender just as Daniel Penny could only speculate about the submissiveness of New Yorkers in 2023.

When Penny descended the stairway into the New York subway on May 1, 2023 – appropriately, the high holy day on the Marxist calendar – he quickly learned he was as out of place in New York City as the Time Traveller was in 802,701.

If anything, Penny had more to fear. After protecting the Eloi on his subway car from Morlock Jordan Neely, Penny had to contend with the Morlocks’ above-ground allies.

These could be found in the DA’s office, in the media, and especially in Black Lives Matter, the movement that had sustained the “nemesis of the delicate ones” for the past decade.

The movement had begun in 2013 when Penny was only 14. Upon the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a trio of gender-confused female Marxists promptly coined the term “black lives matter” and built a movement around that mantra.

The BLM era represented a shift in leftist thinking. For nearly a century prior, when prodded by the hard Left, journalists insisted on the innocence of the transparently guilty.

Over the years, the media created a seemingly endless series of martyrs – Sacco and Vanzetti, Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Hurricane Carter, the Central Park Five.

In each of these cases, and in many lesser ones, sympathetic journalists would muster the evidence that seemed to exonerate the accused, usually a racial or ethnic minority, and suppress the evidence that convicted them.

Then, in the fourth year of the Obama regime, the media shifted gears. No longer content to declare the guilty innocent, they now felt free to declare the innocent guilty.

The first media victim in this dark new era was the transparently innocent George Zimmerman. A Good Samaritan like Penny, Zimmerman was viciously assaulted by an aspiring MMA fighter nearly half a foot taller, the 17-year-old Martin.

Had Zimmerman not shot Martin, he very likely would have been beaten to death. The media, now in transition mode, had zero interest in the facts.

As a case in point, NBC correspondent Lisa Bloom wrote a book on the incident without mentioning that Zimmerman was an Obama supporter and a civil rights activist or even that he was Hispanic.

Zimmerman’s acquittal energized the modern Left in much the way the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti energized their grandparents.

With this new paradigm in play, BLM sought out new victims among the transparently innocent. First to wander into their sights was Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson.

Although it was hard to canonize the thuggish Michael Brown, it was easy to demonize the officer who shot Brown to save his life. Wilson has since gone ghost to protect his own life.

More strategically, BLM also demonized the Democrat prosecuting attorney of St. Louis County who had the integrity to let the evidence speak for itself.

BLM and its allies saw to it that Robert McCulloch was thumped in his ensuing primary.

For the next six years no one on the Left – or even in the center – dared challenge BLM hegemony. When chronic criminal George Floyd died resisting arrest in 2020, America’s institutional leaders lashed themselves senseless in an orgy of self-flagellation.

To appease the monster they created, the people of Minnesota – with full throated media support – sent four innocent police officers to prison, lead officer Derek Chauvin to an unconscionable 22 years.

Serving in the Marines at the time, Penny missed America’s slide into submission. Upon his return to civilian life, he had to identify with the Time Traveller.

“I came out of this age of ours,” says the Traveller, “this ripe prime of the human race when fear does not paralyze and mystery has lost its terrors.” He adds, “I at least would defend myself.”

So would Daniel Penny defend himself and his fellow subway riders. His valor stirred the New York jurors to do what the Minneapolis jurors feared to do – deliver justice.

In the process, they broke BLM’s chokehold on America. Let’s hope our Eloi, going forward, find their nerve.