In the caption of the Instagram post, he wrote, “An old white woman got on the train and immediately pointed at me and told me to correct how I was sitting. I refused, so she went to the conductor and complained. The conductor called the police and stopped the train,” he said.
O’Keefe also says in the caption that the friend of the woman who called the police had said to him, “You’re not the minority anymore.”
A separate video about the incident has been uploaded by the user, Nalae, on TikTok, where it has quickly gone viral, having been viewed over 160,000 times as of reporting.
They said I was disturbing the peace by not leaving the train. They pulled me off the train and arrested me without even talking to the Karen who reported the one black person on the train. On the platform, the police detained me and interrogated me. Only black folks stayed nearby and recorded the arrest. When I demanded a lawyer and reminded them they didn’t even take a statement from the woman who complained they eventually released me. This country is growing more psycho by the day. What will you do about it?"
“You’re not the minority anymore.”
Jesus fucking Christ.
This says so much. They think “minority” means a person who gets special treatment. That’s how fucking deluded they’ve become.
That… explains so much. Racists are fucking jealous that black people get to be oppressed??? Is it like some martyrdom by proxy fuckedupedness?
Sorta. I was raised with this bullshit, so I can see the distortion of reality. I’m still unpacking all this in therapy myself, because it’s a whole worldview.
First off, they’re woefully uneducated about history. My high school in Oklahoma briefly touched on the Civil Rights Movement and tried to pass it off as something that was over and done. Rosa Parks got arrested, the white people were shocked that this could happen, they had a sit-in party at a milkshake stand (they didn’t talk about any of the pushback that got), MLK did his speech and now everything is fine for black people, no more institutional racism, literally being taught in schools. Now, combine that with your own needs not being met, and the talking heads/politicans say that you’re not getting the aid you need because it’s going towards making hurt feelings better. There’s only so much money in the coffers, and you gotta be really hard up if you’re white, but it’s easy to get if you’re black.
There’s also a heavy religious framing about ancestral guilt. Like, if God can make life suck for everybody because Eve ate an apple, and libs are trying to play god, it follows to reason they’d want to make your life suck for the sins of your great-great-great grandparents. It’s never outright stated, but if you listen to enough sermons, the puzzle fills in. Like, again, they think the civil rights movement fixed everything, so they think white people have atoned for their transgressions, but the pastor says libs are in consort with satan and can’t forgive like jesus, so that’s why they want white people to suffer.
Edit: I want to make it clear that I do not personally believe any of that, it’s just what I was taught as a kid.
I appreciate you identifying where in the GOP’s propaganda they lead young people astray.
People like you doing a retrospective autobiopsy via therapy can help those of growing up in other contexts protect young people from propaganda, and distribute to them the truth.
Speak your truth! It’s only becoming more important as time goes on in this increasingly fascistic world.
My favorite part of this is the only people making the ignorant racist lives suck are the Republicans taking everything not the left asking them to be tolerant…
They honestly think that black people and minorities have it on easy street.
Yep. It’s like a child fighting for the attention of an abusive parent.
They should be made to understood what it means to be a minority if they want that status.
Moreover, throw them in jail legitimately, since they misused the justice system.
I honestly had trouble parsing that statement until I read this comment; it was nice being stupid and ignorant for a minute.
Its a tale as old as time that they’d strip protections against racism, implement racist laws, and then pretend as if slavery was so long ago that it didn’t matter anymore. It was literally happening not a decade after the Civil War ended
Cops are racists.
I mean what the actual fuck?!? If this is only half as egregious as this is being portrayed I wish I had been there. I would have told that old white Karen to shut the fuck up. And I don’t even know who this dude is. And I’m an old white dude.
Us old white dudes have a responsibility to get involved in these events.
Exactly…
The only thing better is some old white grandma getting involved. Pretty sure sweet old ladies outranks an old “Susan”.
I’m only 42 but I hope to be brave enough one day to be such a “sweet old lady” who kicks some ass.
Sounds like there’s a market for “Comfy Steel-toed Boots For Ass Kicking Old Ladies”. Let me find that 100k I put under my mattress…
I know cops are scary, but white people need to realise their power in a situation like this. Being white gives you like a +80% modifier in interactions with the police. Even just getting in the space and being a clueless white dude asking questions spreads that modifier to allies in proximity, including those being arrested.
By getting involved you raise the expectation of civility, because our fucking society is racist.
“I was there and heard that Karen screaming (fill in a bunch of racist shit). She said no one would take his word for it. You see that trash on the ground? She threw it at him and missed. He was minding his own business and tried to walk away, but she wouldn’t let him be. Then she started going on about (aliens or jewish lasers or some real schizo shit). I think she’s having a breakdown or fit.”
Can confirm. I regularly cuss out and yell at cops that are harassing homeless people, not even violating their rights, other than their 14th amendment rights to freedom of movement.
There are clips online of crazy white people straight up attacking the cops, and the cops are just like “well shit, now what?”
It’s so fucked up that this is true
Indeed and I do (60, 6’2" 100kg white guy) here in Australia, and it’s most often some old white entitled woman. (My 82 yr oldmother is one of these, she doesnt think our First Nations people should be allowed on the same sidewalk as her)
Problem is I then get called out for being a pedo/rapist , this has happened a couple times for calling out some racist bitch.
He literally says he refused to sit right on the MTAs seats. They decided how he was sitting was not appropriate conduct and HE refused to adjust for the MTA.
You don’t get to put your feet up on the seats just because you’re a “celebrity writer”, or black, or have a tiktok.
If you refuse their rules, they can refuse you service.
He literally says he refused to sit right on the MTAs seats.
No he did not. This is what he said.
this white woman said she didn’t like the way I was sitting on the train."
Yes, trains have rules… Like elections…
And if your sense of rules breaks down, your country might turn to shit.
Slippery slope. First people are putting their feet up and then we descend into chaos. That’s pretty unhinged theory.
Yeah! I mean sitting incorrectly in the train?? He’s lucky they didn’t shoot him on the spot!
Apparently having rules and accepting when the conductor asks you to follow them is just a thing in public transport etiquette:
What you’re missing is that the response was out of proportion. If I park my car in a street sweeping zone, they don’t cart me off to jail, they write a ticket.
No one was carted off to jail. He was removed from the train, released and told to get the next one.
Where do you people get this misinformation?
Reading comprehension: 0%
A ticket isn’t a free pass to keep breaking a rule.
The conductor called the police and stopped the train," he said.
Well there’s your problem, the conductor should have told this woman to do one. Let’s say that he had his feet up on a seat, or whatever, in what world do you stop the train service entirely for that.
Imagine grounding a plane for this.
Interrupting everyone else’s life because yours is inconvenienced, not even impacted, should not be allowed.
Entitled mess of a human
Yeah, you’d just ask him to not do that, explain that it’s a rule …and that’d be that!
And if it’s bothering her so much, change train cars! Sit a few seats down. Get on another train.
Admittedly, this is harder when you don’t have robust public transit.
The way you get more robust public transit is people using it though (and voting for it). Enforcing rules in this works against that imo
Why should some old lady move because some young guy is breaking the rules. Why can’t she try to tell him then go tell the conductor when he refuses to obey the basic rules of public transport.
That sounds like a good way to approach the situation.
Ask the other rider to fix their behavior. If they don’t, ask the conductor to ask the other rider to fix their behavior. If they don’t, I don’t think you need to call the cops.
The conductor could just as much charge the rider some fee that can be posted in the rider policy of the train, in the train, in the ticketing app for the train, at the station, etc. This way the train owner/operator can collect some remedy for the rider’s violation of the rules to help fund remediating the rider’s impact to the train environment (like cleaning their specific seat when that’s usually outside the conductor’s responsibilities), including a markup if they want to add that.
Now, I don’t think charging fees will work for every violation. But I still think it’s a valid lever the train owner/operator could make use of instead of bringing the entire train to a halt.
If the rider refuses to pay up, then call the cops. Or, the conductor could also ask the rider in violation to exit the train at the next stop. That’s another option. If that fails, call the cops.
Additionally, if cops are needed, the conductor could call them and ask them to meet the train at one of the stops coming up. This way the arrival of the cops could be timed with the arrival of the train to the station. Minimizes impact to everyone else’s schedule, and ensures cops have access to the train since most of the time spent on a train is in between stations which often isn’t accessible by road.
I think there are ways to better manage this than to stop a train as soon as a conductor witnesses a violation and start a train only after cops arrive to that specific location and escort the rider violator off the train.
A reasonable take. Others in the thread have cited the rules call for a fine for infractions like this anyway.
“You’re not the minority anymore.”
It’s a code for “you’re in Trump America, now.”
It also makes 0 sense while still sounding racist, so definitely trumpian
💯
I’m sick of the police getting involved and actually acting when no explicit law has been violated. If a law isn’t violated, they should never ever put their hands on a citizen in any way. Detaining someone without actually arresting them should result in immediate firing of the police. If you can’t press charges, you shouldn’t act.
That’d require them to be educated about the law but it seems awfully convenient to keep them ignorant of it.
Sounds like they created the violation in this case. They threatened arrest for disturbing the peace if he didn’t comply and remove himself from the train. They are always able to manufacturer reason for detainment and threatening arrest.
So cops shouldnt be called when drunks and racists on planes get start yelling and delaying flights?
Like that Burger King guy? Cops just shouldn’t have been called? Do Americans just not understand egalitarianism any more? You’re all deranged.
Everyone gets the same rules, transport companies can kick you off, or get the police to detain-you-off the plane/train.
There’s literally thousands of videos of people being thrown of public transport, it happens EVERYDAY whenever anyone refuses to obey the rules.
Fucken, Americans are mentally ill, I swear. This shit is obvious in the rest of the world.
Drunk and Disorderly conduct is a crime. I didn’t say cops can’t be called - I said unless they are arresting you to charge you with a crime they shouldn’t be able to detain you, remove you from a train, or claim you are resisting. This ensures they are only intervening when an actual crime was committed. It puts them in a position to have to defend their initial arrest in court and not just harass people and get away with it because they didn’t technically arrest them - which is the case here. Assuming from your statement you aren’t from America so you don’t know how much police harass people outside of actual arrests here. They will ask you to comply without an arrest to whatever unreasonable demand they make. Then, if you don’t comply with something unreasonable, they will claim you were resisting, and then charge you with resisting. It’s designed to create a charge where there was none to begin with. Police do that all the time over here, especially to minorities.
Not what happened here though. He was taken off the train, released and told to get the next train.
Also, the video shows them saying “stop resisting.” They were attempting to do just what I said, but a lot of people started recording, and this guy started saying how famous he was so the police thought better of it. Without the bystander cameras and the fame of the person involved it likely would’ve been handled much different.
What exactly was the reasoning for taking him off the train that justifies it? Because an old woman didn’t like the way he was sitting? That is the only justification listed anywhere. Is that the only standard necessary to remove this man from his paid for train ride, not to mention police harassing him? Why is his much greater discomfort less important than that ladies? Why does that random old lady get to dictate anything? Why does the train conductor have no responsibility to this other paid customer - he just stops the train due to this old ladies discomfort that has no legal backing? I just can’t see a justification for the way this situation was handled.
He was refusing to obey the MTA rule of no feet on the seats:
Police responded to a complaint of a 31-year-old “disorderly passenger” on a train at Fordham Metro-North station in the Bronx when “a conductor reported a passenger occupying two seats had refused to remove his feet from one of the seats,” according to authorities.
Everyone’s defending this asshole like crazy. Y’all are mental. Broke ass nation.
Yeah, we’re so broken and mental for being against this kind bullshit police intervention given our recent history of black men being murdered by cops.
Why do I feel like your opinions would be different if these individual’s positions were swapped?
Black MTA workers kick white passangers off trains and call the cops if they’re refusing to obey the rules - literally every day.
If a white guy has his feet on the seats, and an old black man or woman comes and gets the black MTA worker to step in - and the white guy STILL refuses to sit up properly - the MTA worker is put in the position of saying *“okay the rules don’t apply to this one guy, you can refuse the rules, they’re meaningless” * or getting physically involved (which they’re not supposed to do), so the only resort if the passanger is still REFUSING the rules to the MTA worker’s face is to call the cops.
They’re low paid MTA workers, not bouncers at a KKK meeting. This shit goes down regularly this way, it’s just most of the time a “celebrity” isn’t involved. Some drunk asshole is.
Edit: Here’s a white MTA worker dragging a white guy off a train. Beligerent customers are an everyday thing. That’s how the public are. MTA worker punched in the face, after asking someone to get off the train… MTA worker sucker-punched at random.
That’s what they’re saying. They’re saying that the police should need more than just the bare minimum investigation of a potential crime to remove you from transit. You’re saying that he was released as if the only two options were not taking him off the train and jailing him indefinitely.
You resorting to ad hominem insteading of sticking to the facts and the arguments paints you in bad faith.
If you want upvotes next time, maybe don’t do that.
I don’t care about imaginary Internet points… And I’ve linked and quoted multiple articles. People don’t care for the facts, they’re stuck in political perspectives
People don’t read on Lemmy, yes.
You should know this if you post evidence.
If you EXPLAIN your evidence, and point out specific inconsistentencies with the majority’s beliefs, then that’ll fly further than shutting shit down because you’re pissed.
You want to do this fine, but I’m not here to argue about arguing. You can argue with people your way if you want.
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I don’t like the headline. He has a name, you know, and it’s Alex O’keefe.
The headline makes it sound like he did something wrong too. Instead he was harassed because of a Karen
Idk to me it was clear he did nothing wrong. In that case it would have said “because he did X ans Y” instead of basically “because of a Karen”
Yeah, total bullshit.
Sitting? While black? That’s a paddlin’.
Luckily he is American. If he was a legal migrant having been booked would be considered a visa offense and he could be sent to a concentration camp.
Luckily he is
Americanfamous.The usual story here for Americans is that they get arrested for resisting arrest and assulting a police officer and then get sentences to 10+ years in the local gulag.
Immigrants instead get sent to the camps for deportation.
He’s well enough known, there were enough cameras and he’s media/white american savvy enough to avoid the worst outcomes.
Without due process, even that doesn’t matter.
He will just be labeled “antifa” now, without proof. This is how fascism usually works.
Most Americans don’t realize just how deeply racist some people are in this country, I’ve seen similar behavior before from white women, towards a black kid who was just hanging around in a library, and now these shitty people feel even more emboldened.
The “You’re not the minority anymore” part was what made me do a double take. The level of delusion these people engage in is absolutely insane.
There’s a lot in this story that could use clarification, but that quote takes the cake. And I would love to know, were that even true, how in the world it justifies what was to follow. I’m not deranged enough to just get this.
Yeah I can’t make sense of it… Does she mean like, great replacement theory happened, and that white people were the minority now?
Jesus Christ. Probably gave the bitch a bit of nostalgia for the “good ol days”. Also, what seating position was he doing that she took offense to? Because I don’t think there’s any seating position that could be considered offensive.
Sitting while black probably.
Maybe this is why we need humanoid robots. So bigots have a decoy to be shitty to.
Fuck man.
This just after a lynching happened in Jacksonville, Mississippi.
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Does the idea of a lynching happening in the US seem particularly far-fetched to you? If so I’d say that you’re extremely uninformed. Also that’s a weirdly specific alternative you’re presenting lol
https://abc11.com/post/javion-magee-21-year-old-truck-driver-found-dead-henderson-north-carolina-death-ruled-suicide-nc-medical-examiners-say/16351111/ Again all you really know at this point is he died and had a rope around his neck, correct? Well at one point that’s all they knew, but then they investigated.
They’re financing an independent autopsy. Assuming we’re talking about the same case.
I believe there is a different case they’re referring to. I don’t know the details.
I totally believe he was probably It should be investigated and I support which ever actor or whatever is paying for the second autopsy however it is hard to know if that is even what you are referring to.
Don’t get the downvotes. Are we at the stage where asking for a source is bad now?
I approve of asking for a source. I downvoted because they were a dick about it.
Fair.
Maybe add a notification for mod deletion?
Damn if we see segregation you owe me a trillion
The sad part is this happens all the time for non-famous people of color and the outcomes are worse. Often the cops will throw them in jail for “resisting” or some other made up bullshit charge. His fame and the cameras saved him from likely worse outcomes.
Shit like this happens every fucking day. This is news because the victim is famous.
I feel for the MTA worker most of all, they probably see this shit all the time.
Really? I feel for the victim of racial discrimination.
Look at their other responses. KKK lost a klown.
MTA rules apply to all passengers.
Riders may not lie down or place feet on the seat of a train, bus or platform bench or occupy more than one seat. Riders may not place bags or personal items on seats.
https://www.mta.info/document/17001
It’s highly unlikely you can get kicked off without violating the rules, and it’s not disputed that how he was sitting was the issue (not who he was).
https://sopuli.xyz/comment/19242346
Calm down.
Doesn’t sound like they apply to all passengers equally.
Oh yeah, if someone brings attention to you doing it - it gets way more attention.
Same as breaking the rules anywhere. Schoolyard rules.
*CTA
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and train with them
with each other
It helps with organization, which is what actually wins both movements and wars
It’s expensive but worth it.
While I agree in general, that wouldn’t have helped in this case, and likely would have just made things worse. He couldn’t draw on the Karen for being a racist piece of trash, and his next interaction was with the police, whom he certainly couldn’t have drawn on. Then the cops would have trumped up the charges because he was armed, and he never would have seen the gun again after it disappeared into the evidence locker.
