Tensions ran high this week after Jordan Neely, a homeless street performer with a record of violence, was killed by Daniel Penney, a twenty-four-year-old Marine. Penney placed Neely in a chokehold on a New York City subway train. The usual suspects, such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, swung into action, calling the incident “murder” and a “lynching” respectively. Conservative media was alive with dire warnings of potential violent protests in response to this death of a black man at the hands of a white man. But a funny thing happened on the way to the riots: they didn’t occur.

So what makes this situation so different from incidents of racially tinged violence in the recent past? For one thing, notwithstanding the one-note Squad and its acolytes who see abject racism in everything, cooler heads on the left prevailed. Mayor Eric Adams in the wake of the incident sounded downright reasonable, asking New Yorkers to wait for the facts. There is little doubt that his predecessor, self-described communist Bill de Blasio, would have been manning the barricades by now, explaining that Molotov cocktails are the language of the oppressed.

Much of the mainstream news media too seems to have learned a few lessons from its embarrassing embrace of outrage in cases like Jussie Smollett’s hoax assault and the supposedly racist Covington Catholic kids. This time around, even left-leaning legacy outlets like the New York Times and CNN took a much more careful approach. This is all for the good — but there is another reason why reactions to Neely’s death, in New York and across America, are causing more circumspection than calls for violent action.