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?"
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.
Without due process, even that doesn’t matter.
He will just be labeled “antifa” now, without proof. This is how fascism usually works.
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.
wouldnt he still be “deported” to africa, because of his skin color, potentially.
Based on his skin color this man is clearly Laotian, send him straight to Vientiane! He can go peddle his scripts by the Mekong! (I’m joking)
Nah, we don’t deport people anywhere they might have tires to.
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.
*CTA
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.
Do you really believe that? Do you believe that the conductor and the cops would’ve acted in the same way if he, a 30 year old black man, was complaining about how an old white woman is sitting? Would they have stopped the train and detained the old woman in your opinion?
You can literally watch videos and videos and videos of problem passangers being removed from planes, trains, and buses… Is it your first day online or something?
Damn if we see segregation you owe me a trillion
“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.
Cops are racists.
Thank you. I’ve been looking for a single comment to explain the lunatic doublespeak she was using.
MAGA is literally a cult of fascism.
That… explains so much. Racists are fucking jealous that black people get to be oppressed??? Is it like some martyrdom by proxy fuckedupedness?
Yep. It’s like a child fighting for the attention of an abusive parent.
They honestly think that black people and minorities have it on easy street.
thats because they are afraid of the power and riches they accumulated through subjugating minorities, will be used against them in retribution, so they go the extra mile , with the help aristocrats/oligarchs to keep the status quo. also white people are extra defensive when discussing racism as well. even if they arnt outwardly racist(closeted racist), i witness how they act around people that are not white , especially when they either look or approach near them.
during covid, like in the midst of it a older white lady dint like i was getting on the train the same time i was, she said it was not nice to go before “an older lady”, i muttered bitch under my breath, you would do that to another white man or lady, but you would do that to a POC, because you will get immediate clapback from a white person over a POC. AS FAR as covid was concerned she wasnt masked, or properly masked. the entrance to train was large enough where 2 people can get on the same time.
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…
It’s like that comic about the guy with a plateful of cookies telling one guy that ta third guy is going to take his singular cookie. There are 2 types of republicans - one that takes, and one that gets taken from just as much as the left. The prior group has convinced the latter group that the actual thief is the left, who are in just as bad of a position as they are, if not worse. That’s why they can’t believe it. They’re not taking everything, at least not enough to make ends meet most of the time, same as us. It’s the much smaller fraction of rich republicans that are doing the taking. The issue is that they can’t believe that truth, and so they lash out and become a completely different problem.
This is why the term “color blind” is used by someone trying to go the right way, but still not getting it, which leads to the ignorance of their racism. In being blind you are blind to the fact that racism still exist and isn’t fixed. Then that leads to incorrect beliefs like “minorities are getting special priveleges and when they don’t have the same quality of life it is because of their own poor behavior” as opposed to acknowledging the systemic racism still in place.
Sometimes, but not always. I used to call myself colorblind, but I could see how the cops treated my black friends worse than they treated me. At one point, they rounded us up waiting at the bus stop (there was an abandoned restaurant by the bus stop, and the cops said we were trying to break in), and all my POC friends got frisked, but I was the only blonde girl, so I just got a talking to about how “hanging out with the wrong crowd will ruin my life”. Some of those kids are working on their PhD now, so “wrong crowd”, kiss my ass.
I understood “colorblind” as a “skin tone has no bearing on how I interact with you, we’re all human”.
I always thought that “everybody gets treated the same at first, adjust as we go along” was respectful, but then moved to the west coast and it’s apparently a horribly racist thing to do here, and I don’t understand why?? Something about how black people are going through struggles I can’t understand, but I also thought that everybody had struggles I don’t know about?
Like, if I don’t make assumptions about somebody in a wheelchair, it’s a good thing and not ableist, but if I don’t make assumptions about a black person, it’s a bad thing and racist? I have never been able to understand how people up here think it’s less racist to stereotype an ethnicity.
There’s also the problem with white “leftists” up here not actually knowing any POC and getting it from fucking facebook memes. Like, I had a white person once tell me, in all seriousness, that me saying “hey, what’s up” is appropriating AAVE and the correct thing to say in greeting to a black person is “I see and respect our differences”. I said that sounded patronizing as fuck, and she said I should join the kkk with that attitude.
Unlearning racism has been an awful experience, really. I’m listening to what black people say they want, but that’s somehow still racist, and I’m so close to just giving up and doing what feels right to me.
Colorblind is removing their identity.
You are still a black, white, brown, etc. person (I’m using {color} from now on cause I don’t want to type an array of colors each time). The person’s experiences as a {color} person are valid.
While you shouldn’t treat someone different because they are {color}, you should validate that they ARE different and celebrate those differences in an appropriate fashion.
It’s like a friend coming out to you and you reply “I don’t care”, while that is not the worst way to respond and you mean well, you are invalidating WHO they are.
I think this is much more eloquently illustrates my point: https://youtu.be/91O7q7D4xnU
Consider therapy. It helps
Consider therapy. It helps
Thanks, you must have missed where I said I’m slowly unpacking all this in therapy. My therapist says I’m doing good, and that I’m not a racist monster because I’m putting in the effort, but that doesn’t seem to be a common definition. In any case, I don’t call myself colorblind any more, even if I don’t understand why, people do react poorly, so I don’t do it any more. This is retrospective.
It’s like a friend coming out to you and you reply “I don’t care”, while that is not the worst way to respond and you mean well, you are invalidating WHO they are.
But when I called myself ‘colorblind’ I wasn’t saying “I don’t care”, I was saying “Okay, tell me what that means”.
Like, when I came out, I absolutely hated how big of a deal people made about it. I had people “validate that I was different”, but it felt like they were just making fun of me for being different because it was all weirdly patronizing. All this nonsense about “it’s okay that you like boys and girls, you’re still my friend” when I’m an adult who is into men and women, and I wouldn’t have started hanging out with you if I thought you didn’t like gay people? I’m still me, I haven’t changed, and stroking my ego is just telling me that you feel weird around me now that you know I’m not ‘normal’.
I still felt stereotyped and unwelcome, even though they were being “inclusive”, and I don’t want to do that to black people. I don’t understand why that’s racist.
on reddit, people said racist white people like that are afraid they do the same thing to them, of how they persecuted the blacks, so they act extra “im not racist, your being racist for calling out my race”. they also try to deflect white privilege as a non-existential issue.
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
Seemed odd about his own testimony, as quoted in this article, that he keeps avoiding to mention HOW he was sitting and whether he complied when told to stop it. Makes me picture one of these assholes who put their dirty shoes on a second seat in a full train.
His odd avoidance of the core of the issue made me search for other sources. Not surprising that a quick search supports most of this. Also, he refused to stop doing that, which he also does not deny as far as the quotes from this article go.
Then, he tries to use his celebrity status to order cops to harass an elderly woman, whose statement is irrelevant because apparently there are plenty of witnesses, including the train personnel and his own confession.
Then, he seriously tries to pull the race card.
And this is the hero of Lemmy?
Hat off the elderly woman and the police, though! Wish this kind of justice would happen when I’m on the train.
This has become a cesspool of disinformation. All the out of context Kirk quotes from the past few days (was still somewhere between nonsense and disgusting in context, but an entirely different statement), and another post claims that every day 0.25 % of the US population gets shot, and this lie somehow supports the trans agenda.
Disclaimer: Judging the situation as presented in available articles, as I don’t know what really happened.
You’re making a lot of assumptions. All we know is that in the end he was released, so they didn’t actually have any reason to arrest him. Whatever the issue was with how he sat, there was no basis for arrest, and probably no basis to call the police at all.
Maybe he did put his dirty shoes on the seat, but the article doesn’t tell us. Nobody does. All we know is that they wanted to arrest him, but couldn’t. Whatever he did wasn’t serious enough for it and yet they tried and held up a train for it.
It is of course only his side of the story. More info would help. But without more info, there’s no reason not to believe that he was harassed mostly just for being black. It’s not like this is the first time that happened.
Maybe he was harassed for his skin color, but this article did leave out the core of what happened. It’s just as likely the treatment was deserved: we have no information either way. The article jumps right to we should be outraged, without actually saying enough of what happened. And yes, I’ve seen assholes on the train where I really wished the conductor would intervene
You think a person should be harassed and arrested if they sit in public transit in a way someone doesn’t approve of?
If someone takes off their shoes, I should feel justified in calling the cops and subjecting them to police custody?
he refused to stop doing that
Doing what? You made an assumption about how he was sitting and decided it has heinous enough to havw police sicc’ed on him.
This better be some well-crafted bait because I bit.
Thanks for bringing Kirk into this. Was most def needed.
🤡🤡
How he was sitting? Really? Fuck right off with your ridiculous ass.
How are theseKirk comments out of context? I’d like to see the context where these are not what they sound like?
whether he complied when told to stop it.
He clearly says he did not comply.
OTOH, I’m glad to see some magas showing up at Lemmy actually, maybe we can curb the infighting a bit.
Disclaimer: Judging the situation as presented in available articles, as I don’t know what really happened.
Who writes such a scathing comment, and then admits that they have no idea what actually happened. For fuck sake
I was about to agree with you, in that its kind of hard to really judge whats going on in this video without seeing exactly what happened prior to the recording – but then you just jumped completely off the deep end into crazy.
I’m trying to envision a scenario that would warrant the arrest and I just can’t. Maybe you can contrive one for us. Loud music or bare feet, and I’m all for it; to the gallows. But sitting wrong? What?
Presumably for not listening. We’ve all seen assholes on the train where we wish the conductor would intervene. Whether deserved or not, this time they did and if you get belligerent whebpn the conductor tells you to do something, they may call the police, who will escort you off the train. I’m not saying that’s what happened, since we don’t know. Maybe this was a clear case of sitting while black, but I’m not ready to follow the herd of lemmings off the cliff when the story has such an obvious gap
all I’ve found so far:
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.
Authorities told ABC News in a statement that a passenger, presumed to be O’Keefe, defied officers’ orders to exit the train. When he didn’t exit, police handcuffed him and escorted him out. Officials added that he was not placed under arrest at any time.
It sounds like he was being an asshole TBH. I can sorta understand why the police wanted him off the train. Not completely sure why they had to handcuff him. But I mean, we’ve seen footage of plenty of disorderly passengers being escorted off planes for being jerks. This doesn’t sound too dissimilar. That said, without seeing any actual evidence, who the hell knows.
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.
For WASPs any position that isn’t upright, knees together, feet on the floor is disrespectful. Whether he was just slouching or maybe leaning over in the seat, who knows other than him.
And even if he was, who fucking cares? The entitlement to think you get control over how random strangers sit in public is crazy. The only official rule I could even think of to begin justifying this is to not lay down completely when there are no seats available, but nothing in the article indicates anything like that. And attempted arrest is an insane overreaction.
What is a WASP?
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. It’s a term that’s typically used to refer to blue-blood old money New England types.
Sitting while black probably.
Maybe this is why we need humanoid robots. So bigots have a decoy to be shitty to.
Fuck man.
“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
its also a codework, its okay for us to say the N-word with the hard R.
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
Yeah, total bullshit.
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”
the final form of a karen, an old/ elderly white lady.
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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.
But then how could they arrest you for resisting arrest?
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The police are now trained to say “stop resisting” for their body cameras, which provides the pretext for additional charges. They throw as many charges as they possibly can hoping one or two stick if it gets plead down.
I haven’t watched the video but I totally agree that it’s inappropriate to order him off the train in this instance. They can conduct their criminal investigation right there. The fact that these incidents are allowed to get to the police is the frightening part; that people who reported him need to go to jail, and the conductor should be at a minimum investigated.
they frame evidence all the time, either by making it up, or trying to use it as an excuse to escalate. i suspect the latter.
That’d require them to be educated about the law but it seems awfully convenient to keep them ignorant of it.
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.
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Not what happened here though. He was taken off the train, released and told to get the next train.
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.
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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.
Everyone’s defending this asshole like crazy.
Maybe because it should’ve been a matter for whatever passes for transport authority or the conductor/inspector and not the police.
Being an asshole isn’t a crime ya know…The conductor was looking the other way, the old lady made the conductor intervene, Okeefe CONTINUED to refuse.
So it was the MTA dealing with it, and Okeefe CONTINUED to refuse. Continued his personal stouch with the lady.
Well, the rules apply to all MTA passangers. MTA trains serve thousands of people each day, the MTA worker wasn’t picking him out. The conductor was leaving him alone until the old lady brought the conductor in, AND OKEEFE CONTINUED TO REFUSE.
So “Racist MTA” doesn’t work as a theory. It doesn’t fit the facts of what happened.
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.
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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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whoever wrote the article sucks
Commentators here acting like this is new racism under Trump. Racist police have been around since the 1992 song “Killing in the name” by Rage Against the Machine came out.
The lyrics clearly state that some of those who work in said forces, are actually the very same who burn crosses. AND now you do what they tell you.
Pretty sure racist police have been around as long as police, which predates 1992 by a few centuries.
I don’t know. Did they have songs back then?
Yes, this one is from 1851 and was later used in 12 Years a Slave. You may be unaware, but American policing was born from the roots of slave catching.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run,_*removed*,_Run
Edit: adding Google share link since word filters censor this
Run, removed, Run - Wikipedia https://share.google/160z56VcnYtEeyBoW
And they still serve to keep the masters’ slaves in line.
Nothing has changed.
Everything I’ve said was in jest
I LOVE BEING CENSORED I LOVE BEING CENSORED
Fuck them, I won’t do what they tell me! (repeated 14 times in a row)
This is just stupid. And I mean, the arrest. You Americans seem to be subject to arrest for the stupidest things.
Putting your feet on a seat is gross. The guy should have complied with the indication to put them down. Non compliance should have resulted in -at most- a fine. This is what would had happened in my country, and my guess, in the majority of places in the world.
Laws are written in ways they can be used at the discretion of the power. Their discretion, their prerogative, their biase, their bigotry. All laws written to apply only when the power chooses are not law, but privilege.
That must be the “freedom” everyone is talking about…
Still trying to figure out which felonies get you deported and which ones get you a seat at the table. Starting to think its not about laws at all here.
It’$ not ju$t about badly-written law$, and it help$ if you do it the white way.
A “seat at the table” these days requires a heady mix of culpability, and wealthy/connected enough to be useful to someone more powerful. Just monied or just a phone-call away from prison ain’t gonna cut it. That said, the clowns we see doing this are at the kid’s table.
They hate us for it.
non-compliance should result in getting booted from the train, not just a fine
And if they won’t, especially if they’re belligerent (we don’t know), it’s fair for the operator to have the police remove them.
There’s a lot missing from the story and it is written for racist outrage, but it’s also plausible it was some self-centered asshole getting what he deserved
Conveniently, the officer body cam footage is “not available”. Absolutely insane they are making it sound like it’s his fault the train is delayed.
How does one sit “offensively” on a train? All the coverage of this seems to just skip over that. Was he sitting with no pants? Laying across 3 seats? This is a novel one for me.
The article is purposely misleading.
From another article: The Bear’ writer booted from MTA train for refusing to take feet off seats — he blames ‘old white lady’
Aha, there you go. I don’t think anyone should put their feet on the seat, but I also wouldn’t alert the police about this.
I can tell why he seemed to leave that bit out of the story. His story is a lot less sympathetic if you frame it as:
“I was sitting on the train and had my feet up on a seat. I refused to take my feet off the seat, so she complained to the conductor. Then ??? and I was getting arrested.”
People with their feet on the seats really bothers me. It’s extra crass if the train was full and he wouldn’t move his feet, but I am not sure if this was a packed car or not. Either way, it’s disrespectful to have your feet on the seat in public transit, and I’d be curious what his exact language was when refusing. Definitely not an arrest-able offense, but this guy sounds like a jerk. I hope we get to see bodycams at one point.
They didn’t call the police, they went to the conductor, who in turn called the police.
Where I live, and you don’t listen to the conductor, they will call the police that specifically handles train security. Not to arrest you but to get you off the train. In most cases it’s to fine the people that get caught without a ticket. If you really misbehave they can legally hold you until the real police arrives.
Yeah, its a different story where we need more context. Racist old lady has blackman arrested, vs entitled idiot was too arrogant to allow others to sit down by placing his feet on open seats. Somewhere in both of those lies the truth.
she meant he should sit at the back
What is your source for this? Even the quote from above says “how” he was sitting, not “where”. Did someone else have better coverage?
It’s a stupid question, I gave it a stupid/nonserious answer. It’s like someone else mentioned a reference.
Yeah, except it fundamentally changes the situation under discussion. Turns out he had his feet on the seat NOT that the woman wanted him to move to the back. Totally different.
ok, my bad
It’s just a reference to racism and Rosa Parks
Err, what?
Sorry I thought you were answering another comment!
At least they didn’t shoot him. (laugh/cry transition)
