No amount of money could ever bring someone back from the dead.
But in the wake of a senseless tragedy that left a wife without her husband and an infant without his father, generosity toward them would only be commendable.
Jonathan Diller was one such victim of the senseless tragedies that have increasingly overtaken our cities.
He was an NYPD cop who was murdered Monday when a routine traffic stop turned into a shootout.
The shooter was allegedly 34-year-old Guy Rivera, a man with over 20 prior arrests, including drug charges and other violent offenses. The man accused of driving the car during this shootout, 41-year-old Lindy Jones, had a similar criminal record.
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Diller’s story went viral, especially when people learned that Diller left behind a wife, Stephanie, and a one-year-old son.
A GoFundMe page created to support Diller’s wife and son has, according to the New York Post, raised over $490,000, but among the most massive of the monetary contributions has come from the founder of the popular Barstool Sports podcast, Dave Portnoy.
Fox News reported that Portnoy initially started his fundraiser on Wednesday, via a video shared to the social media platform X and Portnoy’s TikTok account.
We’ve raised about 240k so far for family of fallen NYPD cop Jonathan Diller. I’ll match whatever our total raised through midnight today is. https://t.co/VaSg3WYpjy pic.twitter.com/IZ9gRkZohU
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) March 27, 2024
In the video, Portnoy told his followers that, in support of Diller’s family, “We put T-shirts on sale, we’ve raised about 230, 240 grand directly for the family. Every penny that we make goes to the family. On top of that, whatever we sell, whatever we make, end of day today, midnight, I’m just going to match it, so, double up on whatever we can make.”
He ended saying, “I know money doesn’t cure this, nothing can cure this, but it’s the least we can do, and Barstool, myself, we have a long history supporting the cops, supporting the boys in blue, supporting first responders. You know, it’s tragic.”
As of Thursday morning, the Post reported, Portnoy’s fundraiser had raised $750,000, which Portnoy, as he told his followers on X, matched to make a total of $1.5 million.
Thanks to everybody who donated. We raised 750k. With the matching of the funds that brings the total to 1.5 million that will go directly to the family. https://t.co/uta26geRjR
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) March 28, 2024
Now, as Portnoy himself admitted, no amount of money will return Diller to his grieving family.
But Portnoy’s efforts should not go unnoticed or unappreciated.
In the divided state of current American culture, where many leftist activists successfully lobbied to get city police budgets slashed and criminals the most lenient sentences possible, Diller’s story was not necessarily an isolated incident.
Many officers have risked — or lost — their lives trying to mitigate the consequences of blue cities’ soft-on-crime policies.
🚨 Joe Biden and Barack Obama arrive in New York for a fundraiser while Donald Trump is en route to the wake of slain NYPD officer Jonathan Diller
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) March 28, 2024
And many of them never received the same public outcry or grief as did career criminals like George Floyd, or mentally disturbed homeless men like Jordan Neely.
Instead, they were either forgotten or left unnamed by our Democratic elites, or at times even vilified by rabid anti-police advocates.
Portnoy has performed an excellent service for Diller’s family and the New York Police Department as a whole.
What our lawmakers should do now is re-evaluate the policies that led to Diller’s death in the first place.
