Greetings, all, and welcome to an action-packed edition of the Carnival of Fools. (My now-traditional exhortation: Subscribe, ya goofballs.) I’ll spare you the introductory hugger-mugger this time, as it’s been a terribly busy week, in the very literal sense that it was both busy and terrible. If I had drafted this week’s newsletter when my work typically gets under way — on Sunday afternoon — it would have read entirely differently from what you’re getting this morning. (The moral of the story: Kids, always procrastinate.) But I held off, because on Sunday night I felt as if America was left hanging eerily on a precipice — with a cold-blooded public murderer on the loose in New York City while, in grim irony, a good Samaritan simultaneously stood on trial by the city’s own politicized justice system — and I wanted to see which way things would tip. On Monday morning, we got our answers.
The Best Way to Dissolve Society Is by Pouring Acid on It
In the early morning hours of December 4, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated in public on the streets of midtown Manhattan by a masked gunman who had clearly targeted him. The gunman sped away on a bicycle and, alarmingly, remained at large until Monday morning, when the suspect was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa. (more than halfway across the state, near Pittsburgh), after having been noticed by a local diner who, one hopes, has now qualified for a lifetime’s free supply of hash browns. He has been identified in reports as Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old computer engineer, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania originally from the Baltimore suburbs who was living in the Philadelphia area.
And there is no doubt now that he was politically motivated. Mangione was captured with a two-page manifesto on his person, the full contents of which have not been released to the public but which contain quotes (as reported by CNN) such as “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.” We are learning that Mangione apparently fell off the face of the earth half a year ago, cutting himself off from friends and family after back surgery, a detail which may prove relevant in coming days. (Mental illness, painkillers, psychedelics — expect all of these topics to surface over the next two weeks.) We will learn more soon.
But we haven’t learned it yet. A thousand speculative reconstructions of Mangione’s path to being a cold-blooded killer will be undertaken in the next week, as we sit helplessly and wonder, but not by me — at least not in print. Instead, I am more interested in looking backward for a moment, at all those who attached a political meaning to Mangione’s assassination of a health care executive — those who, before we could know for sure, attributed precisely the political meaning to the killing that he in his madness intended it to have.
Rich Lowry set the stakes up well when he wrote yesterday morning about the appalling “outpouring of pro-terrorist sentiment” that rose up like a toxic overflow from social media’s sewer system in the aftermath of the shooting — again, it must be emphasized, well before the suspect was identified and we were then allowed to all simultaneously drill down into his social media history for the proper “cues” to spin him one way or another politically.
And for the disaffected Left, reeling from Trump’s reelection and from setbacks both domestically and abroad — Hezbollah fans aren’t feeling great today either, but that’s the subject of a different piece — this was an opportunity to pounce. “He’s a hero, sort of, if you think about it!” was more or less the refrain we heard from one overeducated social media wag after another. Why? Because health care costs too much, we need to eliminate private insurers, something something Marxism and Palestine too. In fact, we were told that Democrats and Republicans alike would be wise to lean in to the message of this moment. Don’t people realize the killer was actually a positive change agent — why, even the good guy?
I wish I were joking about this revolting turn in our discourse, but I am not. One example that can stand in for many, from former Rhode Island state representative Aaron Regunberg: “If your job is to win elections — to judge + channel public opinion — and you’re not taking note of how Brian Thompson’s murder has produced the most potent organic reaction of working class joy and solidarity of any single event in modern political history, you need a new job.” He couldn’t stop there, either, when people correctly pointed out that he, too, sounded like a psychopath: “I’m suggesting that when vast numbers of people across the political spectrum are so mad at a system they’d celebrate an extrajudicial killing, it should occur to a political party that ‘we’re angry too and we’re gonna take on this system’ is probably a good electoral message!”
The New York Times helpfully mainstreamed the argument, talking about how downright exciting it was that, for once, people were reacting positively. Under the headline “Some on Social Media See Suspect in C.E.O. Killing as a Folk Hero,” the Times opened with the following:
A grainy image of his face drew comparisons to Hollywood heartthrobs. A jacket similar to the one he’s wearing on wanted posters is reportedly flying off the shelves. And the words written on the bullets he used to kill a man in cold blood on a sidewalk on Wednesday have become, for some people, a rallying cry.
Three days after a gunman assassinated a top health insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan and vanished, the unidentified suspect has, in some quarters, been venerated as something approaching a folk hero.
Read that delirious, drooling prose again. (It reminds me, alas, of the hopeless Catherine Rampell talking up the sexy masculine virtues of “second gentleman” Doug Emhoff.) The excited, laudatory tone is impossible to feign — the author was unfortunately entranced by her amateurish you-are-there prose in the opening paragraph, something an experienced writer immediately notices — and vibrates with the rebel frisson that ten thousand other disaffected media leftists felt and — this is worse — felt free to give voice to.
Rick Perlstein of the American Prospect said, “Just putting this out there: the jacket the CEO-murderer wore is flying off the shelves. That sort of popular anger was there to be harvested this past November by the Democratic Party, were they led with the kind of valor, empathy, and populist courage FDR showed.” FDR was many things, most of them bad, but I would not attribute to him the “populist courage” to murder law-abiding civilians in broad daylight in order to send a message pour encourager les autres.
So perhaps it’s strange that this message didn’t also occur to actual elected politicians — then again, less so when you remember that they are elected politicians. That is to say, they are people who deal with normal voters on a daily basis, people who realize that nearly 85 percent of Americans are perfectly happy with their health care and a solid 99 percent or thereabouts don’t support the random vigilante murders of symbolic political opponents. Nobody actually thinks this way, not in any numbers.
But the danger for us all, of course, is that you don’t need numbers for this to be a threat. (I re-emphasize: psychopathic assassins are, by definition, rare.) All that is necessary for this to happen is for an opening in the public discourse to exist, one from which these random killers then will emerge in spurts — an occasional but inevitable by-product of the permission structure and its implications. “The Unabomber was legit justified and also health care corporations are evil” is as common a paranoid pairing among the extremely online and mentally ill as “assassinating politicians is okay if you believe it enough”; if you disagree with my assessment then you are lucky, for you blessedly have not spent nearly as much time as I have peering in the dark fringe corners of our modern discourse. (Luigi Mangione and Thomas Matthew Crooks have a bit more in common spiritually than I think people realize.)
That is why what we witnessed over the last week was in fact the most ghoulishly on-the-mark example yet of the Left almost trying to will violence into existence with their hopes and prayers. We just watched the ugliest and most radical elements of the Left talk themselves online into believing that they’re not only a majority, or even a plurality, but the avant-garde of a movement. You’re not about to immanentize the eschaton or get real political change with an approach like that — the ballot box will defeat you time and time again. But you are about to get terrorists.
Meanwhile, I know only this: I know that a man named Brian Thompson flew from Minnesota to New York City for a business meeting and was then pitilessly gunned down, shot in the back by a complete stranger acting in cold blood. Those who care to haggle about the grievances of a madman can feel free to do so — I will feel free to judge you, in turn, with all the harshness you deserve. Because what I saw was not a political statement, regardless of manifesto. I saw mindless violence, I saw an innocent man wantonly murdered, I saw a wife left without a husband and two teenage sons left without a father, all because of the paranoid political fantasies of a madman. Those who would encourage or embrace that paranoid political fantasy for a brief moment’s argumentative maneuver — while discarding Thompson entirely as merely a scalp in a political war — should understand they embrace only evil.
Daniel Penny Is a Free Man
I could leave it there, but I won’t, because something right and just also occurred on Monday. Daniel Penny walked free, acquitted on the charge of negligent homicide by a Manhattan jury. The Penny case was an incredibly fraught one: A former Marine, he intervened as a good Samaritan to take down a homeless man, Jordan Neely, who was violently threatening passengers on a city subway car. After Penny subdued him with a choke hold, Neely subsequently expired on the train platform. His death immediately became a racially polarized affair, and Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg decided to press charges for homicide.
The jury actually was asked to decide on two charges: Initially they deadlocked on a (much harsher) charge of second-degree manslaughter, and rather than accept a hung jury, the city’s prosecutors simply decided to toss the charge altogether. This was done because in New York, juries consider and vote on charges in sequence; deadlocking on the first charge meant they hadn’t gotten around to considering the second, lesser charge of negligent homicide yet. Bragg’s team apparently felt that since the jury was already hung on the more serious charge, they could risk discarding it and asking them to convict on negligent homicide instead. (At the very least, another hung jury could give the prosecution a chance to retry the case.)
Instead, the jury acquitted altogether. One can only wonder why they deadlocked on the more serious charge and then acquitted on the lesser; perhaps they realized they were being used as pawns in a transparently political game by the prosecutors and said “To hell with that.” I assume we’ll be hearing more from the jurors themselves, soon. But either way, Daniel Penny is free, and thank God for it.
Nobody celebrates Jordan Neely’s death. By rights, the man should not have been out on the streets in the first place, as desperately in need of proper mental care as he was. But since nobody has the appetite to scroll back past the last half century of failed and misbegotten post–One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest deinstitutionalization and address the intersection of mental illness and homelessness in the city, then we are left considering the actions of Penny in the moment. He intervened to stop an aggressive, shrieking man (a violent ex-criminal, at that) from physically attacking strangers, including women and children, on the train for money. Penny’s aim was to subdue, not kill. We should not want to discourage other men to act as he did in the same situation. And I think it is shameful that we have already done so, by putting Penny through this torment. (As an aside, it was a spectacle to watch Mayor Eric Adams journey from “Justice for Jordan Neely!” to “Daniel Penny is an American hero and also how about an early pardon, Trump?”) But the main thing is that justice won out.
Until next week.