James Morrow: Wild times and crimes in a berko Big Apple
It used to be that promos for crime drama shows would boast their plots were “ripped from the headlines”. These days in New York, it feels more like real life has been ripped off the storyboard, writes James Morrow.
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It used to be that promos for crime drama shows would boast that their plots were “ripped from the headlines”.
These days in New York, it feels more like real life has been ripped off the storyboard of a particularly frantic Hollywood writers’ room.
Consider these two cases, and what they suggest about where American culture and politics is headed.
Just before lunchtime Monday, the jury in the case of Daniel Penny — a white ex-Marine who had been charged in 2023 with killing black fellow subway passenger Jordan Neely, who had been menacing other riders — was acquitted of all charges.
This was despite prosecutors and the judge ruthlessly stacking the deck against him.
Then, just a few hours later, police collared Luigi Mangione, the prime suspect in the execution-style murder of Brian Thompson on a New York footpath a week ago.
Thompson happened to be the CEO of health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, a fact that excited certain figures on social media’s leftist wing.
Mangione, a former high school valedictorian and Ivy League grad, was arrested with what police say was a three-page manifesto (“These parasites had it coming,” it reads) as well as what has been reported as a 3D-printed gun similar to the one seen in video footage of Thompson’s killing.
Both of these plot lines could have sustained a whole series of Law & Orders back in the day.
But where it gets truly fascinating is the reaction to these cases and the strange moral inversion of those who should really know better.
In Penny’s case, what should have been elevated as heroism — putting a madman in a chokehold so as to protect others — was treated as brutal and deliberate racism.
Despite passengers testifying that they were terrified of the menacing, unpredictable Neely, during Penny’s trial prosecutors referred to him simply as “the white man”, hoping to goad the jury.
Happily, this example of dumb reverse racism didn’t work. Jurors refused to be baited into sending someone down the river just for trying to help by the same local justice system that regularly lets career criminals out on bail to offend again.
Even more disturbing was the reaction to the execution of Thompson, the self-made son of a grain elevator operator from Iowa, allegedly at the hands of a well-educated kid who seemingly had everything going for him.
Taylor Lorenz, a prominent progressive journalist formerly of the Washington Post, fired up with a series of posts on social media seeming to celebrate the killing.
“And people wonder why we want these executives dead,” she wrote in one.
Plenty of others joined the fray. Anti-CEO memes trended and one particularly ghoulish TikTok reported a surge in sales for the hoodie the shooter was seen wearing in footage of the execution.
The reactions to both cases suggest, in different ways, a misnamed elite that has decided to go in for revolutionary chic, encouraging or even celebrating chaos and the breakdown of the social order, presumably in the hope of remaking it in their own image.
To put it another way, many on the left now have fully internalised Marx and Lenin’s amoral calculus of power that justifies any crime as long as it advances their cause.
Meanwhile, normal Americans — even if they’re cross with their health insurance — are horrified at what they are seeing and just want some sense of order back.
These are the people who voted to acquit Penny, and in different ways, also voted for Trump (giving him huge swings in New York).
They are also the people New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, is speaking up for when he vows to fight against sanctuary city policies that have increased crime and beggared the city’s treasury.
It’s an impulse that was best expressed to me by a black cab driver, in his 60s at least, who drove me to the train station in Washington DC one morning just after the election.
Talking about the election, he said he was glad that Trump had won, and said he was “sick of the bulls …” of the past four years, which included illegal aliens including “Venezuelan gangs” being “dumped” in and around DC.
Of course it bears repeating that, if the revolutionaries win, none of this ends well.
Throughout history societies have been destabilised and sometimes overthrown by what the American cultural critic Tom Wolfe aptly described as “radical chic”.
The disaster of the Russian Revolution was driven not by the proletariat but the children of the upper-middle-class bourgeoisie.
It was the same with the French Revolution, which unleashed a psychotic orgy of violence that consumed so many of those who reckoned they’d do well out of it.
Apparently some people still need to relearn the old lessons.
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