Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione: two names in the news this week that tell you all you need to know about the weird and destructive worldview of America’s “progressive” left, about the ways in which they have warped public discourse, and about why the cultural hegemony they have enjoyed for the past decade or more is in the process of being overthrown by a populist conservatism.
Penny is a former marine, a young man with an unblemished record, who found himself in a terrifying – but to New Yorkers too familiar – situation on a subway train last year when a mentally unstable man with a history of violent assault began threatening passengers.
Jordan Neely, a homeless 30-year-old African-American, was angrily berating those around him, lunging at and threatening them. “I don’t have food. I don’t have a drink. I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison,” passengers heard him say. “Someone is going to die today.”
According to sworn eyewitness statements from multiple passengers, Neely was a serious menace. One said he “feared for his life”.
As most New Yorkers do in those circumstances, they tried to look away, but as the threats got closer, the 25-year-old Penny got up and grabbed Neely, pinning him to the floor. With the assistance of other passengers, he held him in a chokehold. Tragically, for too long. When the train stopped at the next station, Neely died shortly afterwards.
To most Americans Penny is a hero. As awful as Neely’s death was, for weary New Yorkers, being aggressively accosted by homeless, dishevelled men high on drugs or alcohol is an almost daily experience on the filthy, crumbling transport arteries of this supposedly world-class city. They are grateful for the rare intervention of someone to bring some sense of security to the subterranean dystopia.
But to the left-wing Democrats who control the administration of justice in New York, and in so many American cities, Penny was a criminal. Alvin Bragg, the city’s district attorney who made his name prosecuting Donald Trump on inflated felony charges over payments he made to a porn star, charged Penny with manslaughter and negligent homicide, offences that could have sent him to prison for 15 years.
On Monday Penny was acquitted by a jury of his peers.
No one believes the troubled Neely, a habitual offender with 42 convictions and who on that morning was an evident threat to innocent people, deserved to die. But to the left, people such as Penny are villains, brazenly exercising their “white privilege” to oppress and yes, murder minorities.
Jamaal Bowman, a Democratic congressman, spoke for many on the party’s left when he issued an “open letter to white people” after the verdict. “Whenever you feel discomfort from your whiteness, black people are harmed or killed. And there is never accountability or justice. This is the evil of white supremacy,” it said. Bowman, in a sign of the times, was defeated this year in a Democratic primary and will be out of Congress next month.
Now consider the case of Mangione. He is the young man accused by prosecutors of calmly walking up behind the chief executive of one of America’s largest health insurance companies last week in New York and shooting him several times in the back. Mangione, an Ivy League graduate from a wealthy Baltimore family, had developed a political vendetta against health insurers, including UnitedHealthcare, of which his victim, Brian Thompson, was chief executive. In a published manifesto, he denounced them as profiteering criminals, making money off the poor and sick by denying them their due health coverage. “Frankly these parasites had it coming,” it said.
Instead of universal condemnation of the cold-blooded murder of a 50-year-old father of two on a dark street, we had a strange outpouring of solidarity with Mangione from many on the left. Politicians, careful not to condone his action, have rushed to “explain” it. “The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the healthcare system,” said Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator. “Wanted” posters with photos of health insurance chief executives have gone up on New York streets.
There is much wrong with the way healthcare works in America. Limited resources often mean the poor don’t get the coverage they need. It is a system in continuing need of reform. But the idea that a legitimate way to achieve this is to start gunning down the men and women who run the private companies that administer medical services is as deranged as it is depraved.
It’s understandable to feel some sympathy for Neely – and even perhaps for Mangione. Neely, whose mother was murdered by an abusive partner when he was 14, grew up destitute and mentally sick. His pitifully short and unfulfilled life should never have been choked out on the floor of a subway train.
Mangione is from the very opposite end of the American economic spectrum, growing up in almost unimaginable wealth, educated at the most expensive schools in the country, but whose mind for whatever reason became so twisted by ideology and perhaps personal bitterness that it took him on a path towards the senseless extinction of another man’s life and the ultimate waste of his own.
Sympathy, yes. But both men made bad decisions of the sort that individually and collectively destroy the bonds of a healthy society. To raise them up as heroes and martyrs is the work of a disordered political ideology that is being discredited and dismantled week by week.
The Times
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