Opinion
By Jeff Childers
12/10/24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! I’ve an early mediation today, so this morning we will compare and contrast the narratives developing over two linked true-crime stories: the brutal killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO in Manhattan by an elite Ivy-league marxist versus the accidental killing of a junkie and subway terrorist by a blue-collar military veteran. Just wait. You won’t believe the connections.
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The New York Times ran a breaking, true-crime story this morning headlined, “Suspect Is Charged in C.E.O.’s Murder After Arrest in Pennsylvania.” The killer wasn’t poor. He wasn’t uneducated. He was never denied medical treatment. Luigi Mangione — which sounds like a made-up name — is a 26-year-old, MENSA-qualified Ivy League honors graduate who 3-D printed the gun he used to murder Brian Thompson.
Two local police officers nabbed Mangione while he was munching fries in an Altoona, Pennsylvania McDonalds. (He’s probably not MAHA.) According to unconfirmed reports, even though Mangione was wearing his blue surgical face mask, an anonymous tipster recognized his distinctive eyebrows.
Consider that for a second. Here is a link to some affordable eyebrow trimmers. Had he used them, who knows how things might have turned out. Just saying.
Officers reported that on arrest, six days after the shooting, Mangione was still carrying the murder weapon. I guess he really liked that gun. They also said that, even though he had a laptop, Mangione —who earned an honors engineering degree— had a three-page handwritten “manifesto” folded into his pocket.
Apparently, Mangione’s manifesto was an anticapitalist screed against big insurance companies, which he called “parasites.” NYPD Chief Detective Joe Kenny said, “It does seem he has some ill will toward corporate America.”
Yes, it does seem that way.
According to police descriptions of his manifesto, murderous Mangione targeted UHC only because it was one of the biggest and most profitable companies, and targeted Brian Thompson specifically only because he was UHC’s CEO.
Mangione doesn’t fit the New York Times’ preferred assassin’s profile. Maybe they were hoping for someone more diverse:
Who knows what the Times thinks likely assassins are like (it never said), or why it believes it is qualified to profile assassins in the first place. Dumb, but arrogant.
On an aside, I found it very curious Mangione recently lived in Hawaii, where Trump assassin Ryan Routh lived for a long time. I wonder whether they ever crossed paths.
Between the fake ID he used to check into the hostel, and the one he had on him when he was arrested, Mangione had at least two fake ID’s — both with the un-counterfeitable “Real ID” flag. So much for Real IDs. He was a fitness buff, sporting a tight six-pack, but friends said he had a bad back injury. People stretching to lionize the murderer seized on his back pain as a potential justification, though the logic was murky.
Perhaps most tellingly, Mangione once sympathetically reviewed Theodore “Unabomber” Kazinzki’s book. In other words, Mangione looks like a privileged, overeducated leftist who was taught to hate capitalism in college. I’d bet that, had Mangione pursued his video-game-designing interest instead of going to Penn, he’d be in Silicon Valley right now making millions instead of in a cell.
Americans are experiencing a wide range of strong emotions over this story. I searched around to find a good media example to frame that point. I nearly dropped my eyebrow scissors when I saw the next headline. It was perfect.
🔥 I’m sure you’ll recall the Washington Post’s former pet progressive and proud ever-masking doyenne, Taylor Lorenz, whose age appears to be a state secret. Taylor, an energetically single white female, rose in the ranks of leftwing affections after doxxing Chaya Raichik, who operates the Libs of TikTok account. Four days ago, the Times of India ran a story headlined, “Taylor Lorenz defends ‘celebrating’ Brian Thompson’s murder: ‘If you have watched…’”
Why anyone would possibly care what Taylor Lorenz thinks remains an open question. But over on far-left BlueSky, she posted an inflammatory pro-murder skeet, or whatever they’re calling them:
Taylor supposedly writes for a living. When she wrote, “we want these executives dead,” the “we” included “I,” so the perfectly clear meaning was: Taylor Lorenz wants these executives dead. In her doubling-down blog post, perhaps sensing the looming danger, Taylor unsuccessfully tried to rhetorically split hairs with a laser beam and create a little strategic ambiguity. I don’t recommend her article.
To make sure it was completely dead, in case her career had any life left in it, a laughing Taylor trotted onto the Piers Morgan show, where she giddily defended feeling “joy” at Brian Thompson’s assassination:
CLIP: Unemployed journalist Taylor Lorenz expresses joy on behalf of ‘many Americans’ (2:16).
But wait, there’s a sequel coming. Back in October, after calling Joe Biden a “war criminal,” Lorenz mutually separated from her high-profile job at the Washington Post. The obnoxious wokescold then landed a lucrative video podcasting gig with far-left Vox Media, to produce a show called “Power User.” Sadly, though, an appalled Vox noticed her BlueSky skeet and her Piers Morgan interview, and then this happened. The Washington Free Beacon, yesterday:
Womp womp. For the record, Vox and Lorenz both claim they decided to part ways before Taylor ran her murderous mouth, but they just hadn’t announced it yet. So. Also for the record, my best guess after research is that Lorenz, who often shares with readers her adventures in New York’s fast-paced singles scene, and even more frequently refers to herself as “hot,” is 46.
She may have trashed the last trace of her journalism career, but Taylor tapped into two trends. First, she tapped into a foul mood. Regular people who are feeling powerless are encouraged whenever the powerful also face problems. It’s a dark and dangerous mood and leads to chaos, anarchy, and French Revolutions if not vented somehow.
The solution is to reduce ordinary people’s feelings of powerlessness and being out of control. (Paging the Pandemic.) Hopefully, Trump’s election will suffice this time.
🔥 The second trend is an obvious part of Democrats’ evolving anti-Trump strategy: to gin up a class war — the Marxists’ comfortable original neighborhood and their narrative castle of last retreat. Despite being cozier with many more billionaires than are conservatives, liberals are currently on an all-out campaign to make the “b-“ word bad again.
For example, note how this BlueSky user calls billionaires “the worst people”:
What should we do to “the worst people?”
If you want evidence for this evolving narrative strategy, simply search for “billionaire” in X or BlueSky. The class war narrative is already seeping into corporate media headlines:
The Mangione-Thompson assassination was a perfect setup for the Democrats’ emerging class war narrative. Mangione’s weird, three-page handwritten manifesto wasn’t whining about healthcare. He aimed his 3-D printed pistol not at a particular person but at corporate greed and profits. Now, useful nitwits like Taylor Lorenz have taken the narrative ball and are running down the field with it.
Finally, have lots of questions. Mangione’s arrest did not resolve the most bizarre facts in his case. For example, how did Mangione know where Brian Thompson would be standing, without security, on the morning of December 4th? Who did Mangione talk to on his burner phone? Who helped Mangione?
Related: did the CIA ever try to recruit the young Valedictorian from boarding school or while he was at Penn?
I’m just asking.
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On the other hand, yesterday we had a simply terrific news development in the Danny Penny case. The New York Post ran its version of the story under the headline, “Daniel Penny acquitted in subway chokehold death of Jordan Neely, sparking applause, uproar in NYC courtroom.”
Chaos erupted outside the Manhattan courthouse yesterday after the jury returned a “not guilty” verdict on the one remaining count against honorably discharged U.S. Marine Daniel Penny, 26.
When the verdict was read, deceased Subway terrorist Jordan Neely’s father, who’d popped from nowhere onto the scene last week like a deranged Jack-in-the-Box, shouted death threats at Penny and his lawyers. Outside the courtroom, all across the country, race hustlers sprinted to microphones to decry what they characterized as a travesty of justice and as official approval that white people can just kill black people whenever they want.
The rest of us, white, black, and every other melanin shade alike, breathed a long, deep sigh of relief. A guilty verdict would have been horrific, spiritually unacceptable, and would it would have been a blow against civilization itself.
And civilization is a little shaky right now. It’s not clear how many more blows it can take.
Folks have wondered why the jury would deadlock after four days on the more serious crime of manslaughter, but then quickly find “not guilty” on the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide.
We find a clue in a different article about Jordan Williams, a black subway passenger who claimed to have stabbed to death another passenger in self-defense, and who was not charged by the same team prosecuting Daniel Penny. In the Williams case, the DA’s office explained that “Under New York law, a person is justified in using deadly physical force when they reasonably believe it is necessary to use such force to defend themselves or others from imminent use of deadly or unlawful physical force.”
In short, Danny Penny’s jury was on solid legal ground to find him not guilty. Even had Penny meant to kill the Subway Terrorist, the jury only had to find that Penny’s headlock was “justified” in order to defend others from unlawful physical force that Danny reasonably expected would occur.
The argument that Danny’s actions were reasonably justified to protect his fellow passengers is pretty easy to make.
We don’t know what happened in the jury room. But here is my best guess. As I’ve said before, I think this was a smart jury. I think they tried to deadlock on Count I for the optics, for strategic ambiguity, calculating that a hung jury would get Penny off the hook — plus nobody would ever know who on the jury voted for or against acquittal.
In that sense, a hung verdict would be better for the jury.
But once the DA astonishingly dismissed Count I, and the judge ordered jurors to just keep on deliberating, with no end in sight, the jury threw in the towel and said fine, he’s not guilty. Now let’s go home.
Who knows. That’s my personal theory as a litigator, offered as one rational reason the verdict could have played out this way.
🔥 Now let’s compare the two killings. Like the Mangione case, the Penny case profoundly stirred the Nation’s emotions.
With Mangione’s arrest, his case has crystallized into an elite-vs-elite narrative of pure ideological class warfare. Sticking it to the man! Taking the law into our own hands! A young revolutionary rises from amongst the elites themselves! (As always.) Justice for the victims of greedy corporations! Down with billionaires!
In other words, Mangione’s case is about the ugly kind of vigilante justice.
Penny’s case resembles Mangione’s in that Penny’s case has been propagandized as being about vigilante justice. But it is not about vigilante justice. Penny never set out to effect any kind of justice on Jordan Neely. Penny never said that, nor did the DA ever accuse him of intending to harm Neely. That’s why Penny’s two counts were both founded in accidental homicide.
Where Mangione represents humanity’s worst characteristics —murdering a stranger just to make a political point— Daniel Penny’s case represents the altruistic best in us.
Penny didn’t kill a stranger to make a political point. Penny risked his own life to protect strangers, to selflessly safeguard a random group of people he’d never met. A deep-blue New York jury did the right thing by finding Danny not guilty, proving that, even if our elected officials are civilizationally suicidal, the rest of us aren’t yet ready to sink into that long, dark night of chaos and terror.
Keep careful note of who complains about the Penny verdict. Those folks are nihilistic enemies of civilization, which means they are also your enemy. They are loud and obnoxious, but fortunately they are few, and getting fewer.
In the meantime, today is a terrific day for Daniel Penny and his family, and for the same reason it is a terrific day for us, too.
Have a tremendous Tuesday! Tomorrow we will pick up the threads of several fascinating developing stories, in Wednesday’s roundup of essential news and commentary.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
