Penny and Mangione
What a week. On Monday, Daniel Penny was acquitted for the subway chokehold death of Jordan Neely. That same day, Luigi Mangione was arrested and arraigned after being spotted in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s. What was as interesting as these events themselves were the receptions they garnered in the wider community. Penny and Mangione have both been heralded as virtuous vigilantes, albeit by opposite sides of the political spectrum. Indeed, after his acquittal, Penny was invited by Vice President-elect J.D. Vance to attend an Army-Navy football game. Meanwhile, Mangione was lionized as a countercultural sex symbol and treated as a Robin Hood figure by much of the online left. This bipartisan positive reception to vigilante justice reveals the widespread dissatisfaction with healthcare in this country as well as the troubling normalization of political violence.
As usual, one of the few columnists willing to state the obvious was John McWhorter. In a column penned immediately after Neely’s killing, McWhorter implores public health authorities to take responsibility for actively dangerous people who terrorize the New York City subway stations. The libertarian, budget-cutting right and the “deinstitutionalize everything” left have created an unholy alliance whereby they are forsaking their responsibility to care for the mentally ill. Instead, they are advocating a nebulous model of community care even as our social, political, and religious communities continue to break down. Ultimately, as Aaron Renn notes, “the result is a city where the mentally ill are left free to harass people.”
Just as the right gleefully celebrated Penny, so too did the online left thirst over Mangione. As I wrote in a previous article for Intersect, the health care system is in disarray in our country. For-profit hospitals are being run by private equity firms in a Randian dystopia where profit is prioritized over patient wellbeing. The support towards Mangione and animus towards Brian Thompson simply reveal the extent to which Americans are fed up with this broken system. As Bret Stephens failed to note in his column celebrating Thompson, the victim himself was making ten million dollars a year by profiting off of denied insurance claims. The lack of public sympathy for Thompson, then, is perhaps concerning but hardly surprising.
So then, where do we go from here? As we seem to be devolving back to a pre-modern society where vigilantism and violence are acceptable means of political expression, we must ask ourselves how we reached this social nadir. In doing so, hopefully we can, per Hamilton Craig, recognize that “we cannot murder our way to a society in which life will be respected.” Instead, we must turn to collective organizing and vigorous political discourse – strategies that seem to have fallen by the wayside in our society relentlessly concerned with political correctness. We must reckon openly with difficult, nuanced questions surrounding the Penny and Mangione cases without resorting to political violence. Only then will our health care system resemble what it ought to be.
