The Penny and Mangione sagas highlight the left’s moral bankruptcy

I used to work for the Mangione family when I did a radio show on WCBM in Baltimore, Maryland. So when the name Luigi Mangione came up in the form of the suspect in the assassination of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, my ears perked up.

Then I confirmed that Luigi was a member of the same family. I don’t think I ever met him, but you never know — there are a lot of Mangiones and I met some of them. Whatever the case, the news was shocking.

It was not as shocking, however, as the reaction to the cold-blooded murder. I have never seen adults celebrate the murder of a man they’d never heard of before, until now.

Brian Thompson was not Jeffrey Dahmer — a murderous monster who had committed acts of cannibalism. Rather, he ran a health insurance company. Therefore, to some progressive Democrats, he is much, much worse.

Journalist Taylor Lorenz told Piers Morgan that she felt “joy” at the murder and “not empathy.” She then claimed that she did not support the murder of all health insurance company executives because those companies “would just appoint a new ghoulish CEO.” 

“They shouldn’t be shot in the street,” Lorenz eventually admitted, “because, again, it doesn’t solve the systemic problem.” Not that murder is wrong — it’s just ineffective.

“United Healthcare will just appoint a new ghoulish CEO,” she continued, “The point is, is that you need to fix these systems so that again people like Brian or whoever’s in charge of these companies stops murdering tens of thousands of innocent Americans.”

There is only suspicion that Mangione allegedly acted out of disgust toward health insurers. His own family is wealthy enough that he’s never had to worry about money himself. So perhaps he was infected during his Ivy League education with whatever has rotted Lorenz’s mind and the minds of those online who joined her in cheering the murder. It would not be the first person poisoned with violent progressivism by the credit hour — Ted Kaczynski was a Harvard alum, after all.

As these ghouls cheered the murder of a husband and father, they were wildly upset over the acquittal of Daniel Penny, a former Marine who acted to protect New York City subway riders from a man who was threatening to kill them.

Penny bravely restrained the man making the threats, and released him when police arrived on the scene. The man, Jordan Neely, was alive when Penny released him, dying later at the hospital. But perhaps because Neely was Black and Penny white, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg decided he had finally found a defendant he actually wanted to prosecute, aside from President-elect Trump, of course. So, it became a national story.

To some of the same people dancing on Thompson’s grave, the death of Neely was some kind of great tragedy for society, rivaling the death of a close family member. Neely had a history of drug abuse, mental illness and extreme violent behavior, having pleaded guilty to assaulting a 67-year-old woman in 2021.

As part of his plea agreement for that assault, Neely “was to go from court to live at a treatment facility in the Bronx, and stay clean for 15 months. In return, his felony conviction would be reduced. He promised to take his medication and to avoid drugs, and not to leave the facility without permission.” But having been offered shelter and all the help he could hope for, he abandoned that facility after 13 days, according to the New York Times. 

Neely’s case is sad. The system failed him, as did his absentee father. But none of that matters in the moment he becomes a threat to your personal safety, as he did to all those innocent people in that subway car. The man some progressives paint as the victim was the perpetrator, terrorizing others. The only reason the threat ended was that Penny acted, with the help of a Black man who wasn’t charged and is rarely mentioned, no doubt because Democrats don’t see a way of exploiting his involvement. 

Would Neely have harmed anyone? The only way to know for sure would have been to have let him harm someone. But when someone threatens your life, you take him seriously. Our laws provide for violence in the defense of one’s own life and wellbeing or the lives and wellbeing of others.

CNN’s Audie Cornish tried to draw an equivalence between the two cases, calling them both “vigilante action.” This is asinine. Merriam-Webster defines “vigilante” as “a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law are viewed as inadequate).”

Neely’s death was not a consequence of “vigilante action.” Self-defense is not vigilantism, nor is the defense of others facing immediate harm from a screaming, drug-addled man in a confined space.

Meanwhile, Thompson was murdered — shot from behind while walking down the street — for running a company in a way no one has publicly suggested was illegal. So that is not vigilantism, either.

A large segment of America has lost its moral compass. They have become so ethically blind that they really need CNN’s Scott Jennings to hold up a piece of paper and explain that Daniel Penny is the “good guy” and Luigi Mangione the “bad guy.”

Their respective reactions to Neely’s and Thompson’s deaths expose both why Democrats lost the election and how morally bankrupt and dangerous the progressive wing of their party has become.

Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).