Killing Time

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, December 10, 2024

 

Sometimes a writer chooses his topic, sometimes his topic chooses him. When, on the same day, the news cycle coughs up two different accused killers being celebrated as folk heroes—by opposing tribes, no less—the topic has asserted itself.

 

In theory, it’s an easy one to write about. “This country ain’t what it used to be” is the lifeblood of modern politics, the animating belief of both Donald Trump’s movement and of this newsletter in critiquing it. Watching Americans rhetorically stand over the bodies of two dead men and cheer should be grist for a woeful lament about how we didn’t used to be so callous.

 

But we did. We’ve always applauded killers and attempted killers.

 

I was 10 years old in 1984, growing up in New York City, when Bernhard Goetz shot four black men in a Manhattan subway car whom he claimed had tried to mug him. His intent to harm them, not just to defend himself, was waaaaaay clearer than Daniel Penny’s was when he used a chokehold to subdue a disturbed man who had been harassing fellow passengers. Yet Goetz’s case became a cause celebre among working-class New Yorkers all the same for his willingness to deliver “rough justice” to thugs.

 

Ultimately, the so-called “subway vigilante” was convicted only of carrying an unlicensed firearm. Penny, who evinced no malice toward his victim and who sought to protect others more so than himself, was a far more sympathetic defendant than Goetz. As lethal folk heroes go, he’s considerably less callous than what New Yorkers were celebrating in 1984.

 

As for Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, you can slot him into whatever appalling American tradition you like. He’s a 21st century John Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde, perhaps, cheered by the dispossessed as he lives out their fantasy of preying on those who’ve exploited them financially. Or he’s a modern-day Weatherman or fin de siècle anarchist, aiming to kill his way toward social “progress.”

 

It’s the opposite of surprising that the sort of progressive cretins who rationalized Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, would find something to like about Mangione killing one of their supposed political enemies in cold blood. Even the oohing and aahing over his good looks isn’t novel: He wouldn’t crack the top 100 worst degenerates in American history to receive sexual interest after committing a heinous crime. As a psychological phenomenon, that’s so common that it has a Latin name.

 

There’s nothing new about the right cheering Penny or the left cheering Mangione. So why does it feel significant that both are, apart from the remarkable coincidence of each making news on the same day?

 

The system is rigged.

 

It’s because this stuff lands differently during populist eras.

 

Penny and Mangione are worlds apart morally, but their respective admirers share the belief that each was compelled to do what he did by failures of “the system.” They’re unified by the sense, as one of my editors put it, that “the institutions that are supposed to deal with injustices are not going to do anything, so you need to take things into your own hands.”

 

Jordan Neely, the victim in Penny’s case, had persistent mental health problems. He was arrested 42 times between 2013 and 2021, on four of those occasions for alleged assault, and landed on New York City’s “top 50” list of locals in dire need of psychological help. That list is overseen by city government officials and nonprofits, all theoretically coordinating to make sure that those on it are no threat to themselves or to others.

 

They blew it. Somehow, Neely ended up in a subway car in May 2023, menacing those around him until Penny, a Marine Corps veteran, restrained him by placing him in a “sleeper hold” that accidentally killed him. Bad enough that New York couldn’t or wouldn’t protect its residents, but to then punish Penny for trying to fill the law-and-order vacuum created by its own negligence? When Manhattan’s “woke” district attorney is notorious for going easy on real criminals? Unspeakable.

 

The Mangione fan club believes their man was also filling a vacuum created by “the system” when he plugged Brian Thompson in the back.

 

Health insurance isn’t that lucrative a business, producing $70.7 billion in profit for the seven biggest insurers in 2023 off of $1.39 trillion in revenue. (For perspective, Elon Musk has been known to add $30 billion to his net worth in a single day.) Costs have risen since Obamacare was enacted, leading insurers to rely more heavily on preauthorization to hold down expenses and in the process leaving some patients without coverage for treatments. Shell casings found at the scene of Thompson’s murder were etched with the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose,” seemingly alluding to insurers’ strategy of denying claims and using legal muscle to defend the denials.

 

Democrats didn’t prioritize health-care reform when they controlled the federal government in 2021 and 2022, and Trump’s Republican Party still has little more than the “concepts of a plan” after 14 years of griping about Obama’s program. If you’re frustrated with the cost of health care (as practically everyone is), angry at how little is being done politically to address it, and of the misguided belief that health insurers are denying claims due to spite and greed rather than thin profit margins, you might convince yourself that murdering one of its most powerful executives is a fine last-resort option to motivate the health insurance industry to fix things, pronto.

 

It can’t be a coincidence that the rising cost of living and public disorder in major cities, both of which figured heavily in Trump’s victory last month, also figure heavily in the Mangione and Penny cases that have captivated so many. The populist spirit, once unleashed, does have a tendency to turn feral.

 

Diverging fortunes.

 

Another interesting commonality is how the two cases reflect the two tribes’ diverging political fortunes.

 

On the heels of Trump’s reelection, Penny’s acquittal feels like confirmation of the right’s cultural triumph. Even the bleeding-heart jurors of Manhattan, it appears, have grown so tired of feeling unsafe on their streets that they couldn’t resist acquitting a right-wing folk hero charged with killing a mentally ill homeless man. The fraught racial politics of the case—Penny is white, Neely was black—were no deterrent either. Locally and nationally, whether in criminal court verdicts or control of the White House, “the system” is becoming more accommodating to the MAGA view of things.

 

It’s the opposite for the American left, which has less political influence at this moment than it’s had in ages. The progressive opinions Kamala Harris adopted earlier in her career, particularly on transgenderism, seem to have hurt her at the polls last month. Working-class nonwhite voters, theoretically a core constituency of the left, have moved toward Trump. Unions aren’t as monolithically Democratic as they were a generation ago. And now, with America’s cultural center of gravity tilting toward the right, liberal leaders are more likely to steer away from progressive positions than toward them.

 

The left scored some remarkable cultural achievements during the Obama years before overreaching with “defund the police,” open borders, and trans radicalism—and now might be locked out of meaningful political power for years. The creepy enthusiasm for Thompson’s murder seems to reflect that reality: They won’t have a way to reform or even influence “the system” in the near term, particularly if Trump succeeds in consolidating federal power on behalf of the right, and so some may decide to work outside of it by intimidating or harming their political enemies. Hamas apologists on campus and elsewhere were ahead of the game in that sense.

 

In short: The right, believing “the system” is now on its side and inspired by Trump’s political success, might conclude that there’s less reason than ever to follow traditional norms in solving “problems” like Jordan Neely. And the left, believing that “the system” isn’t on its side and that it doesn’t pay to play nice in a country that rewards figures like Trump, might conclude that there’s less reason than ever to follow traditional norms in solving “problems” like Brian Thompson.

 

And that might be the optimistic view.

 

Normalization machines.

 

All that said, the neat left/right distinction I’ve drawn here between Mangione’s and Penny’s support isn’t so neat in practice.

 

Based on his public writing, Mangione isn’t a dogmatic progressive. There are New Right aspects to his beliefs. And not all of his supporters are socialists, as right-wing influencers like Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh recently found out the hard way.

 

Which stands to reason. It’s not just leftists who hold grievances against insurance companies for denied coverage, needless to say, and lord knows it’s not just leftists who see value in an ethic of intimidation. The right more so than the left has made threats a mainstream tactic in modern American politics.

 

One expert who tracks online radicalism was taken aback, in fact, by how broad-based public support for Mangione has been. “It’s being framed [online] as some opening blow in a broader class war, which is very concerning as it heightens the threat environment for similar actors to engage in similar acts of violence,” Alex Goldenberg warned the New York Times. Fan fiction is being published about the alleged murderer; merchandise celebrating him is being sold; a site has been set up to crowdfund his legal defense.

 

“I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated,” sociologist Zeynep Tufekci marveled—last week, before Mangione mania erupted. It’s one thing to see exultation over mayhem on an anomic site like 8Chan, Goldenberg told the Times, but this is Internet-wide, thoroughly mainstream.

 

Maybe the applause for a killer this time is a little different from Depression-era Dust Bowl-ers rooting on Bonnie and Clyde’s next heist at their kitchen tables, then.

 

There are two momentous factors conspiring to normalize what Mangione has done. One is the insatiable contrarianism that populism has unleashed: Modern iconoclasts are all but morally obliged to challenge conventional wisdom on contentious subjects, from whether vaccines are a net benefit to humanity to who the aggressor is in the war between Russia and Ukraine. That’s why conspiratorial thinking has become so common in our politics. Conspiracy theorists are just contrarians who are a little bit “extra.” (Even on the subject of Mangione’s guilt.)

 

In an era in which rejecting establishment opinion is treated as evidence of political virtue, of course we were going to reach a point where an opinion as banal as “shooting that middle-aged dad in the back is bad” would be grounds for debate—especially when it’s juiced by heartfelt animosity of the sort many Americans feel for the health insurance industry. A country willing to elect Donald Trump twice is a country that’s willing to reconsider all sorts of conventional moral beliefs it once held. Including, apparently, whether murder is wrong.

 

The other factor, as always in tales of American decline, is the internet. Angry contrarianism is the sine qua non of online commentary, which positioned itself from the dawn of the web as a truth-telling alternative to “respectable” mainstream outlets. Social media turbo-charged that dynamic in two ways, encouraging contrarians by connecting them with like-minded people and rewarding them with clout and followers for their willingness to crank out ever more outre polemics.

 

You don’t need to worry about being ostracized online for saying, let alone thinking, that murder is actually good. Thousands upon thousands of cretins are willing to affirm you publicly in that moral belief when the victim is a political enemy, lending strength in numbers in challenging the moral taboo. In fact, gang-tackling enemies has traditionally been a favorite pastime on platforms like Twitter that reward short, quick, emotional takes. Combine that sadistic culture with the universally held grievances against the health care industry and you’ve got an explosion of sociopathic revelry over Brian Thompson’s death that may have no precedent in the digital age.

 

I wonder, frankly, if the fact that Americans lead so much of their lives online now has numbed them to the reality of what happened to Thompson. Watching a man get shot and die in front of you would be harrowing. Watching him get shot and die in a video clip that you’re scrolling past hurriedly amid sports highlights, movie reviews, and tweets from mentally ill weirdos shouting “double tap!” necessarily creates ironic distance. Lumped together in a social media feed, it’s all entertainment of one sort or another. After being heavily narcotized, what else could people feel about Mangione’s alleged lunatic act except anomie?

 

I’m curious to see if the likes of Shapiro and Walsh can restore a semblance of ideological order to populist reaction to Thompson’s murder or if this is a true “horseshoe” moment in which the postliberals of the left and right forge a new consensus about which people just need killin’. (Or guillotinin’, to be more specific.) If there is a consensus, it’ll be a narrow one: Tufekci compares the killing of Thompson to violence during the Gilded Age, another period of widespread resentment of oligarchs, but Donald Trump and the right-wing fanatics who worship him love oligarchs. There will be no “horseshoe” agreement about whether it’s fine to gun down red-pilled MAGA hero Elon Musk in broad daylight.

 

But insurance company CEOs? Bankers? Defense industry chiefs? I can see a joint left-right firing squad forming for those online. Leopards aren’t picky about whose faces they eat. Thompson won’t be their last meal.