Vigilante-style killings are fine now (*if the victim is Black and homeless)

A 26-year-old was acquitted on Monday for choking an unarmed, unhoused man to death on the subway as another was arrested for shooting a health insurance CEO who sanctioned thousands of deaths a year.

Yes to an unarmed homeless Black man suffering from schizophrenia, even if he only has a muffin in his jacket and hasn’t touched anyone. No to a white CEO for any reason.

A jury acquitted Daniel Penny, a 26-year-old white former Marine, of criminally negligent homicide on Monday in the strangling of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old Black homeless man suffering from schizophrenia, on the subway in 2023. Video shows Penny putting Neely, a former Michael Jackson impersonator, in a deadly chokehold after Neely had been yelling about being hungry and thirsty and saying he didn’t care if he lived or died. Even after Neely went limp, Penny gripped Neely’s neck tighter until he was dead, despite Neely having no weapons on him and not hurting or touching anyone. “He had a muffin in his pocket,” Neely’s family’s lawyer, Donte Mills, said at a press conference after the verdict. “Jordan just wanted someone to acknowledge him on the train, but instead, he was choked to death.”

The defense had argued that Penny’s chokehold was not the cause of Neely’s death, but rather “a toxic combination of his synthetic marijuana use, sickle cell trait and mental illness,” per NYT. (Pointing at sickle cell trait, a genetic condition that’s historically been used to cover for the murder of Black people, was a clear racist dogwhistle.) But New York’s medical examiner rules the incident a homicide and confirmed that it was in fact the strangling alone that killed Neely.

Still, we’re to understand that Neely’s murder “divided the country.” Conservatives hailed the former marine as a “hero” for “saving a train car full of innocent people” from this unhoused man who simply made them uncomfortable, while the rest of us saw the murder as the unjustifiable hate crime it was on a suffering, powerless man whom society had already failed. A jury of Penny’s peers apparently agreed with the former line of reasoning, that he had acted in everyone’s best interest by taking matters into his own hands. And last night, a smiling Penny was pictured on Instagram holding a beer and giving a thumbs up with his lawyers at Stone Street Tavern in Lower Manhattan, ready to get on with his sure to be bright future.

The same day, another 26-year-old man was taken into custody for the murder of a wealthy, 50-year-old health insurance CEO. Luigi Mangione was apprehended at a McDonalds in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after a days-long manhunt and charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare chief Brian Thompson. Mangione was found with four fake IDs, a ghost gun he’d built himself from parts he’d ordered online, and a handwritten manifesto ripping health insurance companies for profiting off the death and suffering of thousands of innocent people each year.

Mangione, who has a back X-ray in his Twitter banner photo that shows four screws likely put into his own spine after a surfing injury, had already made his motivations for the shooting pretty clear by inscribing “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” on the bullets he used to shoot Thompson. It’s unclear whether UnitedHealthcare, specifically, had wronged Mangione in the wake of his own spinal injury, but it’s evident that he was radicalized by pain, as Robert Evans persuasively argued in his newsletter. And the choice to assassinate this particular CEO could have something to do with the fact that UnitedHealthcare is the worst offender in terms of denying people coverage.

The public, generally speaking, have hailed Mangione as a hero and a heartthrob for sacrificing his freedom to call attention to what is essentially state-sanctioned mass violence by the health insurance insurance industry. Insurance companies have scrambled to take down the executive pages on their websites in the wake of the killing, and one company may or may not have resumed anesthesia coverage as a result. But the mainstream media, as Ken Klippenstein points out, has been busy heaping praise on Thompson, who earned $10.2 million a year and fat bonus checks for bankrupting and denying life-saving medical care to the people who relied on his company to help them.

Mangione, of course, did not turn out to be the ideologically pure, left-wing hero that people wanted him to be. Based on his internet history, he appears to be an anti-"woke” libertarian tech bro from a prominent Republican political family who listens to Joe Rogan at the gym. But I’d argue that the details of Mangione’s political leanings and online activity are all beside the point, which is that no conceivable American jury would think twice about convicting him for the murder of an “affable” white CEO, regardless of how many people Mangione believed he was protecting by taking a public stand against health insurance greed. His fate is written; he’s in prison for life. One cannot kill the Brian Thompsons of this world for any reason.

One can, however, still strangle the Jordan Neelys—the people on the subway whose personal suffering makes us squirm. We can kill them with our bare hands, in the middle of a crowded subway car, with witnesses and on camera. We don’t even really need there to be a plausible threat or a weapon; we can just murder them because we don’t want them there being loud and making us feel guilty and uncomfortable and reminding us of our own failures to care for each other. We can choke a Jordan Neely to death for no good reason, and then we can go grab a beer at the bar.