The American right has spent the past week performing an interesting tap dance: condemning the left for cheering on one alleged killer while turning another into a right-wing celebrity.
In the first case, health care CEO shooting suspect Luigi Mangione, the right is appalled by (the admittedly appalling) celebrations in a certain corner of the left. “It’s really terrible that some people seem to admire him,” President-elect Donald Trump said in a Monday press conference.
The second killer — Daniel Penny, who choked homeless man Jordan Neely on the New York subway — has become the subject of much right-wing admiration. After his acquittal on manslaughter charges last week, Vice President-elect JD Vance invited him to attend the Army-Navy football game with Trump.
This contrast was everywhere, among both Republican electeds and right-leaning pundits (much as a mirror image discourse played out among the left’s Mangione supporters).
Incoming House GOP member Brandon Gill, who had broadcast criticisms of liberals on Twitter for lionizing Mangione, said in a Sunday speech that “we need a lot more Daniel Pennys in this country because we have far too many Jordan Neelys.” Bari Weiss, whose Free Press publication had published an editorial calling the very idea of prosecuting Penny unjust, went on Fox News to declare that “you cannot have a functioning liberal democracy like the one we have and accept that certain people are allowed to be murdered in the streets of Manhattan.”
Nothing captures the divergence in reactions to the two killings than a viral clip of Fox News host Laura Ingraham, in which she says:
People celebrating [Mangione]? This is a sickness — honestly, so disappointing, but I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Gentlemen, thank you so much.
Up next, the other big news out of New York: Daniel Penny. A lot of people think he’s a hero.
To many on the left, this might seem like pure hypocrisy. But I think that’s too simple. Not only does it skate over some obvious differences between the two situations, it also fails to grapple with the deeper ideological differences between right and left-wing approaches to these issues.
The notion of “order” plays a central role in conservative thought, in a way that liberals and leftists often have trouble reckoning with. Once you understand the nature of the right’s philosophical commitment to order, it’s easier to see why they find no hypocrisy in their treatment of Mangione and Penny — even if one can fairly question if the right is letting itself off too easily.
While reporting this piece, I watched the available footage of the two incidents in question. And it’s clear that they are very, very different situations.
The killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was a cold-blooded killing; multiple shots to the back with no prior altercation and no hint that Thompson posed an immediate physical threat to anyone. This was a straightforward, intentional, and premeditated killing.
Neely’s situation is different: Some passengers on the train said he was threatening to hurt someone, though he hadn’t actually done so. Penny claims that he restrained Neely to protect the other passengers.
In reality, it’s highly questionable whether putting Neely into a chokehold for six straight minutes is a justifiable response to mere verbal aggression. Even Penny’s defense team implicitly conceded death was not an appropriate punishment, with his attorneys arguing both that Penny didn’t intend to kill Neely and technically may not have.
But conservatives aren’t just arguing that Penny should be found not guilty. They’re celebrating him as a hero. In this, they are mirroring those on the left who see the extinction of a human life on the streets of New York as a political victory.
So why? How can they condemn the left’s choice to lionize an (alleged) killer on the one hand while doing the same with one that they like?
In National Review, cultural critic Christian Schneider took this challenge head-on. His argument proceeds by comic book analogy, comparing Mangione to the Joker and Penny to Batman.
Mangione “likely killed a man in cold blood as an act of showmanship, of toying with law enforcement. It’s straight out of the Joker’s antihero playbook, in which he earns the respect of like-minded citizens as he unleashes chaos,” Schneider writes.
Penny, by “committing a random act of public safety” and being condemned for it, has in contrast begun “the most basic superhero origin narrative: An individual looks around, sees the justice system can’t handle the criminality infesting the streets, and takes action on his own.”
Schneider’s language may be simplistic, but he is putting his finger on the pulse of the conservative approach to these issues. Conservatism is, above all else, a philosophy of order. In fact, the insistence on order’s value is one of the things that binds together the entire conservative coalition — from Trump to the GOP’s centrist squishes.
When Russell Kirk, a defining voice in 20th-century conservatism, made a list of 10 conservative principles, he made this the very first: “The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.” Much of his list consists of an elaboration on this principle: an accounting of what “the enduring moral order” is, how it shapes the health of a political community, and how it may be prudently adjusted over time.
The moral order, for Kirk, is a social code developed collectively by a society over centuries — more akin to common sense than abstractly reasoned-out principles. It is enforced both by law and custom; without it, we risk wholesale societal collapse. “If the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose,” he writes.
On this conservative understanding, the killing of the United Health Care CEO is an exemplar of “the anarchic impulse”: someone violating a time-honored principle of addressing political concerns through the ballot box rather than the bullet. It represents a man attacking the system that we, collectively, have decided on
The killing of Jordan Neely, by contrast, represents a defense of the moral order in the conservative mind. By acting belligerently and threatening passengers on the train, Neely had become a force of chaos and disruption. If the state wasn’t going to intervene to protect the moral order against someone like Penny, then citizens would eventually be forced to act.
“When liberals destroy [the] rule of law, heroes like Daniel Penny are what stop violent thugs from terrorizing innocent citizens. He should be celebrated,” Gill, the incoming Texas congressman, writes on X/Twitter.
For leftists and liberals, this logic sounds a lot like a justification for hierarchy — a fancy way of saying that the people at the top of the social system deserve more rights and protections, no matter how much harm they do. It amounts to a vindication of Frank Wilhoit’s quip that “conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Moreover, the alleged defense of order can become a justification for its own kind of disorder. Daniel Penny is not just a one-off: there is a long and troubling history of conservatives endorsing vigilante killings of the “right kind” of people, with fairly recent examples including Kyle Rittenhouse and George Zimmerman. Conservative fetishization of individuals defending order, of a “good guy with a gun,” is part of why America has such a severe violent crime problem in the first place.
Ultimately, though, I find the very need to have this conversation troubling. It’s not good for democracy to have competing factions — left, right, or otherwise — celebrating alleged killers, attempting to score political points with pamphlets written in blood. And the more we as a society normalize this gladiatorial ethos, the greater the risk becomes of these horrors repeating themselves.
