The Ivy Leaguer and the Marine: Neither is a hero

By now you have either seen or heard of the online blockheads who are lionizing, making a hero of, the Ivy League grad who is accused of murdering a health insurance CEO.

The first thing that put me in mind of was the January 6 rioters who were shouting, “Hang Mike Pence.”

Those imbeciles were dragging around an Erector Set version of a gallows that looked like it could not sustain the weight of a healthy cocker spaniel, let alone a full-grown man.

But, as they say, it’s the thought that counts.

And the thought was murdering the vice president. This from the “law and order” crowd.

Apparently that was true with Luigi Mangione, who might be the worst example of a social justice warrior you can find.

Many people have issues with health insurance providers, but how you go from that to using the term “hero” for a lowdown scumbag who shot an unarmed man in the back is beyond me. This from the “defund the police” crowd.

It is unAmerican. It is cowardly. It reveals not righteous anger, but lack of character, the exaltation of your beliefs over morality.

If your opinion of evil supports evil, then you, too, are evil. Reminds me of the TikTokkers who fell for Osama bin Laden’s letter. Remember that?

Is it possible the keyboard warriors, the Luigi lovers, have spun so far off their moral compasses they can justify cold-blooded murder?

Apparently yes.

Others are calling Marine veteran Daniel Penny a hero.

One person who has not used the term hero is  — Penny himself.

From the brief interview excerpt I saw on Fox News, Penny, who is white, acted on protective instinct and training when he locked Jordan Neely, who is Black, into what turned out to be a lethal chokehold. His intentions were good.

He did not have murder on his mind.

I am not saying that. The jury did. The multi-racial jury.

In a news conference after Penny’s acquittal, Donte Mills, the attorney for Neely’s family said he had filed a civil suit against Penny, but the case had nothing to do with race.

That statement might have been a tad more believable had not a previous clip on CNN showed Neely’s father and others decrying the racism that killed his mentally ill son. That would be the mentally ill son with 42 arrests whose family had allowed him to be homeless on the streets of New York.

I am not blaming the family, exactly. 

I am suggesting that the family, unable to home him, and the city, unable to treat him, are unindicted conspirators in this tragic case.

Looking at these two cases, sometimes bad things happen to good people, and sometimes bad things happen to bad people,

Mangione is bad, if the facts are as we understand them. I would not have him as a friend.

Penny is good. I stand with him.