Who gets to kill?

Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione

The other night I was riding the subway in New York City. A man was acting odd, erratic. He was shadowboxing, and later hitting a pole with his umbrella. He might be homeless, I don’t know. What I do know is that he didn’t hurt a soul, and no one hurt him. No one approached him – we instead practiced the old NYC tradition of minding our damn business, and everyone came out of that subway car just fine.

This brief interaction came just after Daniel Penny was acquitted of manslaughter in the killing of Jordan Neely. As you may know, Penny killed Neely by putting him in a prolonged chokehold on the subway. Neely hadn’t hurt a soul. He had acted erratic, screamed, and alarmed passengers. But nothing, absolutely nothing justified his killing, and Penny being allowed to walk free is a dangerous signal to anyone who thinks they can hurt the homeless, attack the mentally ill, or even kill those suffering at the hands of this cruel society.

The most striking detail about Jordan Neely’s final minutes, to me, was and remains how he was screaming that he was hungry, thirsty, and needed a job. Despite twisted narratives seeking to justify an unprovoked vigilante killing, the truth of the story is glaring and plain to see – poverty and the way those who fall through the cracks are systematically abandoned put Jordan in a terrible position. He was suffering, homeless, abandoned by society. Yet Daniel Penny saw a Black man who he determined it was his right to “subdue.” Now Jordan is dead and Daniel walks free.

Photo by Arthur Hutterer on Unsplash

By some strange twist of fate Daniel Penny was waltzing into a bar to have a celebratory drink just as Luigi Mangione was being taken into custody. The events were nearly overlapping, and despite the widespread outcry against the devastation of our for-profit health care system right-wing pundits and stooges did not shy away from juxtaposing the two killers. On CNN, former George W. Bush assistant Scott Jennings said, “If you’re in the American left tonight, here’s my chart. The good guys: Daniel Penny. The bad guys: Luigi Mangione.” While doing so Jennings held up a little notebook with a chart showing his reductive, dangerous outlook.

On Fox, the rhetoric was even more callous, surprising no one. Speaking about Luigi Mangione, Laura Ingram spewed forth the following: “The Instagram posts from nut bag people, people celebrating. This is a sickness, honestly, it's so disappointing, but I guess we shouldn't be surprised…” She then pivoted to, “Up next, the other big news out of New York, Daniel Penny, a lot of people think he is a hero.”

And then we have the cover of the New York Post, a rag that also happens to be owned by Fox aka the News Corp:

All of this vile hypocrisy, from Ingram and the Post and everyone else preaching that Mangione is the devil incarnate while Penny is a white knight, is obvious. It’s so glaring and disturbing that it can distract us from the bigger move that the right is making. These fascist propagandists are trying hard to shift the Overton window and drag us viciously and violently back through time, to a place where a white man murdering a Black one is widely accepted and even applauded. They’re trying to take us to a place where the homeless are expendable, where poverty is explicitly and openly a death sentence, where fascist vigilantism is celebrated.

Their hypocrisy these past few days is a thin veil over the dark reality that they’re pointing toward, but it also exposes an inherent truth in their weak, sick arguments, one that they cannot cover up; the time the far-right wants to drag us back to wasn’t just violent for the oppressed, it was violent for the bosses and their thugs too. There were lynchings, the National Guard fired on striking workers, and the oppressed too often died too early. But politicians and the super-rich were threatened too.

In April 1919, at least 36 bombs were mailed to prominent politicians and others, including the Attorney General. Judges, newspaper editors, and businessmen, including John D. Rockefeller, also had bombs mailed to them. In 1886, as workers struck and demonstrated for the 8-hour day in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, police attacked the crowd, and in response someone threw a bomb. Seven police officers died, some perhaps from friendly fire, and four workers died as well. The state then rounded up anarchist organizers and killed four after a sham trial, with a fifth taking his own life. May Day, the international day of the workers, commemorates their martyrdom.

Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash

All of this is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the battles that raged in this country a century ago. 1934 saw multiple cities shut down from general strikes. 1917 saw workers and their families killed in the coalfields of Colorado — it also saw workers dynamite mines during their strikes. The national guard and hired thugs shot workers in this era, and workers fired back and threw bricks and seized buildings. This all used to be fairly commonplace, which is to say that if the far-right wants to drag us back to the days of Daniel Pennys and public lynchings, they have to prepare themselves for more Luigi Mangiones, or whoever assassinated that health care CEO. I do not say this to be proscriptive, I say it because dragging us back to the past, with the hyper-exploitative working conditions, the racist violence, and the fascist rule that the ruling class wants to unleash upon the oppressed is not something that can be done without consequence. Causes have effects and violence begets violence.

That said, I do not view our descent into the madness of history as an inevitability. When we examine the work to be done and the struggle before us I think of something that Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò recently wrote: “Our ancestors did more with less against worse.” People have organized and fought and won in worse conditions, and they have done so for centuries. They’ve done it without social media, they’ve done it under harsher police states, they’ve done it when all hope seemed lost.

And we must do the same. We must learn from the past and organize for the future. It’ll take an immense amount of courage and work, but it must be done. Otherwise we’re conceding to those who think murdering the poor and suffering is how our society should operate. Otherwise we’re conceding to those who say you must abhor violence done to the powerful, and applaud violence done to the vulnerable. The ruling class wants you to see yourself as being one of the powerful, while they strip you of your power, rights, and money. As long as enough people are willing to cheerlead the oppression and even murder of the exploited, fascism can proceed.

So every time anyone applauds the murder of the homeless, an attack on migrants, or any other act targeting the oppressed, they in fact further the oppression of us all. They lend fuel to the raging fascist fire being deliberately and aggressively stoked in this country and around the world right now. Because to indulge in the delusion that you or I are one of the rulers, that we somehow have more in common with a CEO than we do with Jordan Neely, is to lose sight of our place in the structures we live under and hand the keys to the hateful, who see us as nothing more than bothersome little profit engines.

We know that the ruling class is demonstrating their solidarity with one another as we speak. They deployed the vast resources of the security apparatus to find Luigi Mangione while letting Daniel Penny walk free. So we must double down on our commitment to one another. We must respond with the certainty that we can and will build a society where our health isn’t a site of profit extraction and where poverty is never a death sentence. We must take action to support the vulnerable, help one another, forge bonds of working class solidarity. We can and will construct a society where there will one day be a generation that doesn’t know the word poverty.

All of this and more is possible, and sharply rejecting the narrative that tells us the answer to our problems is the elimination of our neighbors, the deportation of our friends, and the oppression of people around the world is just the beginning of our work. But it is an important first step. We must reject fascist narratives decisively, and go about the task of creating a powerful and overwhelming positive alternative. As Jordan Neely’s father Andre said after his son’s killer was acquitted, “The system is rigged. C’mon, people. Let’s do something about this.” That’s our charge, and let’s get to it. Solidarity.