Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione, two men in the spotlight for killings in New York City, are sharing more than just the local and national news cycles. Both have been largely celebrated as vigilantes who have taken on larger societal issues that our institutions have not.
Mangione, 26, was arrested on Monday in connection with the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Midtown last week. Hours earlier, a Manhattan jury acquitted Penny, 26, who is white, in the subway chokehold death of 30-year-old Jordan Neely, a homeless Black man with mental illness. Witnesses say Neely had been acting erratically on an F train in 2023.
The two incidents differ in many ways. Penny was found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Neely, and Mangione is accused of premeditated murder of a health care insurance executive, against the backdrop of widespread public disdain for the health insurance industry.
But vigilante narratives have been grafted onto both cases, with both men being publicly embraced — and even applauded in some quarters — for taking action against sometimes scorned figures: homeless people in distress in the subway and health care insurers, notwithstanding the deadly outcomes.
Scholars who have closely followed both cases said the public reaction showcases changing norms in the era of digital media, with even deadly violence by non-state actors becoming acceptable in certain situations. As the guardrails come off social and political discourse, viewpoints long considered fringe or callous are increasingly showing up in the open.
“There is a massive social shift underway,” said Brian L. Ott, a distinguished professor in Missouri State University’s Department of Communication, Media, Journalism and Film.
Ott said recent events pointed in an ominous direction. He added, “I think we’re going to see a dramatic rise in this kind of violence going forward.”
A nation that valorizes vigilante action
Kathy M. Newman, an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University who studies social formations and workers rights, said she was struck by the public response in the immediate aftermath of Thompson’s shooting death outside a Midtown hotel, particularly the “thousands and thousands of laughing emojis in response to the news of this death.”
“There was an outpouring of malice towards Thompson, the victim, and an outpouring of romance and support and almost love for the person who killed him,” Newman said. “That really took me by surprise.”
The glorification of the killer was widespread in social media and real life, including a look-a-like contest in Washington Square over the weekend, when the police manhunt was still underway. As the Cut recounted, many members of the public “started swooning” and compared the suspect’s features to those of actor Timothée Chalamet, with the reporter noting his “cute dimples, an impressive Roman chin, and a stunning set of pearly whites.”
Michael Asimow, a legal scholar and author of “Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes to the Movies,” said he was less surprised by the “eruption” of approval, noting that a “strong strain of vigilantism” had existed in the country since before the American Revolution.
“And it’s always been met with vast public approval,” Asimow said. “People think vigilantes are just great.”
He pointed to the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance, which formed twice in the 1850s during the chaos of the Gold Rush era and which he said was popular with the citizenry.
The nongovernmental organization policed the city, incarcerating and interrogating suspects, many of them immigrants, “without benefit of counsel,” wrote historian Philip J. Ethington in his book “The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco.” The group even carried out executions of prisoners, he wrote.
A modern-day villain
Asimow said that as the CEO of a massively profitable insurance company that reportedly issues more denials of insurance claims than any of its competitors, Thompson epitomized the industry and became a convenient modern-day villain – even if Thompson was a stranger to most of the public prior to his murder.
“‘The police aren’t going after him. He’s really invulnerable. So I’ll just deal with the problem myself.’ And people really like that,” Asimow said, summarizing the public sentiment.
He said the discourse after Thompson’s shooting bore some resemblance to the aftermath of the fatal encounter between Penny and Neely, who according to witnesses at Penny’s trial had been acting erratically on the F train before Penny intervened, putting Neely in a chokehold.
“The Penny case is another example in which people thought, ‘He’s dealing with subway crime, it’s something I’m really afraid of, the police can’t handle it.’”
A legal defense set up in Penny’s name grew to nearly $3 million within days, with tens of thousands of donors, including high-profile ones like then-presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican who gave $10,000. It has since grown to more than $3.3 million.
After Penny’s acquittal on Monday, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance wrote on X, “thank God justice was done in this case. It was a scandal Penny was ever prosecuted in the first place.”
But in the case of Thompson’s killing, Newman said, support for his assassin didn’t fit into neat political compartments. Yet, she added, “this is clearly an anger that is ready to express itself.”
Fears of the future
Scholars said the rapid changes taking place in the digital world made it hard to understand what the future holds.
Newman said things have changed significantly since earlier periods of political violence. She pointed to the 1960s and ’70s, when the Weathermen, a radical leftist group, detonated bombs at sites across the country, including NYPD headquarters, as statements against the Vietnam war and white supremacy.
Unlike that period, when the news was primarily filtered by a handful of network TV news anchors, the media landscape is no longer consolidated, and traditional gatekeepers no longer hold sway, allowing alternative voices and narratives to come to the forefront of political debates.
“I think we have something much more fractured,” said Newman. “I mean, as a media scholar, I haven’t fully wrapped my head around it.”
Although Asimow saw the recent episodes as a continuation of a longstanding American vigilante tradition, Ott argued something fundamentally different was now emerging, thanks to digital technology.
“The whole decentralized, networked nature of online communication is about there being no authority,” said Ott.
“And what networks share in common is that they’re non-hierarchical,” he said. “Hierarchy is precisely the thing in society that creates norms that people then abide by.”
Ott said as widely embraced norms, including the generally recognized prohibition against political violence, lose ground, “simplistic, impulsive, obstinate and amoral” views gain legitimacy. He saw Penny’s acquittal as part of this larger pattern.
“I think juries are increasingly sympathetic to arguments that people can in fact take actions into their own hands,” Ott said. “I think that that’s becoming the new social norm.”
He said the erosion of norms extended to the top of the nation’s political leadership, pointing to President-elect Donald Trump’s claim that he would pardon those convicted for the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol.
“That will absolutely send the message this kind of behavior is appropriate,” Ott said.
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