When the jury voted to acquit Daniel Penny yesterday morning, we can be pretty sure that their verdict came as a pretty big shock to Alvin Bragg, Dafna Yoran, and the rest of the Manhattan DA’s office. That’s because on Friday — just a few days ago — the jury announced that it couldn’t come to a unanimous verdict on Count 1, which is manslaughter. That meant that at least one juror was committed to voting “guilty” on the most serious charge. Nothing could change that juror’s mind, supposedly.

Logically speaking, that meant there was no conceivable way that the jury would ever vote unanimously to acquit Daniel Penny on Count 2, which was criminally negligent homicide. After all, Count 2 was a “lesser-included” charge. It’s not possible that Penny could have committed manslaughter, without also being criminally negligent as well. So if at least one juror was sure that Penny committed manslaughter, then of course, that juror would also be sure that Penny was criminally negligent.

That’s the logic that prosecutors were using on Friday, when they petitioned the judge to dismiss Count 1, and send the jury back to consider Count 2 by itself. It was unconstitutional and unethical, and they did it because they didn’t think it was possible that an acquittal would result. They didn’t imagine that their scheme would backfire spectacularly, because a juror (or multiple jurors) would change their mind from “guilty” to “not guilty.”

But that’s what happened on Monday. We don’t know why that happened. It could be that the juror who was in favor of convicting Penny realized, after the stunt that prosecutors pulled on Friday, that Penny was being railroaded. Or maybe the juror was bored and wanted to go home. The end result was that a jury of 12 people — mostly consisting of women, in one of the most Left-wing cities in the entire country — just voted to acquit Daniel Penny. They totally and unequivocally rejected the lie that BLM and the media had been pushing for more than a year.

For their part, BLM doesn’t appear to be deterred by this development. Here for example is Chivona Newsome, the co-founder of “Black Lives Matter of Greater New York.” She went off on a predictable anti-white tirade after the verdict. Watch:

There’s one line that really stands out amid that sea of overt race hatred, which was this one: “There is no one coming to save black people.” And that part is obviously true. There is no one “coming to save” black people. There’s also no one coming to save anyone, because people are responsible for themselves. That’s how life works. Black people need to save themselves and take care of themselves and their own communities. Same for people of all other races. That’s what it means to be an adult in a free country.

Although, in this case, Jordan Neely was given taxpayer-funded housing and healthcare at a treatment facility in the Bronx after he admitted to punching a 67-year-old woman. Prosecutors set him up there, instead of throwing him in prison. He abandoned the facility in less than two weeks, and shortly afterwards, began harassing people on Daniel Penny’s train. So in this particular instance, people did try to “save” a black person. And he thanked the community for its efforts by threatening to kill them all.

But as we all know, preaching the virtues of personal responsibility isn’t the best way to secure handouts in the grievance industry. So instead of doing that, Chivona Newsome decides to attack the jury. She basically says they’re all white supremacists. But the racial argument doesn’t even come close to making sense here, because the jury wasn’t all-white, as she admits. There was a black person, an Asian person, and a Middle Eastern person on the jury. There was also a guy wearing a COVID mask the entire time, and somehow, the prosecutors couldn’t even convince him to convict Daniel Penny. So if white supremacy is to blame here, it’s a very strange, multi-racial kind of white supremacy.

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For his part, washed up, former MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan did his best to contribute to that same narrative. He wrote:

Imagine, just imagine, if Jordan Neely had been white and Daniel Penny was black. Imagine what some of the folks defending Penny today would be saying. Just imagine.

Well, it turns out we don’t have to “imagine” this scenario. As an editor for Reduxx pointed out, last year — just a day before Daniel Penny was indicted — a black man named Jordan Williams stabbed a violent homeless man to death on a Brooklyn train. The homeless man punched William’s girlfriend and threatened other passengers before Williams eliminated the threat. It’s a very similar situation to the Daniel Penny case.

But there was no need for anyone on the Right to rally behind Jordan Williams, because he was never indicted. The DA didn’t pursue political charges in a transparent attempt to ruin his life. They reserve that kind of treatment for white defendants like Daniel Penny.

Of course, Mehdi Hasan doesn’t care about any of this. Neither does Jordan Williams. He recently called for the jury to convict Daniel Penny of manslaughter. He also claimed that Penny had attacked, “random people for no reason.” Just to reiterate: a guy who did the exact same thing as Daniel Penny publicly called for Daniel Penny to be prosecuted and convicted. And he said that, obviously, because Penny is white. These people are just blindly repeating the narrative to agitate as many people as possible, because historically, that’s all they’ve had to do.

That has been BLM’s strategy for the past decade or so. They’d recite some form of lazy, anti-white race hatred based on lies, and then the mobs would start rioting. But this time around, that’s not happening. There have been no riots in New York over this verdict, and it doesn’t look like there will be any. There were some protests last night, but they were, by historical standards, very small and subdued. One might even say “low energy.”

You get the sense that yesterday morning, BLM activists knew they weren’t going to get a particularly fiery response from the mob. So Hawk Newsome — the brother of Chivona Newsome and the other co-founder of Black Lives Matter Greater New York — had to come out and explicitly call for “vigilantes” to rise up. This is a bit like watching a movie and the director’s worried that you won’t get the subtext, so they just come right out and tell you what they’re trying to get you to do. And it’s just as embarrassing here. Watch:

As uninspiring and desperate as all of this is, it’s important to keep in mind that this ordeal isn’t over for Daniel Penny. He’s been acquitted of criminal charges, but Jordan Neely’s family is still suing him for negligence. They’re doing everything they can to bankrupt him. 

To that end, yesterday, Neely’s father appeared in public in an attempt to garner some sympathy for his case. Watch:

Neely’s father implores the crowd to do something about this alleged injustice that his family has supposedly endured. That’s an interesting way of phrasing it. As Neely’s father, he could have done something about it by raising his son, rather than abandoning him for his whole childhood — only to surface when he stands to make millions of dollars. Somehow Neely’s father never gets around to explaining why he only cares about his son now that he’s dead. Even calling him Neely’s father at all is vastly overstating the case. He’s more like a glorified sperm donor.

At this point, it’s not really necessary to go any further. The BLM activists have discredited themselves to such a degree that Manhattan juries don’t believe a word they say. Every side of the political spectrum understands that BLM is fundamentally an anti-human, anti-civilization and anti-white movement, and pretty much everyone is now roundly rejecting it. That’s why Daniel Penny was just acquitted. It’s why there are no riots.

At the same time, just because the BLM era is ending, that doesn’t mean everyone’s on board with the rule of law, and a stable, properly ordered society. In fact, the opposite is true. The aftermath of the assassination of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, makes that very clear.

When I talked about the killing last week, I explained why ghouls on the Left — like Taylor Lorenz and Columbia University professors — were celebrating Thompson’s murder, while mourning the death of Neely. In their worldview, Brian Thompson deserves to die because he’s white, rich, and powerful. But Jordan Neely, as a black career criminal, should be celebrated as a hero. This is an ideology that reveres the least productive members of society, while calling for the public executions of men who are actually earning a living and providing for their families. It’s an anti-white, anti-human ideology, and it must be rejected.

In response to my monologue, many people wrote in with negative responses in the comments on YouTube. Apparently, someone at Newsweek noticed this, and they wrote a whole article about it. It was a slow “news week,” I guess. And there are some comical paragraphs in this Newsweek article, too — which is what you’d expect from an article that’s devoted to a YouTube comments section.

For example, here’s one paragraph: 

Commentators like Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh are being told by their supporters that they’ve got it wrong when it comes to Thompson’s murder. … At least three users expressed to Walsh that even though they agree with a lot of his opinions, he was ‘dead wrong on this one.’

Yes, “at least three users expressed to Walsh” that I was “dead wrong on this one.” At least three users. Not a maximum of three. A minimum of three. The actual number of people who disagreed with me could be even higher than that. Newsweek is still looking into the matter.

But I’ll save them the trouble. 

Indeed, there were slightly more than three comments that were critical. Here’s one of them, which Newsweek quoted. This is pretty representative of the overall response: 

The fact that [M]att is trying to paint this as a left wing issue, when there’s clearly bipartisan celebrations going on, just goes to show how out of touch celebrities are, whether on the right or left, with regular everyday ordinary people.

So the contention is that I’m wrong to rail against Leftists for celebrating the public execution of a CEO, because in fact, people all over the political spectrum are celebrating the execution. And supposedly “regular, ordinary” people on the Right disagree with me.

Let me address this as directly as I can. As I said yesterday on X, if you are a conservative expressing any sympathy with leftists who are celebrating the murder of a businessman by some mentally deranged loser, then you are not a conservative at all. We stand for law, justice, and a stable, properly ordered society. Leftists want the opposite of all of that, which is why murder and mayhem in the street fills these sickos with orgasmic glee. If you’re on the right and you find yourself even slightly siding with a crazy wench like Taylor Lorenz on this issue (or any issue), it should tell you something very troubling about yourself. It tells the rest of us something too.

Again, that’s not to say that UnitedHealthCare is blameless. It’s not to say that healthcare in this country can’t be improved. I made all of that clear on Friday. At the same time, the fact remains that UnitedHealthcare doesn’t have particularly large profit margins, and they exist in a competitive marketplace with many other big insurance companies — all of which compete to cover claims without green-lighting every single expense that doctors want to charge. It’s not the ideal process, but it has to occur under our current system, or else healthcare costs will go even higher, the insurance companies will go bankrupt, and then no one will be able to get coverage. This is our alternative to a far more dysfunctional state-run system like Canada’s, which now regularly murders its own patients to avoid having to pay for their care.

So any problems with healthcare access and coverage in this country — and there are obviously problems — can’t be boiled down to this one company. It’s a larger issue that isn’t addressed by killing the CEO of this company, or of any other company.

But the important point is that, even if shooting Brian Thompson in the back would make UnitedHealthcare somehow operate more efficiently and ethically, it would still be a great moral evil to kill him. If anything distinguishes the Right from the Left, it’s principles like this. We don’t settle policy debates like Bolsheviks. Once you start down this path, then very quickly, civilization collapses. That’s why the Left is so thrilled about Brian Thompson’s execution. It’s why Taylor Lorenz is now giving television interviews where she says she’s giddy after the murder of a father and husband. Watch:

Again, if you see any common purpose with this person — if you sympathize with this obvious psychopath — then you have a problem. It doesn’t matter if you call yourself “Right” or “Left.” And by the way, if you’re on the Right and you find yourself nodding along with this psychopath while she expressed “joy” in first degree murder, please realize that Taylor Lorenz also feels the same way about you personally. She also thinks that it would be okay, even joyful, to murder you. That’s the person you’re finding common cause with. Someone who wants you dead. 

This is a matter of basic principle. The most basic. We are conservatives. We want to conserve, at the most fundamental level, civilization itself. Violent crime in the streets degrades and destroys civilization, which is why we oppose it.

One of the comments I received, for example, was about how I should, “read the room.” In other words, when the mob is bloodthirsty, I should join in — or at least not take issue with them. But it’s precisely when the mob is bloodthirsty that you need people to step up and say the truth. I don’t need to read the room to find out if I’m still opposed to first degree murder.

Since then, we’ve learned a lot about the man suspected of killing Brian Thompson, 26-year-old Ivy league graduate Luigi Mangione. The alleged assassin was arrested yesterday at a McDonald’s, and within just a few hours, we had access to all of his social media profiles, his GoodReads profile, and speeches he gave in high school. Meanwhile, several people that Luigi interacted with recently — including his friends and various social media personalities — have come forward to describe their conversations with him. It’s worth pointing out that we never got anywhere near this level of information about Thomas Crooks, who somehow evaded the Secret Service and very nearly assassinated Donald Trump live on national television. Thomas Crooks may as well be a ghost. But Luigi Mangione is all over the place.

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From what we know, Luigi comes from a very wealthy family in Maryland. His late grandfather has a real-estate empire that includes prominent country clubs and hotels, and he went to a high school that costs north of $40,000 a year. Luigi also appears to be psychologically disturbed, not that anyone should be surprised by that. He apparently dropped off the face of the Earth a few months ago, ignoring friends who were publicly asking where he was. 

In other words, there’s a very real possibility that Luigi Mangione — who had no clear direction in life — had access to more money than the CEO he gunned down in the street. He certainly came from a much wealthier family than Brian Thompson did. Thompson’s father was a grain elevator worker. He went to the University of Iowa and started his career as an accountant, before working his way up at UnitedHealthCare over the course of more than 20 years. And he was on his way to work at 6:40 a.m. when a mentally ill trust fund baby decided to murder him in the street. Apparently this trust-fund baby decided that murder was preferable to paying his bills.

This is the Left’s new hero. This is the kind of violent scumbag they’re aligned with. They’re on the side of Jordan Neely and Luigi Mangione because they’re driven by a barely-concealed desire to destroy the foundation of this country, which is the rule of law. That’s the common thread here. Either the rule of law applies to everyone — of all financial backgrounds, of all professions, of all races — or it doesn’t exist at all. It’s now clear that the Left would prefer that we abandon the rule of law, in order to accelerate the end of the United States.

But for our part, conservatives are not Bolsheviks. We are the only bulwark against these arsonists of civilization. We stand for what’s morally right, regardless of what the mob demands. And the morally correct position here, obviously, is that Brian Thompson’s murder was evil. It shouldn’t be celebrated in any way. You can either conserve basic moral principles like that, or you conserve nothing at all.