Two vigilantes

 

In May 2023, Daniel Perry took down Jordan Neely, an erratic homeless man who was making wild threats on a New York subway car. Perry then killed Neely by strangulation.

Police reacted nonchalantly to the Perry-Neely killing, at first letting Perry go without charges.

In December 2024, Luigi Mangione fired bullets at the back of a prominent accountant, Brian Thompson, who was minding his own business on a midtown Manhattan street.

Police mobilized an intense manhunt for the Thompson killer, with the police commissioner appearing daily flanked by a phalanx of top NYPD officials vowing to track down the threat to the business district’s reputation for safety.

Perry’s defense fund quickly raised $1.5 million from people who cheered his permanent removal of the subway ranter. Tabloid news coverage noted that he was an ex-Marine, more for the heroic aspect than the implication that he knew how to kill people.

Other New Yorkers were uncomfortable with the extreme action. Dealing with unhinged riders on the underground trains is a daily occurrence for anyone who rides them regularly.

While we’re always wary of how things can get out of control, nearly all of the mentally ill passengers are merely exasperating. (There are exceptions.) We give them a wide berth or move to another car.

The hundreds of uniformed NYPD and MTA agents swarming the platforms don’t ever seem willing or authorized to do anything about the assorted monologuists and dazed spirits. One occasionally sees security talking to a lost soul in the station, getting them to stand up from their squats, or nudging people unconscious on the platforms or sound asleep at the system’s terminal stations.

But I have never once seen police climb onto the subway itself and remove someone causing a disturbance, (illegally) flogging chocolates to every rider one by one, or preaching The Word to a captive audience.

I’d support them if they did.

I’d be even gladder if the city ever figured out how to attend to the untold thousands of mentally ill people who have taken up residence in the subway system in the absence of anywhere else to go. We certainly spend enough city cash on policing the place with the very inadequate results we all can see.

Perry was acquitted yesterday just as Mangione was nabbed at a Pennsylvania Macdonald’s. The latter can expect to get a multi-decade sentence for his act and didn’t seem terribly eager to get away with it, given his indifference to the horde of incriminating evidence he was still carrying around.

From early accounts, Mangione was moved to commit homicide by the state of our health payment system, which empowers people like his victim to engage in financial legerdemain that enriches accountants while denying people the healthcare they pay enormous sums to obtain—sometimes resulting in their deaths.

Maybe he’ll express disdain for the judicial system that lets people off while the elites get away with, well, murder.

Assassination is not a good way to address injustice (ask the Mexicans). Then again, when other avenues are cut off, we can’t be surprised to see it occur.

 

The Biden Crime Family and its loyal claque

How appropriate that the Biden Era should begin with a shadow state maneuver to protect the Big Guy from the damning contents of Hunter’s laptop by declaring it a Russian fake news operation and end with the pardoning of the family bagman. 

Predictably, the clapping seals on state media like MSNBC immediately mobilized to justify it. These debased sycophants who assured us that Joe was compos mentis (until suddenly he wasn’t) signed up to shill for him even as he poked a stick in their eyes. All those solemn promises that he wouldn’t exercise the pardon power turned to dust, but hordes of media comfort women (and men) rushed to his defense in exchange for nothing. A self-respecting sex worker at least demands payment. Maybe they’ll get book contracts.

None of the commentators have much to say about the 10,000 non-violent offenders still in federal prison for marijuana possession who are not, so far, the beneficiaries of a Biden pardon. Instead, we hear about how we should respect family feeling though obviously not every family.

After all that panic about Trump being a dictator-in-waiting, virtually the new Hitler about to seize power, we see that none of it was to be taken seriously. Joe, playing the part of Hindenburg, welcomed The Donald to the White House with a broad grin, as one capo di tutti capi entertaining another. 

The aghastitude over January 6 that we were supposed to see as an attempted dismantling of the Constitution (which it certainly was) turned out to be a big, phony wrestling match as far as the outgoing crowd is concerned. If 1/6 truly mattered to Biden, he wouldn’t have given Trump a golden invitation to use the pardon power to free all the day’s rioters by arguing that they were unfairly targeted, just like Hunter. The moral high ground, if it ever existed, is gone.

Hunter’s laptop, as we now know, was completely genuine and had a slew of data about his dubious business dealings as well as distracting sleaze. But the politicized FBI went to Capitol Hill and lied about it, for which it merits the sound thrashing that I fervently hope will be forthcoming at the hands of nominee Kash Patel. How luscious that the citadel of jughead white dudes should be thoroughly scoured by a dark-skinned guy who thinks half of them should be behind bars. They should have pushed Biden to close Guantánamo before Trump gets the idea of sending them there. 

Some of my liberal friends will probably leap to the defense of the FBI since it was so reliably anti-Trump during the Russiagate scandal, which was a far worse assault on the constitution than Watergate. It was even worse than the January 6 circus, in part because 1/6 only lasted one day while Russiagate was a 4-year campaign by intelligence and police agencies to undermine an elected president. Trump seems determined to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and if the Revenge Tour is properly directed, it could be very healthy. (Trump should also get a food taster.)

I remember the old FBI that snooped on every left-wing social movement under COINTELPRO, kept files on our protected political activities, and helped murder Black Panther Fred Hampton in his bed. But those days seem forgotten now that the security-intelligence apparatus boosts the fortunes of Democrats, and erstwhile radicals scurry to hop onto the party’s tail and help wag it because Trump is a threat to “democracy.” (No matter that people voted for him.) 

Biden’s pardon of Biden fils covers anything he did all the way back to 2014, precisely the date of the Maidan coup that brought a NATO handmaiden regime to power in Ukraine. Joe was on the scene immediately, even chairing a foreign country’s cabinet meeting IIRC. It was also the year Hunter got a $60K per month gig sitting on the board of Burisma for which his sole qualification was shared DNA with a powerful oligarch. 

How convenient for the neocons who wanted to use Ukraine to push war with Russia to have a willing partner busily extracting millions for his family accounts from the place and easily kept in line for the pursuit of their geopolitical games. The Sullivans and Nulands could rest assured that no annoying attention would be paid to the interests of U.S. citizens in getting ourselves involved in yet another expensive war based on the fantasy that the American military is the “greatest fighting force” in world history and more than a match for the “gas station parading as a country.”

Living in Lalaland is fun until reality intrudes. It will soon be impossible to ignore the fact that the expensive weapons we pay our left nut for don’t work and that we’ve sent a million Ukrainian men to their deaths for nothing. The deals available in 2014 (Minsk 1), 2015, (Minsk 2), 2022 (Istanbul), and even as recently as last year when the Ukrainian counteroffensive failed would have left Ukraine with an intact state and a chance for neutrality and eventual reconstruction. Now, it will be lucky to exist at all. Meanwhile, they continue to send untrained kids into doomed battles to be slaughtered by the thousands.

Trump’s loony-tunes advisors like the deranged friend of MI6 Sebastian Gorka will help him bluster into further stupidity and makes things worse. The collapse when it eventually comes will be dramatic; the finger-pointing should be quite a spectacle. But the Bidens will be long gone, their foreign accounts intact and their deals beyond the reach of investigators and prosecutors. Historians will have to uncover the saga of the crime family whose surname doesn’t end in a vowel, and Biden will die in his bed. May the rest of us be so lucky.