[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
A mob of leftists wearing green ‘Luigi’ caps and waving banners about ‘fascism’ celebrated, danced and hugged each other on a Manhattan street after terrorism and first-degree murder charges were thrown out against the leftist killer of a health care CEO.
Judge Gregory Carro argued that Luigi Mangione was wrongly being charged as a terrorist since the radical terrorist’s objective “was not to threaten, intimidate or coerce, but rather to draw attention to what he perceived as the greed of the insurance industry.”
Luigi’s means of drawing “attention” was murder which is the definition of terrorism.
The dozens of leftists crowding the narrow sidewalk outside the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse less than a dozen blocks from Ground Zero testified to the fact that Luigi Mangione was a political terrorist, part of a radical movement, killing on behalf of a larger cause. Why else was a mob wearing ‘Free Luigi’ t-shirts and caps associated with a Nintendo video game character hanging around an unappealing stretch of Center Street that not even a feeble attempt to stick a mostly unused park between the courthouses and government buildings could make livable.
It also brought home the ongoing leftist support for the “assassination culture” highlighted by Charlie Kirk before his murder and by the leftists cheering his killing across social media.
Luigi’s leftists had gathered early Tuesday morning, bringing sleeping bags, along with books about Communism and “Mansplaining’, and bottled water and Gatorade brought from nearby businesses in Chinatown run by elderly men and women who had fled Communist China.
Many had a good deal in common with Luigi Mangione: a rich kid turned radical. After all, no one who works for a living could just take Tuesday off and hang around Lower Manhattan.
Above all else, they wore their green ‘L’ caps like berets from a 60s militant organization. The reference to the Mario Bros video game cartoon character named ‘Luigi’ was typical of the hipster meme pop culture that the woke left, the woke right and Charlie Kirk’s killer had been marinated in. What had been pop culture irony for Gen X is tongue in cheek terrorism for Gen Z radicals who use pop culture references and memes to make murder and hate seem playful.
Gen X had used pop culture to tweak real world concerns while Gen Z radicals borrow pop culture to make their horrible politics seem cute, dressing up Communism and Nazism in cartoons, in Mario and Luigi, or in anime characters, for overgrown malicious children dreaming of a world in which WWII or the Cold War had gone very differently.
“Justice will prevail,” a skull and crossbones sign brandished by one man read. “Whoever wins this war becomes justice.”
In Manhattan, that had already happened. And that meant justice would not be done.
By the time Judge Carro threw out first degree murder charges against Luigi, the crowd had moved on to another of the micro-parks usually occupied by Chinese senior citizens playing board games on stone tables or court workers grabbing some Mexican food, where they clapped and awkwardly danced, but mostly taped each other, immediately uploading the spectacle they were creating to social media so they could take credit for it all.
But Luigi’s fan club had nothing to do with it.
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, a pro-crime prosecutor so radical that even Soros associates emailed me to disavow him, who came into office and in his Day One memo had ordered prosecutors not to pursue prison sentences for many crimes including armed robberies and told them not to ask for life sentences, had botched an easy case from the beginning.
Whether deliberately or through DEI incompetence, no one knows.
Judge Carro had previously given a pass to Mary Saunders, a woman who took part in her family’s murder of an Afghan war vet, and let her off with time served, and gave only 15 years to a transgender man who murdered a mailman at a deli after claiming that the man had misgendered him. Carro justified the light sentence for the transgender murderer who had previous offenses because “proving someone’s intent to kill is always difficult”.
Generally stabbing someone in the chest and neck indicates an “intent to kill”, but not to Judge Carro. And killing a member of a group as part of a political cause is generally terrorism.
But, once again, not to Judge Carro.
There was no evidence that Luigi Mangione had intended to “intimidate and coerce a civilian population” while murdering a civilian or that he had “made any demands of government or sought any particular government policy change, let alone that he did so by intimidation or coercion,” Judge Carro falsely claimed even as outside a mob was doing just that.
Luigi Mangione even wrote that the purpose of the murder was to “win public support”.
“There is no indication in the statute that a murder committed for ideological reasons (in this case, the defendant’s apparent desire to draw attention to what he perceived as inequities or greed within the American health care system), fits within the definition of terrorism,” the judge argued.
If murdering people for ideological reasons isn’t terrorism, what is?
The judge dismissed Luigi Mangione’s own stated “revolutionary anarchism” as insufficient evidence that he intended to “influence the policy of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion” and then argued that CEO Brian Thompson and the 400,000 employees of United Healthcare could not “constitute a ‘civilian population’”.
If trying to intimidate 400,000 civilians isn’t terrorism, again, what is?
While Judge Carro may not have been wearing a green ‘L’ cap, his argument is suspiciously similar to the rougher one being made by the ‘Free Luigi’ mob outside.
Rather than following the law, Carro chose to read the most sympathetic interpretation into Luigi’s writings. “The defendant’s apparent objective, as stated in his writings, was not to threaten, intimidate, or coerce, but rather, to draw attention to what he perceived as the greed ofthe insurance industry,” the judgewheedled. “The defendant emphasized that he wished to spread a ‘message’ and ‘win public support’ about ‘every.thing wrong with our health system.’”
And, most significantly to the judge, the terrorist didn’t believe he was a terrorist.
Judge Carro argues that “the defendant explicitly contrasted himself with Ted Kaczynski, the ‘Unabomber,’ because he ‘indiscriminately mail bomb[ed] innocents,’ and ‘cross[ed] the line … to terrorist, the worst thing a person can be.’”
The judge admits that a “defendant’s own characterization of his conduct is of course not dispositive,” but apparently dispositive enough to ignore his actual crime, his writings about the crime and the mob of leftist supporters outside, and drop first-degree murder charges.
Under second degree murder charges, Luigi Mangione will be eligible for parole.
Federal charges will likely preclude him ever seeing daylight again, but it’s hard to say.
What is more apparent is that the radicals in their green ‘L’ caps were only the tip of an iceberg when it came to support for the leftist assassin within the leftist political system. New York’s truly powerful leftists didn’t put on costumes or wave signs, they just abused the system to aid Luigi.
