COMMENTARY: The upside-down mentality of the left

The biggest stories in the national media recently both came from the mad streets of New York.

The manslaughter trial of Daniel Penny, the young man who accidentally killed a crazed homeless man on the subway, and the cold-blooded assassination of a health care CEO on the sidewalks of Manhattan, both deserved the saturation coverage and commentary they received.

But the way in which the stories were spun by the left-liberal news media shows what a sick, upside-down mentality exists in the United States.

In the case of Penny, it’s safe to say Fox News and conservative media of all types treated him like the hero he was.

When Jordan Neely popped into his subway car and started threatening people and acting like a mad man, Penny did what you would expect — and hope — any ex-Marine would do. He tackled Neely, put him in a strong chokehold and held on to him until police and paramedics arrived. Sadly, the multi-troubled Neely died at the hospital.

Also sadly, instead of hailing Penny as a citizen hero, the city’s grandstanding prosecutor Alvin Bragg put him on trial for manslaughter and criminal negligent homicide, ruining Penny’s life for more than a year.

Because Neely was Black and Penny was white, the ugly issue of race was always part of the story. One of the top race-baiters in the cable media, Joy Reid of MSNBC, griped that Penny’s acquittal was just the latest example of the systemic racial injustice in our legal system.

Others equally blinded by skin color said Penny was a racist because he never would have subdued a white guy — skipping the fact that several men and women Neely was threatening in the subway were Blacks or Latinos.

Neely was a victim of bad parenting and his city’s broken mental health system and civic chaos. Penny’s political trial, though an unnecessary political stunt, ended in the best way possible. Justice was served by the judge and jury and 95 percent of Americans would agree.

We’ll have to wait to see what happens to Luigi Mangione, the bright and proudly evil young man who has been arrested for assassinating United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Details are still coming out about the motives and politics of the 26-year-old Ivy League grad who apparently has had health and mental issues of his own and doesn’t fit in any political box.

Mangione’s cold-blooded hit made left-wing nutjobs such as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Sen. Elizabeth Warren do moral backflips — and make fools of themselves. They tried to explain that, while of course violence is wrong, what Mangione was pushed to do was understandable because our health care system is so systemically unfair.

Online thousands of anonymous knuckleheads submitted their own moral depravity, cheering for Mangione, buying “Free Luigi” shirts and calling him a hero for shedding light on the terrible crimes of insurance companies.

Even hinting at the idea that it is the bit understandable or excusable to murder a health care CEO to protest the failings or unfairness of our health-care system is not just immoral, it’s insane. By that twisted logic, to protest higher gasoline prices in California, it would be OK to gun down the CEO of Exxon. And to protest high inflation or the failure at the southern border, it would be OK to ...

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to reagan@caglecartoons.com.