Vigilante Killers/Heroes of the Right and Left

Karl H Christ
3 min readDec 23, 2024

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Right wing politicians choose to lionize some of the strangest and often terrible people. They’ll take killers and decide, based on a forced interpretation of the conditions in which they killed people that justifies murder, that these people are heroes. They don’t do this for just anybody. Ideally, and almost invariably, the killers are white, and the people that they kill are not white or they are associated with actions counter to right wing white capitalist hegemony. They are, as a rule, proponents of fascism, whose violent actions are driven by fascist ideology and which uphold fascist notions of order.

Kyle Rittenhouse became a darling of the Right when he crossed state lines to gun down antiracism protestors in a city in which he didn’t live and to which he had no apparent connection or any right to be patrolling with an assault rifle. By portraying Rittenhouse’s victims as rioters, and therefore being legitimate targets of vigilante violence, regardless of the fact that they were unarmed, and absent any proof that they’d committed any crime, right wing media and politicians portrayed the little psycho as somehow being an underdog hero and champion of American values.

They’ve done similarly recently with Daniel Penny, a former marine who choked a mentally ill unhoused Black man to death on a New York subway. Jordan Neely was having a mental health crisis and had threatened other passengers on the train. In that context, Penny’s decision to act could be justified. His argument, echoed and amplified by the right wing machine, was that he was protecting the other passengers. His supporters, either incredibly credulous or biased by animosity towards the unhoused, mentally unwell, and Black people, don’t question the method Penny used to “restrain” Neely. There are dozens of ways to restrain or incapacitate a person that are not fatal. Penny chose a fatal method, choking Neely until he died of asphyxiation. He could have gotten assistance from other people on the train, a couple of whom can be seen trying to help in the video, and several of whom tell Penny to let Neely go, that he’s killing him.

The Right is not alone in celebrating vigilante killers. However, it’s not the supposed left-wing political- and media-sphere lionizing them. As we’ve seen in the case of Luigi Mangione’s killing of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, it’s the people who champion the killer, in outright opposition to the statements of political representatives and the media. While Democrats decry Mangione’s action, the people write anthems, make merch, and donate to his legal defense fund.

A big difference between the two sides is that the Right is united in celebrating their killers. The rabble of everyday jackoffs obediently support the killers their leaders tell them to, while the Left makes its own decisions and celebrates a killer in opposition to what their ostensible leaders say.

The biggest difference, however, is the way in which one side clamors to uphold a failed system while the other blames it as the true enemy. In each of these examples, and in many others, the root cause of the violence is a structural failure of governing forces in US society, whether that be law enforcement, mental healthcare, or the health insurance industry, all organized under capitalist principles. The Right directs its anger at individuals, people it views as a threat to the status quo, while the Left is ultimately in opposition to that status quo, identifying it as the cause of national suffering and violence.

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