After an extremist organization called Al-Awda gathered outside Manhattan’s Park East Synagogue explicitly to intimidate Jews interested in moving to Israel—“We need to make them scared,” one demonstrator repeatedly yelled, while others called their targets “Jewish pricks”—New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani said exactly what he was supposed to. “Every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation,” he said through a spokeswoman. That’s the law at the federal and state level.
But then the spokeswoman continued. “These sacred spaces,” she said, “should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.” The synagogue was hosting an event with an organization that helps Jews make aliyah, or move to Israel, something many Jews consider one of the Torah’s 613 Commandments. That might sound uncomplicated, but the organization in question includes the contested West Bank in its definition of Israel, and it’s ostensibly this inclusion that drew the protesters—and Mamdani’s addendum.
Indeed, his spokeswoman later clarified that the statement only referred to Jews moving to disputed territories. But this, and the arguments around Mamdani’s comments, glossed over Mamdani’s wink-and-nod approach to intimidation. Politics has a long tradition of hypocrisy, featuring leaders who speak like statesmen and act like … well, like politicians. That is what we got from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who characterized the demonstration as “shameful and a blatant attack on the Jewish community”—but won’t take the logical next step of ordering an investigation of the terror-supporting group that organized the lawlessness.
But we got something more sinister from Mamdani: a small act of recontextualization that adds caveats to prohibitions we once thought absolute. He chips away at sacred cultural norms in a way that no less a political philosopher than Louis C.K. explains best:
Everybody has a competition in their brain of good thoughts and bad thoughts. Hopefully … the good thoughts win. For me, I always have both. I have, like, the thing I believe, the good thing, that’s the thing I believe. And then there’s this thing, and I don’t believe it, but it is there … it’s become a category in my brain that I call ‘of course … but maybe.’ I’ll give you an example, OK? Like, of course, of course children who have nut allergies need to be protected. Of course we have to segregate their food from nuts, have their medication available at all times, and anybody who manufactures or serves food needs to be aware of deadly nut allergies. Of course! But maybe … maybe if touching a nut kills you, you’re supposed to die! Of course not, of course not.
“Of course it’s illegal and wrong to intimidate Jews outside a synagogue. Of course! But … maybe …”
A minimally refined person—any adult—should recognize that tinkering with moral intuitions is a dangerous game. In a sense, having well-formed and stable moral intuitions is the essence of adulthood. Having developed solid moral intuitions, we can be trusted with power, with radical free speech, with cars and weapons and liberty. A child fails to appreciate how crucial those intuitions are and, impatient with the roadblocks our hard-and-fast rules impose, finds ways to rationalize overcoming them.
It might be alarmist to identify the tinkering Louis C.K. describes—and Mamdani embodies with winking implication—as the raw material of revolutionary violence, but there is reason to analyze it in that context.
Mamdani may have included the dig against the synagogue because he really believes it, or to appeal to his leftist followers. One way or another, he knows there is a significant constituency that eats such garbage up. Case in point is the cult of Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson who has won untold numbers of fawning admirers. As John H. Richardson’s new book, Luigi: The Making and the Meaning, makes clear, prior to the murder, Mangione was simultaneously thoughtful and inquisitive, yet adrift and adolescent. He was unable to accept the world, doomed as it was—in Mangione’s thinking—by technological displacement, alienation, and other ills exacerbated by scarcity and inequality.
To be clear: Mamdani is not a murderer and bears no responsibility for Thompson’s murder. At the same time, he and Mangione, and more importantly the constituencies that have arisen to support them, have something in common: their conviction that dramatic gestures can substitute for the hard work of persuasion and reform. Once the sludge of accumulated intuition is cleared, lashing out appears the height of sophistication, an expression of elevated consciousness unavailable to sheep like the rest of us.
It’s a small problem, all things considered, that there are man-children who would discard millennia of civilization brick by brick as part of a tantrum about unfairness. It’s a huge problem that the supposed adults in the room are more interested in humoring them than putting them in timeout. In Mamdani’s case, enough people in New York City were willing to look past his refrain that he’d like to seize the means of production and conspiracy theories about Israeli influence everywhere that he was elected mayor. And in Mangione’s case, a sympathetic ecosystem has revealed itself willing and able to rationalize and even lionize murder, as though we’re supposed to breeze past the decision that condemned Thompson’s children to grow up fatherless and engage with the underlying frustrations, as if Mangione had a serious claim—as some lawmakers implied—to self-defense.
“Of course it’s wrong to kill a man because you don’t like the industry he represents. Of course! But maybe …”
The appetite for a figurehead like Mangione predated his heinous act. Luigi: The Making and the Meaning, published—by Simon & Schuster, no less—barely 11 months after Thompson’s murder, exemplifies this pattern perfectly. The book is incredibly hard to read, but not for the usual reasons. It is beautifully written and never boring. But page after page, it searches for different ways to avoid the only conclusion it should: Murder is wrong, and people celebrating murder should be ashamed.
It wanders from justification to justification, but it is not aimless. It is the magnum opus of the effort to reorient our moral intuitions toward accepting cultural-political vigilantism as a legitimate form of activism. Like the conspiracies that now animate the Carlsonian Right, Richardson’s examination begins by “just asking questions.” Rather than feigning interest in facts, which is right-wing conspiracists’ preferred method of distortion, Richardson indulges philosophical exercises that sound profound but amount to sophomoric false choices. Is Mangione a martyr or a menace? A techno-pessimist who perceived the bleakness of our AI-commanded future, or a revolutionary simply acting on principle? The questions themselves are the evasion, and they are the point. They innocuously suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t rush to judgment, because context matters. This young man’s feelings and motivations deserve our careful attention before we condemn him.
This is the political equivalent of gentle parenting. Rather than steering our culture away from a destructive path, we’re invited to validate the big feelings that led to the tantrum, to understand that Mangione’s frustration with the health care system was real and deep, that his sense of powerlessness in the face of corporate indifference drove him to desperate measures. Never mind that when Thompson’s children went to bed on December 3, 2024, they did so as normal kids, and by the time they woke up they were fatherless. Gentle parenting performs empathy on the cheap by pretending to confuse a lack of emotional regulation with insight.
The comparison does not end there. What makes this revolutionary posture so fundamentally juvenile is not just its impatience but its astonishing ingratitude. Richardson’s book returns again and again to Mangione and his supporters claiming they’ve tried to reason with us about injustices in American health care, that persuasion has failed, that nothing short of dramatic action can pierce our complacency. Yet they have mistaken their inability to persuade others for the impossibility of reform itself. It is emphatically not impossible to change our health insurance system. It happened in our lifetimes. The Affordable Care Act was an incremental change, and one may think it is insufficient or even a step in the wrong direction. But it proved that change in that massive and complex sector is possible. And it was a very big deal.
This is the pattern with children: They see only obstacles, never progress; only their own powerlessness, never their own inexperience. Like children, too, they hold themselves blameless while finding fault everywhere else. We’re victims of rapacious billionaires, they insist. The system is rigged. They’ll never listen to us. Nothing will ever change. This is the language of the temper tantrum dressed up as perceptive radical analysis. It absolves the speaker of any responsibility to engage seriously with the world as it is, to understand how systems actually function, to grapple with tradeoffs and unintended consequences. It’s also just flat wrong. Yet the children of the revolution cannot fathom that perhaps their arguments aren’t as persuasive as they imagine, that maybe other people have heard them and simply disagree, that democracy’s whole point is managing these disagreements without violence. The revolutionary option is appealing precisely because it’s simple. You don’t have to do the unglamorous work of coalition building, of compromise, of accepting partial victories and tradeoffs and incremental progress. You just identify the villains and mark them as legitimate targets.
There is genuine suffering within our health care system. Bankrupting medical bills, arbitrary denials of coverage, and bureaucratic indifference to human pain are real grievances that demand real solutions. But the leap from recognizing injustice to endorsing murder is not a proportionate response. It’s a chasm of moral reasoning so vast it reveals not desperation but a real failure to grasp what’s at stake. We can study why young progressives feel so hopeless that they flirt with violence without pretending the violence itself deserves anything but contempt. Understanding a phenomenon is not the same as validating it.
There is something so childish about lashing out with violence, being unable to grasp the magnitude of tragedy when a father is stolen from his children. I don’t expect Mangione, in his state of arrested development, to understand the reverberations of his alleged actions. But we should expect adults, especially those like Mamdani who hold positions of responsibility, to know better. We can expect publishers and commentators to recognize the difference between believing a cause is righteous and making excuses for abominably anti-social behavior in its service.
What we have gotten, instead, is condescension. For implying that a synagogue was to blame for intimidation campaigns against it, Mamdani’s team merely had to clarify that illegal demonstrations are acceptable when Jews want to move to the West Bank for the whole thing to blow over as a run-of-the-mill politician’s statement. Richardson can write a sympathetic biography of an alleged murderer within a year of the crime, marshaling evidence to contextualize and even justify the act, and a major publisher sees the project through. Mangione himself can become a celebrity, a public philosopher whose writings are mined for deeper meaning, and we’re invited to engage with the phenomenon as if it represents legitimate political expression rather than the breakdown of civilization’s most basic prohibitions.
It’s gentle parenting for revolutionaries, and the further erosion of moral intuitions is what results. Not through argument, but through accumulated gestures of understanding that slowly shift what seems acceptable, like a toddler who knows that enough screaming will earn him TV time.
Whether Mangione had legitimate grievances or whether the health care system needs reform, or whether the organization at the synagogue that night espouses anything controversial is immaterial. The only relevant question for reexamining our moral intuitions is what kind of world we want to live in. One with due process, fair warning, and clear rules about what sort of conduct is illegal and not? Or one where vigilante violence will be excused as zealous activism, where illegal conduct earns a wink from the mayor and a shrug from the public because the victims have the wrong opinions?
The sympathetic treatment of Mangione and the casual moral erosion in Mamdani’s comments about the synagogue protests, while not the same in degree, both point in the same direction. They suggest a growing appetite for a world characterized by the juvenile impulse, where the patient work of persuasion and reform is short-circuited by those sufficiently convinced of their own righteousness.
Adults know better. Adults understand that civilization’s moral intuitions, however imperfect, are what make peaceful coexistence possible. And they understand that you don’t have to re-deduce the prohibition against vigilante murder each day anew. Our intuitions are not the thoughtless impulses of sleepwalking masses but the lifeblood keeping us from descending into a war of all against all.
Sorry if this makes me a boring grown-up, but I’ll take the rule of law, liberalism, and social peace. I’ll take the world where mothers don’t have to explain to toddlers that daddy isn’t coming home because someone else’s child could not bear the world’s persistent injustices even one moment longer. The alternative is a society where moral intuitions fade into obscurity and the thin veneer of civilization gives way to something far darker. We’ve seen glimpses of where that leads. We should have no interest in seeing more.
