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This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online, and more personal info in places that could expose you to identity theft. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second. If your identity is stolen, their US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with Lifelock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply. Luigi kills a man on purpose. He's good. Daniel Penny tries to stop someone from hurting others. And he's bad. Support for the Chris Cuomo Project comes from Everyday Dose. Look, we all want to perform at our best mentally and physically. Sometimes habits don't set us up for success. Everyday Dose, it's coffee, but better than coffee. Since I started drinking Everyday Dose, I can get through my day and I get more consistent energy. I don't need the hits the way I did, you know, another cup, another cup, another cup. And there's not that roller coaster. Caffeine crash and gut. Health for me is everything. And the mushrooms, collagen, it's like a one, two punch for keeping me regular and feeling good. The taste is legit. It's smooth, rich. It's actually got more of a creaminess than drinking black coffee. And it's definitely coffee flavor. None of that dirt water stuff that I've tried with some others of the mushroom drinks. So head over to everydaydose.com Chris for 25% off plus five free gifts with your first order, including a USB rechargeable frother helps. It helps, definitely thickens it up. I like it. Every month after, you're gonna get an amazing free gift with your order, so go to Everyday dose. D o s e.com Chris, you get 25% off plus five free gifts with your first order. Support for the Chris Cuomo project comes from Select Quote. Look, so much in life is uncertain and the older I get, the more comfortable I am with my decision to have life insurance in place to take care of my family. All right? Now, the problem is it's complicated. You know, there's so many sales pitches, there's so much pricing, there's so much variability. That's why I am so happy to partner with Selectquote. It's one of America's leading insurance brokers. 40 years of experience, they've helped over 2 million people find over $700 billion in coverage since 1985. Head to selectquote.com and a licensed insurance agent will call you right away with the right policy for your life and your budget. Select quote they shop, you save. Get the right life insurance for you for less at SEL. Selectquote.com Chris C Go to selectquote.com ChrisSee today and you get started. Selectquote.com Chrissie Support for the Chris Cuomo Project comes from Cozy Earth. Look, I use the bedding, okay? I even have a set of the jammies. I'm not a big jammies guy like Greg Ott is. He has all these different jammies with footies and all these things. Not my thing. But they are really cozy and I wear them around the house. And the sheets are just no joke. You want your Cozy Earth pajamas by Christmas, you better order by December 13th. And by the way, you'll get free shipping. Oh, no, I missed it. You can still get expedited shifting until December 20th. That way you get in there in time. Don't wait. Go to cozy earth.com Chris use my exclusive code, Chris. You can get up to 40% off. That's crazy. Give the gift of luxury this season, okay? It's the holidays. Do it right. Cozyearth.com Chris if you get a post purchase survey, please tell Cozy Earth that you heard about them from the Chris Cuomo Project podcast. It'll help us keep doing business. I'm Chris Cuomo. Welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project. And I'm trying to figure out who we're becoming, and you probably are too. So let's take a look at these two young men and these two cases, these two situations, and try to figure out how they make any kind of sense about what is right and wrong in society anymore. Now, here's the good news. This is not a new frustration or question. H.L. mencken. Do you know that name? Henry Lewis Mencken. End of the 1800s into the early, almost mid-1900s. Journalist, thinker, philosopher, huge influence on society. Then Baltimore native, talking about life and virtues and society. A lot of the same grievances that we have now. Corporate class, rich, poor, morality, how to change things, institutional failure. So the good news is these struggles may suck and the attendant problems and issues may be really frustrating and self limiting. Meaning that they hold back the individuals who worry about them. In fact, they hold back society. But they're not new. So the idea of well, I never. Yeah, now the only well, I'll never, I'll give you is I can't remember an assassination of somebody who wasn't a terrorist. Now I guess I gotta put an asterisk on that because of how Some of you see healthcare companies and I'll get into that. Where the person who did the assassinating of a non criminal. And again, asterisk, because a lot of you believe that every health insurer is a criminal organization was celebrated. I hate that Luigi Mangione, or Mangione as they call themselves, although that's not how you'd say it in Italian, but that's all right. I hate that the kid is Italian with that Italian a name, especially when you know, it just. It just adds to more bad stereotypes. When this guy, it's not like he was living the Italian experience. He was living the uniquely American, wealthy, generational wealthy experience. I'll get into that. So let's just go back and forth. You know the facts of the two situations. Luigi Mangione, 20 something, becomes disaffected. Maybe it was partly because of an injury, maybe it was just because of what he was feeding his head. But very smart guy winds up killing a healthcare CEO because he believes that he had to make a statement against the system. Daniel Penney, young guy, got known as the Marine. He is a Marine, but he was only. He was in and out. But they're using it as some kind of like suggestion. He's a trained killer, is on the subway. Passengers, including females, are freaked out by a homeless black guy who comes on, who's threatening them. Not saying, give me money, give me money, but saying, you know, violent things. And he doesn't care if he goes to jail, puts him in a chokehold and he dies. Those are the basic things. You can look them up. But there's not much need for fact analysis here. Luigi kills the CEO, that's good. Penny kills a black homeless man, that's bad. Why? Well, because Luigi was killing a bad guy and Penny was killing a good guy. No, I mean, I don't mean to judge somebody for being mentally ill. That doesn't make you good or bad, that makes you sick. But Neely was actively harassing people and making people feel that they were going to be hurt. But Penny's bad for getting involved, but Luigi is good for getting involved because healthcare CEOs are an extension of the establishment and the elites who are oppressing us Now. Healthcare as an industry to me gets separate consideration and analysis than other corporate grievances. And I'll deal with it in depth in a different episode. But it's not the same as how they fuck you at the drive through. It's not the same as credit card companies. It's not the same because it's about Your health and how they commoditize and make profitable, figuring out how healthy you should be, that makes them different. Fine, but we're assuming that Brian Thompson was a bad actor in this because they all are. But the same assumption is not being offered up to what Neely represented in this equation. Now, what's interesting is part of that is because Neely is black, if Neely is white, I don't think we even have this conversation. I don't think Daniel Penny gets charged. Now, that's interesting. Why? Because the black side of the argument, although it shouldn't be broken down this way, and I don't like that the media is doing it, but that's the way that it was explained. I think that you don't have to be black to have an affinity to black suffrage and the injustices that are sometimes systemic, sometimes episodic in our society. I think white people can be allies. I think when white people go too far and pretend that they too are victimized because they support those who are, that's adopting an oppression. And that can get a little toxic. We've seen that also, because that's what Luigi did. But one step at a time. Well, the argument goes that if Neely were white, Penny would have been convicted, but because he's black, he wasn't. The opposite is that if the homeless guy was white, then you wouldn't have had the black argument that it's racist if he doesn't get charged. And maybe then Alvin Bragg, the prosecutor, a person of color who does like to traffic in racial politics, wouldn't have charged him because a lot of people thought he wouldn't be charged. And then you look at on the other side. What if Daniel Penny was black? Well, then he would have been shot 50 times by everybody in the subway car because a black man can't do anything violent and get away with it. If you look at the statistics to the extent that we have a racial component when it comes to crime, you will see that minorities commit more crime against other races. Now, does that mean that minorities are racist in terms of who they pick to victimize? I don't think so. I think it's more socioeconomic. But if you're going to look at it as well. Do we have a problem with race and crime? To the extent that we do, it does not paint minorities in a good light. Because the problem, if we're going to put race into criminality, it's hard to make the argument that white people hurting black people never get punished as if it's A racial disparity issue. When it's black people hurting other races, that happens more often. Now, I happen to accept, acknowledge and agree with the idea that systemically black people do not get the benefit of fairness under law as the majority does. I believe that, and I believe it's very complicated. And I believe that's why you gotta be careful about trying to mete out a measure of comeuppance or of correction in a given case, like the Daniel Penney case. One, I don't think you fix the racial imbalance by punishing the people who tried to control Jordan Neely. Jordan Neely is not the face of the victimized black man by the justice system. I don't agree with that. Knowing Jordan Neely's background, I think he is the face of how our society deals with mental health or doesn't deal with it and sets people up to fail and creates. Makes them monsters and makes them bad because they're sick. But I don't think that any black guy can be Jordan Neely. That's not true. They're not mentally ill. They're not on subways harassing people. And in very extreme ways. Okay, this wasn't give me money, give me money again. It was, I'll kill you, I don't care if I go to jail. Closing distance. You know, it made a brown guy very nervous and he helped Daniel Penny hold him down. But all of that is seen as wrong because even if the circumstances required it, it was too much. Yet that analysis is not being applied to the CEO case. Because even if you want to assume that all healthcare CEOs are bad, right? Which would be the same kind of stereotype that we don't want applied to Jordan Neely, it's still okay that Luigi took this guy out. And indeed, if you are concerned and motivated by the idea of the established, the privileged, the elite, getting away with shit, getting over on the rest of society. Luigi is the picture of privilege. White by today's standards, though profoundly ethnic in his name. But being Italian American is not being a minority, certainly. And is not being an ethnic anymore. Not like it was for his grandparents generation, my parents generation. So he is a white guy, rich. No small irony. How'd they get rich? Healthcare. So he assassinates a healthcare CEO, yet celebrates the wealth and prosperity of his own family that made their fortune off of health care. And this does not in any way subdue the support for him. So he is the picture of the elite. No, no, no. I'm just mad at the healthcare companies. No, you're not. No. You're not the same people who are saying, fuck the insurance companies. Say, fuck everything that's corporatized, and fuck the elites and fuck the privilege. But not this guy when he checks every box because he did what you like. Now you sound just like a MAGA person where all your values, all your character, all your right and wrong goes out the window when you find a change agent who does what you want done but don't feel you can do it yourself. Support for the Chris Cuomo Project comes from Get Maine Lobster. Oh, the holidays. It's all about making them special, right? Well, what's more special when it comes to looking down at that plate than getting Maine lobster? I'll paint you a picture. It's Christmas Eve and all through the house. No, none of that. Certainly not a mouse. Find a mouse in my house, you know where you're going to find it? On a glue trap. But I'll tell you, here's what you will find. A table filled with people talking about why they love each other, talking about what's good, laughing about what's not, and enjoying food, especially to an Italian American family. Man, we love it. And I gotta tell you, you crack open a fresh, sweet lobster, especially like us, we're all water people. What's better than getting a taste that takes you straight to the coast of Maine? Get Maine Lobster. Has everything you need. Lobster rolls, lobster tails, whole lobster feast. I feel like Bubba Gump. Plus, as a listener of the Chris Cuomo project, you get 15% off all orders storewide with the promo code Cuomo. That's right. 15% off the freshest lobster you'll find anywhere. So this season, create new memories. Make it extra special by adding a touch of Maine to your holiday table. Visit getmainelobster.com use the promo code Cuomo and you'll get 15% off all orders today. Support for the Chris Cuomo Project comes from Shopify. Listen, my friends, success in selling comes from a business and how often that business behind the business gets it done for that business. What does that mean? It means that you need people to help you get your wares where you need them to be. They work with untuck it. They work with Death Wish Coffee. So when you think about a business that sells through the roof, like aloe, Allbirds skims. Yeah. Yeah. They must have a great team. Yeah. What they have is the business behind them, known as Shopify. My brothers and sisters, upgrade your business and get the same checkout that Untuck it uses sign up for your $1 a month trial period@shopify.com Chris C All lowercase if you please. Chris c. Go to shopify.com chrissie upgrade your selling today. Where shopify.com Chris C. So Luigi is the picture of entitlement who assassinates a man who is the picture of the American dream. Brian Thompson is all self made. He is exactly what you say you want a reward in society. Oh yeah. But what he decided to do, you don't know what and how Thompson did his job. You look up United Healthcare and him as the CEO. Well first let's start with the fact that and I will take this on in an entirely different episode. I'll give you just a little hint. I am on the precipice of litigation against the healthcare company right now for my own family's situation. I get it. Oh no, you don't get it. No, I get it better than most of you. Unless you are someone who's had your life ruined over the course of years by a health insurance company. Okay. But most of you are not that okay. I've covered it for over 20 years. You go back and Google GMA gets answers. I don't know why ABC News is an amazing organization but they take all their stuff offline. I don't know why, but go. You'll find transcripts and stuff. Slow walking claims. How they pick their experts, how they do their pricing, the lack of transparency, how they do their billing, how it's an entirely separate industry, how little transparency there is in what your plan covers and does not. How they make the language and the prescriptive nature of it so hard to understand and abstruse by design so you don't know what you're getting into. Pharmaceuticals. Same thing with transparency of pricing. The idea of the later administrative costs of a system that is fundamentally empowering, a middleman where we don't need one. And eschewing the idea of a single payer system. Why? Well, just to support a corporate class. Gee, I wonder how I know all that if I don't give a shit about it and don't understand it. I've been covering it for a long time and I gotta tell you, it hasn't meaningfully changed. Except ironically by the ACA who enforced Obamacare. That enforced preexisting conditions which is a huge way they used to get them. They wouldn't even want to give me life insurance, let alone what they would charge me for health insurance because I smoke an occasional cigar. All right, I can jump up on a pull up bar and do 15 of them right now. Run a mile in under seven minutes. But I shouldn't be insured because I have an occasional cigar. Come on. So I get it. This is not about the system. This is about a society that has forgotten what to reward and what to punish and no longer knows what it is becoming. Penny kills the black homeless man bad. Luigi kills the CEO good. But Luigi is the picture of entitlement, Ivy League everything else. Living in Hawaii on his parents dime to figure out his best self. Thompson is a self made guy, Comes from nothing, achieves the American dream, gets killed by the privileged guy. You take the privileged guy's side well. But the healthcare business is actively menacing people and Luigi stepped up. Neely was actually actively menacing people and Penny and others stepped up. But that doesn't get rewarded. If Neely was white, this wouldn't happen. If Luigi were black, one, he'd have a very weird name for that guy. But would he be celebrated the same way? If Luigi were a black man, would he have the same fans? I actually believe maybe. Maybe. Now here's a. Here's one for you. If Brian Thompson were black. Now how do you feel about what happened? If Brian Thompson is a black CEO fighting his way to the top of an absolute boys club of white males and he gets shot by an Ivy League white kid. Now what I think it changes the analysis and I think that's really, really wrong. And what I'm trying to distill for you is that we have gone from principles to triggers. And the problem with the distinction for me is a lack of consistency and completeness. Look, sometimes you can get triggered by something that activates your feeling about a principle or a. More. Okay, but sometimes the trigger is just what it is. You have a reflexive response to something, but it's not a consistent principle. Again, think about that. If the healthcare CEO were black and Luigi shot him in the back of the head and said these people are parasites. I don't know that he has the same fan base he has now. He has some of them. He has some of them. He has the white really radical hate the corporate class guys, even though they're forgetting that Luigi comes from it. But I think it changes it. And that means that we're not valuing the right things. If Luigi was black, would he be celebrated? Maybe, maybe not. If Thompson was black, would Luigi be celebrated? Because now you fall more into what Daniel Penny was about. Murder by assassination to make a point is okay. A guy trying not to kill someone to help others. It's not okay. And it results in his death accidentally. Accidentally, not okay. Do you see the inconsistency? The argument for why they are not inconsistent would be that the victim in one, the deceased in one, was a bigger problem than the death of them, how they died. So Neely is a victim because he wasn't doing anything that warranted killing him. But Brian Thompson did deserve to die because of what his company does. His company killed so many people. Now that is a characterization of something that's going to be really complex. Now, certainly it's not as simple as that because you would have a lot more history of litigation against insurance companies criminally, right? Not just civilly for wrongful death. And even then, they're very rare. Why? Because it's a business. So you have to play by their rules. And it gets you back to the point that then, well, why is it a business? Huh? Okay, now we're talking. But I'll tell you what, we'll never make it. Single payer, government sponsored. That's socialism. Well, maybe, maybe it is, maybe it is socialism. But unless you're going to just run away from a label, you got to look at what the net effect is of it on society. I'll tell you what one effect would be. Much higher tax burden for the rich. Much higher. Is that going to happen? Nope. Did you make it more likely that it might happen by killing a rich guy? Nope. What you did was make sure that a lot of CEOs are making people who run security companies a lot of money because they're all going to get security now. And you have lost the moral high ground of the fact that they are doing the wrong thing as part of their profit profitability model. And you've actually made it less likely that there's going to be change because you've taken some of the sting out of. Look what you're doing to people because they get to say, look what you just did to him. Look what you just did to Thompson. We're supposed to change what we do that is lawful for people who are just vigilantes. And by the way, they're not even a vigilante because where's the justice in it? You killed a man who by all accounts is a good man who was self made. This is the problem with honoring Luigi is that you wind up hurting your stated goal of having the system get to a better place. Similarly, by condemning Penny, you are making the change that you seek less likely because you are punishing the wrong thing. You're just making it so that the next time a guy like me is on a subway and sees something that they should try to stop, they won't. Because God forbid I get this guy and he's got these health conditions or whatever it is, or I'm choking him the wrong way or for too long and he dies. I'm going to go to prison for the rest of my life. Fuck it. Let him punch the woman in the face. Is that what we want? I don't think so. If you don't change the way we want to, we get to shoot you in the head and make you do that. Is that who we want to be? Is that what we want to be becoming? I don't think so. But the reason I say I don't think so and instead of of course not, is I don't decide. You decide. The collective decides in terms of what it rewards and what it punishes. Right. In a very subtle way. This is what we were dealing with with Cancel Culture. And why is it dying out? Well, because it wasn't consistent. It wasn't based on a real principle. It was just the opportunism of bold faced names. And how do we know this? Well, go back. Did anybody ever check the different entities that were involved and whether or not they changed in a way that women specifically feel safer and easier and to report what happens and free her to move up without restriction of any type of harassment? I don't know. Neither do you. Nobody ever went back and figured it out. You took down the bold faced names. A lot of people got paid out a lot of money for things that a lot of other people thought were complete bullshit and not worth it. What got better? I don't know. I hear people all the time saying that they're slow to hire women, especially if they're attractive. They'll never say that in public. And by the way, they don't even want to say it when they find out who I am or that I was there. And I definitely don't agree with their answer. I mean, you know that just by looking at my staff, it's almost entirely female, right? It's overwhelmingly female. I don't know. I've never. I didn't specifically count, but the it is now I will count. So how many guys do I have? I got Tom, I got Ron, I got James. Who am I forgetting? I got Ben. He's like one of my main producers. I don't like him, so I kind of buried his name. Kidding. Yeah, I mean, maybe a third. So what's the point? I obviously don't agree with not hiring women, we need them. But reaction formation as a principle of what you are becoming. Looked at through the lens of these two cases, it seems that we don't know what we're rewarding and what we're punishing anymore because we don't know who we are and what we want to be. Well, we don't want corporate class to do what we're doing. Listen, all you have to do is spend five minutes researching the history of change in society. Unless you are trying to throw off a violent oppressor. Violence is almost never as effective for long term sustainable change as nonviolent resistance. I mean, look, look at our own example here in America. What's the biggest systemic change we've seen in my lifetime, let's say, or in the modern era? It's gotta be the end of Jim Crow and the move towards racial equality, right? I mean, that's gotta be the biggest systemic change that affected our overall culture. The two pieces of litigation legislation in 64 and 65, how was that achieved? The violence was all on the side of the people who wanted to keep it the way it was. They lost to people who were committed to non violence. Martin Luther King and a generation of people. That's how they did it. Gandhi overthrew British rule through non violence. The Velvet Revolution. There's a lot. I mean, there was some violence in the Velvet Revolution, but it was largely nonviolent. Shooting people in the head is not going to make the change that you seek now. Does that mean that there shouldn't be change? Well, you made it harder, but I think that you have to now kind of raise the specter of the desperation of this situation. And does that make me worried that I'm going to be rewarding an assassin's dream? Yeah, that. Now when I start talking about how, look, people are pissed at healthcare for good reason, it's just he did what he did for bad reason. I kind of am rewarding it. I am kind of saying that he gave it the attention. Who are we becoming? Daniel Penny is your kid and Luigi is your kid. Which one do you support? I mean, do you even have to think about it? I mean, of course you can't quit on your own family, but Daniel Penny didn't want a bad outcome. All Luigi wanted was a bad outcome. And yet he is a folk hero and Daniel Penny is being attacked. Why? The simple answer is the perspective on who was killed. The black homeless man who was mentally ill and menacing people on the subway somehow shouldn't have been Killed because blacks get a hard time. The CEO who made his own success and was doing nothing wrong gets assassinated and it's good because his company denies people care in a way that people hate. I just don't see the through line of what kind of functioning society that is. It's just based on preferences of likes and dislikes that don't always makes sense. Who are we becoming? When you look at it through the lens of these two cases, it doesn't make sense to me. Am I surprised Penny got charged? No, not by Alvin Bragg. And you have a dead guy and he was choking him for many minutes. Would I have been surprised if he wasn't charged? No. I would have had to think about it and I would have thought that, wow, that's impressive of that grand jury to not charge him. Do I think it was the right verdict? Yeah, the way they came about it was a little weird and kind of makes me feel the jury quit on it, but understandable and yeah, because if you don't have an intent to kill somebody, you're not a murderer. And Jordan Neely put himself in the position for this to happen. He wasn't a hapless victim. And the Luigi case, I mean, I am really trying to see it from the perspective of the people who are saying this is a good thing. And I just don't know how they get there. So you tell me, because now I feel that changing healthcare is going to get harder, not easier. And I think we got to think about who we're becoming. You tell me, what do you think? I'm Chris Cuomo. Thank you for subscribing and following being part of the Chris Cuomo project. These are tough questions and the instinct is to have a snap judgment about it, but that's you being triggered, not necessarily being thoughtful and being a critical thinker. So play it through, figure it out and then let me know. I'll see you at News Nation AP 11p Eastern every weekday night. If you like this, but you don't like the ads, go to the substack. You want to wear your independence, go get the free agent gear and show that you're not going to be co opted by some poison party. My friends, problems are real. You can't be passive. Let's get after it.