December 13, 2024 10:36 AM UTC

Trump, Boebert Love Them Some Vigilante Violence

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• by: Colorado Pols

As NBC News reports, Daniel Penny, a Marine veteran now infamous for having choked to death a Black man who was allegedly threatening passengers on a New York City train in 2023, is getting the A-list treatment from President-elect Donald Trump and sidekick J.D. Vance after his acquittal on negligent homicide charges this week:

Daniel Penny, the man who was found not guilty in the chokehold death of Jordan Neely, will be the personal guest of Vice President-elect JD Vance at the Army-Navy game on Saturday.

Vance and Penny will watch the game from Trump’s suite at the Washington Commanders Stadium in Landover, Maryland, at 3 p.m. ET.

“Daniel’s a good guy, and New York’s mob district attorney tried to ruin his life for having a backbone,” Vance wrote in a post on X.”I’m grateful he accepted my invitation and hope he’s able to have fun and appreciate how much his fellow citizens admire his courage.”

We recognize that opinions of this case are not unanimous and do not divide cleanly along partisan lines, and it’s not our intention to second-guess the jury’s verdict. What we can say is that the defendant Penny believed what he did was necessary for his immediate self-defense and the defense of his fellow passengers, and the jury agreed.

But Colorado’s foremost congressional controversy-seeking missile, Rep. Lauren Boebert, sees something bigger:

It seems unlikely that Rep. Boebert believes “we fight back against the woke mob” by attending this weekend’s Army-Navy game. What Rep. Boebert appears to be saying is that the way to “fight back against the woke mob” is to…choke them to death. That’s an assignment we can only hope Daniel Penny would decline, since it reaches well beyond the scope of his defense of fellow subway passengers.

Lauren Boebert is of course no stranger to rhetorical excess, which is in no small part responsible for her meteoric rise. In a national political environment increasingly defined by such excess, even calls for violence from sitting members of Congress get lost in the din.

But here is another one for the record.