EXCERPT > Guilty Pleasures: Luigi Mangione and the making of a folk hero
“Throughout recorded history, killers and thieves become folk-heroes when injustice becomes law. Political protesters, rebel leaders and religious martyrs all get their moment in the big story of a species trying to civilise itself, but folk heroes break the moral and social code as well as the law. They are thugs and gangsters and bandits. They rob and rape and murder. They don’t faff about with conventional morality or common decency, and people love them not in spite of those things, but because of them.
… Trump has never in his seven grasping lying decades told it like it is. He’s popular because he tells it like it feels. He told half of the American people ‘I am your vengeance’. He promised to hurt and humiliate the people they had decided they were allowed to hate, and he delivered. He’s not the only grifting populist whipping up orgiastic disaster nationalism to waft himself into high office – but as C-suite executives bump up their security, his handlers might consider exactly what it is they have unleashed. Populist violence is simple to weaponise, after all, but difficult to contain, and it doesn’t point the way you want it to forever.”
_______________________________________
Read full essay on Substack: https://lauriepenny.substack.com/p/guilty-pleasures
* * *
Laurie Penny (aka Penny Red) is a journalist, an essayist, a screenwriter, an author, a novelist and a game designer. She has been a journalist for fifteen years and a writer all her life. She reports and writes columns and features about politics, pop culture, technology, mental health, sex and gender and social change. She is a fellow of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and a graduate of the Clarion West Writers’ Programme. She’s written for The Guardian, Wired, The New York Times, The Independent, The Baffler, and Time Magazine, to name a few. She’s been a contributing editor at New Statesman magazine and at The New Inquiry, and has written nine books.