To the Editor:
In his recent column, “Stop glorifying Luigi Mangione,” Daniel Cheong ’27 woefully mischaracterizes not only the discourse surrounding the alleged killer, but also American culture and protest as a whole. Cheong attempts to reduce nearly all sympathy expressed for Mangione as being a result of his good looks and “TikTok edits.” Cheong does not, for a moment, discuss the issues within the health care industry that investigators say motivated Mangione’s alleged crime. In fact, the word “health care” does not appear once in the entire piece. Regardless of how you feel about Mangione, it is unconscionable to not even acknowledge the immense anger Americans, across the political spectrum, feel toward the health care system. By ignoring that anger, Cheong conflates the people who fawn over Mangione’s looks online with the millions of Americans who have been victimized by a broken system.
What I take primary issue with is Cheong’s gross misrepresentation of American history and culture. Cheong describes America as having a “national obsession with revolution” and states that “Americans have a great deal of respect for the revolutionary spirit.” Cheong seems to live in a world where protesters are universally revered as national heroes. Unfortunately, in the real world, Americans who engage in protest have historically been despised and branded as enemies of the state and have had immense violence wielded against them — violence of the very same kind that Cheong condemns in his column. The military has been deployed to crush labor strikes. Leaders of the Black Panther Party were assassinated and imprisoned by the government in response to their revolutionary ideals. Joseph McCarthy made a career of witch-hunting “communists” on baseless claims about anti-American activity. There are countless more examples. To ignore these facts and pretend as though America is a nation of revolutionaries is to spit in the face of history.
Finally, and most disturbingly, Cheong attacks his peers at Brown who have the courage to protest injustice. He suggests that students who have engaged in pro-Palestine protests at our school may be motivated by a vague sense of “excitement” rather than an actual passion for the cause they advocate. As a student who has been arrested on campus for protesting in support of Palestine, I take immense offense at Cheong’s derision. His skepticism is by no means unique: polling shows that the American public hates student protestors. Thus, by questioning the integrity of those of us who dare to care about a cause, Cheong undermines his original thesis: Would student activists be so widely disliked if America was truly a nation of revolutionaries? Perhaps I lack the “intellectual sophistication” to know the answer.
Sincerely,
Garrett Brand ’26
