Merriam-Webster defines a vigilante as “a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law are viewed as inadequate).”

There can be loner vigilantes, of course. If, say, someone Penny cared about was harmed by a mentally ill homeless man, and he started riding the subways looking for mentally ill homeless men to take vengeance on, that’d be vigilantism. …

Indications are that Penny (and his fellow passengers) sincerely believed Jordan Neely, suffering from untreated mental illness, was a threat to people on the train. There’s still much we need to know about the particulars of the case, but the impulse to protect others is deeply admirable and rare. …

What progressives are doing is taking praise for someone who stepped up in a difficult circumstance and twisting it into something perverse, dangerous, and racist.

[This is nothing more than an attempt to gaslight everyone into thinking that the disastrous results of the progressive justice “reform” are entirely benign and that the streets and subways are as safe as ever. They want to paint Penny as a racist lyncher to cover up just how badly the cities are degrading and declining in areas where prosecutors refuse to prosecute and let dangerous people back out onto the streets and subways. Neely was a very good example of the problem. — Ed]