Imagine two 26-year-old men. One is a Marine veteran who grew up in a working-class neighborhood on Long Island and is now in architecture school. The other is a scion of a wealthy family with two Ivy League degrees in computer science.

The veteran, Daniel Penny, was acquitted on Monday in the death of a homeless subway rider who was threatening passengers, saying, “I will kill.” The other, Luigi Mangione, is charged with the pre-meditated murder of a health insurance executive. Mr. Penny is lionized on the right and joined President-elect Trump at the Army-Navy game this weekend.

Mr. Mangione is emerging as a folk hero for some on the left. TikTok is ablaze with videos hailing him a “sexy” anti-capitalist champion of the common man against a corrupt and greedy health insurance industry. GoFundMe removed fundraising campaigns for Mr. Mangione’s defense on its crowdsourcing platform. Another defense fund on the platform GiveSendGo has surpassed $115,000.

What can a study of contrasts between Messrs. Penny and Mangione tell us about the state of young men today? Friends and family describe both as bright and well-liked. They took divergent paths — with different motives — but both wound up in the criminal justice system.

Hero Mythology

Mr. Mangione’s social media indicates he doesn’t fit as neatly into the left-right binary as initial reports — or his fans — suggest. He gave the Unabomber’s manifesto a four-star review on Goodreads and re-posted to X content from the social psychologist and Heterodox Academy co-founder, Jonathan Haidt, and “manosphere” health podcaster, Andrew Huberman. He posted about typical young tech bro concerns — artificial intelligence, fitness, psychology, and drugs — and about “toxic masculinity” and the underappreciated role of men in society.

“If you want to understand men better, just look at all the movies they’ve made, books they’ve written, and games they invent when they’re young,” Mr. Mangione re-posted to X in April. “In the end, he rises above, he wins, he conquers. He conquers first himself and then the threat. … This is the heart that society is trying so hard to quash.”

Mr. Mangione fashioned himself the hero in an epic battle with a health insurance behemoth. He allegedly sought out his victim and pre-planned every detail of his crime for mythic effect, scrawling “delay,” “deny,” “depose” on the shell casings of the bullets and leaving Monopoly money in his discarded backpack in Central Park. Despite his academic pedigree, though, his manifesto shows a facile understanding of American healthcare spending, health outcomes, and the role of insurance. 

Pathologizing Masculinity

“Many boys want to see themselves as heroes,” a psychologist and physician who’s written extensively about the crisis facing boys, Dr. Leonard Sax, tells the New York Sun. “They may seize on bad ways of doing that, and that’s my understanding of what happened here with Luigi Mangione.”

Mr. Mangione re-posted in 2023 an excerpt from “Of Boys and Men,” a book by a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Richard Reeves, on why men are struggling to keep up with women in a society that has moved so far to create equality of the sexes that it prioritizes women to the detriment of men.

Denying biological differences when it comes to boys’ later brain development or increased sex drive and aggression may be politically correct, Mr. Reeves argues, but it’s harmful. Men are falling behind women at all levels of education. They are increasingly dropping out of the workforce in the prime and succumbing to alcohol, drugs, and suicide — so-called “deaths of despair.”

“When it comes to masculinity, the main message from the political Left is that men are acculturated into certain ways of behaving (generally bad ways, of course, in this version), which can therefore be socialized out of them,” Mr. Reeves writes. “But this is simply false. Men do not have a higher sex drive just because society valorizes male sexuality, even if it does. They have more testosterone. Likewise aggression.”  

“This suggests he had some insight into what was going on in his head,” Dr. Sax says of Mr. Mangione re-posting Mr. Reeves. “Throughout the 20th century there arose this idea that we need to deny any sex differences because the notion that girls and boys are different has been used as an excuse to limit opportunity for girls. I understand that. But denying the reality of differences between girls and boys has ultimately led us to a bad place.”

When masculinity is pathologized, it’s more difficult for men to understand their role. Mr. Mangione’s X post about society trying to “quash” the hero impulse could have also been written about Mr. Penny. Jurors acquitted Mr. Penny in the chokehold death of Jordan Neeley, yet those celebrating the not-guilty verdict worry that prosecution of him will itself deter other men from stepping forward in similar crises. Those condemning the verdict say Mr. Penny got away with “a modern-day lynching” and suggest he should have pacified Neeley instead.

“The criminalization of masculinity has such a dastardly impact on society and on men’s ability to say, look, this is what we were given the testosterone for — to stand up and protect women,” a journalist, Batya Unger Sargon, said on “The Megyn Kelly Show.”

The ‘Manosphere’ Speaks

Trump won male voters in part by appealing to men’s masculinity and appearing on “manosphere” podcasts like “The Joe Rogan Experience.” The Democrats chose Governor Walz as Vice President Harris’s running mate and tried to paint him as the beacon of a new masculinity that prizes guns but also women’s and trans rights. He earned the nickname “Tampon Tim” instead.

After years of the left trying to eliminate sex differences — the trans debates being the ultimate expression of this — Trump’s “Fight! Fight!” with his fist raised had real appeal to men. The politics of Americans younger than 30 are bifurcating by sex, as women increasingly identify as liberal, while fewer young men do.

The last time Mr. Mangione posted to X was in June. A fit and seemingly athletic man, he underwent spinal surgery at some point in the last year and friends and family report that he cut off all contact around this time. This injury also reportedly made him unable to have sex, an emasculating condition for a man in his prime.

Going Dark

A meme that went viral about a year ago shows women asking men, “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?” The joke is that men are constantly thinking about it. They are starved for meaning and long for a time when men’s strength and heroics were valued.

Mr. Mangione reposted a thread in March about the fall of the Roman Empire, shortly before he went dark. It’s unclear what he did in the past six months or whether he had some kind of psychological break, but he mangled what it means to “conquer himself and then the threat.” He is accused of killing a man in cold blood and left two boys without a father. If convicted, he will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.

Mr. Penny didn’t plan the events that brought him into the spotlight, but he understood his purpose and rose as a man to meet the occasion. “I would not be able to live with myself if I didn’t do anything in that situation and someone got hurt,” he told Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro. 

Despite the unfortunate death of Neeley, a jury came to the same conclusion. In a society that denigrates masculinity, the difference between heroism and vigilantism is harder to discern. Mr. Mangione’s fan club isn’t making it any easier.

This article has been updated to clarify details about the crowdsourced platforms used to raise funds for Mr. Mangione’s legal defense.