Caroline Downey

Ralph Lauren's whole life has been a love letter to his country. • This article is part of Upstream , The Daily Wire's new home for culture and lifestyle.

The show suggests that Luigi Mangione is not some calculating monster but a principled man and a reluctant (alleged) killer. •

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.***Step aside “Chicago,” there’s a new show in town that glamorizes celebrity criminals. Featuring alleged sex trafficker Sean Diddy Combs, convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, and alleged assassin Luigi Mangione, “Luigi: The Musical” brings all three together in a supposed satire comedy.I walked in with an open mind, assuming the show would lampoon the trio and the fact that they were once all housed at the same Brooklyn prison, the Metropolitan Detention Center. Musical theater doesn’t necessarily shy away from tackling sensitive subjects and sacred cows. “The Producers,” a musical by Jewish filmmaker Mel Brooks, includes a love song to the Third Reich, “Springtime for Hitler.” “The Book of Mormon,” written by the creators of South Park, roasts the Church of Latter-day Saints. Surely, “Luigi” would mock its subject as well. It turns out, it only pretended to do that. On Thursday night in Hell’s Kitchen, I learned that the crowd was attending not just to laugh but to show their support for a certain message.“It tells you a lot that this place is packed,” the guy next to me said. “It was bad what he did, but the CEO wasn’t a good guy.” He said his office is on the Midtown block where the shooting took place. The girl behind me in line to get into the venue said the show had been such a blockbuster success in Manhattan that it added two more show times. Safe to say, there were a lot of Mangione sympathizers in the house. They were eager for validation, and the show delivered. The first signal of the show’s agenda came when Mangione broke out into a humorous ballad that quickly turned serious. Titled “All for a Smile,” the song details how Mangione was ultimately caught by authorities because he pulled down his mask at a youth hostel check-in to smile at a staff member, exposing his identity to the security cameras. “I shouldn’t have bought those hash browns,” the actor laments about his character’s subsequent visit to a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, where he sat brooding over a table with his manifesto and the gun he allegedly used to commit the crime. “A martyr’s life is what I chose,” he belts with an indignant passion. The show’s tone suggests that Mangione was not some calculating monster but a principled man and a reluctant killer. I realized halfway through the show that the intention behind including the disgraced music giant and crypto entrepreneur in the story was so they could serve as foils to Mangione’s more noble motivations. Desperate for fame and fortune, Bankman-Fried and Combs are peas in a pod, while Mangione is the odd one out in this band of misfits. The rapper and the nerd exchange witty banter that culminates in their (fictional) gay relationship. While Bankman-Fried defines “venture capitalism” as investing in startups in exchange for capital, Combs remarks that he basically does the same thing by investing in the potential of his strippers. As they formulate a prison escape plan, Bankman-Fried muses that they could finance their heist through a “classic pump and dump,” by which he means artificially driving up the value of an asset and then shorting it for quick cash. Combs says that he too is familiar with the pump and dump, but that it means something different at his Hamptons white parties.All these clever double entendres are meant to show that whether white collar crime or sexual exploits, it’s all the same evil. Those two fiends were hungry for money, power, and pleasure. Mangione, on the other hand? He is simply accused of gunning down a father and a husband in cold blood for the altruistic purpose of avenging victims of the healthcare industry (who apparently don’t understand that buying insurance doesn’t mean the company covers every claim). That was the obvious conclusion of the show. As an Australian guy I talked to put it, speaking about Mangione and Combs, respectively, “This one’s warranted, and this one’s nasty.” I questioned him about Australia’s nationalized healthcare system, which he praised as quite functional. He suggested nothing violent would ever happen in Australia because of grievances with corporate greed. Maybe not, but it recently experienced antisemitic terrorists spraying bullets at Jews celebrating Hanukkah on the beach.When I asked if there were long wait times to see a doctor in Australia, the guy replied, “Oh, yeah.”That’s a major caveat of universal healthcare that progressives in America haven’t had to endure and therefore haven’t given much thought to. Nowhere in the show was the necessary nuance about why our healthcare system is so convoluted and seemingly capricious. Like, the fact that government intervention has overcomplicated it six ways to Sunday. The coexistence of government programs and private insurers forces healthcare providers to navigate a complex labyrinth of billing codes, rules, and claims processing, making administrative expenses account for nearly 25% of all healthcare spending.With tears in his eyes, Mangione reads letters from fan girls and fitness chads with serious injuries and medical conditions, treatment for which their insurance companies denied. The show ends with the prison guard taking Mangione to solitary confinement, where he confesses in soap opera fashion that he, too, requested coverage for a debilitating health problem that United Healthcare denied. Moved by Mangione’s cause, the guard gives him his gun back to bust out of the clink. Prison corruption and murder to own the health insurance complex!The claim that the musical was a satire was a massive stretch. It’s not a satire if it picks and chooses which characters, all of whom did or allegedly did very immoral things, to criticize. It was whiplash-inducing to keep up with when the left-wing editorializing starts and stops. The most abrupt transition comes after the prison guard has at length justified Mangione’s vendetta with his sob story. With a lyric that lands as more sincere than satirical, the final song proclaims, “We’ll shoot everybody until there’s peace on earth.”***Caroline Downey is a columnist and video personality at National Review. She is also a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and a 2025-2026 Novak fellow with the Fund for American Studies.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.***The “Call Her Daddy” podcast empire is built on intellectual deceit, teaching that promiscuity is freedom and that a woman’s prime years should be spent mastering how to manipulate men sexually instead of discerning dating and marriage. It’s no wonder that the company’s internal dynamics reflect the toxicity of the propaganda that’s been peddled since the beginning.Several young women who once idolized Alex Cooper and her vision for a feminist media company are now disillusioned after working for her directly. In an incriminating report published by Vanity Fair, sources that include over 20 former and current employees of the Unwell Network, the parent organization of popular podcast “Call Her Daddy,” revealed that the sisterhood was not at all what it was marketed to be. While maintaining a public boss-babe image, Cooper allegedly deferred to her domineering husband on business matters and managing personnel. Instead of encouragement, verbal abuse and boundary-crossing were what the female staff said they experienced. But why would they expect to get professional nurturing from Cooper? Right from episode one, titled “Sext Me So I Know It’s Real,” Cooper sets up a relationship with her listeners that is sabotage masquerading as mentorship. To be fair, the show’s description says of its cohosts: “In their 20s, the two exploit the f*ck out of their lives, making you feel a hell of a lot better about yours.” It was a bit like reality TV but with some self-awareness, in which the actors know they are making fools of themselves for your entertainment value. No doubt they drummed up the provocative outbursts — such as “you’re just a hole” — to generate more buzz. But at what point does it go from being titillatingly weird content that’s hard to tune out of — like Alex Jones for sex and dating — to ideas you start to take seriously and internalize? Cooper often spoke in a paternalistic way, literally, to her loyal fans with her signature opening catchphrase, “What is up daddy gang, it is your founding father!”After co-host Sofia Franklyn’s unceremonious exit from the podcast following the pair’s separation from Barstool Sports, Cooper tried to adapt the show into something more sophisticated, in theory. She appeared to be aiming for a millennial version of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” giving hot celebrities the safe space to spill their secrets. In reality, the only thing that changed was the aesthetics — boucle chairs and a proper microphone instead of a fratty corner office set-up. The same problematic topics persisted, whether it was threesomes, blackmail in the context of orgies and escorts, or the joys of single parenthood from a wealthy guest for whom the cost of childcare is immaterial. It mainly only matured in the sense that the horrible advice was in glossier packaging. But even if Cooper thought she had achieved the rebrand of the century, that doesn’t excuse the degenerate level she stooped to to get the show to take off. When the show declared in an early episode, “If you’re a 5 or 6, die for that d*ck,” the implication was that women of average attractiveness by contemporary standards should overcompensate with their bedroom skills to keep a partner’s interest. Cooper and Franklyn provided a lesson on how to go through a significant other’s phone in search of evidence of impropriety. In another episode, they warned their audience that if they’re not performing oral sex on their man, “someone else is.” For practical application, they described in the seminal “Gluck Gluck 9009” episode a technique that is “every man’s kryptonite.” Does this sound like a cute trust circle or like a cult leader stoking fear in women that their sexual prowess is their only hope of keeping a man’s attention, which is likely divided among other women anyway? Some of their advice is just laughably contradictory, but no less insidious. In episode 24, they talked about “how to cheat or catch a cheater.” How can you advance both positions simultaneously? You wouldn’t need to learn how to catch a cheater, which they imply is nefarious enough that it’s worth doing detective work to uncover, if cheating were in short supply in our culture. But here they were, giving step-by-step instructions on how to commit infidelity. This hamster wheel logic, like most of the show’s themes, was the opposite of empowering.In episode 28, the hosts addressed faking pregnancies. The show had a baseline premise that most men are only seeking out sexual satisfaction, so the smartest strategy women can adopt is to weaponize their sexual nature to maximize their own pleasure and make mischief along the way. In the creators’ worldview, living among men is not about friendship or courtship but a game where there are only winners and losers. And winning, in the spirit of Samantha Jones in “Sex and the City,” meant achieving the best sex and then discarding the man before he could discard you. It’s hard to quantify the aggregate harm such a message has on the trust between young women and men in society today. If I were a young man, knowing that so many young women are disciples of a show that explicitly tells them men can’t be trusted so they have to be played, I would stay far, far away. Then there’s the matter of the message just not comporting with scientific reality, that women chemically bond to men during sex, making casual affairs almost impossible. Cooper and Franklyn seemed to acknowledge this truth, while insisting to women that they had to figure out how to fight it, in episode 30 where they “discuss the tricky art of how to not catch feelings…” What if you’re supposed to catch feelings for the person you’re intimate with, according to biology? The most prudent advice is to secure commitment as the price of that intimacy, so that the woman is not left with the bag, emotionally.Some of the disgruntled Unwell staff reported that their interactions with Cooper’s husband were suggestive and uncomfortable. Again, how is this unusual, given the show’s history? In episode 23 titled, “Cuckolding, Everyone’s Doing It,” Cooper and Franklyn shared “a technology hack to help you get away with murder or better yet, cheating!” If anything, Kaplan was just being consistent, taking cues from the show’s legitimization of open relationships and polyamory. Their entire business model was trafficking in engagement on raunchy stories that do the opposite of dignifying women or men. The show didn’t inspire better behavior on the part of either gender; it brought both down to new lows.A common conservative argument since Cooper got married and pregnant has been that she pursued the most tried-and-true paths to sustained human happiness while offering her audience garbage dressed up as candy, the epitome of a luxury belief. Cooper defends: What’s wrong with “having fun” in your 20s and then settling down in your 30s? But “Call Her Daddy” was not merely about having fun; it perpetuated a degrading hookup culture that leaves scars more than it builds character. Gender relations and happiness levels were better when sex was still something reserved for a one-and-only, something sacred. Based on the Vanity Fair story, it seems the couple behind Unwell is surrounded by moral and marital trouble. I imagine it’s hard to be a part of an operation like that without it finding you. They made their bed; now they have to lie in it. ***Caroline Downey is a columnist and video personality at National Review. She is also a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and a 2025-2026 Novak fellow with the Fund for American Studies.

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