The Lanyards Are the Story: How Mamdani's City Hall Credentialed Mangione's Cheerleaders

Reported originally by Kyle Schnitzer and Matt Troutman in the New York Post, May 18, 2026.

The trio gathered on the courthouse steps in Lower Manhattan on Monday morning wore credentials issued by New York City Hall. Abril Rios, Ashley Rojas, and Lena Weissbrot operate Substack newsletters devoted to celebrating the man accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson. The administration of Mayor Zohran Mamdani has decided these three are journalists.

That is the part of the story worth pausing over. Not the slogans the women shouted, though those were grotesque enough. The slogans were predictable. Three young women whose entire public identity is built around the cult of Luigi Mangione gave the answers anyone with a passing familiarity with their output would have expected them to give. They called the dead executive a mass murderer. They mocked his children. They called for more killing. None of this was a surprise.

The press passes are the surprise.

Or rather, the press passes would be a surprise in a serious city governed by serious people. In Mamdani's New York, they are the natural consequence of who now runs the building at 250 Broadway and what those people think journalism is for. The press credential program has always been a discretionary instrument. The City Hall press office decides who gets to stand inside the velvet rope and who does not. Under previous mayors, the office occasionally embarrassed itself by denying access to outlets the administration disliked. Under Mamdani, the office has decided to embarrass itself in the opposite direction.

Consider what was on the credentialing application. Rojas, Rios, and Weissbrot did not pretend to be neutral observers. Their Substacks are public. Their social media accounts are public. Their entire body of work documents an open infatuation with a man charged with executing a healthcare executive on a Manhattan sidewalk. They are not covering the trial. They are organizing the fan club. The City Hall press office, looking at this record, decided the city's official seal of journalistic legitimacy belonged on their lanyards.

The statements outside the courthouse made plain what the credential now covers.

Rojas opened with a brief soliloquy about Brian Thompson's mother. The soliloquy was not flattering to either party. Weissbrot took the children, declaring them better off without their father. She offered a comparison to Osama bin Laden, drawing a moral equivalence between the man who orchestrated the murder of three thousand Americans and the chief executive of an insurance company. She added that Americans understand "heroic violence," her phrase, and grasp the moments when violence is good.

Rios closed the show. She turned to the Second Amendment, which she described as a tool for shooting either schoolchildren or politicians. She announced her preferences. She suggested the president of the United States should be hanged by his testicles in a public square. She finished with a direct line to the president: "Trump, I'm coming for you, baby."

This was on camera. This was on the steps of a Manhattan courthouse. These were not anonymous online accounts. These were people wearing official press credentials, identifying themselves to a New York Post reporter, and naming the publications the city's credentialing office had decided were the press.

The Mamdani question writes itself. Will City Hall revoke the credentials? Will the press office that issued them face any internal consequence? Will the mayor be asked, on the record, by a reporter whose lanyard is not contingent on Democratic Socialists of America loyalty, whether his administration believes a person can threaten the life of the president and retain the privileges of accredited journalism?

The answers, in order, are probably not, probably not, and the question will probably not be asked. The mayor's press operation has spent the first months of the administration cultivating exactly the press corps now wearing exactly the lanyards. The Substack ecosystem that produced Rojas, Rios, and Weissbrot is the same ecosystem that produced the volunteer canvassers, the Twitter Spaces moderators, and the social media amplifiers who pushed Mamdani over the line last November. The campaign and the fan club are the same people. The credentials are the reward.

That is the structural fact. The murder of Brian Thompson on December 4, 2024, was not an event the left mourned and moved past. It was an event the left adopted. A merchandise economy emerged. T-shirts. Mugs. Tote bags. Fan art. The figure of the accused killer became, in certain precincts of progressive culture, a folk hero. Substacks proliferated. Defense fundraisers raised millions. Rooftop bars in Brooklyn hosted Mangione-themed nights. The man's face became iconography.

The progressive intelligentsia did not stop this. Much of it cheered. Briahna Joy Gray ran segments. Hasan Piker streamed for hours. The Jacobin crowd produced essays explaining why the murder was, technically, regrettable but also, structurally, comprehensible. The official left position settled into a kind of wink. The killing was bad, of course. But the system. But the denials. But the medical bankruptcies. But.

The But did the work. It always does.

Mamdani's people heard the But and decided to build infrastructure around it. The credentialing decisions are downstream of a worldview. The worldview holds that some violence is legitimate, that some targets deserve what they get, that the appropriate journalistic posture toward a CEO assassin is sympathy and toward an insurance executive is celebration of his demise. The three women on the courthouse steps did not have to be told what to think. They were already inside the tent. The administration simply gave them tents of their own.

This is what people mean when they describe an administration as captured. Capture does not require formal command and control. Capture is what happens when bureaucratic discretion inside an agency runs in only one direction, when every borderline call goes the same way, when the people processing the paperwork share a worldview with the people requesting the favor. The press credential office under Mamdani is not following a written rule that says assassination cheerleaders get lanyards. It is following an unwritten one. The unwritten rules are the ones that matter.

Brian Thompson left behind two sons. They are in high school. On the morning of December 4, 2024, their father was walking from his hotel to an investor conference. A man stepped from behind a pillar and shot him in the back with a 9mm pistol fitted with a 3D-printed silencer. The bullets had words written on them. Words drawn from a book about how the insurance industry kills people. The shooter, allegedly, is the man whose face is now on a thousand pieces of progressive merchandise.

Eighteen months later, the City of New York, through its official credentialing office, has decided that the people who think this was a good idea deserve press passes.

That is the story. The slogans on the courthouse steps were the symptom. The lanyards are the diagnosis. The mayor's office issued the lanyards, and the mayor's office can answer for them. Until it does, every working New York reporter standing in the same press pen now stands there on the same paper. That is the cost. The administration set the price.

The press pass program is a public trust. It can be revoked. It can be revised. It can be subjected, in a serious city, to standards. Mamdani's office made a choice. The press corps gets the press corps it credentials. The city gets the press corps Mamdani picked.

Original reporting by Kyle Schnitzer and Matt Troutman, New York Post, May 18, 2026.