‘Murder is bad’ is now apparently a controversial stance

After an extremely annoying weekend that involved seeing a stand-up comedy set where this Gen-Z kid performed a whole routine around “screw that guy, he deserved to die,” narrowly beating a team called “More CEO Murders Please” at bar trivia, and witnessing an Instagram yoga chick account called “thisbadasslife” offer safe harbor to the shooter (before we knew his identity) while spreading her legs wide on a terrace, I decided I had to say something. Our compass was broken. It was up to me to correct it.

So I took to Facebook and posted, “Anyone making excuses for the UnitedHealthcare CEO assassination in any way is a moral idiot. This is not the way to effect social change. You are a fool and your jokes are not funny. I will cede the rest of my time.”

The reaction ate my brain. I don’t know if I’ll ever recover.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that my social-media feed is the absolute worst place on the entire internet. Of my nearly 5,000 Facebook friends, I know maybe 10 percent of them. The rest of them are leftovers from a time when I was a writer, when that meant something other than “well-read professor who signs petitions calling to defund Israeli cultural institutions.”

Essentially, these are not my people anymore. So on the rare occasion when I post something other than a joke about movies or some sort of superfan boast about the Los Angeles Dodgers, it really shouldn’t surprise when the response is a torrent of oppositional hyper-stupidity. But it always does surprise me.

It seems natural to say “locking down society for two years is wrong” or “burning down private businesses is wrong” or “terrorism is bad” or “murder is bad.” But a lot of people hopped on the social-media bus this weekend to say, “actually, murder is good.”

Though I didn’t receive this memo, at some point over the last week, a bat signal went out informing people that it was perfectly acceptable to refer to a healthcare businessman as a mass murderer. I had more than one person on my feed compare Brian Thompson to Adolf Hitler. Also, I had more than one person refer to his assassin as Nelson Mandela. They invoked the Warsaw Uprising. It was all very confusing.

“Go preach that outside the John Brown Museum in Baltimore,” said a moron named J.C. Hallman, who I specifically invoke by name because he is an author with six books to his credit. After some good-spirited debate during which he called me “pendejo,” he quoted American abolitionist Lydia Marie Child: “All tyrannies should come to an end by peaceful means, but it appears to be the will of providence that some tyrannies must come to an end by violence.” 

To which I replied, in one of the rare instances where you actually say the sick burn that you wish later you’d said: “Did they teach that to you at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop?” Let the record show I delivered a rhetorical blow from which this man can never recover.

Also, let the record show that at no point in my Sunday online screamfest did I defend health-insurance companies or say that they do a good job. Because obviously they don’t. Our system is a mess. All I said is that I’m tired of people, from their relatively comfy perches, cosplaying a violent revolution that we do not need. On my feed and elsewhere I saw so much “I don’t endorse vigilante justice, but…”

But nothing. We live in the freest, most prosperous society in human history. It also happens to be an absurdist goofball circus that, like all human history, contains injustices and inequalities. At least our problems are meme-worthy. We’re all lucky to have a front-row seat to a show that no one else seems to be willing to enjoy.

Luigi Mangione was the valedictorian of an elite private school in Maryland. His family owns a country club. He went to the University of Pennsylvania. He is not your friend. He is not your hero. You freaking goofballs. Where do these marching orders come from? Why does everyone always have the same opinions at the same time? What is for dinner? Have you seen my reading glasses?

I’ve lost eight “friends” and two “followers” since I posted that murder is bad. Frankly, I was hoping it would be more. For my next commandment, maybe next I should speak out against worshipping false idols. I think I have the perfect candidate. He’s twenty-six-years-old, has washboard abs and wrote a 250-word manifesto that says “these parasites had it coming.” If you worship him or want him to sit on your lap, you’re an idiot. Please unfriend me if you disagree. I beg you. In this badass life, you’ve got to have goals.