The creepy idolization of Luigi Mangione

So according to the modern left, killing the fascists of Hamas is “genocide,” but killing a CEO and father of two is “justice?” How else are we to make sense of the creepy idolization of Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the shooting dead of Brian Thompson, chief executive of the health-insurance firm UnitedHealthcare? Seriously, the swooning over Mangione is a new low for the “very online” left.

This was just desserts for America’s unfair system of health insurance, they insisted

Thompson was slain on the streets of Manhattan last Wednesday. He was fifty years old, a dad and he’d been boss of UnitedHealthcare for three years. Almost instantly, even before we knew the identity of the suspect, leftists were swarming social media to make excuses for this barbaric attack on an innocent, unarmed man. Some even celebrated it. In some corners of the web there was, as one report described it, outright “ecstasy over [this] brazen assassination.”

He had it coming, cried thousands of sunlight-starved online radicals. This was just desserts for America’s unfair system of health insurance, they insisted. They went on Wikipedia to edit Thompson’s page, branding him a “parasite” and a “conman” who is “currently burning in hell.” When UnitedHealthcare posted about their CEO’s death on Facebook, the comments section was clogged up with people posting the cry-laughing emoji. Seventy-seven thousand people posted that guffawing face in mockery of the dead dad.

When it was revealed that the mysterious masked gunman had used bullets inscribed with the words “deny,” “defend’ and “depose” — a slogan often used to describe health insurers’ tactic of delaying payments — the leftish web went wild. Some have even embraced those three D-words as a rallying cry in tribute to their hero killer. To the privileged toy-town revolutionaries of TikTok, the shooter, whoever he was, was nothing short of a twenty-first century Robin Hood.

Even some mainstream commentators, while not quite dancing in the streets over Thompson’s death, did wonder out loud if the “gleeful reaction” to it made sense. Former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz posted a celebratory image saying “CEO DOWN.” She later told Piers Morgan that she felt “joy” at his death. When Morgan pushed back, she dialed it down: “Maybe not joy, but certainly not empathy.”

Over at the Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi said the reason Thompson’s death “elicited so little sympathy” is because he was ‘the face of an unfair system.” For those who are “shocked by the satisfaction Thompson’s murder has inspired,” she had a terse request: “Spare me the pearl-clutching…” If it’s pearl-clutching to be concerned that we live in an era of such casual cruelty and digital spite that tens of thousands of people will happily taunt the colleagues of a murdered man with a cackling emoji, I guess I’m a pearl-clutcher now.

Then the identity of the suspect was revealed and things got really crazy. Luigi Mangione is twenty-six, an Ivy League student from a well-to-do Maryland family — and cute. He’s being fawned over everywhere. “He can serve the sentence in my house, your honor” — that’s been the tenor of the memes.

In the eyes of the tragic leftists addicted to doomscrolling, the kind of people who put the hammer and sickle in their social-media bio to piss off their rich parents, Mangione is a brooding one-man slayer of the capitalist order. Not since those wayward hippy girls got ensnared by Charles Manson have so many youthful members of the bourgeoisie obsequiously snuggled up to a suspect in a murder case.

Until, that is, it was revealed that Mangione has some “un-woke” views. He seems to be less a blazing revolutionary than a “centrist tech bro.” He appears to be a fan of the right-leaning entrepreneur Peter Thiel and a cheerleader for “traditionalism.” Some of his fans are mightily disappointed. In summary, being the suspect in a murder case — cool! Retweeting Jonathan Haidt — cancel him!

Behold the twenty-first century radical, who will melt into a puddle of tears if you ‘misgender’ him but who’s cool with murder if the victim is a CEO

It should go without saying — and yet apparently it doesn’t — that killing people is not a reasonable response to social problems. I agree with Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, who said: “In America, we do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint.” If that makes me an old square — worse, a pearl-clutcher — so be it.

The frenzied beatification of a murder suspect speaks to a serious moral malady in the digital world. That so many on the virtual left got a vicarious kick from the death of Thompson suggests they are increasingly unmoored from reason and decency. It’s a kind of juvenile barbarism, where confused, isolated leftists, bereft that the working classes have wholly abandoned them in favor of Donald Trump, get to feel alive and “revolutionary” for once. The price of their fuzzy warm feeling? The life of a human being. For shame.

Behold the twenty-first century radical, who will melt into a puddle of tears if you “misgender” him but who’s cool with murder if the victim is a CEO. The sea of online rage has dragged these people so far from the shores of moral reason. Here’s my moral code: don’t murder people. And don’t celebrate when people are murdered. Boring and not very memeable, I know. But there we are.