America's Hottest New Take is That Murder is Bad
This place has everything: Twinks, zip lines, grown men in wedding dresses, a cat from a bodega, D-Bag Chopra, a child
My piece from yesterday is here since many of you asked to share it — and it seems important to me to stay on this, with pro-shooter merch everywhere and wanted posters for healthcare CEOs are showing up in New York. So here’s more today on the creepy idolization of the shooter from Brendan O’Neill, who notes: “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.”
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.
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!
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.
Related: The shooter brings up a renewed conversation about ghost guns.
Prepare For More Syria Tumult
Assad begins his exile in a gilded cage.
On the face of it, the answer is a rather opulent one, even if in practice it means becoming part of one of the most rarified zoos of all: Putin’s collection of ex-dictators. West of Moscow, a little way beyond the city’s MKAD orbital motorway along the A-106 Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Shosse, lies the village of Barvikha. From the main road, it is pretty undistinguished, but as soon as you head into the side streets, you notice the opulent dachas – mansions rather than summer cottages – behind high walls and ornate but very functional metal gates.
In Soviet times, this was one of the select settlements of houses assigned to party figures and select members of the loyal cultural elite. Now it has become a home for the more tastelessly wealthy new rich, and a selection of deposed dictators and their families.
First, there is the family of deposed Serbian president and war criminal Slobodan Milošević. There are no fewer than three former presidents: Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan (overthrown by the 2005 ‘Tulip Revolution’), Aslan Abashidze of Georgia’s Ajarian Autonomous Republic (convicted in absentia on terrorism and murder charges in his native country), and former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych (who fled following the 2014 ‘Revolution of Dignity’). Bashar and Asma al-Assad are presumed to be the latest addition to the collection.
This is the most tastelessly gilded cage of all. The properties are massive (Yanukovych reportedly splits his time between a $52 million (£41 million) mansion in Barvikha and a place in Rostov region to the south). The village offers upscale restaurants and retail outlets to match, from the Drim Khaus (‘Dream House’) shopping centre to Barvikha Luxury Village, where you can pick up a Ferrari in your new Ermenegilda Zegna outfit.
However, the Assads will have to pay for it. Of course, no self-respecting dictator will not have salted funds away just in case. The US State Department has estimated the Assads’ private fortune at up to $2 billion (£1.6 billion) secreted around the world in offshore accounts and shell corporations, although it is unclear how much of it they can still access. They will have to pay for the properties and the other trappings of wealthy exile life, not least the private security guards and the discreet servants. A fair number of the latter will likely be agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB).
The Coming Fight to Abolish DEI
The first step is to understand how DEI bureaucracies became embedded in the federal government. That is the result of actions by two presidents: Barack Obama, who issued Executive Order 13583, which laid the groundwork for many national “diversity” initiatives; and Joseph Biden, who signed Executive Orders 13985 and 14035, which entrenched DEI principles into every federal department and routed billions of dollars toward advancing this ideology throughout American society.
Having understood this history, Cabinet officials must work with President Trump to rescind President Obama and President Biden’s executive orders. In their place, the 47th president should sign an order advancing the principle of colorblind equality, stating that the government shall treat all individuals equally according to their merit, rather than unequally according to their ancestry.
The second task is the work of administration. It’s one thing to issue an executive order, and another to make it a reality across the sprawling federal bureaucracy.
On this score, my primary guidance for Trump’s Cabinet is swiftly to shut down all DEI programs and to terminate the employment of all policy officials responsible for those programs, effective immediately. There is an enormous advantage to acting quickly and aggressively on the first day, when the public is most willing to grant the new administration discretion. Every president has the right to shape his own administration according to his principles, and DEI principles are diametrically opposed to those of President Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, and the Cabinet writ large.
The Global Winds of Censorship
Prime minister Justin Trudeau has intensified efforts to regulate online content through his Online Harms Bill, which was introduced to parliament earlier this year. If passed in its current form, Canadians could be sentenced to life imprisonment for ‘hateful conduct’. They could even be subject to house arrest and electronic tagging if a judge considers them ‘likely’ to express so-called hate speech in the future.
The winds of censorship have even blown all the way down to Australia. Consider the example of Canadian advocate ‘Billboard Chris’, known for traveling the world wearing billboards with statements about gender ideology and its effects on children. In February 2024, Chris posted a Daily Mail article on X questioning the suitability of a transgender activist’s appointment to a World Health Organisation panel. Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, requested that X remove the content, citing it as harmful because it ‘misgenders’ the activist. The social-media platform initially refused, but after a formal removal order from Grant, the content was geo-blocked in Australia. Billboard Chris, supported by ADF International, is taking this violation of his right to peacefully share his convictions to court.
This global censorship trend is effectively being driven by something like a global censorship industrial complex. This complex comprises governments, NGOs, media, corporations and academia, who are working together in similar ways to erode free speech. The result is a global attempt to redefine free expression as a threat, and to use state authority to suppress dissent.
Daniel Penny and the End of BLM
The contrast with previous high-profile cases is striking. Kyle Rittenhouse’s 2021 acquittal for shooting three men during unrest in Kenosha sparked days of protests nationwide. Meanwhile, the officer who killed Daunte Wright faced crowds of demonstrators throughout her trial. But Penny’s case, despite its similar themes of racial justice and use of force, has failed to mobilise the masses in quite the same way.
Penny’s defence team recognised this shift in the national mood. Rather than engaging with racial dynamics, they focused on public safety and self-defence, asking jurors: “Who do you want on the next train ride with you?” This approach proved effective with a jury that seemed more concerned with everyday safety than larger questions of social justice of the sort that animated prosecutor Dafna Yoran…
Conservative commentators such as Laura Loomer have already positioned Penny as a heroic figure, much as they did with Rittenhouse. But so far, Penny himself has shown little interest in becoming a political symbol. Unlike his predecessor, who embarked on a speaking tour of Right-wing events after his acquittal, Penny has understandably maintained a low profile throughout his trial.
Perhaps most telling will be how quickly attention moves on from the verdict itself. In 2020, this outcome would have provoked immediate protest action and dominated news cycles for weeks. Today, it competes for attention with a CEO assassination, regime collapse in Syria, a possible ceasefire in Ukraine, the declaration of martial law in South Korea, and the looming inauguration of Donald Trump. The era of mass mobilisation around racial justice cases, it seems, has largely passed — not with a bang, but with a quiet verdict in a Manhattan courtroom.
Feature
The Hollow Allure of Spotify Wrapped.
Items of Interest
Foreign
Syria’s rebel leader’s Al Qaeda past.
Netanyahu fires back at media in corruption trial.
Russia warns citizens not to visit the U.S.
Blinken to testify on Afghanistan debacle.
Kimball: The reason Americans fear for Britain.
Chinese national arrested for flying drone over U.S. Air Base.
Domestic
CPI report shows effects of inflation decline.
Van Duyne: Expect economy and border bills right off the top in new Congress.
Trump nominees have busy day on Capitol Hill.
Younger Democrats challenge older members for chairmanships.
Tom Cotton blocking John Cornyn for Senate Intel could lead to retirement.
Tulsi Gabbard expresses full support for Trump position on Syria.
Trump nominates Ferguson as head of FTC.
Kim Guilfoyle named ambassador to Greece.
Ronald Johnson named ambassador to Mexico.
Mace sustains injury as pro-trans man assaults her in Capitol.
Five out of ten disapprove of Biden pardon.
Alvin Bragg opposes Trump’s dismissal motion.
Judge Chutkan’s January 6th defendants await pardons.
D.C. Democrat leaders split over fighting Trump or finding common ground.
Media
Brett Cooper leaving the Daily Wire sparks backlash.
Judge rejects sale of Alex Jones’ InfoWars to Onion.
Health
Warren, Hawley want to break up insurer, pharmacist connection.
Ephemera
Belichick offered UNC head coaching job.
Taylor Sheridan’s super-sized Yellowstone finale.
Paul Mescal cast in Beatles movie.
The appeal of a Turkish barber.
Podcast
Quote
“I have known many Christians — Poles, Frenchman, Spaniards — who were strict Stalinists in the field of politics but who retained certain inner reservations, believing God would make corrections once the bloody sentences of the all-mighties of History were carried out. They pushed their reasoning rather far. They argue that history develops according to immutable laws that exist by the will of God; one of these laws is the class struggle; the twentieth century marks the victory of the proletariat, which is led in its struggle by the Communist Party; Stalin, the leader of the Communist Party, fulfills the law of history or in other words acts by the will of God, therefore one must obey him. Mankind can be renewed only on the Russian pattern; that is why no Christian can oppose the one — cruel, it is true — idea which will create a new kind of man over the entire planet. Such reasoning is often used by clerics who are party tools.”
— Czeslaw Milosz