Social media ghouls have seized on the killing of Blackstone exec Wesley LePatner “as symbolic retribution,” roars Jesse Arm at City Journal. “The message was unmistakable: her death was something to relish.” A new permissiveness allows “the disturbing mutterings of the fringe” to be “public, performative, and proudly cruel.” Purveyors of “Luigism” — invoking Luigi Mangione, the killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last December — believe “violence is a legitimate response to the perceived injustices of capitalism.” And “Luigism isn’t confined to digital cesspools like TikTok, Tumblr, or Twitch,” but fortified by figures like Zohran Mamdani whose beliefs “justifies violence based on identity and class status.” Unchecked Luigism will “inflict serious damage on the social fabric.”

Democrats “appear desperate, and increasingly are becoming a clown show without direction or purpose,” snarks USA Today’s Nicole Russell, flagging how “the Democratic Party got its lowest rating from voters in 35 years” in a “ recent Wall Street Journal survey.” Why? Dems “lack direction and competent leaders.” “The party’s brightest star, failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris,” isn’t running for California governor. “Cory Booker, once seen as a rising star, regularly engages in bizarre political theater,” and Dems are locked out of huge states like Texas and Florida. Meanwhile, the GOP “could be even more dominant after Trump leaves office,” as worthy successors like Elise Stefanik, Marco Rubio and JD Vance wait in the wings. Dems “look aimless now, and their future appears even more grim. No wonder voters aren’t attracted to them.”

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The “deep thinkers of the internet have identified” capitalism as the reason “for why everything, everywhere sucks all the time,” grumbles Reason’s Emma Camp. Online, “capitalism gets conflated with everything from consumerism and government corruption to the concept of work itself.” On the left, “a world without capitalism is often imagined as a world without responsibilities of any kind,” though “under every economic arrangement, in every point in history, human beings have had to earn their keep.” “It’s easy to call these utopian anticapitalists lazy. And there may be some laziness there,” but the real problem is young people’s lack “of purpose.” “By arguing that capitalism is the cause of your dissatisfaction, you deny your own agency,” which “only leads to more unhappiness in the long term.”

Chloe Cheung, a pro-democracy protester who fled Hong Kong for London, now fears she’ll be extradited, since Britain “might make it easier for Hong Kong to go after political targets in exile,” reports The Free Press’ Frannie Block. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Labour Party “have been cozying up to China as their economy has struggled,” and a letter from Security Minister Dan Jarvis argues for extraditions. The government vows not to extradite anyone sought on political grounds, but Cheung fears authorities will be unable to properly assess whether a charge is politically motivated. Hong Kong officials have placed a bounty on Cheung and 33 others, including two US citizens. “They want to silence us,” frets Cheung, so dissidents don’t “reveal their real evil.”

AI is now “the defining arena of great-power competition,” argues Juan Villasmil at The American Mind, with “autocracies” like China “poised to benefit disproportionately” from “pervasive surveillance, granular social control, and predictive state planning.” In America, “normative constraints hinder large-scale deployment.” And China is “redefining technological power,” aligning “priority and policy with unmatched discipline.” The United States maintains “dominance in raw computational” power and “excels at experimentation,” but in a “difficult position” with China “producing a huge share of global AI talent.” America must “close export loopholes” to “deny Beijing access to cutting-edge innovation,” and “act deliberately to close the applicability gap through a whole-of-nation strategy.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board