If reports are true, it looks like the targeted killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York last week was politically motivated. The alleged shooter, Luigi Mangione, a former Ivy Leaguer from an affluent family, was reportedly caught with some kind of manifesto.
Even before we knew who the shooter was, however, the reaction from far too many leftists was to either justify, celebrate, or rationalize the shooting. There’s a real debate going on in some quarters of the progressive Left over whether slaying CEOs is a bad thing. And it’s unsurprising.
Of course, if any MAGA professors or journalists were online publicly defending the killing of perceived political enemies, there would be thousands of wringing hands lamenting the menacing rhetoric of conservatism. And rightly so.
It should not be lost on us that there is a clear ideological continuum between people who rationalize the shooting of a CEO and those who rationalize the murder and rape of Jews by Palestinian terrorists and those who rationalize the burning down of cities for social justice.
If you’re convinced your opponents are abetting some (imaginary) “genocide,” you have a moral duty to stop them. And much of the left-wing violence we’ve seen is predicated on the idea that the enemy is irredeemably nefarious.
On his Goodreads page, Mangione quotes left-wing terrorist Ted Kaczynski (though his reading list is mostly mainstream left-leaning technocratic authors). The Unabomber’s unhinged demonization of modernity and capitalism was a fringe position in the ’90s. Now the unhinged demonization of healthcare insurance, the pharmaceutical industry, and Big Oil (all industries, despite their inadequacies, that make lives better for everyone) is the norm. A generation of college students have been indoctrinated into believing the profit motive is killing people when the opposite is true.
One expects Mangione’s writing will be largely indistinguishable from what a person hears from elected progressives and pundits. Yet few will ponder why a seemingly rational Ivy League-educated engineer decided to become a hit man.
Of course, leftist violence is always treated as something completely apart. Every time there’s a mass shooting, everyone scours the web trying to divine the motivations of the shooter. When the perpetrator is a left-winger, the media plunges into a national discussion about the problems of gun culture. When there’s no coherent ideological reason for the shooting, the media plunges into a discussion about problems of gun culture. When the shooter is a right-winger (or an approximation of one), we are called to talk about gun culture and the “climate of hate” created by conservative rhetoric.
You may recall the time when Paul Krugman and the New York Times editorial board said, without any evidence, that Sarah Palin had inspired the 2011 shooting of Gabby Giffords in Tucson, Arizona. The climate-of-hate canard goes back at least to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, which, incidentally, was perpetrated by a communist. (Indeed, the last president before Kennedy to be assassinated was William McKinley, who met his end via two bullets fired by another leftist extremist named Leon Czolgosz.)
The Left has been prone to violence since Year Zero. In the early 1900s, the United States was awash in communist and anarchist bombings, culminating in the deaths of 30 people on Wall Street in 1920. Most cultural depictions of the ’60s upheavals were of a genteel, peace-loving movement, but it was imbued with extremists, as well. By the 1970s, left-wing terrorist groups such as the Weather Underground were setting off bombs at the Capitol, police stations, the Pentagon, and state attorneys general offices. In an 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, there were an amazing 2,500 bombings in the U.S. by leftist groups.
Worse, then as now, violence was often ignored or idealized by the “intellectual” Left. When I was young, leftists would sometimes commemorate mass murderers such as Che Guevara or Mao Zedong. Today, feted contemporary public intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates write books celebrating terrorism. The late Kathy Boudin, a former Weather Underground member who was involved in a Brinks truck robbery that killed two innocent people, operated the Columbia University’s “Center for Justice” for decades.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Angela Davis, widely considered a hero by younger progressives, who not only championed murders and terrorist regimes her entire career but bought two guns used in a courtroom kidnapping-shootout perpetrated by the Black Panthers in 1970, when three hostages and a superior court judge were killed in Marin County, California. There is simply no comparable mainstreaming of right-wing extremists.
James Hodgkinson, who walked onto an Alexandria, Virginia, baseball field in 2018 and opened fire at a Republican congressional delegation, wasn’t an exotic leftist. He was a Bernie Sanders fan. Certainly, no reporter ran around the halls of Congress asking every elected Democrat if they were going to lower the temperature of their rhetoric.
Nor did they do so when a left-wing assassin showed up at the house of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, promising to “stop roe v wade from being overturned” by “shooting for 3” justices. After years of hearing the demonizing of the Supreme Court, the man showed up with a Glock, zip ties, duct tape, and various other tools.
When Paul Pelosi was attacked by a deranged man, the entire media conversation revolved around conservative rhetoric. When we had two attempted assassinations of Donald Trump, most of the Left could barely stop calling him Hitler.
The public is incessantly warned that white supremacists are gathering in the shadows, readying to spring their coup. So dangerous were these alleged impending “major civil disturbances” that the Justice Department created a new category of extremists to “track and counter” the “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism.” To the Left, parents who protest school boards over critical race theory and mask mandates are “domestic terrorists,” but those who burn down cities are mostly peaceful.
And when mostly peaceful unrest envelopes the nation, causing billions in damage, destroying thousands of lives, one could barely get anyone in the media to admit it was even happening. Indeed, plenty of reporters and pundits defended the Marxist antifa “protesters” (you can see, they’re “anti” fascists right in the name, right?) If any of these groups had been on the Right, we would scar the American psyche forever. The resulting HBO documentary would already have won a bunch of Emmys.
Antifa and Black Lives Matter marches sparked the most expensive and prolonged domestic destruction in American history from 2016 to 2020 (looting, rioting, arson, homicide), and Democrats were never asked in any serious way to condemn it.
Yes, BLM was an objectively racist movement that was tethered to a slew of media-generated myths (Michael Brown being the most prominent) and incidents that had no proven racial component (George Floyd). Even before 2020, there were riots in Milwaukee, Baltimore, Oakland, California, and Ferguson, Missouri. Why was there no conversation about the dangers of leftist race-baiting when five Dallas police officers were gunned down by a Black Lives Matter activist?
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Even during the riots, name-brand pundits excused the destruction, arguing that victims had insurance. It didn’t matter that immigrant- and minority-owned businesses, already suffering from needless COVID-19 shutdowns, suffered most of all.
None of this is to maintain there isn’t right-wing violence. Of course, there is. It’s simply to say that we should acknowledge a lot, perhaps most, of our contemporary political violence emanates from the Left. And a lot of it is girded by the hard-left progressive turn in America’s politics.