Like the Media Research Center, WorldNetDaily claimed to be upset that people weren’t terribly broken up about the murder of health insurance executive Brian Thompson:
- A Dec. 5 article by Bob Unruh declared it “horrific” that former Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz noted that an insurer was limiting coverage for anesthesia, adding, “And people wonder why we want these people dead.”
- In the Dec. 11 edition of the WND LIve” podcast discussed the case and the arrest of the alleged assailant, “Luigi Mangione, calling him “The Grimace Reaper.”
From there, WND columnists showed up to wring their hands about alleged “left-wing violence.” David Harsanyi huffed in a Dec. 12 column:
Even before we knew the targeted killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione was politically motivated, many leftists were justifying, celebrating and rationalizing 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.
But the unhinged demonization of the health care insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry and Big Oil are now the norm. A generation of college students have been indoctrinated into believing the profit motive is killing people when the opposite is true.
And there’s a clear ideological continuum between those who rationalize the shooting of a CEO and rationalize the murder and rape of Jews by Palestinian terrorists and rationalize the burning down of cities for “social justice.”
Daniel McCarthy claimed in his Dec. 16 column:
The Marxist-Leninists of old knew you couldn’t make an omelet without breaking the eggs, and class enemies deserve to die anyway.
That’s exactly the attitude of the self-described socialists in higher ed (and elsewhere) who celebrate the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Don Feder imposed his right-wing religious view on the incident in his Dec. 23 column:
According to a March Gallup survey, only 30% of Americans now attend religious services regularly, while 56% seldom or never do so. Those who don’t identify with any religion (the “nones”) rose from 13% in 2010 to 21% today.
Is it so surprising then that in an Emerson College poll, 41% of adults under 30 said the cold-blooded killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was “acceptable”?
This is what comes from not teaching religion to the young but instead allowing them to absorb the values of the secular culture.
Victor Joecks brought it back to blaming liberals in his Dec. 31 column:
This call for vigilante justice shouldn’t be considered an idle threat. The BLM riots of 2020 caused billions in damages and injured thousands of police officers.
And then you look at the reaction to another death in NYC. A gunman murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson while he was walking down the street in NYC. Police have arrested and charged Luigi Mangione for the crime.
Many on the left struggled to contain their glee.
“I felt, along with so many other Americans, joy,” Taylor Lorenz, a former reporter at The New York Times and Washington Post, said. On social media, she wrote, “And people wonder why we want these executives dead.”
Lovely stuff.
New York magazine wrote a puff piece on “the people cheering the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting.” This brutal murder was merely “an opportunity” for those frustrated with insurance companies “to vent.”
There’s plenty to be upset about with the health care system and insurance companies. Start with the ill-named Affordable Care Act, which has made everything less affordable. Funny how the people who want health care executives dead are loath to criticize Barack Obama.
Regardless, in our democratic republic, however, citizens are supposed to solve those problems at the ballot box, not with bullets or “black vigilantes.”
But in recent years, the left has been flirting with those who would use political violence to accomplish the left’s objectives.
Unmentioned by Joecks: The right-wing attempt, incited by Donald Trump, to violently overthrow the 2020 election because Trump was emotionally incapable of accepting that he lost.
Nicholas Waddy spent a Jan. 9 column being annoyed that Thompson’s death has renewed discussion about health insurance and whether socialized medicine might be a better option:
Wendell Potter, a former health insurance executive himself, and a convert to the cause of abolishing private insurance and promoting government-run health care instead, is not among those who lionize Luigi Mangione. In fact, in his latest New York Times op-ed, Potter is at pains to describe Thompson’s death as “tragic” and “horrific.” What Potter and the Times are not above, however, is exploiting the media sensation surrounding this execution-style killing in order to shine a bright and unflattering light on the health insurance industry, which was, of course, Mangione’s real target in the first place. Neat trick, that! No wonder Potter has been praised by left-wing icons like Michael Moore and Bernie Sanders. His zeal is commendable, even if his timing is obscene.
And what is the goal of people like Wendell Potter, health care analyst extraordinaire, and of leftist media organizations like the New York Times? It is, as it has always been, to abolish private health insurance. It is to maximize government funding and government oversight with respect to all forms of health care, with an eye to creating a single-payer system and/or extending Medicare or Medicaid coverage to all Americans, such that private insurance companies would wither away. The premise, as always, is that government-provided or public health care is inherently better and more equitable than capitalist health care. Let’s be more like Cuba, these brainiacs keep telling us, where every conceivable medical treatment is provided free of charge, and no one ever gets sick and dies (more or less)!
[…]Consider that Potter, like almost all health care advocates beloved of the editorial board of the New York Times, was a big supporter of Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act of 2010. Well, did Obamacare fix the high cost of American health care? Did it eliminate high deductibles and medical bankruptcies, which so offend Mr. Potter? Did it clamp down on health insurance company profits? No, no and no! Indeed, the expansion of government funding and control that Obamacare embodied, while it may have improved access for some, solved none of the fundamental problems of our health care system, and it appears to have worsened many of them. And that fact only confirms what we have known ever since the 1960s: the steady expansion of government funding for, and control over, health care has been matched by a steady increase in the cost of such care, and declining public confidence in the fairness and effectiveness of the American medical system overall. In other words, in so many ways, more government has not proved to be the solution to the problem – it has become the problem. This is a fact men like Mr. Potter seem incapable of grasping.
But fully private insurance has not proved to be a workable and equitable option either, and Waddy offers nothing but partisan platitudes in response: “America’s mostly private health care system still works, in many ways better than any other system in the world. What works even better, historically speaking, are capitalism and competition, and here’s hoping that, under Trump, we will get more, not less, of both!”