‘Like October 7th’: Why the Left is celebrating the execution of a CEO

His assassination, to them, was a good first step toward taking that system down, especially if it sowed terror in the hearts of other healthcare industry executives that they might be next.

By Mark Tapson, Frontpage Magazine

Like practically everyone in the country, I have no love for the massive American healthcare bureaucracy or for a medical profession that was exposed by the COVID pandemic as being riddled from top to bottom with greedy liars.

I would wager that most Americans have either personally experienced medical malpractice/indifference or know someone who has; outrageous tales of systemic heartlessness abound.

The collapse of trust in our healthcare system over the last several years, like the collapse of our trust in the news media, has been well-deserved. So yes, people are right to be fed up and to expect better.

But does it really need to be said that targeting healthcare industry executives for assassination is not only not the solution, but is also morally wrong?

Apparently it does need to be said, because the widespread, open celebration over the recent murder of one such CEO and the surge of popular support for the suspect are very disturbing.

They are reminiscent of the ghoulish celebration over the October 7, 2023 massacre of Israelis, perceived as genocidal occupiers, and the defense of the Hamas subhumans who perpetrated it (“You don’t get to choose how we resist,” was the cruel slogan declared by those who sought to justify the terror group’s war crimes).

United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, 50, was murdered last Wednesday at 6:46 a.m. outside the Midtown Hilton Hotel in New York City by a hoodied gunman.

Surveillance video shows the assassin slipping up behind the oblivious Thompson, aiming a silenced pistol a few feet from his back, and firing three times.

The response from many media talking heads and social media accounts was swift and shockingly exultant.

The gist of it all was that Thompson, as the chief honcho of an insurance company perceived to be responsible for tens of thousands of patient deaths from the callous denial of treatment coverage, deserved an equally callous extrajudicial execution.

For example, former Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz (who admittedly is unhinged), told Piers Morgan that she felt “joy” over Thompson’s murder.

Another example: a Columbia professor self-described as “anti-violence” and “Commie” tweeted his disdain for “multimillionaires” like Thompson and highlighted the deaths of Americans for whom Thompson was supposedly responsible.

Predictable comparisons of the CEO to Hitler and other Nazi monsters littered the internet.

The United Healthcare exec left behind a wife and two children, but that elicited no sympathy from the assassin’s defenders. “Fuck his family too,” tweeted Mike Figueredo, self-described on social media as “Host of The Humanist Report, co-host of The Leftist Mafia” to his nearly 122,000 followers.

“Who was Brian Thompson? I don’t know, and neither do you,” culture critic Bethel McGrew correctly observed.

The Leftists who spewed the aforementioned grotesque smears did not personally know Thompson, but the Left views everything through a collectivist lens, and so he was not, to them, a human being but a symbol of an abusive capitalist system they seek to overthrow.

His assassination, to them, was a good first step toward taking that system down, especially if it sowed terror in the hearts of other healthcare industry executives that they might be next.

And indeed, healthcare organizations swiftly began taking down photos and names from company websites. This delighted the Left even more.

On his Monday Morning Podcast this week, purported comedian Bill Burr, who is not nearly so politically incorrect and independent as he would like you to think, let his foul-mouthed hot take fly:

I gotta be honest with you, OK? I love that fucking CEOs are fucking afraid right now. You should be! By and large, you’re all a bunch of selfish greedy fucking pieces of shit; and a lot of you are mass murderers. You just don’t pull the trigger.

Why are they like this? Why does it seem that a vengeful bloodlust runs perpetually through progressives? The short answer is that murderous violence in the service of revolutionary justice is the beating heart of Leftism.

As I’ve written elsewhere:

Our justice is not their justice. To the Left, who see everything through the distorting Marxist lens of oppressor-vs.-oppressed, justice means overthrowing the oppressor, end of story.

They view it collectively; justice is not served until an entire guilty society is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, and restoration has been made to all who were oppressed.

Think of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer’s famous declaration, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

For conservatives, justice is about individual responsibility, law and order, right and wrong. For the Left, justice is collective and is not necessarily about law and order or right and wrong, but about revolution against the power dynamics of an unjust society.

It is the same impulse that has always inspired ecstatic, Left-wing mob violence couched as revolutionary justice – from the sickening excesses of the French Revolution, to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, to Mao’s Chinese Cultural Revolution, to many other examples including the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, 2023.

“There is no crime in revolution!” went the Maoist slogan of the Cultural Revolution – meaning, no act which furthers the overthrow of the “old” can be considered criminal.

Hence, Brian Thompson’s assassin is seen by the Leftist mob not only as just, but as a veritable folk hero. Jon Stewart’s Left-wing Daily Show audience, for example, let out a chorus of boos Tuesday night when an arrest was mentioned during the host’s monologue.

After an intense manhunt, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, grandson of late multimillionaire real estate developer and philanthropist Nick Mangione Sr., was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania for the murder.

He has been charged in that state with a series of crimes that include forgery, carrying firearms without a license, tampering with records or identification, possessing instruments of a crime and false identification to law enforcement.

He was also charged in New York with murder, as well as criminal possession of a loaded firearm, possession of a forged instrument and criminal possession of a firearm silencer. He has reportedly chosen to plead not guilty.

In Mangione’s possession at the time of his arrest, in addition to a firearm and suppressor that were “consistent with the weapon used in the murder,” was a handwritten manifesto of sorts.

As NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny subsequently said in an interview with Good Morning America, the document “does make some indication that he’s frustrated with the health care system in the United States.”

The manifesto slammed healthcare companies for prioritizing profits over compassion, specifically naming United Healthcare, noting the size of the company and how much money it makes.

“These parasites had it coming,” the document reads. “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”

Mangione also reviewed Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski’s manifesto “Industrial Society and Its Future” on the book reviews website Goodreads, where he called the domestic terrorist Kaczynski a “prodigy” and “an extreme political revolutionary.”

He praised Kaczynski as having “had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere,” and asserted that “[w]hen all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive.”

Complaining about fossil fuel companies, Mangione continued, “These companies don’t care about you, or your kids, or your grandkids. They have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck, so why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive?”

“You may not like [Kaczynski’s] methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution,” the review read. This is exactly the mindset of the radical Left, which frames terrorism as revolutionary justice.

Mangione concluded that the notion “Violence never solved anything” is “a statement uttered by cowards and predators.” That’s ironic, because Brian Thompson was executed by a coward and a predator in disguise, who lay in wait for the unsuspecting man before shooting him from behind and then fleeing the scene.

As I wrote at the outset of this article: Americans have legitimate beefs with the healthcare industry, just as we have with every big-scale institution that has been granted too much power and too little accountability for too long – like the federal government.

But no person with a moral compass could believe that targeting corporate executives – or political opponents – for assassination is a just and effective resolution to any of those issues. That way lies the disorder and collapse of civilization.

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