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The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Wednesday was big news. I mean, he was just gunned down on the streets of New York City, messages reported scrawled on the shell casings. The gunman, armed with a suppressed firearm and wearing a mask, left the scene and still hasn’t been identified.
Now, this is an insurance company CEO, so the list of potential suspects is going to be a long one. The question is which ones had the means and opportunity to go along with the motive. I don’t envy the cops investigating this one.
But there’s a very troubling trend happening where some…interesting folks are seemingly embracing the murder as some kind of good thing.
For example, we have Columbia professor Anthony Zenkus, a supposed trauma expert who says he is anti-violence (and a self-proclaimed commie, naturally) who offered this on X:
Today, we mourn the death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down.... wait, I'm sorry - today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.
Doesn’t sound very anti-violence to me. Anti-violence would mean that you can mourn both the people who die because their health insurance wouldn’t pay for the necessary treatment—and you should show your work that it’s really that many who die from that and who wouldn’t have died otherwise—and the murder of a husband and a father.
Instead, he’s clearly blowing off the brazen murder of a man in broad daylight simply because he doesn’t approve of how companies handle things.
The we have Taylor Lorenz, who has waxed long and often about harassment via the internet, who has claimed that trolls and other vile souls have targeted her and how wrong that is.
Yeah, this is some of her latest antics:
This is a woman who has gone on for several years about the threats she’s received the harassment she’s gotten, and who has decried every moment of it, and here she is celebrating someone’s actual murder and seeking to capitalize on it to threaten and harass others.
Now, I’ve long thought Lorenz was mostly screaming so she could get attention and sympathy, and this ain’t exactly dissuading me from that position, but these are only two examples.
See, it’s not shocking, but the double standards at play here are still disgusting.
And no, these are not the only two examples. Hell, I’ve seen others from Lorenz alone, but there are a lot of people who are celebrating this on X right now. I couldn’t include them all.
Most of them are justifying the murder simply by arguing that claim denials hurt people too.
Sure. I can accept that. I can also accept that some of those denials led to people’s death.
So the hell what?
That really doesn’t have anything to do with gunning down a man on the streets of the largest city in the nation. That’s a completely different issue and one I’m more than happy to talk about. I just won’t entertain anyone who even remotely seems to suggest that the murder is justified, even if only by implication.
But the truth is that the modern left is very much into hypocrisy and trying to hide it under the idea of nuance. It’s not a nuanced view to think it’s a good thing a CEO was murdered just because other people died.
Thompson wasn’t in the process of harming anyone when he was killed. His murder didn’t prevent someone else from dying. That means it’s not self-defense and since he also wasn’t being executed after due process was observed, it means this doesn’t fall under the kind of killing that is permissible under the rule of law.
But the same people who did the whole “no one is above the law” bit when Trump got convicted of BS charges are now pretending that the law is irrelevant and we can just go around killing people we don’t like.
They might want to stop and think this through, though, because I don’t like a whole lot of them and quite a few of them want policies that will negatively impact my ability to keep my family fed in various ways. Does that mean it’s justified if I start shooting people?
No, it’s not. Luckily, I have actual principles, and while I’m not perfect in adhering to them all the time, I do try to live by them to the best of my ability. That means no murder, for one thing.
Yeah, it’s not a high bar to clear, but it’s apparently high enough that a startling number of leftists can’t make it.
Again, nothing surprising about it. That doesn’t make it any less disgusting.
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Politics, culture, a dose of snark, and a profound love of personal and economic freedom.
I agree the rank hypocrisy is vile, but I guarantee you if people like those on this Substack got fed up with being an afterthought of their government (if they're not actively being persecuted by said government), snapped and shot up, say, the local FEMA office, these same elite people would write Op-eds in the Post and Times about how they knew all along the MAGA crowd were violent hillbillies. They have no idea what it's like to be continuously vilified by those who believe they have a God-given mandate to rule over you, no matter whether you're peaceful, violent or simply having a screaming fit at the DMV because your agent has been on a coffee break for 3 hours. Our "betters" need to walk a mile in our moccasins before they act so put upon they feel they can comfortably celebrate the murder of, while not a good man, a man who's elite adjacent to those same individuals. There's a hair's breadth of difference between a multi-millionaire CEO, a multi-millionaire Congressman (looking at you, Nancy Pelosi!) and a big city journalist making high five, low six figures.
I wonder what those people see when they look in the mirror every morning?
I'm not anywhere near on the left, and that asshole had it coming. Under his leadership, UH used an AI that they knew inappropriately denied valid claims. They kept using it because only 10% of people with denied claims bothered to dispute them, because the process to dispute a claim is such a pain in the butt. His leadership of UH directly led to the deaths of thousands of patients because UH refused to meet their obligations.
The simple truth is that there is very little capitalism in the American healthcare market. It's so overregulated and burdened by the heavy hand of Medicare that it's more or less impossible for medicine to respond to real market demands. Assholes like Brian Thompson work really hard to maintain the current broken situation, which seems almost designed to cause moral injury to every person who takes care of patients and weaponizes our empathy against us. He deserved a lot worse than what he got, in fact.
I don't want targeted assassination to be necessary for the CEOs of large corporations to act like moral people instead of sociopathic monsters. I would prefer that they act like decent people because they are decent people. However, if it requires targeted assassinations to convince the sociopathic monsters heading up major companies that mimicking decency is the key to a long life, so be it.