Why the Left Loves Revolutionary Violence

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Friday in a Manhattan federal courthouse, accused murderer-turned-folk-hero Luigi Mangione pled not guilty to the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, whom Mangione shot – allegedly – three times in the back with a suppressed handgun as Thompson walked obliviously down the sidewalk. Surveillance video captured the cold-blooded shooting. Mangione, 26, grandson of a multimillionaire real estate developer, has been charged with murder as an act of terrorism and other charges that carry a possible life sentence without parole. Outside, some of his many supporters gathered to protest his innocence. One supporter held a sign calling to “Free Luigi” and – ironically – for society to place “Lives over profit.”

Except lives like that of Brian Thompson, apparently. In the worldview of the Left, Thompson was a greedy capitalist oppressor of the people, and Mangione is an heroic liberator who is being unjustly victimized by an illegitimate system which must be resisted – and preferably overthrown.

Normal people would consider the targeting of healthcare industry executives for assassination a morally unacceptable solution to the very valid issue of healthcare reform. But the Left is not populated with normal people, as evidenced by the disturbing degree of popular support for the suspect Mangione, and by the open celebration of the executive’s murder.

The response to Thompson’s assassination from many media talking heads and social media accounts was 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. Former Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz told Piers Morgan she felt “joy” over Thompson’s murder. 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.

The Left view everything through a collectivist lens, and so Brian Thompson was not, to them, a human being but a symbol of an abusive capitalist system they seek to overthrow. 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, “Host of The Humanist Report, co-host of The Leftist Mafia,” to his nearly 122,000 followers.

Why are they like this? Why does it seem that a vengeful bloodlust runs 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 savage 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.

In Mangione’s possession at the time of his arrest, in addition to a firearm and suppressor consistent with the ones used to commit the murder, was a handwritten manifesto of sorts. It accused healthcare companies, specifically naming United Healthcare, of prioritizing profits over compassion. “These parasites had it coming,” the document reads. “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.” After all, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few unfortunate eggs.

Interestingly, Mangione had reviewed Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski’s manifesto “Industrial Society and Its Future” on the book reviews website Goodreads, where he called Kaczynski a “prodigy” and “an extreme political revolutionary.” He praised the domestic terrorist 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?” The Left is always blathering about upholding democracy, but when it comes to overthrowing the status quo, they jettison democratic values and means in favor of simply committing ruthless murder and mayhem, which they justify as self-defense.

“You may not like [Kaczynski’s] methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution,” Mangione’s 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.” How ironic – because Brian Thompson was executed by a coward and a predator in disguise, who lay in wait for the unsuspecting husband and father before shooting him from behind and then fleeing the scene.

No person with a moral compass could believe that targeting political opponents for assassination is a just resolution to any issue in a democracy. That way lies the disorder and collapse of civilization – which is precisely the Left’s goal.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior