|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
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.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior
“Leftists in media and government seem unsure how to regard the murder of the health care CEO. On the one hand, our existing insurance system, a fusion of profit and socialism known as fascism, is their brainchild, the offspring of Obamacare. On the other hand, they hate all things that smack of profit or business. Murdering a white, rich businessman is really consistent with the “moral” creed of leftism. But the monsters they decry are all of their own creation.” – Michael J. Hurd
Because I always take life advice from an Objectivist psychologist………….
Off topic but: BIDEN/DEEP STATE/others are silent on DRONES because they are going to BLAME THEM for bringing down a plane since THE BULLET MISSED!
Notice that not one Army helicopter sent to take photos, follow one till in lands, then who owns it and why they are flying them. The WH, and many others, are using The Schultz Plan: “I see nothing! I say nothing! I KNOW NOTHING!”
They have to do this before J20!
Good point.
Chickenshit democrats were so confident in Obamacare that they exempted themselves, their staff, and their voting block in the UAW from it.
Penn medicine
PHILADELPHIA— Revelations that some members of Congress, including members of key health care committees, hold substantial personal investments in the health care industry have raised concerns about lawmakers’ financial conflicts of interest and their potential impact on health care legislation and oversight. Now, a new study shows that over a third of all members of Congress held health care-related assets with a median total value per member of over $43,000 between 2004 and 2014.
https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2021/august/over-one-third-of-congressional-members-heldy-significant-health-care-related-financial-assets
The opposite is true. We live under the godless creed of leftism today, and have done so since the French Revolution murdered God’s representative to end all hierarchy and usher in the rule of men — promptly installing your goddess of reason in Notre Dame. Thus began the downward spiral of their and our civilization.
Men must be governed, and the standard must not be left to our reason or discretion – always a changing standard. History shows decisively what standard creates true freedom, peace and prosperity for all men – an unchanging standard outside of themselves rooted in the LORD God Who alone is Truth.
Atheists cannot or will not see these connections because they love a lie – that they are gods and can bring about utopia with their own strength and wisdom. Are the French better off today? Are Americans and Europeans better off today? What changed? They forgot their God and wished to live without Him. You would have more of the same, only accelerated.
Has Europe declined? Are Americans better off today? You seek destruction as blindly as the rationalists of the French Revolution. Your idol in Notre Dame is the adulterous and narcissistic Ayn Rand.
The tendency of us all is to be like Jeshurun who “grew fat and kicked…then he abandoned God who made him, and treated the Rock of his salvation with wicked foolishness.” Deut. 32:15. God gives blessings and we forget Him when our lives are blessed, and become parasites upon the crumbs of His former mercies.
Nowhere in my comment did I mention Ms. Rand or Objectivism. Get back on your meds.
Oh T, you don’t have to mention it or her. Most everyone on this comment board knows you. You live and breathe Rand and Objectivism. They are the cornerstones of that boring life you live.
Perhaps if you had shut up about them several years ago you wouldn’t be tarnished with those two. But you did what you did and, as John Lennon said during his Christian controversy, “Now it’s all this.”
You are Objectivism’s clown prince on this comment board. Accept it.
Human sacrifice is popular by any means and with varied cult names.
Oh, Look… “woke” Democ-rats are goose-stepping again.
For-profit healthcare and the 2nd amendment make for a deadly combination, quite literally.
For profit? Is a top-notch surgeon who trained for a decade or more supposed to work for free?
EARNING a profit under Free Market Capitalism is a noble virtue. The problem is the health insurance industry is now under FASCIST control by the government and they are feasting on UN-EARNED profits at the expense of the taxpayers and the patients and they lobby for more favors and protections. They lobby for more fascism.
Michael Moore says Cuba has superior Healthcare and it’s free. Of course, if you’re a poor campesino you get the empty clinics while Party members get the best treatment. You should join The Party. No Amendments there either to worry about. You don’t even have to think there since one man thinks for everyone.
No election hassles either. I know you like FREE stuff so I’m giving you five inner tubes and a bus ticket to Key West. Tie them together and you’ll make history by being The First, Democrats love Firsts, The First to float TO Cuba! VIVA CHE! VIVA FIDEL! VIVA OBAMA!
OH, Michael Moore goes to the Mayo Clinic.
Most all the Nations M.S. Media and Bottom Feeder Leftists Propagandists who cover up f or the enemy Kronkite was one the Viet Congs biggist Propagandists and Walter Duranty served Stalin and Hitler the New York Slimes covered up for Castro and are behind their 1619 Project
“I have no love 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. ”
A truly disgusting and slanderous comment. Really despicable.
Slanderous? How so? The elites lied to us over and over about Covid and they made billions of dollars as a result. Covid was a SCAMdemic.
Slanderous towards practicing doctors who really helped people with COVID. My colleagues and I at our hospital saved hundreds of lives of people who were critically ill.. Tapson accused us of being greedy. We made no more money than usual and risked our lives to take care of people. So he slandered us, the front line practicing physicians.
But the truth hurts.
Its a lie, that’s the problem!
“Dr.” Fauci, is that you?
NO, just an Emergency Physician who risked my life saving others.
playing proctologist with your boi-friend’s butt doesn’t make you a doctor, larry.
You POS, I’ve saved THOUSANDS of lives as a Emergency Physician in critical care an trauma centers you junkyard scumbag!
What have you done do help you fellow human beings other than being a public imbecile?
Brian Thompson wasn’t executed. He was murdered. People who approve of political murder do it as an outlet for their angry, irrational hangups.
United Healthcare covers transgender surgery. Do they cover transspecies surgety? Could I take oit a policy with them and ask to be convertef to a cat? ;-).
Why don’t these leftists go for the real target?
Government.
Ummm, the Government you speak of. Is that the one that has been heavily controlled by Leftists, Liberals, Progressives, Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, Fascists, etc. for 16 of the past 20 years and were the architects of Obamacare? That government?
The few classes I took on Rhetoric provided me a tool, or “organon” of formal logic, but given my human fallibilities, I too could err.
So let me know if this makes sense.
If it’s justified to allow, promote and participate in the targeted assassinations of anyone deemed guilty of screwing up the healthcare system, should combat Veterans be allowed to eliminate the myriad VA bureaucrats, union thugs and Marxist psychiatrists, who run like rats through the seemingly endless miles of VA hospital corridors?
Vast billions for marble floors, anti-military “fine art” and Karl Farbman furniture greet the Veteran seeking an appointment… only to encounter the nearly impenetrable wall of indifference and incompetence; that is guaranteed lifetime employment with benefits.
If the answer is “Yes”, truly a new day has dawned, and my movie script will bring me a fortune.
Leftism, in all it’s varied and sick iterations, has always been a death cult. From psychotic leaders like Mao (50+million deaths), Stalin (100 million deaths), Hitler (20-30 million deaths), Pol Pot (2 million deaths), the inbred family that runs N. Korea (unknown), Obama (if he’d had the chance) and the rest of the sick leaders to the individual losers who just can’t get along with what life throws at them, they will always end up killing en mass or individually.
C’mon boys and girls, isn’t leftism and collectivism fun? We just haven’t done it right yet.
Intrepid…
Screw you and your allah loving satanic ELCA fake church…
satanic islam is respo0nsible for over 300 million murders…
But you won’t report on that… you homo Bisexual… allah lover…
Haven’t you heard… Communism is dead… today’s agenda… Islamofascism…
Poor widdle baby. “Screw You”? Really? That’s all you have? And “homo” jokes? Very mature.
Tell you what. Try animal skins and screaming at the sky in a river. I’m sure that will get you a big following.
Fun exercise: Ask ChatGPT who will win in the future war between China’s “Belt and Road” initiative and Islam’s quest of the global Caliphate.
This was an amazing occurrence. The different opinions in the comments underline a sharp divergence in our society about the medical system issues.
obammy care was the start of our system that has the negative aspects of both capitalism and socialism. It comes hardest into focus because it affects EVERYONES’ pockets and their health. I personally have had quite terrible experiences with both incompetent medicos and financial disasters while under an insured status. People who have lost everything including loved ones lives have a much different view than a comfortable, pompous moral lecturer.
The obammy-Mccain-Roberts system has every problem that our society faces in spades. In the early 60’s before most of you were born, a Doctor made a house call at 8pm. He charged $5.00 and was polite and effective. Try that today. In the end obammy care must be repealed. The Sherman Anti Trust act would be a good start. Quality would go up and costs down. If John D Rockefeller had not seen big profits in personal control of the medical system, we would not be here.
IMAGINE THE CELEBRATIONS if the Punk Kid DIDN’T MISS or the Man got his shots off! Many professors on FB implied that they were saddened by the missed opportunities “to save our Democracy!” They were happy when the Trump family got Covid… so, so, hoping.
They HATE GUNS, blame guns, want to ban guns, but NOT ONE WORD ABOUT THE GUN that killed the CEO, or the Evil Guns used for the Assassination Attempts!
The right is blatantly misreading this shooter/CEO situation.
They so badly want to pin this as a left wing issue. A leftist extremism case. It’s not. Go read his manifesto. What it was is an anger issue. Anger at problems that the left have created, sure. And he was misguided on who created this mess.
This guy who was assassinated was not a good man. He was no better than a mob boss and if it wasn’t this kid who got him, someone else would’ve given the amount of financial crimes this guy had going on. He was very corrupt. He should’ve been behind bars ages ago.
This isn’t a right vs. left issue. It’s a crime issue. It’s an injustice issue. It’s a vigilante issue. It’s a result of systems out of control.
You’re behind the times, babe. Today, the internet is alive with the fear of drones.
How much money are we spending on sex change procedures, and how much pressure does that put on Insurance companies to cut back in other areas?
https://nypost.com/2024/12/12/opinion/feds-help-health-insurers-hide-dirty-secret-rising-denials/
Cold blooded premediated murder requires execution of the murderer. This is Biblical. This is and may be a deterrent.
Insanity is no excuse. We can assume the murderer was insane or is insane.
Awarding life in a mental institution over execution is not punishment, is not sympathy, it’s catering to demonics.
i don’t believe anyone is REALLY celebrating the death of the CEO. the many reactions to the crime is much more complex.
people are celebrating that the crimes perpetrated by BIG PHARMA, BIG INSURANCE are graphically exposed as they would never have been otherwise.
our pols do not hear the people. they only hear the coins being dropped in their pockets by the special interests they serve.
it will come to revolution. as CHRIS HEDGES said, the system is far too corrupt to be saved.
For some your point might be true.
But there are others who are simply nihilists and want this country to collapse into chaos, don’t forget the Cloward-Piven Strategy.
Yet the same tribe would walk over hot coals to worship Faucci.
This assassination could easily inspire more left-wing fanatics to mobilize in what the Dems have already publicly announced is a “resistance.” Could it escalate to a more organized armed rebellion? I tend to get melodramatic at times, so this might only be a product of my overactive imagination. But I’m hardly the only one who has ever uttered the phrase “civil war” more than once.
The Left are a collective of anti-social personality disorder types. They are narcicists who manifest deficiencies in empathy and remorse.
This was an act of terrorism, not a murder. The terrorist should be publicly executed by firing squad or hanging; and all those who have publicly expressed agreement with the act should immediately be shipped to Guantanamo Bay prison and locked up for domestic terrorism.
Most in the M.S. Media kissing the Rings of China Soros, Gates and the UN/Globalists and or course the Demo-Rats
It is to be expected that medical, insurance or pharmaceutical companies dealing with human suffering or death threat caused by physical afflictions should cover their costs; but it is outrageous, it’s a crying shame that they make such a huge profit out of it that their managers may become multi-millionaires.
Assassination is NOT an acceptable punishment for any kind of thieves, whether in the medical professions or not. In turn, I believe that the life of any individual who has deliberately killed someone should automatically be in the balance.
The Left have become morally inverted.
Most in the M.S. Media kissing the Rings of China Soros, Gates and the UN/Globalists and or course the Demo-Rats
Yes, you don’r murder people who have different ideologies than you. That’s what THEY do.
Yes, you don’r murder people who have different ideologies than you. That’s what THEY do.
Leftist ideology has a moral reversal at its core. Up is down and evil is good. As the ancient prophet warned, “Woe to those who put dark for light and evil for righteousness”. Any crime is justified in the context of a leftist’s superior morality, so they erroneously believe. Such moral reversal is at the bottom of TDS.
You can usually tell when a writer doesn’t really know how to write or form an argument about someone when they offer the “you didn’t know him personally” case–as if Mark Tapson based all of his shaking, faux-machismo tirades against Kamala Harris on mutual dinner and cocktail conversations in which she was rude to staff and didn’t tip well.
You don’t have to support Luigi Mangione–although you should check out some of the great folk murder ballads written about him over the past few days–but I pity the folks who are mourning the carpetbagging blockhead who found himself at the wrong end of his gun.
The leftist celebrate murder because they are evil.