The arrest of Luigi Mangione for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is more than a criminal case. It is a test of America’s ability to distinguish right from wrong. At this point, far too many Americans have flunked that test.
Elizabeth Warren, for example. The Democratic senator from Massachusetts did not wait long to draw policy lessons from the heinous assassination that widowed Thompson’s spouse and deprived his two sons of a father.
“Violence is never the answer,” Warren told the Huffington Post, “but people can be pushed only so far. This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.”
The mind reels. No other elected official so perfectly captures the progressive combination of credentialed self-regard, fraudulence, and imbecility. Warren’s blinkered statement provoked a backlash, and rightly so. She hastily revised her comments. “Violence is never the answer,” she said. “Period. I should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder.”
Ya think?
Yet Warren is not alone. She’s inhabiting the zeitgeist—or, as her namesake might say, painting with all the colors of the wind.
The confusion extends beyond Warren to other elected officials, from Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), who has turned this shocking crime into what they might call a “teachable moment.”
These luminaries of the anti-corporate progressive Left are experts in moral inversion. They reduce politics to the binary of victim and victimizer and justify the behavior of designated victims as acts of resistance. Brian Thompson’s job as CEO automatically placed him in the category of oppressor, thereby diminishing the moral gravity of his murder.
The same illogic leads the progressive Left to equate Israel’s defense against Hamas terrorists with the October 7 atrocities and to draw false equivalences between Daniel Penny’s intervention on a subway and Mangione’s premeditated execution.
Thompson, Israel, and Penny are oppressors, you see. And in the topsy-turvy world of the global Left, oppressors are presumptively guilty. Condemned by reason of status. Appeal denied.
The oppressed, however, are desperately trying to be heard. Their grievances justify lawbreaking, havoc, and rampage. Why? Because, according to the Left, they have no other choice. Society did them wrong. They are depraved on account of being deprived. And if they, like Elizabeth Warren said, “lose faith” and “take matters into their own hands,” can you blame them?
Oh yes, you can. Religion, tradition, and the law tell us that we are moral agents. We possess free will. We are responsible for our actions. And we will be judged by a higher power.
The moment you let morality out the door, the second you rationalize terrorism, you open yourself to nihilism and self-destruction. This isn’t just the theme of great literature. It’s the lesson of radical politics from the Jacobins to al Qaeda. The idea that some Americans would walk down the same dark road out of frustration with health insurers is horrifying.
Thus the case of Luigi Mangione highlights another deficit that threatens the country. A shortage of moral clarity enfeebles our sense of good and evil. It hampers our ability to arrest and punish criminals in our cities and on our college campuses. It blinds us from recognizing friends and foes abroad. One consequence is a rise in threatened and expressed political violence: swatting, assaults, riots, and assassination attempts. Another is a gradual slide in manners, an erosion of the rule of law.
Insanity must be treated. Evil must be confronted. But what of the apologists for madness and criminality, the comfortable sophists who invert morality to score partisan points? They are the product of degraded and debased institutions. Families, neighborhoods, churches, and schools are the places where we form our characters and learn right from wrong. The reactions to Mangione’s arrest tell us that many of these institutions—higher education, most significantly—are not doing their jobs.
But some are. Not everyone is prepared to break their ethical compass on the anvil of the Left. The lionization of Mangione has been met with profound disgust. For every Elizabeth Warren, there is Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who said of Mangione, “Hear me on this: He is no hero. The real hero in this story is the person who called 911 at McDonald’s this morning.” Or as Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.), the conscience of our time, put it: “He’s the a—hole that’s going to die in prison. Congratulations if you want to celebrate that.”
In the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, let’s hope that Shapiro and Fetterman prevail over the addled Left. For a test of moral clarity is no ordinary exam. The questions are weighty. Failure leads to disaster. And there are no retakes.
Matthew Continetti, Director of Domestic Policy Studies, Patrick and Charlene Neal Chair in American Prosperity
Reprinted with Permission from www.aei.org – By Matthew Continetti
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
I have two questions for the people who are basically condoning what Mangione did. 1. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ALL OF YOU?! 2. How would you feel if Mangione killed a member of your family?
How many more years will we have to listen to Elizabeth Warren? This proves that so much of our country hasn’t learned anything after all these years.
Will Warren and co change the tune when violence is turned against their ilk, will they scream their heads off about the evil and danger of the right?
Left seems to be sympathetic to Mangione who is a product of their ideology that is pushed by ed. institutions on all levels. Had he been on the right, their screaming would be deafening. I wonder if parents might sue the institution that weaned him for his radicalization and harm it caused. It is common to blame everything and everyone else ,so they might as well try to blame the institution, I’d love to see that.
Instead of the execution he deserves, no doubt he’ll end up in a cushy mental health institution.
“Violence is never the answer,” she said. “Period. I should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder.”
As a hard-core Leftist, EW should know that the history of the political Left contains nothing but death and destruction.
I can’t wrap my head around their reasoning! It wrong, wrong. WRONG!!
I hope sen fetterman is right but i imagine right now the demonic left is marshaling all its resources to defend this …… After all, hes going to be tried in nyc. We could be seeing another oj trial outcome although they’ll probably get him on gun charges.
The progressives have minds like children in the areas of deductive reasoning and rational thought. The spew garbage because they are incapable of processing facts.
Joe Biden labels people terrorists and kills them with airstrikes.
Good thing Luigi decided to shoot a CEO rather than a school otherwise he wouldn’t have a GoFundMe page with over $150,000 for his defense and no one in Congress claiming to “not condone violence” then uttering the disqualifying “BUT”… before justification of it as “having enough”.
First remove the lefty mandates such as trans surgery and other medication.
Second defund coerced abortion imposed on all rate payers.
Third eliminate all vestiges of ObummerCare.
Fourth reform prescription drug pricing and make it transparent.
Then and only then can Trump start cutting out the middleman and restore the proper relationship between doctor and patients.
Elizabeth Warren is a mental case. How could she possibly think that what this young man did, this horrible act, could in any way be justified? To say the Thompson, Israel and Penny are oppressors shows how ignorant she is.
No one wants to hear, “you’re not covered” and yet there seems to be no recourse for those who paid their premiums but failed to read the fine print. CEO’s can’t run a business giving the store away, stock holders won’t stand for it. And yet, someone finally said “no more” and we’re rightly appalled and outraged. Both sides are guilty including the government which condones fine print exclusions.
this is not a right/left issue….obviously, his action is immoral. But, is actively, deliberately denying healthcare to seriously ill people moral? When UHC has been exposed as devising algorithms to deny care to as many as 1 in 5 claimants? How many people have suffered or died due to a “for profit” system for something that should be a pubic good? I’d like to see that # tallied up. White collar “crime” and “violence” against society in the name of profit is not moral, it is just accepted by a society that endorses greed and selfishness in the sake of the God Almighty stock market.