Warren and Sanders tell us why killing CEOs is understandable
"If you think sympathy for the devil in Luigi Mangione is confined to the fever swamps of Reddit, consider comments by Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Asked Tuesday about those celebrating the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the Massachusetts Democrat called it a “warning.”
Did she mean a warning not to shoot someone? Not quite.
“The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the healthcare system,” she said, as quoted by HuffPost. “Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far. This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they . . . start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.”
Translation: Violence may be wrong, but it’s explainable by the U.S. healthcare system. And copycats may be coming for the same reason. Oh, and how about passing Medicare for All?
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders also used Thompson’s murder to opine that the “anger at the healthcare industry tells us is that . . . you cannot have people in the insurance industry rejecting needed healthcare for people while they make billions of dollars in profit.”
As an explanation of Mr. Mangione’s alleged act, this is factually wrong and morally benighted. We don’t know if Mr. Mangione was denied care or even what his specific healthcare complaint was, apart from a general loathing for the system. Perhaps he blames health providers for his back pain, but that isn’t an explanation for murder.
Murder can’t be rationalized, and a society does so at its peril. This is why a healthy society establishes laws and guardrails against killing the innocent that should never be crossed. Shooting a healthcare executive in the back is not a “warning” of anything other than the illness or evil of one young man.
And sympathy for it is a sign of the degraded state of our culture and politics.
The right response to the healthcare assassination came from John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat, in the same HuffPost story. He criticized what he called “vile” social media posts for celebrating an “a— that’s going to die in prison.”
“If you gun someone down that you don’t happen to agree with their views or the business that they’re in, hey, you know, I’m next, they’re next,” Mr. Fetterman added. “And people want to celebrate it. It’s twisted.” It certainly is."
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