It should surprise no one that the man charged in the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is a college-educated anti-capitalist, or that the killing’s biggest cheerleader in the media, Taylor Lorenz — a lefty “journalist” who’s a huge proponent of cancel culture but has never been involved in a scandal she was willing to take responsibility for — can’t seem to hide her jubilation over the brutal murder of an innocent man.
Following a massive manhunt that lasted nearly a week, Luigi Mangione, the suspect in Thompson’s Dec. 4 murder, was found by police dining at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Monday. On his person was a three-page, handwritten manifesto, in which he reportedly portrayed himself as a hero fighting the “parasites,” who “had it coming.”
Similar sentiment was also espoused by Lorenz, long before Mangione was a suspect in the case. On the same day that Thompson was gunned down in broad daylight outside the Hilton hotel in New York, where UnitedHealthcare was holding its annual investor conference, Lorenz appeared to justify the murder.
On social media, she wrote, “And people wonder why we want these executives dead.” She then doubled down, saying, “People have very justified hatred toward insurance company CEOs.” The comments from the popular tech podcaster — who previously worked for the New York Times, the Washington Post and other news outlets — understandably set off a media firestorm, which Lorenz brushed off as “pearl clutching” in a Dec. 5 Substack post, titled, “Why ‘we’ want insurance executives dead.”
“This is what the media fails to understand. They don’t see insurance CEOs who sanction the deaths of thousands of innocent people a year by denying them coverage, often coverage doctors deem medically necessary, as violent,” she wrote in her newsletter. And she’s right: I don’t see insurance company executives running lawful businesses as being inherently violent, unlike gunning down a father of two in cold blood.
This is a distinction the modern left finds increasingly hard to make. For years, they have tried to make us believe that hurtful or potentially offensive speech is actually a form of violence, while losing any ability to take a joke and feigning outrage over anything that might be remotely offensive to anyone at all. At the same time, they have callously justified actual violence — such as the rape and murder of 1,200 Israelis on October 7 — when they believe it furthers their twisted ideological objectives.
On his talk show, British journalist Piers Morgan called Lorenz on this apparent cognitive dissonance, asking: “Aren’t you supposed to be on the caring, sharing left where, you know, you believe in the sanctity of life?” To which she responded: “I do believe in the sanctity of life and I think that’s why I felt, along with so many other Americans, joy.”
“Joy? Serious? Joy at a man’s execution,” responded Morgan, articulating what most of his viewers were likely thinking. Lorenz later attempted to argue that, “I didn’t say I felt joy in a man’s death” — even after Morgan played back the clip of a statement she had made moments earlier. She had been cut off, you see. Had she not, she would surely have given a perfectly reasonable explanation for the “joy” she felt upon hearing that someone had been murdered.
Lorenz’s penchant for sticking her foot in her mouth and then categorically denying it was ever there is her modus operandi. Last summer, for example, Lorenz landed in hot water for posting a picture on Instagram of herself wearing an N95 mask at the White House that featured U.S. President Joe Biden in the background with the caption “War criminal” below him. She initially tried to claim she had nothing to do with it, but after it was confirmed by multiple people, she left her job as a columnist at the Washington Post before an internal investigation could be made public.
After numerous media outlets reported this week that Vox Media was not going to renew its contract to host Lorenz’s podcast, she took to social media to claim it was all “false” and that “Vox doesn’t own or distribute my YouTube podcast.” Whether Vox is still maintaining whatever relationship it had with her, or if she simply thinks journalists mischaracterized the terms of the deal, is still unclear. One thing is certain: for someone who makes a living by communicating, she sure has a habit of miscommunicating the point she is apparently intending to make.
And that includes her political point about America’s health-care system. Lorenz has been attempting to use Thompson’s death as an opportunity to criticize health-insurance companies for denying claims for life-saving care, which she says has resulted in the deaths of “tens of thousands of Americans.” Lorenz likes to portray health-insurance CEOs as greedy murderers, but the fact is that they are operating within a highly regulated market.
If she wishes to change to rules by which they are governed, or advocate for a public health system, she should be calling for political change (not that universal health care is any better: an estimated 17,000 Canadians died on wait lists in 2022-23). By instead tacitly condoning the murder of people who are making an honest living within the existing system, she has allowed her broader argument to be drowned out by the ensuing controversy.
This willingness to engage in or excuse politically motivated violence is a growing problem on the progressive left. In January, Mangione, the suspect in Thompson’s murder, posted a review of the Unabomber manifesto, in which he favourably quoted another review that praised the terrorist for recognizing “that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere,” and claiming that the Unabomber’s actions were “not terrorism.”
It should probably also come as no surprise that Mangione followed Lorenz on Twitter (a fact she also claimed to be ignorant of), or that he graduated from Ivy League schools. Over the past year, university campuses throughout the West have been consumed by mobs of anti-western terrorist supporters who have cheered on the rape and murder of innocent Israeli civilians and persecuted their fellow citizens simply because of their religion or political beliefs.
The Thompson murder appears to be an example of this same vile woke ideology leading to more senseless violence. It is time for our society to recognize that the modern left is not the tolerant, peace-loving movement it once claimed to be — it is a racist, violent ideology that spurns everything western society holds dear. By calling out Lorenz for her heartless disregard for human life, the media is not “pearl clutching in outrage,” as she would have us believe. It is finally sticking up for western values, such as the rule of law and democracy — the main benefit of which is its ability to resolve political disputes without resorting to violence.
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