Who Do We Kill Next?
“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons
Happy Sunday, which seems like a good time to remember that I never promised you a safe space here.
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Spend anytime at all on social media, and you’ve seen it: The real-time process and effects of online radicalization; the embrace of terrorist morality by a claque of neo-Jacobins (many of whom were posting paeans to decency, tolerance, democracy, and kindness just five minutes ago.)
Once upon a time, this sort of sick shit was confined to extremist 4-chan message boards after a school shooting, or a massacre at a mosque.
Now, though, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed on social media sites like Threads, X, Bluesky, and even here. There is a raucous celebration of a murder because the system is so unfair and “CEOs aren’t human.” And there is an endless stream of rationalizations; the “buts” that provide winking justification for cold-blooded assassination. Noah Smith notes that a new poll finds that almost a third of Americans under the age of 45 have a positive opinion of Luigi Mangione, the probable murderer.
The killing has already made the masked Mangione our new anti-capitalist antihero — Robin Hood meets Robespierre, Lenin, Che, and the Punisher. And all of this is mixed with some sort of psycho-sexual ghoulishness, where even some critics feel obliged to comment on the hotness of the killer’s “6-pack.”
But, of course it doesn’t stop there. Because it never does. So we get this sort of thing:
Dystopian 'wanted' posters of top health CEOs appear in New York City
In the wake of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, video shared on social media showed 'wanted' signs featuring other healthcare corporate leaders plastered across traffic control boxes in Manhattan…
The signs also included the phrase suspected shooter Luigi Mangione allegedly wrote on the bullets found at the crime scene - 'Deny. Defend. Depose.'
In Seattle: A hacked road sign that flashed the message, “ONE LESS CEO MANY MORE TO GO.”
And this, where the killer becomes a comic book hero:
And this…
And this, FFS:
We also get stuff like this: A column in New York magazine headlined, “The Shooting That Was Inevitable: Our political system is breaking down. Now it has killed.”
But, of course, the shooting was not “inevitable.” It was a choice. And the system did not pull that trigger.
And, of course, there are the “buts.”1
“This is not to say that an act of violence is justified,” [said AOC], but I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that ppl interpret and feel & experience denied claims as an act of violence...”
“Denied claims as an act of violence."
No, explained, Stephen Hayes: “Murder is an act of violence. Denied claims, however painful, are denied claims.”
This is the crucial distinction; and here are other things that are not violence: speech, books, and political disagreements.2
Even the most incendiary rhetoric — unless direct incitement to bloodshed — is not violence in the same sense as shooting someone in the back.
**
It’s still early days, but it appears that the writing of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, may have inspired Mangione to murder the CEO.
Kaczynski murdered three people and injured 23 in a series of deadly mail bombings between 1978 and 1995. Mangione, who admired his writing, also shared the Unabomber's hatred of corporate America. That hatred had a very long tail. So, now we have to ask: Who will Mangione inspire? Even decades from now?
Because you know it’s going to happen. Noah Rothman writes:
In deference to a Leninist theory of terroristic violence as the force that moves the wheels of history, progressives in media have forgotten all they know about copycat attacks and the impressionability of the young and dispossessed. They are inviting more violence of the sort they seem to value.
Who’s next?
The murderer may turn out to have severe mental health issues, or not. But what about all the people penning justifications of his actions? They support the murder as a matter of principle, making judgments they regard as rational, reasonable, and high-minded, and they are unashamed in suggesting that not only did the victim have it coming, but that others have it coming as well.
So who else should be killed?
Or to put it somewhat differently, what other murders would be cheered or rationalized? What is the governing principle here? Is it limited to the cis white male CEOs of health insurance companies?
Who else? How about CFOs, and executive vice presidents? How about the “risk managers”? Or the lawyers? Or investors? Or shareholders, all of whom are surely also complicit?
The belief that we should not murder someone in cold blood is a limiting principle.
Liberal democracy has a limiting principle. Terrorism does not.3
If murder is justified by anger, disappointment, “or the unfairness” of the system, then why should vengeance be limited to executives of just one industry?
So this seems a good time to ask some clarifying questions. Who do we kill next?
The list seems almost endless: Politicians who vote to cut programs? Members of the military? Police officers? Judges and juries who hand down unpopular or outrageous rulings? The Medicare officials who also delay and deny? How about Jews who support “genocide” by Israel?
These days I seldom find myself in agreement with Rich Lowry. But he is painfully right when calls this “morally grotesque and, if taken seriously, would be warrant for killing anyone whose choices — lawfully arrived at in the normal course of business — have deleterious consequences for individuals.”
A governor had a catastrophic nursing home policy during Covid? A pharma executive helped set in train the opioid crisis? A defense official authorized an operation that went disastrously wrong? A Boeing official made terrible mistakes? All of them should be, by the reasoning that makes Thompson’s murder somehow understandable, subject to violent retribution.
No one should want to live in a country where this dynamic is remotely acceptable.
**
Why should we imagine that only the Jacobins get to pick the targets for righteous payback? We are awash in tribal fury, and the philosophy of cleansing violence is not the sole province of the anti-capitalist Left, is it? It can (and already has been) used by others who are nurturing their own demons and anger.
In their obtuseness, the hyper-online neo-Jacobins seem not to realize that when you knock down all the laws and all the standards of decency to get at the devil, there is nothing to protect you when he turns around.
**
A wreckage of trust
None of this is to deny that there are serious problems with our health care system. But what we’re seeing now suggests that other things are also broken.
Years of norm breaking has left us surrounded by the wreckage of trust in principles and norms of every sort. So what we are seeing is a loss of faith not just in capitalism, but in virtually every other institution — a loss of belief in the democratic process itself.
The right celebrates vigilante killings (lionizing Kyle Rittenhouse) and defends a violent attack on the Capitol. A nation that elects a convicted felon and serial liar to its highest office mocks the very idea that the powerful are — or ever will be — held accountable.
To many Americans right now, appeals to decency or the Rule of Law itself are seen as weakness or delusion — a naïve throwback to a world that no longer exists: A world where we knew and trusted the rules of civilization. In the Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance writes that “Decivilization May Already Be Under Way.”
“The line between a normal, functioning society and catastrophic decivilization can be crossed with a single act of mayhem,” she writes.
This is why, for those who have studied violence closely, the brazen murder of a CEO in Midtown Manhattan—and, more important, the brazenness of the cheering reaction to his execution—amounts to a blinking-and-blaring warning signal for a society that has become already too inured to bloodshed and the conditions that exacerbate it.
The process of civilization — and especially of liberal democracy — has seen the drift away from violent conflict resolution. But that is what now seems to be breaking down. She writes:
Along with layers upon layers of social conditions that make us especially prone to political violence, the Machiavellianism of contemporary politics has stoked both the nihilism of those who believe that violence is the only answer and the whitewashing of recent violent history.
This is how a society reaches the point at which people publicly celebrate the death of a stranger murdered in the street. And it is how the January 6 insurrectionists who ransacked the U.S. Capitol came to be defended by lawmakers as political prisoners.
It matters when people downplay and justify violence, whatever form that downplaying and justifying takes—whether by revising history to say something that was violent wasn’t so bad, or by justifying a murder because of the moral failures of the victim’s profession.
When growing tolerance for bloodshed metastasizes into total indifference for—and even a clamoring in support of—the death of one’s political enemies, civil society is badly troubled indeed.
Exit take: Yes, it’s time for that Yeats poem again.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Your Sunday dog
I’m in Maryland with the granddogs.
At least initially, this included Elizabeth Warren.
When initially asked about the callous responses to Thompson's death, Warren told HuffPost, "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 health care system."
"Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far," [said Warren]. "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."
"Really leaning into the 'but' on this one in ways no Democrat has been comfortable doing," tweeted Semafor Washington bureau chief Benjy Sarlin. "No, it is not inevitable that some weird rich kid assassinates an insurance CEO — what is this framing?"
Igor Bobic, the author of the HuffPost piece, noted several hours later that Warren had "clarifi[ed] her remarks on the UnitedHealthcare CEO's killing and the response to it," jettisoning the second half of her original statement.
"Violence is never the answer. Period," said Warren. "I should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder."
There was also significant Democratic pushback:
Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman:
“He’s the a--hole that’s going to die in prison. Congratulations if you want to celebrate that. A sewer is going to sewer. That’s what social media is about this. And I don’t know why the media wants to turn that into a story, just with these trolls saying these kinds of things anonymously like that,” Fetterman said..
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro:
“The suspect here is a coward, not a hero," Shapiro said.
The governor spoke out against "vigilante justice" and rebuked those who have praised the slaying of Thompson "in some dark corners" of the internet.
"In America, we do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint," Shapiro said.
Since we’re talking about Jacobins, it’s worth recalling The French Terror, during which “at least 300,000 suspects were arrested; 17,000 were officially executed, and perhaps 10,000 died in prison or without trial.” This included guillotining, and drowning elderly prisoners, pregnant women, and children.
After the massacre at Vendee, the commanding general boasted: “There is no more Vendée… According to the orders that you gave me, I crushed the children under the feet of the horses, massacred the women who, at least for these, will not give birth to any more brigands. I do not have a prisoner to reproach me. I have exterminated all.”[8]
Instead of Yeats: "Any man`s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." John Donne (1572 - 1631)
Doesn't matter if it's a CEO by an elitist, or the homeless mentally ill man by a cop. And now, we have a president elect with his minions who espouse death and violence for everyone who doesn't think he's god.
One point about the French Terror. In the end, it turned on those who supported it.
Charlie, you and a lot of others are really misunderstanding statements like AOC’s and Elizabeth Warren’s. The “buts,” you call them. Trying to understand the reason for a visceral, disturbing positive reaction to an assassination is not cheerleading it, it is absolutely essential work to figuring out what went wrong and what needs to be fixed in our system. Understanding that UHC and Brian Thompson as its CEO are directly responsible for dozens or hundreds of wrongful deaths because they purposefully denied valid claims for essential medical treatment in order to increase profits is not approving vigilante justice, it’s explaining why many people online are lionizing Mangione. We can’t fix the problem unless we know its cause.
“But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”
MLK said the above. Was he endorsing or excusing the riots? Of course not. He was absolutely committed to nonviolence and thought the riots were harmful to the cause. But he was explaining the cause of the riots and the underlying problems that needed to be fixed. AOC and Liz Warren were basically saying exactly the same thing he did. They don’t deserve having you and others twist their words into some sort of approval of the killing.