WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: The Left’s response to the Daniel Penny and Brian Thompson cases exposes their sick hypocrisy.
In an interview that’s gone viral, I confronted [Taylor Lorenz] on my “Uncensored” show Monday night about these repellent comments, asking: “Why would you be in such a celebratory mood about the execution of another human being? Aren’t you supposed to be on the caring, sharing left where, you know, you believe in the sanctity of life?”
To my astonishment, rather than back down — or apologize — she went even further, saying: “I do believe in the sanctity of life, and I think that’s why I felt, along with so many other Americans, joy.”
I was incredulous. “Joy?! Seriously? Joy at a man’s execution?”
“Maybe not joy,” Lorenz smirked, instantly realizing how callous she’d sounded, “but certainly not empathy.”
To which I retorted: “How can this make you joyful? This guy is a husband, he’s a father, and he’s been gunned down in the middle of Manhattan. Why does that make you joyful?”
At which point, Lorenz accused Thompson of murdering “tens of thousands of Americans” with his company’s health care policies, and then repeatedly laughed as we went back and forth over her incendiary rhetoric until I eventually lost my temper and exclaimed: “Taylor, I don’t mean to be rude, but why the f–k are you laughing all the time?”
Staggeringly, her stunningly heartless reaction to Thompson’s assassination has received widespread praise from left-wing social media accounts, which have tried to turn the suspected killer, Ivy League graduate Luigi Mangione, into some kind of sick pinup hero.
And I would bet good money that many of those same people celebrating the murder of a non-violent, non-threatening, non-criminal man in the street were also outraged by the accidental death of a violent, threatening, habitual criminal on the subway.
The reaction to the two deaths has been very illuminating about the woke left’s shocking double standards and warped, hypocritical morality.
They promote the hashtag #BeKind and profess to be so much more caring, sensitive and tolerant than conservatives.
But they also think courageous veterans like Daniel Penny are villains, and deranged shooters like Luigi Mangione are heroes.
If you believe those two things, you’re a disgusting excuse for a human being.
At NRO, Jeffrey Blehar is “Against Cheap Nihilism:”
Rick Perlstein of the American Prospect said, “Just putting this out there: the jacket the CEO-murderer wore is flying off the shelves. That sort of popular anger was there to be harvested this past November by the Democratic Party, were they led with the kind of valor, empathy, and populist courage FDR showed.” FDR was many things, most of them bad, but I would not attribute to him the “populist courage” to murder law-abiding civilians in broad daylight in order to send a message pour encourager les autres.
In a 2008 interview with Reason magazine to promote his then-new book Nixonland, Perlstein, the leftwing author and former JournoList member, said that he viewed [the movie] Bonnie and Clyde as “the most important text” of the ‘60s era New Left:
Reason: You like to mix cultural history with political history. Bonnie and Clyde is one of the central texts in the book.
Perlstein: My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate [sic] how strange and fresh that was.
In her 1986 book Damaged Gods: Cults and Heroes Reappraised, Julie Burchill compared Hollywood’s late-‘60s cinematic killers to the real-life late-‘60s killers in Hollywood:
In the Sixties the cocaine Communists – natural heirs to the limousine liberals – of Tinseltown demonstrated just how far beyond the mainstream, and just how far removed from ordinary people – film fans – they were by producing a string of films which had violent psychopaths as their heroes. That violent criminals are not rebels, but the warped policemen of poor communities – causing people to lock their doors, stay inside, live in fear – was lost on these butterflies; it is easy to canonize criminals when you have bodyguards. The craze culminated in the making of Bonnie and Clyde, in which two perfectly hideous and brutish murderers of eighteen people of 1934 were turned into two bona fide Beautiful People of 1967. ‘They were young, beautiful and they killed people,’ ran the film’s advertising catchline.
It would be interesting to know if the Manson Gang of Death Valley, frequent guests at the parties on the cusp of glamour and gutter in the Hollywood of the late Sixties, saw the film and heard the slogan and thought of themselves in the same light when they killed the young movie actress Sharon Tate Polanski and six other people in the last summer of the Sixties. They were certainly no uglier than Bonnie and Clyde, although perfectly repellent. They were literally not half as bad – only seven deaths to eighteen. Yet no film would dare show them as sensitive, poetry-writing young beauties forced into their position by an unsympathetic society – Mark Chapman either – and if one did, Warren Beatty et cie would be appalled. Because Bonnie and Clyde – even their names were familiarized to make them sound like a groovy young married Sixties crooning couple: Bonnie and Clyde and Sonny and Cher – killed ordinary people, film fans, while Sharon Tate was a REAL PERSON, one of them, precious. After the Tate murders, the Hollywood brats showed less enthusiasm when it came to giving a makeover to the hideous psycho killers of American folklore and in the mid Seventies the same cocaine Communists were fond of employing the slogan DON’T BUY BOOKS BY CROOKS to blacklist the post-Watergate autobiography of Richard Nixon. But they had been buying something much worse for years – buying murderers’ sweetest dreams of themselves.
On the “Progressive” left, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
