RADICAL CHIC — THE BOY BAND ERA: The deranged lusting after the ‘hot assassin.’
The widespread fawning over Luigi Mangione, the man charged with the murder of US healthcare boss Brian Thompson, is as bizarre as it is nauseating. You would have thought that we were beyond victim-blaming by now. But no, a consensus has emerged from ‘progressives’ that Thompson ‘had it coming’, and that his alleged killer can be excused for his apparently good motives. Worse still, he can even be indulged on account of his good looks.
The latter response has been the most deranged aspect of this episode. Just when you thought our society couldn’t become more superficial, witness how this ‘hot assassin’ has been lusted over by legions of pervy half-wits. In other circumstances, the actions of a lone nut armed with a gun and violent fantasies would have had progressive Americans in paroxysms of moral panic, usually about gun laws or the threat posed by the far right. But no. It’s different this time, it seems. This killer meant well, we’re told. And aren’t his looks just to die for, too?
Some have sought to dress up their fawning as politically motivated. The former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz seemingly spoke for many when she said her initial reaction to Thompson’s death was one of ‘joy’. Arwa Mahdawi of the Guardian spoke of Thompson as ‘the face of an unfair system.’
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In recent days, it has emerged that Mangione is no left-wing radical, but instead seems to be enamoured of America’s lunatic fringe and its icons. ‘He was a violent individual’, he once wrote of the Unabomber, a terrorist who murdered three people and injured 23 others with nail bombs. ‘While these actions tend to be characterised as those of a crazy Luddite, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary’, Mangione added.
Speaking of the Unabomber, perhaps to calm its more bloodthirsty leftist readers, the New York Times has an opinion column titled: The Unabomber’s Influence Is Deeper and More Dangerous Than We Know.
Plenty of young people are alienated from both sides of the political spectrum, and trying to create their own patchwork philosophies. They’ve seen little meaningful reform from either political party in their lifetime, get their information from a wide range of sources of varying reliability and take pride in forming their own opinions.
So what do you say to a young person who has come to admire Mr. Kaczynski? I share many of the same frustrations over the state of the world as those of the college students I teach — how we are bound up in and complicit in horrors across the globe without a viable political alternative to chart a new way forward. How do we maintain our humanity in an inhumane system, where people die unnecessarily every hour on the streets of the richest country in the world?
I did give an answer to the teacher’s question, the best one I could. I told him to tell his students that Mr. Kaczynski was cruel, that he tortured dogs and took pleasure in imagining the suffering of others; to read not only his manifesto, which he polished for public consumption, but also his diaries. There they would see what kind of man he was. I told him that the Unabomber’s philosophy was taken from thinkers like Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, who never killed anyone, and urged him to teach his students about their work.
I hope my words reached them. And I hope they understood that what Mr. Kaczynski represents is not a new way forward or an answer to the injustices of the modern world, but another turn of the wheel of violence that brought us here.
Finally, Justine Bateman spots the dog that didn’t bark in the wake of Mangione’s coldblooded assassination of an insurance CEO:
