RADICAL CHIC: THE BOY BAND ERA. Luigi Mangione and the American Abyss.
To the mainstream media, the question posed by this episode was obvious: Why are Americans so angry at health-insurance companies? And so reporters and opinion columnists got to work limning a portrait of the health-care industry—its profits, the salaries of its executives—and fleshing out the animus against it.
The only relevant question in the wake of the Thompson murder, however, is: What has gone wrong with Americans’ moral compass that so many could cheer the extrajudicial killing of an innocent man? That question has not been deemed worthy of exploring.
When the high fives for the assassin started appearing on the web, some observers dismissed that support as a minor emanation from the fever swamps of social media, where anonymity and the desire for a following push users to rhetorical extremes.
But a poll of registered voters released on December 17 undercuts that diagnosis. Over 41 percent of respondents supported the Thompson assassination, or were at best ambivalent about it. Nearly 16 percent of respondents were “unsure” or “neutral” about whether the killer’s actions were “acceptable or unacceptable.” A little over 8 percent of respondents found Mangione’s actions “completely acceptable.” Another 8.4 percent found those actions “somewhat acceptable,” and 9 percent found them “somewhat unacceptable.” (It is not clear how “somewhat acceptable” differs from “somewhat unacceptable.”) Four of every ten Americans, in other words, will not unequivocally condemn the killing.
The younger the voter, the greater the level of support for political killings. Sixty-seven percent of voters aged 18 to 29 were ambivalent about or supportive of Mangione’s actions, with only 33 percent finding those actions completely unacceptable. Fifty-seven percent of voters aged 30 to 39 were unwilling to condemn the killing unequivocally, with only 43 percent finding it “completely unacceptable.” Democrats were nearly twice as likely as Republicans to find it either somewhat or completely acceptable.
It’s no surprise that age is inversely correlated with support for left-wing assassination, since the younger the voter, the more recent his exposure to the American education system. The pro-Mangione reaction epitomizes the dominant traits of contemporary academia: narcissism, a juvenile view of economics, the inability to think in terms of principle and precedent, and ignorance about the civilizational triumph that is Western due process. Campus reaction to the October 7, 2023, terror attacks in Israel put another item on that list: support for barbarism when the victims of that barbarism belong to a group disfavored by the academic Left. We can now add corporate executives to the list of acceptable targets.
The left-leaning film-oriented Cinesthethic account on Twitter descended into inadvertent self-parody with a tweet and retweet in short succession today:
Meanwhile: Colin Jost’s Reaction Says It All As ‘SNL’ Audience Cheers For Luigi Mangione. “Jost, who is married to actress Scarlett Johansson, seemed caught off guard when the audience responded with enthusiastic applause upon hearing Luigi Mangione’s name.”
America’s Newspaper of Record believes that Lorne Michaels will ultimately succumb to fan pressure, and give Saturday Night Live’s audience the host the show deserves. Sounds killer:
Truly bad timing on Mangione’s part, though. If he had acted sooner, he would have very likely been among the 37 federal inmates facing the death penalty who “President Biden” pardoned today.