WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF VIOLENCE? Shock poll: 41 percent of young voters find killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO acceptable.
A poll found 41 percent of adults under 30 consider the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson acceptable, more than the 40 percent in that demographic who consider it unacceptable.
Anger over health insurance companies has been in the spotlight after Thompson was fatally shot Dec. 4 in New York City.
Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old, was arrested last week in Pennsylvania and faces charges in Thompson’s killing.
The survey from Emerson College Polling found 68 percent of all respondents found the actions of the person who shot and killed Thompson unacceptable.
But a startling 24 percent of those aged 18-29 found it “somewhat acceptable,” and 17 percent of that group found it completely acceptable.
Since Thompson was shot, first in the back and then again as he fell to the ground, a number of social media posts from people saying they do not have sympathy for his death have gained popularity.
Spencer Kimball, the executive director of Emerson College Polling, said 22 percent of Democrats said they found the killing acceptable, compared to 16 percent of independents and 12 percent of Republicans. He said the overall findings underscored “shifting societal attitudes among the youngest electorate and within party lines.”
And then there’s the violent rhetoric emanating out of lefty-dominated BlueSky: Jesse Singal: Bluesky Has a Death Threat Problem.
On December 6, I made my first post on Bluesky—which was actually launched by Twitter in 2019, before becoming an independent company two years later. As I soon found out, it is an exceptionally angry place. And in part because of a widespread culture of impunity when it comes to violent threats among some of its users, it comes across as a potentially dangerous one—in a way X, or Twitter, never did for me in my decade-plus of actively using that platform. Bluesky has either made a conscious decision to take a laissez-faire attitude toward serious threats of violence, or its moderators are incapable of guarding against them, or both.
There’s at least some evidence for the latter theory. While many left-wing people announced they were leaving X after the election, one million users joined Bluesky that week. The results weren’t pretty. As The Verge reported on November 17, “the Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that it received 42,000 moderation reports in the preceding 24 hours.” That’s more than 10 percent of the number received in the entirety of 2023, which was 360,000.
But given what I’ve learned about Bluesky’s “moderation” over the last week, I feel compelled to inform the site’s users—and potential users—about its staggeringly negligent policies toward violent threats and doxxing.
The background here is that a subset of users on Bluesky disagree with my reporting on youth gender medicine—a subject I’ve been investigating for almost a decade, and have written about frequently, including in The Atlantic and The Economist. (I’m currently working on a book about it, commissioned by an imprint of Penguin Random House.) I’m not going to go deep here, but I’d argue that my reporting is in line with what is now the mainstream liberal position: See this Washington Post editorial highlighting “scientists’ failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them.”
But perhaps because I wrote about this controversy earlier than most journalists, and have done so in major outlets, I’ve become a symbol of bigotry and hatred to a group of activists and online trolls as well as advocacy orgs like GLAAD that push misinformation about the purported safety and efficacy of these treatments, and attempt to punish journalists like Abigail Shrier for covering the controversy at all.
Bluesky appears to have attracted a particularly high number of these trolls, and even before I arrived on the platform, some of them were making sure I wouldn’t feel welcome there. Nora Reed, an online influencer and cultural critic, wrote in November that “I think we need a plan for if Jesse Singal shows up here in advance.”
“Honestly?” responded one user. “[G]un.” Another user then replied, lamenting the absence of technology that would allow them to shoot me via the internet:
Anyway, I joined nonetheless. I figured these messages were coming from a small group of disturbed people. There’s no lack of disturbed people on X—albeit ones who usually have very different politics—and I really did want an alternative to X.
When I arrived, I was bombarded with messages from people telling me to kill myself, or expressing their opinion that I should be killed. When a Change.org petition signed by 25,000 people failed to get me booted off the platform—likely due to my having never come close to violating any rule—the anger only spread further.
The 21st century – and the party of tolerance for diversity – is not turning out as I had hoped.