SHE WAS MURDERED IN MIDTOWN MANHATTAN. THE INTERNET CELEBRATED IT:
My initial reaction was relief.” That’s what Penny, a 30-year-old sociologist from Tampa, Florida, told me about seeing the news of Blackstone real estate executive Wesley LePatner’s killing in the lobby of a Manhattan office building.
“Her death, as a valuable instrument to such evil corporations, is nothing to mourn. Thousands of Americans die every day from situations that her company exacerbates, such as the affordable housing crisis.”
I reached out to Penny via direct message on Reddit, after I found one of her comments about the news of LePatner’s murder. Her comment made a joke about the amount of money the victim spends on her children’s private school. When I wrote to Penny directly, asking how she made sense of the news, she got back to me right away.
In no time at all after shooter Shane Tamura went on a rampage Monday, killing four innocent people before turning the gun on himself, the shock and horror over what happened competed with a frenzy of social media posts, including Penny’s, that celebrated LePatner’s death on mainstream sites from YouTube to Reddit to Instagram.
I saw dozens of them that night, and spent hours messaging back and forth with the people who wrote things like “I’m shocked it’s not more common,” and “Rest in Piss.”
As Ed Morrissey wrote in April after Taylor Lorenz went full fangirl on Luigi Mangione, “The problem with Che Fever is that it sets the incentives to deliver on that prophecy. That’s why we’re seeing an explosion in violence, such as the arson at Josh Shapiro’s governor’s mansion, assassination attempts on Donald Trump, attacks on Tesla owners and dealers, and the thuggery of Hamasniks on college campuses. The Taylor Lorenzes of the media use them to promote La Causa and hail the violent nutcases as brave soldiers for change. And that’s because the moral compasses of the Taylor Lorenzes of the media skew toward cowardly backshooters and Molotov-cocktail throwers as ‘morally good,’ whether they admit to it or not.”
Once again, America’s Newspaper of Record is doing straight-up reportage:
