By Tal Fortgang
Thursday, November 20, 2025
A deranged man walked into a Manhattan skyscraper on July
28 and murdered four people before turning the gun on himself. His motivations
are unknown and will probably remain so forever. For the first few hours after
the shooting, social media reflected the somber mood that properly follows
hearing news of a tragedy. When it became clear that one of the murdered was a
police officer — a husband and father of two young children, with a third on
the way — some of us worried we would see celebrations from the anti-police crowd.
But that didn’t materialize.
It turns out we were right to worry about grotesque
celebrations of random violence, though. The first indication came in an X post
from leftist podcaster Sean McCarthy: “New York City is so evil that if you
walk into a random big building to do a mass shooting there’s decent odds
you’ll hit the person in charge of buying up single family homes for blackstone
[sic].” He was referring to Wesley LePatner, an executive at the asset
management firm, a lay leader at her synagogue, and the mother of two children.
To McCarthy, she was nothing more than an avatar for the evils of capitalism.
When Blackstone put up posts mourning LePatner, revolting
messages piled up among the replies. Anonymous accounts, often featuring
symbols of leftist politics, expressed their contempt for LePatner and glee at
her untimely death because she was wealthy, white, and responsible (in their
eyes) for contributing to high housing costs and other economic ills.
My Manhattan Institute colleague Jesse Arm calls this
sort of reaction “Luigism,” after Luigi Mangione, who still enjoys cult status
in some quarters for allegedly killing health insurance executive Brian
Thompson. Luigism, Arm writes, is “the idea that violence is a legitimate
response to the perceived injustices of capitalism.” There is a system of
reasoning that leads Luigists to conclude that celebration is the proper
response to Thompson’s and LePatner’s murders. It continued to show itself,
unsurprisingly, in gleeful reactions to the horrific assassination of Charlie
Kirk in September. It has insinuated itself into American culture, especially
among young leftists, vying to replace a mode of moral reasoning that most
Americans don’t even realize they subscribe to.
The moral reasoning that has undergirded American culture
since Europeans settled this land is the system developed by the Hebrew Bible.
Christianity, which began as a Jewish sect, spread that system throughout the
West and universalized it. The basic moral system Jews applied internally would
apply to all under a religion that recognized “neither Jew nor Greek.” Our
moral assumptions have long been deeply Judeo-Christian, no matter how
unfashionable that phrase has become. We have taken it for granted to the point
that it now seems strange to articulate. The new, menacing moral reasoning is
so foreign to us, it seems impossible that it could be grounded in any system.
But in fact, lurking unarticulated beneath Luigism is a system that is very
old; it is prebiblical. And if biblical morality seemed harsh, the pagan view
it aimed to supplant was far worse. As its resurgent manifestations suggest, it
is incompatible with sustaining a civilization.
Mangione and his cult following signaled the rise of the
new morality. Fundraising for Mangione’s legal defense and sales of “Free
Luigi” apparel went gangbusters not because anyone thought he was innocent, but
because some contingent thought he was guilty — and worthy of being honored for
his crime. To Mangione’s fans, Thompson deserved death because he symbolized
exploitation, though hardly anyone knew who he was before Mangione allegedly
shot him in the back, much less what, if anything, he had personally done
wrong.
Mangione’s vigilantism thus transformed into
self-defense. “I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled” by
Mangione’s celebrity, explained Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “they
need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied [health
insurance] claims as an act of violence.” That doesn’t personally implicate
Thompson in wrongdoing. For all anyone knows, he could have been agitating
internally for a no-denials policy, just as LePatner could have been a champion
of progressivism within Blackstone. Those who do anything but condemn their
murders do not care, clearly. They believe, quite passionately, that
sacrificing some executives to the gods of justice for an industry’s sins is
right and proper.
A similar set of justifications greeted the grotesque
news that Charlie Kirk had been murdered for being an outspoken political
conservative. Using phrasing familiar to Luigists, some public figures made it
clear that they thought Kirk’s murder was fine, even good: “Hope the bullet’s
okay after touching Charlie Kirk,” was one refrain. Kirk was not a person, a
husband and father of two young children, but an avatar of conservative
revanchism. To many, he was just “hate” personified.
Virginia even elected an attorney general, Jay Jones, who
had fantasized about killing his political opponents. “I will go to their
funerals to piss on their graves,” he wrote of his Republican colleagues in the
state legislature, drawing on the same phrasing Luigists use to celebrate
capitalists’ deaths. “I mean do I think Todd and Jennifer,” Jones’s opponent
and his wife, “are evil? And that they’re breeding little fascists? Yes.” After
wishing gruesome death on those “little fascists,” Jones revealed his adherence
to the new morality: “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on
policy.” Violence against people (even children) is justified — even good — to
strike a blow against the forces of political evil. The dignity of every
individual person could not be farther from the equation.
Most telling, though, is that this line of reasoning even
extended to LePatner’s murder, where, unlike the other two cases of actual
murder, the shooter’s motivations were irrelevant. All that had occurred, and
all that mattered, was that a “bad” woman had been murdered in cold blood. A
meme quickly emerged among those celebrating that featured a word stamped
across her picture: “LUIGI’D.” The Free Press quoted one adherent of the
new morality explaining his glee: “I don’t know this woman, so I have to view
her as a symbol.”
He doesn’t have to. He chooses to subscribe to a
moral system that conceives of human beings not as individuals made in the
image of God but as representations of abstractions. This is the pagan view of
humanity: People are not really individuals; they do not really have agency, as
they are merely manifestations of great systems of power reflecting the wars of
the gods; human beings are not infinitely complex but simply symbolic. Where
the Hebraic tradition teaches that one who quells a single life has destroyed
an entire world, the pagan view is that what happens on earth merely mirrors
what happens in some other realm. With that view comes a pagan view of justice,
which occurs at the cosmic level when the good ism triumphs over the bad.
Our neo-pagan morality marries the ancient human tendency
to find order in the simplicity of a world run by exogenous forces to our
obsession with power, power dynamics, and power disparities. For years now, we
have heard sophisticated people insist that social interactions are determined
by systems of power designed to privilege certain groups over others.
“Antiracist” celebrity Robin DiAngelo took this view to its extreme, embodied
in her infamous quote, “The question is not ‘did racism take place?’ but rather
‘how did racism manifest in that situation?’” Racism, the abstract power beyond
human control, has agency of its own. It is one of the forces that run the
world, in a pantheon alongside imperialism, sexism, and their inverses:
anti-racism, anti-imperialism, feminism, and so on. People can align themselves
with good powers or bad, but they have no ability to free themselves of the
“system” as a whole.
More dangerously, the sophisticated view of justice is
now that we ought to calculate innocence and guilt, or what we might call
desert, by analyzing the characteristics of those involved. According to this
view, individuals are to be judged on the basis not of their actions but of
what groups they are aligned with and how much power they accordingly have. It
therefore holds that justice — the great moral guide — is achieved when power
is redistributed. That is supposed to even out the injustices that brought us
to the current day. It may not be fair to you as an individual, but it does
justice across time and space.
The new morality asserts itself in obvious ways, such as
race-adjusted sentencing in Canada. It is less obvious, but still present, when
people deny the unfairness of race-preference schemes that discriminate against
whites and Asians. It can be projected onto geopolitics and frequently serves
as shorthand for why Western leftists should support Palestinians against rich
and powerful Israel — and even support Hamas as a “progressive force.” The
history of the region is genuinely irrelevant to the new morality; Israel’s
success is complete proof that it is cosmically guilty. Some true believers in
the new morality hold that members of powerless groups can literally do no
wrong to members of powerful ones.
This is all diametrically opposed to the biblical notion
of guilt and innocence. Because man is created in God’s image, the locus of
desert in the Bible is the individual. The Bible repeatedly enjoins its
adherents not to punish parents for their children’s wrongdoing, or vice versa.
Rather, “each person for his own sin shall die.” As Tomer Persico explains in
his book In God’s Image, this is an emphatic rejection of the idea that
a human being is fundamentally an extension of a system greater than himself
and therefore can deserve reward or punishment for another person’s actions.
Prebiblical legal codes held that if a man harmed another’s son, that man’s son
shall himself be harmed. Punishment accrued to the system, not the choosing
individual. The new morality revives this idea, considering it just to harm the
system that Thompson and LePatner represent, even as the murdered individuals
chose to do nothing wrong. Who they were — where they stood, literally and
figuratively — was enough.
There is a reason why biblical society spread and
flourished while pagan morality suffered a long dormancy. Biblical morality
undergirds a system that allows cooperation and social trust. Its rules about
desert provide certainty about what you — a thinking, choosing person with
agency — have to do to stay out of trouble. Going to a job and doing legitimate
work, even if it’s unpopular, is not going to land you in prison or under
attack. You can control what you do and count on the rules to tell you when you’re
putting yourself at risk. Society will judge you based on what you did.
That view is losing ground to a competitor, in which
certain individuals are simply classified as unprotected for representing the
wrong deity, as it were. While the legal system will still prosecute Mangione
(and would do the same to the high-rise shooter had he survived), popular
morality inevitably shapes law over time. Meanwhile, the social and
psychological barriers to committing violence erode when perpetrators expect to
become folk heroes with crowdfunded legal defenses. The cost-benefit calculation
of turning to violence is shifting in a dangerous direction because the
boundaries of the new morality — whom it will protect and whom it will condemn
without prior warning — are undefined.
But the real reason to sound the alarm is that the new
morality is totally incompatible with social life. What would you do if you
were a law-abiding person who suspected that you lived among a critical mass of
Mangiones, or the people who desecrate LePatner’s name? You wouldn’t just watch
your back. You would go back to social distancing, avoiding interactions with
strangers at all costs. You would take your family, your business, your ability
to cooperate with others as far away as you could. You would cut off the social
bonds required to build, develop, and invest in anything. And you would be
perfectly reasonable to do so. If there is reason to believe that your
neighbors would try to justify your murder because you have come to symbolize
something they detest, finding new neighbors is urgent and imperative. This is
no way to build a community, an economy, or a polity. Just the opposite: it’s
fatal to the cooperation we need in order to flourish. The new morality is not
safe for human consumption.
We are witnessing the practical consequences of a culture
losing its ability to defend or even articulate its moral basis. As biblical
literacy declines and appreciation for the Bible as a foundational American
text becomes passé, the Bible’s once-radical moral injunctions go from being
taken for granted to being usurped without so much as public disputation. That
people are individuals was once so obvious that we didn’t have to say so —
until suddenly we lost sight of how precious that basic truth is.
Meanwhile, the pagan instinct to reject the notion of
individual agency and dignity — indeed, to deny that each person is an
individual — does not die easily, and never permanently. When it rears its
head, it does so not merely as incantations and abstractions but as a
prefabricated justification for bloodlust, dehumanization, and social
breakdown. Even if just a small fraction of the population is tempted by the
new morality, which in truth is a very old morality, we would have a major
problem on our hands. And it doesn’t seem like such a small fraction anymore.
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