An Outpouring of Pro-Terrorist Sentiment

By Rich Lowry

Monday, December 09, 2024

 

Apparently, we don’t live in quite the country we thought we did.

 

As of early last week, we assumed we were a society where business decisions by insurance companies might be wrongheaded or unpopular but could be made without fear of violence.

 

Health care companies putting the names and photos of executives on their websites didn’t appear to anyone to have potential security implications.

 

And it could be taken as a given that no one, beyond a fringe on social media, might excuse the cold-blooded assassination of a business executive.

 

The targeted killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last Wednesday has put paid to all of this, in a disturbing reminder of how fragile civilized rules of society truly are.

 

The crime has been the occasion for the expression of the most frankly pro-terrorist sentiment in this country since the anti-Israel protests on college campuses last spring.

 

There was an outpouring of celebration and snark online, and sympathy for the presumed motive of the killer.

 

The latest entry in this execrable genre was a column in New York magazine headlined, “The Shooting That Was Inevitable: Our political system is breaking down. Now it has killed.”

 

There are a couple of outrageous contentions just in that title and subhead.

 

There was nothing inevitable about the killing of Brian Thompson — someone had to plan it meticulously and go out and do it, with considerable sense of purpose. Generalized discontent with health insurance didn’t pull the trigger, and pretending that it did is a way of robbing the killer of agency and absolving him from his heinous act.

 

The same point applies to the idea that the “political system” now “has killed.” Oh, really? The political system bought a gun, found out Thompson’s whereabouts, traveled to New York, stayed in a hostel, and then walked up behind Thompson and shot him?

 

This is quite out of character for our political system that, prior to carrying out this murder, was occupied holding democratic presidential and congressional elections and starting the process of Senate deliberations over the president’s cabinet picks.

 

The author, Sarah Jones, advances the Friedrich Engels concept of “social murder”; when a society mistreats its proletariat, according to Engels, “its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual.”

 

Jones says this logic applies to health insurance companies, too. Sure, UnitedHealthcare “does not pull a trigger and shoot its victims in the street,” but it is killing people nonetheless.

 

So, what we have with Thompson and his assailant is, in effect, a gangland dispute between two murderers — the former set the rules for what gets covered or not and the latter stalked the rule-maker and shot him in the back, but who can really tell the difference?

 

This is morally grotesque and, if taken seriously, would be warrant for killing anyone whose choices — lawfully arrived at in the normal course of business — have deleterious consequences for individuals.

 

A governor had a catastrophic nursing home policy during Covid? A pharma executive helped set in train the opioid crisis? A defense official authorized an operation that went disastrously wrong? A Boeing official made terrible mistakes? All of them should be, by the reasoning that makes Thompson’s murder somehow understandable, subject to violent retribution.

 

No one should want to live in a country where this dynamic is remotely acceptable.

 

But we are already further down this path than one would have thought possible.

 

The warning that unless the insurance industry operates in a manner more acceptable to its critics there will be more such violence is akin to the old line about an imminent “long, hot summer” — a threat masquerading as rueful prediction.

 

Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield’s decision in the wake of the Thompson murder to back off a (completely reasonable) proposal to limit the excessive costs of anesthesia was made under the shadow of the threat of violence.

 

And it’s not a good sign if companies are frightened to have the identities of their executives out there too publicly.

 

Perhaps Thompson’s assassin is arrested soon and is not the anti-insurance folk hero some expect, and this moment goes away. Regardless, we’ve discovered that if more violence is indeed directed at unpopular business executives, a segment of American opinion certainly won’t mind.