Lefty Sophists Delude Themselves. Again

By Noah Rothman

Friday, December 13, 2024

 

Those on the far left who’ve spent the days that elapsed since Brian Thompson’s assassination making his killer out to be the vanguard of a popular anti-capitalist revolution have once again deluded themselves.

 

Compelled by an outbreak of shockingly poor judgment, the Center for Strategic Politics went into the field to find out if Americans still thought murder was bad. It found that, among the 445 adults it polled, very few hold his alleged assassin in high regard. Even fewer told pollsters they believed the UnitedHealthcare CEO somehow deserved to be shot to death. Just 12 percent of all respondents said the slaying was in any way justified. Seventy-three percent saw the murder in a “negative” light.

 

Unfortunately, respondents under the age of 45 were far more receptive to the Left’s utterly ghoulish inhumanity. Among younger adults, 31 percent had a “positive” disposition toward Thompson’s alleged killer, and 21 percent believed he was slaughtered for a worthy cause. That’s depressing enough. But even among this cohort, a negative impression of Luigi Mangione and regarding his act of murder as unjustified were plurality and majority propositions, respectively.

 

There are lessons here for political operatives who fetishize youth, but those lessons will go unlearned. Why? Because the same lessons were available when a very similar contingent made spectacles of themselves by expressing their support, veiled or otherwise, for the terrorist group Hamas.

 

Progressives with even the most tenuous understanding of the country they claim to represent should have intuited that mobs of menacing vandals eagerly destroying their campuses and intimidating or even assaulting the Jews in their vicinity would not attract a mass following. But it took polling for the activist Left and the Democrats who cater to their delusions to discover that the people blocking roads and bridges, disrupting air travel, and shutting down holiday parades were not all that popular.

 

Perhaps the Democrats who are today appending a “but” onto their condemnations of bloodshed — and their colleagues who are eagerly elevating those morally bankrupt legislators to positions of prominence — will be chastened by these results. But I doubt it. Those who suspended their capacity for rational thought and convinced themselves that a cold-blooded killer’s heinous act would prove a galvanizing clarion call to the rest of America are too far gone. They are convinced that their movement is a mass movement, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.