The Sickness Spreads

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, December 12, 2024

 

For the better part of a week, mainstream media outlets and far-left Democrats (the Venn diagram approaches the point of eclipse) have foolishly mistaken the nihilistic Left’s jubilant response to the slaughter of an innocent man for a mass movement. Axios reporter Maya Goldman is only the latest to succumb to this grotesquely immoral and inordinately imbecilic temptation.

 

The lead sentence in her latest story tells the tale: “The vitriol directed at health insurers following the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson could prompt more scrutiny of an industry thought to be facing a favorable regulatory outlook in the second Trump administration.”

 

Goldman’s story is not, in fact, about the victim, his company, or even his industry. It is about the degree to which Joe Biden’s moribund administration has pulled an Elizabeth Warren in heedlessly overinterpreting the bloodlust of bored social media users for the vanguard of the revolution. Its members are stoking the investor class’s fears of “a regulatory crackdown” on the health insurance industry, thereby contributing to UnitedHealthcare Group’s declining stock price. But to read her lede, we might conclude that this example of the Biden administration’s reliable oversensitivity to the very-online Left’s slightest discomfort is Brian Thompson’s fault.

 

Thompson had the temerity to be shot in the back by a cowardly and privileged scion of old money, whose deranged thinking led him toward the same disjointed conclusions Goldman apparently shares. The “public outcry over coverage denials and corporate indifference” ignited by his slaughter, she wrote, speaks for itself. The eight in ten Americans who expressed satisfaction with their private health insurance in a 2023 Kaiser Family Foundation survey, we must assume, do not.

 

Goldman dwells on “the public fury directed at health insurance companies in the wake of Thompson’s killing” and notes that the “insurance industry has condemned the outcry.” But the insurance industry is hardly alone. Properly socialized adults of all political stripes have reacted with the purest revulsion to the barbarism promulgated by faceless sadists on cloistered social media venues.

 

The reaction from the press to this heinous act is nothing short of demonic. In deference to a Leninist theory of terroristic violence as the force that moves the wheels of history, progressives in media have forgotten all they know about copycat attacks and the impressionability of the young and dispossessed. They are inviting more violence of the sort they seem to value. They should not escape culpability if their dark desires are fulfilled.