Wow: After a week in which a pack of privileged, too-online lefties have been praising the assassination of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, the NYPD apprehended a suspect . . . who looks to be a privileged, too-online lefty.
We will learn more about Luigi Mangione in days to come, but he reportedly was caught with a ghost gun and silencer consistent with the killing, multiple fake IDs and a manifesto that raged, “These parasites had it coming.”
He’s an alum of a nearly-$40,000-a-year elite Baltimore private school and the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned two impressive tech degrees.
Law-enforcement sources familiar with Mangione’s online activity say he subscribed to anti-capitalist and climate-change causes.
And while sources suggest his personal motive for the killing involve the insurance or health-care industries’ treatment of an ailing relative, we note he also liked a telling quote from “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski complaining that “antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.”
Whether or not an insanity defense is coming, we see a common derangement in the assassin and his online fans: The idea that the US health-insurance industry is willfully evil, which makes violence against its execs somehow rational.
Lord knows, health-care financing in this country can be a bewildering, maddening mess. But the left’s obsession with a government takeover as the cure for all ills, and its demonizing of those who disagree, is nothing but dim-witted arrogance.
Fact is, health insurance in the country is entangled by a host of government-imposed costs and other mandates.
And socialized medical systems like Britain’s and Canada’s require people to wait months to get specialist care or basic tests like MRIs that most Americans get within days. Residents of those countries who can afford it routinely turn to the private sector.
There’s no such thing as infinite “free” care, but many of our best and brightest imagine otherwise.
That only one of them apparently took the “logical” step killing an innocent on that basis doesn’t mean there isn’t something horrifically wrong with the thinking of those who cheered him after the fact.