Murder is bad

There is a sickness in America, and it’s something our broken health care system can never hope to solve. It is deep and disturbing and has manifested in ugly, incomprehensible ways over the last two weeks.

On Sunday afternoon, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a seemingly reasonable member of the Democratic Party, sat down in front of his phone and recorded a two-minute video for his million followers on X. “I know it’s uncomfortable for political leaders to wade into the conversation that’s happening in this country in the aftermath of the murder of the United Health CEO,” he wrote. “But we need to listen to what people are feeling. And act.”

He said that “political leaders need to be part of this conversation” after the murder of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, on Dec. 4 on a New York City street, execution-style, by a young Ivy League graduate from a wealthy Maryland family. Murphy went on to rail against a “health care industry that mostly doesn’t give a s--- about people and only cares about profits.”

Said Murphy: “Murder is never justified. It isn’t. But if this country’s leaders don’t pay attention to the conversation happening right now this weekend, that is a mistake.”

That construction was not unique to Murphy. “Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told HuffPost. “This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change.”

“Shooting somebody in the back is totally unacceptable, but what I think has happened in the last few months is what you have seen rising up is people’s anger at a health insurance industry which denies people the health care that they desperately need,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on “Meet the Press.”

It’s all the same purposeful vacillation. Murder is never justified, but. Violence is never the answer, but. Shooting somebody is unacceptable, but ...

No. Murder is bad. Period.

Murder doesn’t help raise awareness about important problems. Murder doesn’t start a national conversation. Murder doesn’t get justified — ever, for any reason — in a society with a moral compass and its priorities in order.

But there is a contingent of Americans — not massive, but not insignificant — that do not subscribe to this view. There are some who have become cultists, deifying alleged killer Luigi Mangione, cheering his image at a Boston concert over the weekend. There are more championing his pseudo-intellectual manifesto as if he were some kind of martyr for their preferred political cause.

And there are even some flirting with the idea that both Mangione and the CEO he allegedly killed are murderers, because Thompson led a giant company indirectly responsible for the deaths of thousands — a form of “both-sides-ism” that ends up looking like a tacit understanding of the action taken by this deranged assassin.

One example is a social media post from the progressive journalist Matthew Stoller, a strong advocate against corporate power. “It’s absolutely outrageous that Luigi Mangione addicted large swaths of America to heroin in return for kickbacks oh wait that’s UnitedHealth Group never mind it’s cool,” he wrote on Tuesday. He was highlighting a New York Times story about OxyContin titled, “Giant Companies Took Secret Payments to Allow Free Flow of Opioids” (and yes, UnitedHealthcare was reportedly one of them).

This appeared to be an attempt to downplay Mangione’s criminal act, and instead point to the greater sins of the person he killed. I reached out to Stoller to discuss.

“I think assassination is a dangerous and unacceptable way to express political disagreement and deeply destabilizing to a free society,” Stoller told me. So we agree on that.

“The reaction to the killing, where large swaths of the public expressed disdain for the victim, was organic and shocking,” Stoller said. “And this wasn’t some lefty reaction — nurses and doctors were among the people who said they don’t feel bad for him. Politicians can choose to ignore this conversation, but that conversation is happening without them.”

And it’s true — this reaction has become shockingly prevalent. According to a new Emerson poll, 41 percent of respondents aged 18 to 29 said they believe the “actions of the killer of the United Healthcare CEO are acceptable,” while 40 percent said it was “unacceptable” and the rest were neutral. That’s an astonishingly high figure, and totally out of step with every other age group. People aged 30 to 39 years found the killing 56 percent “unacceptable” to 23 percent “acceptable,” and older cohorts found it even less acceptable.

Young people in America are in deep trouble. It feels like the celebration of Mangione, or even the attempts to turn him into a Robin Hood figure, can only happen in a post-pandemic world, where an Extremely Online, broken-brained generation is totally adrift. They are on TikTok and Reddit but have lost a general sense of humanity, are full of pent-up grievance and resentment, with no outlet to recalibrate around human interaction. It’s pure keyboard nihilism, listlessly anarchic, unbound by a set of morals that come from being part of a community and society as a whole.

“Clearly, a lot of people do not think the law is respectable, and that should scare us and prompt calls for reform,” Stoller told me.

But Mangione’s murder should not prompt calls for reform. It should set back, not advance, the cause he supposedly represents. Murder cannot become an avenue for social change.

Imagine if some lunatic killed the leader of a prominent pro-choice group and had written a vaguely pro-life manifesto. Imagine terminally online conservatives were celebrating him, and Republican politicians were saying that “violence is wrong, but it’s time to have a national conversation about when life begins.” I hope we would all find that gross and reprehensible.

In fact, the framing by senators like Murphy is so outrageous that I’m not sure he even believes it. Like most cynical politicians, Murphy and his fellow Democrats are likely reacting to the reaction — happy to feed into the perverse frenzy to advance a political objective and get a few extra retweets and followers.

Murder is bad, and there is no “but” after that. There is no next sentence.

That’s not an endorsement of a health care system or of the health insurance industry. Let’s have that conversation. But the ghouls using a deranged murderer to push their political agenda because the victim provides an expedient path to winning the issue are a manifestation of the worst of American culture today.

Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.

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