An Astonishing Level of Dehumanization
The cast of Saturday Night Live has said lots of things over the course of the show’s 50-year history that have drawn wild cheers from its audience. But two Saturdays ago may have been the first time the person drawing shrieks of delight had been arrested for a cold-blooded assassination.
The spontaneous ovation was for Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged in the December 4 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The husband and father of two teenage sons was walking to an investor meeting in Manhattan when he was shot in the back and leg. Police called the shooting, to which Mangione has pleaded not guilty, a “premeditated, preplanned, targeted attack.”
So how did Mangione become a folk hero? It’s not just the crowd attending SNL. An Economist / YouGov poll shows that 39 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 29 view him favorably, while an Emerson College poll shows 41 percent of that cohort finding the assassination acceptable. At least a hundred people even showed up at a court hearing to support Mangione.
The primary explanation for the lionization of Mangione is the rage directed at America’s health-care system in general and the health-insurance industry in particular, for its high costs, its profits, and its denial of coverage. To many people, Thompson embodied a system they consider not just broken but evil. They saw his killing as a strike against a system that exploits them. No one can plausibly argue that the murder of Thompson will do a single thing to fix the problems in America’s health-care system. Yet for some, his murder seemed cathartic, while others greeted the development with open glee.
Hours after Thompson was killed, UnitedHealthcare posted a statement on Facebook: “We are deeply saddened and shocked at the passing of our dear friend and colleague Brian Thompson.” Within a couple of days, more than 71,000 people had responded with the laughing emoji.
The journalist Taylor Lorenz told Piers Morgan she felt “joy” at the news of the shooting. (When Morgan responded with shock, Lorenz backtracked, saying, “Maybe not joy, but certainly not empathy.”) A professor of bioethics at St. Louis University shared her own story of frustration with UnitedHealthcare, declaring that while she was not celebrating Thompson’s killing she was also “not sad” because “chickens come home to roost.” One person, commenting on a video of the shooting online, said, “Thoughts and deductibles to the family. Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.” Another wrote, “My only question is did the CEO of United Healthcare die quickly or over several months waiting to find out if his insurance would cover his treatment for the fatal gunshot wound?” A road sign in Seattle said, “One Less CEO. Many More to Go.”
THEN THERE ARE people like Jia Tolentino, a staff writer at The New Yorker, who says she holds “anti-capitalist views” and believes “the American health-care system is profoundly immoral.” In an appearance on Amanpour & Co. to discuss an essay she’d written about the Thompson murder, Tolentino said, “There are lots of different kinds of violence. Someone shooting someone in the street is one. I think our health-care system is quite clearly another.”
Tolentino went on to invoke Friedrich Engels’s concept of “social murder,” his term for a society withholding the conditions that are necessary for its people to live. For Tolentino, “social murder” describes America’s policies on the minimum wage, housing, and, in particular, health care. She said: “I just think there are a lot of ways to unjustly and immorally end someone’s life before it should have ended. One of them, the kind of violence that we fixate on in this country, is a single person with a weapon that intends harm upon another person and then causes it. But there’s a lot of other ways to end a life early and unjustly and immorally, and denying people health care is one of them.” Mangione was being celebrated as a folk hero, she explained, “for taking someone out that was seen to be a danger to public safety.”
But Tolentino wasn’t done.
“If people want to make CEOs of profoundly immoral companies, if we want to make their lives miserable”—at this point, she smiled and chuckled—“we can do that without shooting them.” She went on to advocate for “obstructive forms of protest” that “are not violent and murderous.” So while Tolentino wasn’t endorsing brazen murder, you could be excused for suspecting her of being sympathetic to those who have turned an Ivy League graduate accused of brazen murder into a folk hero. After all, in her own estimation, the man Mangione shot in the back, Brian Thompson, was himself responsible for “social murder.”
WHAT A LOT OF PEOPLE who are celebrating Thompson’s death and demonizing UnitedHealthcare don’t seem to understand—or don’t seem to want to understand—is that in every modern health-care system, some institution is charged with rationing care. In some, it’s a government bureaucracy. In others, it’s a private for-profit or nonprofit insurer. In America, it’s a mix of all three. Many insurers, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kaiser Permanente, are nonprofits. The biggest insurers are Medicare and Medicaid, which are single-payer public programs. So is the Veterans Affairs Department. Other insurers are for-profit companies, like UnitedHealthcare.
You don’t have to be a fan of the way that UnitedHealthcare makes its decisions to acknowledge the difficulty of mediating between providers and patients. Private insurers make their rationing decisions in ways that are relatively transparent but always far from perfectly simple or fair. But if they didn’t do it, someone else would need to, Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute told me. The reality of scarcity is not their fault, nor is it “social murder.”
As the intermediary in the health-care system that plays the requisite role of rationing care, UnitedHealthcare surely makes some horrifying decisions and outright mistakes, and even when it rules out coverage based on a defensible calculus of costs and benefits, that can be a devastating thing for patients and their loved ones to hear. So there’s legitimacy in the frustration and anger many people feel. Nevertheless, turning to lethal violence is horrifying and ominous. So, too, is applauding and justifying assassinations.
The American health-care system certainly has its flaws, but those are hardly the fault of UnitedHealthcare alone. Nations such as the United Kingdom, which offer the sort of single-payer public health care that Tolentino extolls, have long wait lists for treatment, significant staff shortages, and outdated hospital infrastructure. Public satisfaction with the U.K.’s National Health Service is at a 40-year low; only 29 percent of the British public is “quite satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the NHS.
Alan Milburn, who was a member of the Labour Party and England’s health secretary, years ago conceded what is still true: “The NHS—just like every other health system in the world, public or private—has never, or will never, provide all the care it might theoretically be possible to provide. That would probably be true even if the whole of the UK gross domestic product was spent on health care.”
NOW CONSIDER WHAT HAPPENS when the logic of those who are celebrating Mangione is applied to a different issue. Some Americans believe that abortion is murder, and that those who facilitate abortion deserve to be punished for their complicity with evil. Imagine if, after an attack on an abortion clinic, a journalist were to say “I just think there are a lot of ways to unjustly and immorally end someone’s life before it should have ended. One of them, the kind of violence we fixate on in this country, is a single person with a weapon that intends harm upon another person and then causes it. But there’s a lot of other ways to end a life early and unjustly and immorally, and aborting an unborn child is one of them.”
And, they might continue “there are different kinds of violence. Someone shooting someone in the street is one. I think organizations that facilitate abortions is quite clearly another.”
The list of organizations and individuals who could be targeted because their critics on the left or on the right believe they support policies that lead to suffering or death is endless: gun-rights lobbies; those who want to defund the police; individuals opposing childhood vaccinations, and those who administer them; groups that want to cut funding for the global AIDS initiative; those that want the United States to withdraw from the Paris climate accords; those that oppose a higher minimum wage. So who decides which Americans are guilty of “social murder”? Staff writers at The New Yorker? And what actions will we justify against those deemed to have committed murder by omission rather than commission—in the words of Engels, “disguised, malicious murder, murder against none who can defend himself”?
ON DECEMBER 9, the family and friends of Brian Thompson gathered at Lord of Life Lutheran Church in Maple Grove, Minnesota, to mourn his loss. Thompson grew up in a working-class family in Jewell, Iowa; he appears to have been liked by pretty much everyone who knew him.
“He was just a farm kid living out in rural Iowa,” Taylor Hill, a close friend of Thompson’s from childhood, told The New York Times. “Everybody got along with him and he got along with everybody else. He was just a great, silly, funny, smart guy to be around all through the years that I have known him.”
At Jewell’s South Hamilton High School, the Times reported, Thompson was valedictorian, a star athlete, homecoming king, and class president. A teacher described Thompson as an excellent student, a model person, “a super kid.” As a corporate leader, he kept a low profile; friends and colleagues remembered him as mild-mannered and humble, down-to-earth and self-deprecating. He was a passionate advocate for the Special Olympics and a devoted father to his sons, Bryce and Dane. His obituary described his love for his sons as “limitless.”
“Brian was an incredibly loving, generous, talented man who truly lived life to the fullest and touched so many lives,” his wife, Paulette Thompson, told Fox News.
“A lot of people are judging him, not knowing him at all,” Hill told the Times. “And it’s not right. That’s not him. It’s just a sad thing of what has happened and even more sad of what people have tried to turn him into.”
Thompson’s funeral service was attended by those who loved him. But it also required the presence of a dozen state troopers, a drone flying overhead, and a police sniper stationed on the roof of the church. A security code was needed to get into the church, and Thompson’s home received fake bomb threats after he was assassinated.
Celebrating a murder and turning an accused killer into a sex symbol and a cult hero, a modern-day Robin Hood, requires an astonishing level of dehumanization; it is only slightly less appalling when journalists covering the story find ways to excuse the people doing the celebrating, on the grounds that they are displaying a social conscience. But when angry mobs of social-justice activists get riled up, their righteous anger needs targets, some figurative and some literal.
In the meantime, Bryce and Dane Thompson just spent their first Christmas without their father.