A Hot Hitman, a Health Care CEO, and the Ultimate Cancellation

At least his dental cover was in good shape.

Here’s a short list of things you need to be (and do) to be praised for shooting someone in cold blood these days.

1. Make sure you are handsome as…
2. Do it for a supposedly liberal cause.
3. Shoot someone we all love to hate.
4. Anything else you might want to put in here.

The murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO, Brian Thompson, by that smouldering hunk with the smoking gun (Luigi Mangione) last week in New York, has socials going into overdrive. Who will play Mangione in the movie that eulogises him? And who will play Brian Thompson? (agent hurriedly flicks through speed dial to find type-cast villainous actor. Mark Strong perhaps?).

And of course there’s the darlings of the Left in the USA, you know, the ones who want gun control. The “I don’t condone violence and murder, but…”  types. This is the point where they equate the health care regime in the USA with actual murder.

So we have this from the Democrats’ Elizabeth Warren:

“People can be pushed only so far” before having to add later, “I should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder.”  Phew!  And there we were thinking there was!

And what about that bastion of all virtue, and life-giving affirmations (in certain circumstances at least),  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?: “People interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them.”

Well maybe they should get a filter.

Whatever next? A headline: “UnitedHealthCare CEO gunned down: Mostly Peaceful”

But hey, Mangione is hot. Hot and rich. Though he’d renounced all of that in a kinda Rich Young Ruler sees the light moment. Which elevates his status even more.

So we get this on social media, as reported in The Wall Street Journal:

Ross Douthat states in The New York Times on the matter, that although such views have not become mainstream, our destabilised Western framework is set to keep giving oxygen to such groups as we lose our coherent centre:

Whatever faction you fear most — socialists or reactionaries, cranks or racists — is likely to persist as an influence on one or both political coalitions to a degree that would have seemed quite alarming 20 years ago. But that persistence doesn’t prove that the extreme elements are destined to fully achieve their wildest dreams or worst intentions. Instead, the fate of many of these groups is probably to coexist somewhat chaotically rather than to dominate and rule.

In other words, we haven’t got to the stage in which the police arrest him, take some selfies with him, before releasing him to an adoring public, while the Sheriff of Nottingham glowers in the background. The law will take its course.

What makes it even more complicated, of course, is that Mangione wasn’t even a paid up member of UnitedHealthCare. His motive w0uld appear to be about healthcare in general – (UHC is the fifth largest corporation in the US) – rather than about the sore back that has cost him a fortune in health care costs,  in particular.

But it allowed a whole heap of people – predominantly on the “stick-it-to-the-man” side of politics to go all “yes-buttery” about it.  Turns out that progressives have more in common with their conservative counterparts after all, particularly when it comes to guns and justice.

So we get “Yes, but it’s understandable”, from the lawmakers of the Left, and we get “Yes, but he’s hot” from the lawless lands of social media. A heady mix indeed.

Writing in The Spectator, Katherine Dee takes a more nuanced tone, noting how Mangione’s manifesto, such as it was, was a garbled bag of tricks. Was he Right? Was he Left? Was he anticapitalist? She shares, with Douthat, the fear of a different malaise:

Both mass shootings and assassinations are abhorrent. If we are indeed moving from indiscriminate massacres to targeted killings, we face a different kind of darkness: violence as a misguided bid to restore a supposedly lost order. In this scenario, the spiritual emptiness of our hyper-technological era is the real villain — the real foundation on which the culture war rests upon — one the killer believes can be confronted by revolutionary acts.

A supposed lost order. A sense of justice without a sense of mercy. A return to the world of honour-killings (or an installation of it in the West, because it’s in full swing in other parts). A desire for the kind of utopia that led to the mass killings of the 20th century. But more pointed perhaps.

And there is Mangione – a buffed Ichabod Christ (there is no going back to a pre-Christian world – not really), a Pale Rider for the internet age.

And the ultimate irony? Mangione had eschewed all social media in recent months, indeed there was something of the purity culture about him, which perhaps explains the messianic longings drawn out from so many by his actions.

Dee states:

Mangione drew intellectual influence from thinkers such as Jonathan Haidt and Freya India, who warn that social media corrodes empathy and encourage more thoughtful engagement.

That’s the classically liberal-minded Jonathan Haidt whose latest book warns of the perils of early smartphone usage.

And what of the vengeance culture that so many partake in, even if not to Mangione’s level?

It’s instructive that Tim Keller’s last book before he died was called Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I?   He rightly saw that our culture that has forgotten the gospel in its imagination, will soon forget it in its actions. He observed:

The new shame-and-honour culture either produces a heavily inquisitorial, merit-forgiveness approach or leads people to abandon forgiveness altogether.

Keller observed that it will no longer be assumed that we should forgive anybody. For anything. Ever. The church will require an incredibly strong discipleship program – and practice – of forgiveness in the face of the Mangione’s and their ilk.

Douglas Murray, writing five years ago, put it this way:

We live in a world where actions can have consequences we could never have imagined, where guilt and shame are more at hand than ever, and where we have no means whatsoever of redemption.  We do not know who could offer it, who could accept it, and whether it is a desirable quality compared to an endless cycle of fiery certainty and denunciation.

Fiery certainty and denunciation at the end of an assassin’s gun. It’s the ultimate cancellation of a highly moralistic (if you really squint you can see it), pharisaical cancel culture.

Katherine Dee ends her piece on a sobering note:

Whatever the case, we are at the dawn of a new era. We have argued endlessly over left versus right radicalization, but this case nudges us to think along a different axis: between faith in technology’s promise and despair at its hollowing of the human spirit. Beneath the endless streams, apps, and feeds, something essential is slipping away. My sense is that we’ve arrived at the beginning of the real culture war: techno-optimism versus techno-pessimism. In this world, may we all become techno-realists.

Here’s a picture of Brian Thompson, with his family, by the way. Clearly not as hot as Mangione, and obviously a Facebook man with a dad-bod, but no less made in the image of God for all of that.