Just like the woke left, there is a “woke right” similarly prepared to reduce individual human beings to avatars of the hated class they represent. They don’t know or care to know what kind of man Brian Thompson really was. His profession marks him as an “oppressor,” and that’s all that matters to them. Like the woke left, the woke right will show no mercy. The popular pseudonymous pundit Peachy Keenan has been suggestively posting about the evils of health insurance companies as well as coyly admiring a picture of the alleged killer. 

For anyone with a moderately high public profile, it’s a chilling thought that some corner of the internet would cheer your untimely, bloody death. In the case of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, we have seen not just one but multiple corners converge in celebration. It’s like a page lifted straight out of the script for a police procedural: A health insurance executive has been shot dead in the street. Who’s done it? The snarky sidekick jokes that it would be easier to count the people who wouldn’t have done it.

The police have identified, captured, and charged an Ivy League grad and tech whiz named Luigi Mangione. His crime appears to have been a meticulously planned hit. Bullet casings recovered at the scene were graced with the words “deny,” “defend,” “depose,” which has been read as a hat tip to the insurance injustice exposéDelay Deny Defend. Leftist X accounts have been twittering with admiration for the young killer, comparing him to comic book vigilantes like The Punisher, while Thompson is condemned in the same breath as history’s worst villains.

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