The woke left and woke right show no mercy

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 exposé Delay 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.

We’ve come to expect this sort of gloating from leftists over the suffering of anyone perceived as a member of society’s “oppressor class”—a white man, a rich man, a rich white man. When the Titan submarine tragically imploded last year, there was a similar outpouring of vicious rhetoric over the deaths of the billionaires on board. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s studied the history of bloody left-wing revolutions, from the Reign of Terror to the Bolshevik uprising to Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward.

However, it’s important to recognize that the same bloodthirsty spirit can also animate “right-coded” clusters of the internet. Last year, I wrote about the shockingly vicious reactions to the stabbing of social justice activist Ryan Carson. Right-wing posters gleefully circulated the video of his murder, calling it poetic justice that he was an anti-racist white man who wound up dead at the hands of a black man. It was a perfect mirror image of the left-wing reactions to the Titan tragedy.

In Brian Thompson, edgy posters on both sides of the political aisle have found a common target for their hatred. The phrase “horseshoe theory” is becoming a cliché, but sometimes it is apt. 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. Alt-right blogger Charles Haywood wrote a tweet that stopped short of cheering Thompson’s murder but said it would be “good and salutary” if guilty “elites” lived in fear of vigilante justice. (He then deleted it but posted a follow-up, making it clear that he was doubling down.)

There’s certainly a serious discussion to be had about the failings of the private health insurance system. It’s been alleged that UnitedHealthcare wrongly denied many claims based on a faulty artificial intelligence system, leaving numerous vulnerable people stranded without the support they desperately needed. It’s understandable that an accumulation of such grievances would foster deep and wide bitterness in the American populace, boiling over in one self-styled antihero’s choice to make someone pay in blood. But just because something can be understood doesn’t mean it can be justified.

Whether Thompson’s murder will spark a grisly new trend in targeted killing remains to be seen. In the middle of the discourse last week, Blue Cross Blue Shield happened to make an ill-timed announcement that it wouldn’t cover anesthesia for unexpectedly long surgeries in select states. In response, leftist provocateur Taylor Lorenz posted a threatening screenshot with the BCBS Association CEO’s name and photo. It’s probably not a coincidence that the company immediately walked back its decision. In another vindication of horseshoe theory, a dissident right account praised Lorenz as if she’d singlehandedly bullied BCBS into compliance.

Christians are good at spotting vitriolic leftists like Lorenz as our enemies. At the same time, we should be mindful that the political opposite of Taylor Lorenz is not necessarily the friend of Christians. An ideology that abandons true justice for oppressor/oppressed class narratives must be consistently rejected, whomever it targets. The fact that a randomly murdered man has become a shared object of fringe left and fringe right hatred provides a particularly clear moment for us to see this in action. Know these rhetorical patterns, mark them wherever they appear, and reject them in the name of the only One who holds the final authority to judge, condemn, and grant mercy to us all.