OPINION:
In Luigi Mangione — who confessed in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — we see the grinning face of evil staring at us from the abyss.
Pleading guilty in federal court to interstate stalking resulting in death, Mangione said he knew that what he was doing was “illegal,” a word better suited to describe littering or jaywalking. He did not say that it was immoral or evil because he did not believe it was wrong.
He also expressed no remorse for taking a man’s life, making that man’s wife a widow or making the man’s children fatherless.
An alarming segment of the population condones Mangione’s malevolence.
According to an Emerson College poll, among 18- to 29-year-olds, 41% believe the murder was either somewhat or completely acceptable.
America’s sane center is eroding. A CloudResearch survey showed that 20% of Democrats thought the murder of conservative leader Charlie Kirk was justified. That figure rose to 32% among Democrats younger than 30.
The week that Mangione pleaded guilty to cheering onlookers, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, a far-left Democrat, signed a bill allowing abortion up to the moment of birth. Late-stage abortion involves either poisoning the baby in the womb or crushing its skull and extracting the pieces — depravity committed in the name of a woman’s right to choose.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat and an enthusiastic proponent of late-term abortion, said of Mangione’s crime, “Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far.” Still, if people are pushed so far — say, by high insurance premiums or companies not responsive to claims — why can they not push back, and why can that response not involve violence?
This is the left’s standard rationale for bloodshed.
Israel’s presence in the Gaza Strip is deemed repressive, so the murder of 1,200 civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, is either somewhat or completely acceptable. The death of George Floyd was an outrage, so burning down whole city blocks is either somewhat or completely acceptable.
The left believes morality is shaped by ideology. God has no place in its universe.
In the 1946 drama “Dragonwyck,” set on a 19th-century estate in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York, Gene Tierney, whose character was raised in a devout farm family, asks her husband plaintively, “Don’t you believe in God?”
Vincent Price, the powerful landowner, replies, “I believe in myself.”
We later learn that he murdered his first wife and is planning to murder Tierney in pursuit of an heir. An unrestrained ego leads to a morality of convenience.
Ideological killers such as Mangione and Tyler Robinson (currently at the preliminary hearing stage of a trial for Charlie Kirk’s murder) believe there is no law higher than themselves. The Unabomber and Charles Manson would concur.
The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky warned, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” He meant things like the Reign of Terror, the Holocaust, dismembering a child in the womb and shooting an innocent man in the back to protest “the deadly, greed-fueled health insurance cartel,” in Mangione’s words.
The Ten Commandments ordain “Do not steal” and “Do not murder.” One logically leads to the other. That is what makes the Democratic Socialists of America so dangerous. Socialists start with theft and often end in mass murder.
If you can take a man’s property, why not take his life too? The Bolsheviks, Nazis, Maoists and Khmer Rouge followed the logical progression from robbery to murder.
The blood-drenched 20th century is a testament to the relationship between the two. Under the Bolsheviks, correcting the “unequal distribution of wealth” led first to confiscation, then to collective farms, then to planned starvation and finally to gulags.
The heroes of the DSA include Hamas and Fidel Castro.
In a recent interview with The New Yorker, DSA co-Chair Megan Romer called the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel by Hamas “the inevitable backlash” to Israeli policy. You can push people only so far, right?
On the 100th anniversary of his birth, the DSA website called the late Cuban tyrant “a stalwart symbol of the anti-imperialism struggle and self-determination.” Castro brought untold misery — including starvation and brutal repression — to Cuba.
Given half a chance, the DSA will do the same to America.
When asked what a sinner was, St. Bernadette of Lourdes said that “a sinner is one who loves evil.” In America today, there is a lot of love in the air.
In a way, we should be grateful to Luigi Mangione for putting a human face on the evil that pervades our society.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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