Sometimes evil isn’t just banal. It’s direct, open, and unrepentant.
That was the case on Monday afternoon as three “credentialed” journalists showed up to cover the Luigi Mangione trial in New York and revealed that they were happy he allegedly shot and killed UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson.
The self-described “Mangionistas”—and dedicated fans of democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani—were unrepentant in their embrace of assassinations as a reasonable form of political action.
They not only reveled in Thompson’s death, they also took shots at his family too.
“F— Brian Thompson,” said a woman who the New York Daily News identified as Ashley Rojas based on the press credentials dangling from her neck. “That’s all I want to say. F— Brian Thompson. F— his mom.”
Lena Weissbrot, who appeared to be dressed up as a cross between Beetlejuice and Luigi, but the one from the Mario Bros., said that Thompson’s son was better off with his father dead.
“His children are better off without him. They need to learn to not be like their dad. And enjoy the blood money, kids,” she said.
She then compared Thompson to Osama bin Laden.
“He’s responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden, and I remember Americans celebrating when Osama bin Laden was killed,” Weissbrot continued. “It’s not like we don’t understand heroic violence, or, like, when violence is good.”
The Mangione superfan kept going.
“I mean, why do we protect the Second Amendment so much—is it to allow people to shoot up schools, or is it to protect our democracy?” she said.
The New York Post, always quick with the clever headlines, called them “the ghouls next door.”
Many others took to social media to condemn the hateful women and noted that they were given press credentials by the Mamdani administration.
The comments were so vile and potentially damaging to Mangione’s case that his lawyer chimed in to denounce them.
“These individuals do not represent the views of Luigi, nor the tens of thousands who have shown their support from around the world,” his attorney said in a statement. “The only people who speak for Luigi are his attorneys. We condemn these vile and irresponsible statements that have no place in the discourse around these cases.”
The New York Times reported that the city is now reviewing their press credentials, which were given to them by the Mamdani administration. Though I’m honestly glad the American people saw this display, as heinous as it was.
There is a not inconsiderable number of Americans, mostly on the left, who are so pathologically hateful toward their political opponents that they openly call for and celebrate their murder.
We saw this in spades after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Countless videos of seemingly normal professional people publicly danced with glee when they heard the news.
It’s not hard to imagine the same reaction and then some if one of the assassination attempts against President Donald Trump had been successful.
It seems like on the left, calls to kill those who disagree have been virtually normalized.
Heck, the current Virginia Democrat Attorney General Jay Jones won an election after it was discovered that he sent text messages fantasizing about the death of the Republican Speaker of the House and his children.
Some of this is surely a version of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Many on even the “mainstream” left have been driven psychologically over the edge in recent years due to their inability to make the Bad Orange Man go away.
But this goes deeper than just run-of-the-mill pathological hatred. This is baked into an ethos that equates political correctness with moral correctness, and political incorrectness with something so terrible that it justifies stripping the individual of even the most basic rights.
There is clearly an increasing number of people on the left who believe it is not just politically expedient but noble to outright kill people who carry out or represent policies, or business practices, or really anything else they oppose. The only thing stopping them is force or fear of consequences. This is assassination culture, for lack of a better phrase, as many noted on X.
From Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah:
It’s hard not to see this as an emerging and dangerous pattern leading us toward a deeper political and cultural crisis.
“Mainstream” Democrats call for the obliteration of constitutional institutions that stand in their way, their base calls for blood, and a handful of their activists extract it.
The mentality of these assassins or those who glorify them is they don’t think they should be bound by the law, or society, or anything else. The justice of their cause makes any action they take on its behalf a morally correct pursuit.
It’s hard to create any kind of compromise or carry on “normal” politics with people who have such a mentality. The attitude is one that leads to anarchy and civil war. That seems to be what some of these folks foolishly crave.
But one way or another, it shouldn’t be dismissed as a phenomenon relegated to a few extremists and weirdos. This is a very real and significant part of modern American politics that very much threatens the future of our free society.
