A Shock­ing Assas­si­na­tion — And The Left Cel­e­brates

On Wednes­day, a shock­ing assas­si­na­tion occurred in New York City, and the Left cel­e­brat­ed. 

Bri­an Thomp­son, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare’s insur­ance arm, was fatal­ly shot out­side a hotel in Mid­town, the cen­ter of Manhattan’s busi­ness and tourist dis­tricts.

Police said it was a tar­get­ed attack. The video footage makes it seem clear this was a pro­fes­sion­al hit. Thomp­son walked past the shoot­er, who appeared to emerge from the shad­ows. The shoot­er shot Thomp­son, shot him again, then calm­ly walked by him and appeared to shoot him a third time. 

The sus­pect fled on foot after the shoot­ing. Police Com­mis­sion­er Jes­si­ca Tisch said this was not a ran­dom act of vio­lence, adding:

It appears the sus­pect was lying in wait for sev­er­al min­utes. And as the vic­tim was walk­ing to the con­fer­ence hotel, the sus­pect approached from behind and fired sev­er­al rounds, strik­ing the vic­tim at least once in the back and at least once in the right calf. … I want to be clear — at this time, every indi­ca­tion is that this was a pre­med­i­tat­ed, pre-planned, tar­get­ed attack. 

Paulette Thomp­son, Thompson’s wid­ow, told NBC News, “There had been some threats. Basi­cal­ly, I don’t know, a lack of cov­er­age? I don’t know details. I just know that he said there were some peo­ple that had been threat­en­ing him.” 

There are at least two things to be said about this.

First: New York City is gov­erned hor­ri­bly. When assas­si­na­tions occur in pub­lic places in New York City, that reflects how law enforce­ment is deployed and what law enforce­ment is allowed to do. When vio­lence is com­mon­place on New York streets, that goes to gov­er­nance. 

Take, for exam­ple, the case of Daniel Pen­ny, the Marine vet­er­an who took down a crazed drug abuser named Jor­dan Neely with a sub­mis­sion hold on the New York sub­way as Neely was threat­en­ing oth­er mem­bers of the pub­lic in this sub­way car. Despite the fact that Neely’s death could be attrib­uted to drugs in his sys­tem or his reac­tion to the lack of air to the brain, New York City is bring­ing a manslaugh­ter or mur­der charge because the city is gov­erned hor­ri­bly. 

WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show 

But sec­ond, some­thing else is going on here: the left-wing reac­tion to the mur­der of Bri­an Thomp­son. 

Antho­ny Zenkus, a social work pro­fes­sor at Colum­bia and Adel­phi Uni­ver­si­ty whose X bio reads, “Trau­ma expert. Anti-vio­lence. Com­mie,” a Com­mu­nist who’s appar­ent­ly against vio­lence, react­ed to Thompson’s death this way: “Today, we mourn the death of Unit­ed Health­care CEO Bri­an Thomp­son, gunned down…. wait, I’m sor­ry – today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Amer­i­cans who need­less­ly die each year so that insur­ance com­pa­ny execs like Bri­an Thomp­son can become mul­ti­mil­lion­aires.” 

Today, we mourn the death of Unit­ed Health­care CEO Bri­an Thomp­son, gunned down…. wait, I’m sor­ry – today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Amer­i­cans who need­less­ly die each year so that insur­ance com­pa­ny execs like Bri­an Thomp­son can become mul­ti­mil­lion­aires.

— Prof Zenkus (@anthonyzenkus) Decem­ber 4, 2024

So he sounds like he’s imply­ing Thomp­son deserved to die because Unit­ed­Health­care is a mild­ly prof­itable com­pa­ny. 

They are a mild­ly prof­itable com­pa­ny — mean­ing, when it comes to the health insur­ance indus­try, the prof­it mar­gin is gen­er­al­ly below 2%. This is not an indus­try in which the prof­it mar­gin is 10%, 15%, or 20%. If you take issue with Amer­i­can health insur­ance and how it is run, that is because of the legal struc­ture that has been set up for health insur­ance in Amer­i­ca.

We could note that health insur­ance should not be tied to employ­ment, that you should be able to opt into var­i­ous lev­els of health insur­ance rather than basi­cal­ly being shov­eled into one of a few cat­e­gories. We could talk about the fact that an enor­mous amount of health care should actu­al­ly be pro­vid­ed just on a pay-for-play basis as opposed to via insur­ance.

It’s bizarre that a nor­mal check­up should be cov­ered by insur­ance. What are you insur­ing against? That’s not typ­i­cal­ly what insur­ance is for. Insur­ance is for an unex­pect­ed sit­u­a­tion you are bet­ting might hap­pen, while the insur­ance com­pa­ny bets it prob­a­bly won’t hap­pen, or at least not in the time­frame you’re think­ing. That is why you have fire insur­ance; not because you know tomor­row you’re going to set your house on fire — which would be arson and would vio­late your insur­ance pol­i­cy.

It’s bizarre that health insur­ance in the Unit­ed States works such that it is called insur­ance, when in real­i­ty, it’s just a kind of sub­si­dized form of group cov­er­age. 

You can have what­ev­er argu­ments you want with the sys­tem. But the idea that because you don’t like this sys­tem, the CEO of a pri­vate health care com­pa­ny deserves to die, or at least it is his fault if 68,000 Amer­i­cans “need­less­ly die each year so that he can become a mul­ti­mil­lion­aire,” shows a dra­mat­ic lack of under­stand­ing of not only mar­kets but of moral­i­ty. 

Tay­lor Lorenz, once con­sid­ered a well-respect­ed reporter at The Wash­ing­ton Post, react­ed, “Peo­ple have very jus­ti­fied hatred toward insur­ance com­pa­ny CEOs because these exec­u­tives are respon­si­ble for an unfath­omable amount of death and suf­fer­ing.”

Screen­shot: BlueSky. Tay­lor Lorenz.

“Exec­u­tives are respon­si­ble for an unfath­omable amount of death and suf­fer­ing”? That’s not true. You might not agree with how the insur­ance com­pa­nies run their busi­ness. You might think the insur­ance com­pa­nies go too far in attempt­ing to restrict cov­er­age or find loop­holes in their poli­cies that pre­vent them from hav­ing to issue cov­er­age. 

But that’s what insur­ance does. It’s what they are.

What you’re real­ly crit­i­ciz­ing is the sys­tem, the sys­tem of pri­vate health insur­ance in the Unit­ed States, which is a bizarre amal­gam of gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies. 

Near­ly all health care cov­er­age in the Unit­ed States is, in some form or fash­ion, gov­ern­ment-involved. Even pri­vate health care sys­tems are heav­i­ly gov­ern­ment-reg­u­lat­ed.

But that is not UnitedHealthcare’s fault. Stat­ing it is their fault is like sug­gest­ing that if a grocery’s price on bread is at a par­tic­u­lar lev­el because the mar­kets have deter­mined there is only that much bread avail­able, that is some­how the grocery’s fault when peo­ple can’t afford that bread.

The idea that if you work for a pri­vate health care insur­ance com­pa­ny you should be mur­dered is aston­ish­ing.

Lorenz con­clud­ed, “As some­one against death and suf­fer­ing, I think it’s good to call out this bro­ken sys­tem and the peo­ple in pow­er who enable it.”

I have a ques­tion. Why is Thomp­son the one who enables it? I wasn’t aware that Bri­an Thomp­son was a pub­lic pol­i­cy pro­fes­sion­al work­ing in an are­na in which con­sent was not actu­al­ly the key­stone. What I mean is that if you don’t want to buy health care insur­ance via Unit­ed, don’t do it or don’t work for a com­pa­ny that does.

This says some­thing deep­er about the far-Left. There’s a rea­son why a Venn dia­gram would show only one cir­cle includ­ing peo­ple who are fine with Bri­an Thomp­son get­ting mur­dered on the street and peo­ple who are pro-Hamas: That rea­son is the base­line belief of the far-Left’s sys­tem that if you are work­ing with­in a sys­tem they have deemed moral­ly infe­ri­or, you deserve to die.

That belief says if some­one kills you, you prob­a­bly had it com­ing. You are a Kulak, and you deserve to die.

On the oth­er hand, if you work with­in a sys­tem that the hard-Left deems moral­ly praise­wor­thy or you’re a mem­ber of a “moral­ly praise­wor­thy group,” you can lit­er­al­ly do any­thing. If your griev­ance aligns with the view of the Left as they deem in any way legit­i­mate, you can do any­thing.

This is the same group of peo­ple who will sug­gest, for exam­ple, that if you are in the Gaza Strip and you don’t like your sit­u­a­tion, that jus­ti­fies you rap­ing women and mur­der­ing babies.

That is the far-Left’s full-scale belief sys­tem.

And Thompson’s death is a per­fect exam­ple of the Left’s beliefs and how they play out.

What’s aston­ish­ing about this is that the way the Left adju­di­cates whether a sys­tem is moral­ly praise­wor­thy or moral­ly blame­wor­thy is not based on a util­i­tar­i­an cal­cu­lus.

The pro­fes­sor from Colum­bia who sug­gest­ed that the pri­vate health care sys­tem in the Unit­ed States is respon­si­ble for 68,000 deaths doesn’t actu­al­ly believe that if you work for an alter­na­tive health care sys­tem that is gov­ern­ment-run and it kills more peo­ple, then you deserve to die. He doesn’t think that pure­ly because his belief is not about a util­i­tar­i­an cal­cu­lus for what’s best for human­i­ty. 

For the Left, it nev­er is. For the Left, it is all about the cen­tral moral prin­ci­ple.

What the Left actu­al­ly cares about is pow­er and con­trol. If the Left con­trols the sys­tem, the sys­tem is good. If the Left does not con­trol the sys­tem, the sys­tem is bad. And if you are a mem­ber of that sys­tem, then maybe, just maybe, you deserve to die. 

It’s all a pow­er game. If you’re a pros­e­cu­tor and you see a Good Samar­i­tan on the street try­ing to stop a vio­lent act on a sub­way, the per­son who tried to stop the vio­lent act is bad because that per­son is not of your polit­i­cal ilk. They’re not part of your team, and so that per­son ought to be pros­e­cut­ed for felony mur­der. 

But if that per­son is a mem­ber of your team, you do your best to let that per­son off the hook because it’s all a team sport.

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The sub­ju­ga­tion of basic lib­er­al prin­ci­ples by Left-wing prin­ci­ples is per­fect­ly obvi­ous here. It’s the great untold sto­ry of the last sev­er­al decades in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics.

It used to be that lib­er­als in this coun­try were peo­ple who you or I, as a con­ser­v­a­tive, might dis­agree with on tax or health care pol­i­cy.

But as I’ve said my entire career, there’s a dif­fer­ence between a lib­er­al and a left­ist. A lib­er­al would nev­er argue that because some­one works for Unit­ed­Health­care, that per­son ought to die or at least be shot. They might say, “This com­pa­ny needs to be run bet­ter.” They might object to that par­tic­u­lar CEO. But they would nev­er argue that per­son ought to be moral­ly dis­pensed with and just shot on the street in the way some of these mem­bers of the rad­i­cal Left are. 

For left­ists, all dynam­ics are pow­er dynam­ics. To them, the only thing that mat­ters is that their allies con­trol the gov­ern­ment gun. Mur­der is, in their view, just part and par­cel of the sys­tem.

Some­times to cook the Left-wing omelet, you have to break a few eggs.

Even if that means mur­der.