Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Stop idolising Luigi Mangione

Luigi Mangione, pictured in a Facebook photo posted in 2019, was arrested in McDonald's (Alamy)

So according to the modern left, killing the fascists of Hamas is ‘genocide’, but killing a CEO and father of two is ‘justice’? How else are we to make sense of the creepy idolisation of Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the shooting dead of Brian Thompson, chief executive of the American health-insurance firm UnitedHealthcare? Seriously, the swooning over Mangione is a new low for the ‘very online’ left.

This was just desserts for America’s unfair system of health insurance, they insisted

Thompson was slain on the streets of Manhattan last Wednesday. He was 50 years old, a dad and he’d been boss of UnitedHealthcare for three years. Almost instantly, even before we knew the identity of the suspect, leftists were swarming social media to make excuses for this barbaric attack on an innocent, unarmed man. Some even celebrated it. In some corners of the web there was, as one report described it, outright ‘ecstasy over [this] brazen assassination’.

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