OAN Commentary by: Thomas Stratmann
Thursday, February 6, 2025
Audiences appreciate a relatable villain. That’s the whole idea behind the recent blockbuster Wicked — take the one-dimensional cackling witch from The Wizard of Oz and make her into an object of empathy. “Are people born wicked? Or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?” one character (and the film as a whole) asks.
If these movies — other examples include Joker, Maleficent, and Cruella — do their job well, audiences should leave thinking that they might have acted the same under similar circumstances. “I can’t condone, of course … But still, she had a point.”
The insight that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart is a noble one. The problem arises when we spend so much time seeking to understand evil that we forget to abhor it.
And that’s exactly what’s happened in the weeks since 26-year-old Luigi Mangione shot United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson in the back. According to Mangione’s manifesto, he killed Thompson because healthcare companies “abuse our country for immense profit” while failing to deliver good health outcomes. Apparently, Mangione and his mother both struggled with chronic pain.
This week, Mangione strengthened his legal team. Will his self-preservation efforts ultimately succeed?
Time will tell, but as far as public perception goes, the usual left-wing extremists are still lionizing the killer, and images depicting him as a saint are still circulating widely on social media. 48 percent of college students said they view the murder as justified.
These responses are to be expected. What’s really disappointing is the way powerful figures in politics and media have exploited this brutal crime to start a “national conversation” about healthcare policy.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), for example, offered a boilerplate condemnation of Mangione’s actions before claiming that Thompson had committed his own “act[s] of violence” by failing to grant every single insurance claim.
Or take Wendell Potter, a former PR flack at Cigna who now advocates for single-payer healthcare as head of a lobbying group called the Center for Health and Democracy. Within two weeks of Thompson’s murder, Potter argued in the New York Times that the “tragic assassination” had “reinvigorated a conversation that my former colleagues [in the healthcare industry] have long worked to suppress.”
Potter says he left Cigna because his conscience could no longer bear it. I wonder how his conscience feels about using Thompson’s death as an opportunity to place an op-ed.
It’s worth noting, of course, that the “national conversations” these violent acts initiate always align with progressive politics. When abortionists get murdered, nobody on MSNBC suggests that pro-lifers might have a point. When an anti-immigrant gunman killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019, the Times didn’t run op-eds from the Center for Immigration Studies about the need to ramp up deportations.
The worst part isn’t the opportunism, though — it’s the recklessness. AOC, Potter, and other figures who’ve made similar statements are signaling to unstable extremists across the country that murdering innocent people is an effective way to shift the national discourse.
We’ve seen this pattern before. When a transgender former student killed three nine-year-olds and three teachers at a Nashville Christian school in 2023, the mainstream media seized the opportunity to promote greater LGBT inclusion. As with Mangione, they turned the killer into the victim.
In September, before the blood on Trump’s ear had fully dried, New York Times journalist Peter Baker was already declaring that “[a]t the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him.” Other would-be gunmen heard the message loud and clear: your instincts are correct; your grievances are valid. Sure enough, two more assassination attempts followed.
The hard truth is that you get more of what you incentivize. When Britain’s colonial government in India announced it would pay bounties for dead cobras, people started breeding cobras to gain bigger payouts. The venomous snake problem got worse, not better.
Lobbyists, politicians, and media elites pursue a similar policy when they amplify the grievances of cold-blooded killers. If you murder into an effective PR strategy, you’ll get a lot more of it.
The proper response to Thompson’s murder is not “I condemn it, but…” It’s “I condemn it.” Full stop. Anything that comes after “but” serves only to validate the killer’s views, reward his actions, and encourage potential imitators. Our opinion-makers should adopt a clear and simple policy: if you commit murder, you disqualify yourself from public policy debates.
If progressives want to keep pushing their (deeply flawed) single-payer healthcare schemes, that’s their right. But when they use Mangione as a pretext for advancing those arguments, they risk justifying and normalizing political violence.
Oz may be full of injustice. That doesn’t mean Elphaba gets to kill Toto.
(Views expressed by guest commentators may not reflect the views of OAN or its affiliates.)
Thomas Stratmann is a Distinguished University Professor of Public Choice, Political Economy, Law and Economics, Health Economics, and Experimental Economics at George Mason University. He holds an appointment at both GMU’s Department of Economics and Antonin Scalia Law School.
