In an article on the American Free News Network, Mike Thiac notes the compassion and empathy of our good friends on the left concerning the assassination of Brian Thompson, the Chief Executive Officer of United Heaththcare. Many on the left believe that Mr THompson deserved to be murdered, because he was CEO of an evil health insurance company. The lovely but loony Taylor Lorenz told us that she felt “joy” when she heard he’d been killed, and we noted here how some on the left were celebrating.

There are already “Free Him” trends on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — and Bluesky, calling him a hero. The lovely but lunatic Taylor Lorenz celebrated the assassination, and has been drawing internet fire.

Mr Mangioni didn’t lose. He was born into a very well-to-do family, one with the resources to send him to the tony Gilman School, an all-male prep school, where the high school tuition is $37,690, plus additional fees of $400 to $650 per year. Mr Mangione was one of the co-valedictorians when he was graduated, and won admission to the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania.

At Penn, Mr Mangioni earned both a Bachelor and Master of Science in Engineering, in computer science. As Robert Stacy McCain reported:

after graduating in 2020, “worked as a software engineer at TrueCar,” but was apparently laid off last year when the company cut about 100 employees as part of “restructuring.”

After being laid off, Mangione seemed to start drifting into isolation. He was dealing with a persistent back injury that led to him undergo surgery. While recuperating from that ordeal, Mangione posted a review of Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future — the manifesto of the Unabomber. “It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless[ly] write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies,” wrote Mangione. “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.” Mangione said Kaczynski’s “actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.”

What we have with looney Luigi is a kid reared in all the privileges of Western civilization, who rejects Western civilization. He took it to extremes, but he’s simply the poster boy for a much larger problem, the privileged rejecting their privilege, and longing for a more ‘equitable’ society. Western civilization and capitalism allow people to have great success, but a system which allows for people to ‘win’ must also allow people to lose, and the civilization rejectionists decry the fact that some people lose. We see that all the time in the calls for some form of socialism.

The trouble with that is that a leveling of society doesn’t make us all winners, but brings almost everyone down to the level of the losers. Karl Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” quickly became the dictatorship of one man. The “proletariat” do not take decisions, because, unlike the Borg in Star Trek, the proletariat are not some sort of connected hive mind. The “leadership” of the proletariat — Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and the rest — do get to live in whatever luxuries they choose, and the “nomenklatura,” as the Soviet Unions top bureaucrats lived well, too.

The actual workers in the worker’s state? Not so much.

Looney Luigi was well educated, but he was also dumb as a box of rocks. He knew just enough to be able to read Mr Kaczynski’s manifesto, and understand it, but not enough to be able to think critically about it. He managed to get out of New York, but he was stupid enough to carry what are suspected to be the tools of the crime itself. Walking around Altoona, Pennsylvania, with a ‘ghost’ gun and sound suppressor? Maybe not the brightest move!

The Keurig coffee machine on our kitchen countertop, with one of my favorite coffee mugs. I get my coffee a lot cheaper than having to pay a ‘barista’ to pull it.

Still, how is that any different from the baristas with bachelor’s degrees working at Starbucks, having paid tens of thousands for degrees from prestigious colleges but have been unable to parlay their BAs in Gender Studies into the upwardly mobile careers they envisioned? Just like loony Luigi, their expectations of privilege haven’t worked out so well in an economy where people have to actually contribute something to society other than Student Center bloviating. Pulling a raktajino for people making four times, or more, as much money as them on their way to posh offices in the morning might be mildly productive, but it’s hardly upwardly mobile for most, and there’s too much of a sense of “I should be paid that kind of money” when they hand the lattes to the men and women in business suits.

Then again, when the demand more money, sometimes it just doesn’t work out for them.

“(I)sn’t it true that most such would-be revolutionaries are lunatics?” Mr McCain asked. Yeah, they are, except for the ones that actually succeed. Abu Mohammad al-Jolani is, or at least was — he’s trying to sound pleasant to Western leaders — a complete Islamist nut, but now he’s the ruler of Syria, having deposed Bashir al-Assad. I can just picture people like loony Luigi and Miss Lorenz and thousand of other campus radical thinking/dreaming that they could be the revolutionary leaders, ready and willing to lead us away from the evils of capitalism and Western civilization into whatever paradise they believe awaits the world on the other side.