By: Jeffrey Blehar – nationalreview.com – December 11, 2024

One Democrat takes away the right lesson from Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson; another one does not.

Once news that Luigi Mangione (the self-confessed assassin of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson) had been captured in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, the takes began to roll in from hoi polloi of social media, commentators, and politicians alike. You’ve already hopefully read my take, and if you want to jump into the algae- and filth-clogged sump that is Bluesky or X, you can find an unrepresentative sample of hard Left opinions as well. But perhaps it’s more valuable to focus on what politicians say — after all, they’re the lawmakers, and we are mere spectators. Their opinion matters!

First, let me reintroduce you to John Fetterman, who I think it’s fair to say has upgraded his way from earning “Strange New Respect” in the eyes of centrists and even conservatives to “every Democrat should be like this guy” status. The irony with Fetterman, as I have pointed out before, is that any objective look at his votes in the Senate shows him to be a faithful party line Democrat, there with Chuck Schumer on important votes. He hasn’t played the Kyrsten Sinema “wild card” role in his caucus yet, nor does he seem likely to. In a Pennsylvania that just ousted Bob Casey Jr. in favor of Dave McCormick and cast its electoral votes for Donald Trump, Fetterman has found a way to become electorally bulletproof simply by carving out a niche as the Democrat willing to speak truths such as this, his on-the-spot reaction in the Senate hallway to the capture of Mangione:

He’s the asshole that’s going to die in prison. Congratulations if you want to celebrate that. A sewer is going to sewer. That’s what social media is about this. And I don’t know why the media wants to turn that into a story, just with these trolls saying these kinds of things anonymously like that. I don’t know why that’s news. Remember, he has two children that are going to grow up without their father… It’s vile. And if you’ve gunned someone down that you don’t happen to agree with their views or the business that they’re in, hey, you know, I’m next, they’re next, he’s next, she’s next.

There was exactly zero time given to moral equivocation in that statement. Fetterman did not use it as a platform to make a political point about health care, he did not cavil, and he appropriately pointed out the horrifying stakes of encouraging an ultra-minority of radicalized online freaks to believe they have the media wind at their backs: People will quite likely be killed.

I’ll admit it: I’ve really come to like Fetterman on a personal level, ill-kempt lumpensenator that he is. Perhaps in part that’s because the first thing I ever wrote for the Corner was an October 2022 piece about how he was clearly unfit for office because of his stroke. His comeback trail since then has been remarkable and really quite heartening, but that would be a minor human interest story had he not also acted as a blazing beacon of moral clarity after the October 7 attacks on Israel — standing out among non-Jewish Washington Democrats for his unabashedly straightforward clear-sightedness about the moral issues at stake. He’ll never be a conservative or Republican, and I’m honestly happy with that — I’d like to see many more Democrats like him, even if they vote in lockstep with Chuck Schumer when it counts. Beyond that, his willingness to poke fun at both Bob Menendez and Matt Gaetz demonstrates the sort of intolerance for obvious stupidity that I naturally gravitate toward simply because it’s so rare to see in a politician.

Meanwhile, what can you do about an embarrassment like Massachusetts senator Liz Warren? (Except celebrate, if you’re a Republican.) Thankfully, I don’t have to give you a lengthy recap of her serial egregiousness because my excellent colleague Charlie Cooke laid it all out this morning with the contempt she deserves. (He even drew the same comparison with Fetterman that I do, albeit with fewer pokes at his state of dress.) The matter of direct relevance is, as Charlie described, the forever damning “but.” “Violence is never the answer, but” — and at that point you can stop talking, lady, because everything that comes afterwards betrays the falsehood of everything that came before.

I won’t repeat Charlie’s thesis, though we are in complete agreement. I felt the need to speak about it a second time, however, because, like him, I found Warren’s act to be particularly vile even for a bitterly shell-shocked, endlessly degraded era of political morality as is late 2024. It is the cynical use of the killing as political leverage that betrays a monstrously instrumentalist soul underlying that superciliously lecturing tone of hers. Like most leftist academics, she sees a human tragedy as a teaching moment — to teach her values, ones that she herself played no small role in helping to falsely impart to the killer. I normally can talk a mean line when it comes to politicians whom I find contemptible, but I lack the vocabulary to fully explain how antihuman I find what Warren said was — the way she views the world, as revealed by statements like this. Her statement reflects perhaps the worst of our politics precisely because it adopts that gently coercive tone ubiquitous to the modern progessive elite, lecturing us about the need to “learn the right lesson from this.”

No, Senator Warren: The right lesson to take from Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson is — as John Fetterman was happy to point out — that Luigi Mangione is a mentally disturbed, cold-blooded murderer. There is no further lesson to learn. One Democrat understands this, instantly; another one does not. One of them is the spiritual future of their party, if it is to survive; the other is not.

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Source: How to Respond to an Assassination — and How Never To | National Review