Celebrating Death

Life is cheap, except for the person who loses theirs.

Luigi Mangione appears for his arraignment at Manhattan Criminal Court on December 23, 2024 in New York City. Mangione, 26, was arraigned on state murder charges in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street on December 4.

The first assessments of one’s health start with the basics of pulse, blood pressure, and body temperature. If we’re interested in the health of our culture, we have to check its basics as well.

While many indices — economic opportunity, education, and such — give us important information about the health of our coexistent life together, there is no more decisive indicator than how individual life is protected and secured. That is the whole point of our collective organization around a family, community, state, and nation.

Protecting our family members is paramount. Through our communities and states, we establish laws and empower authorities to protect individuals from murder and other physical violence. Collectively, we defend the country from foreign enemies and armies at the national level.

The primary duty of the established order in our Founding is to protect the right to life, liberty, and personal property. None exists without the others.

This brings us to Luigi Mangione, the alleged gunman charged with the brazen murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan on December 4 as he walked to an early breakfast meeting.

Inconsistencies

The murder was so shocking that it quickly turned into a national drama playing out across legacy and social media platforms. While the killing seemed to be well planned, with detailed knowledge of Thompson’s schedule, Mangione’s escape and arrest a week later while eating breakfast at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, are inexplicably careless.

The former valedictorian and top-of-the-class Ivy League graduate had revealed his face in a hostel with security cameras. He also left physical evidence that led to his subsequent identification. And when arrested, he was still carrying the alleged murder weapon.

Thompson’s company, UnitedHealth Care, is among the largest medical insurance companies in the world, with over a million providers and 6,500 medical facilities accepting its plans. It services health plans for nearly 50 million users, and according to Forbes, it has one of the industry’s highest initial claim rejection rates.

However, according to the NYPD, Mangione never had coverage under UnitedHealth Care. He had complained on Reddit about a long-term battle for care for a back injury, yet later posted that his 2023 back surgery was a success and he was no longer taking pain medication.

After his arrest, his written rambling about the abuses of the “health care system” and the need for someone to stop the “greed” surfaced — providing fresh evidence of our culture’s overall mental health and media-driven emotionalism.

It’s not in good shape.

Justifiable Violence?

Many nationally known Democrats – America’s locus of neo-Marxist claptrap – and their media proxies have endorsed by inference and outright sympathy the acceptance of violence as justifiable in this case because the target was the chief executive officer of a company whose service and performance are supposedly based on greed and the destroyed the lives of the insured – exposing the “progressive” intellectual superstructure for the junkyard of ideas that it is.

Just as appalling, a sizeable group of social media commentators agreed that the murder was acceptable, and a national poll revealed that 40% of the under-35 cohort consider the killing justified.

The shocking equivocation on whether Thompson’s murder was justified exposes the soul of an entire radical political and educational movement that promotes and celebrates violence, destruction, and death in every form imaginable.

A Tale of Two Homicides

Of course, public health in general, the delivery of health care services, its skyrocketing costs, and denial of services for strictly financial reasons, are legitimate fodder for debate – and criticism – as is the role of the government in screwing up the entire industry, to begin with, whether through nationalized medicine or third-party insurance payers. (I’ve long advocated for health savings accounts that allow individuals to pay directly for routine health care with catastrophic coverage for major events. This would remove both private and government insurance from the picture and return medical care to individuals and their doctors.)

But this murder has nothing to do with adding to or expanding that discussion – it does the opposite. It’s a spark plug that fires the emotions of silly or unhinged public discourse and defiles civilization’s most crucial standard of personal and corporate responsibility: Thou shall not murder.

Two weeks after Thompson’s death, a second murder took place at a private Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin. On December 17, a deranged 15-year-old girl killed 14-year-old Rubi Patricia Vergara and her 42-year-old teacher, Erin Michelle West, in a study hall class. Six other students were injured but survived, while the female shooter took her own life.

Sadly, the nation’s attention span was cut short by the incessant babble of the authorities and the media we’ve become accustomed to in these all-too-frequent and preventable events. It’s the standard boilerplate language that ignores the monstrous, unimaginable evil — the love of death — that has taken root, replaced by nonconfrontational platitudes.

Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes stated, “The investigation has yet to find a clear motive,” adding that the killings were “likely a combination of factors.”

To this point, there will never be answers to “why” as long as the demonic nature of mass shootings is dismissed or diminished, leaving the why to psychologists and psychiatrists to explain. Evil lives far outside of scientific reach.

“Gun Control” — But Only If We Like the Victims

Concluding his remarks as if it was a statement of reality instead of wishful thinking, Barnes added, “In the midst of this tragedy, our community has come together in an incredible demonstration of support from Madison and indeed the state of Wisconsin and our nation.”

Unlike the thinly disguised admiration for the handsome murderer in New York City, the national media immediately turned its attention from the innocent dead and injured in Madison – and the shooter’s demonstrable cowardly wickedness – to harp about “gun control.”

Before the crime scene was secure, Joe Biden and Democrat-Socialist members of Congress ignored the atrocity itself. Instead, they called for a ban on “assault-style rifles.” This collection of buffoons was evidently unaware or uninterested in the fact that the young murderess was armed with two handguns.

The Slippery Slope of History

The juxtaposition of these murders could not be more profound. These events and how the culture reports on, absorbs, and reacts to them speak to the the health of our communal life and the moral foundation upon which that rests. It communicates clearly that the protection of life as a fundamental right is crumbling before the eyes of a dumbfounded citizenry.

Nothing about these events should surprise anyone. The culture of death now has been promoted and suffused into the corporate body for decades. The country now has a high tolerance for both murder and chaos. On average, convicted murderers serve less than 17 years in prison.

Life is cheap, except for the person from whom it is taken.

The media only focuses on the most sensational murders now. Solving murders has seemingly slid off law enforcement’s list of priorities. NPR reports that the rate of solved murders nationally has declined for years and was less than 50% in 2020. In big cities like Chicago, which has more than 500 murders a year, are only making arrests in 30% of cases.

The culture of accepting death has been coming for a long time. Fifty years ago, the abortion debate was presented to the American public as a rational extension of human freedom.

Today, 60 million abortions later, the US has advanced to an unconscionable enthusiasm in radical leftist circles to turn a human tragedy, regardless of circumstance, into a celebration. Now, the so-called progressives speak of abortion up to and including labor as though it’s a perfectly normal extension of that freedom. Some, including former Virginia Governor Ralph Northam — a pediatrician before he ran for office — say we should be able to terminate life even after a baby is delivered.

Time to Stop Ceding Ground

This is only one note in the drumbeat for death. Physician-assisted suicide is legal in nine states and the District of Columbia, and there are substantial efforts underway in many states and at the national level to normalize it as an answer to problems.

Only last month, British Parliament voted to move one step closer to state-assisted suicide, joining a handful of countries in the vanguard for death. It is an ungodly yearning dressed up as compassion. Canadian broadcaster CNB reports that medically assisted suicides in Canada soared to 1 in 20 deaths, accounting for 15,343 — or 4.7% — of all deaths in 2023, which was 15.8% greater than the year before. Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program has overseen the deaths of 60,301 people since it became legal in 2016.

The process that has led to these calamities is long-standing and predictable. It is the slow erosion of the immutable moral laws that grounded the Western World: Good restrains evil; law and order, and covenantal community and the social order defend life.

It is a battleground for our time, and we need to turn the tide, not surrender more ground.

Michael Giere writes award-winning commentary and essays on the intersection of politics, culture, and faith. He is a critically acclaimed novelist (The White River Series) and short-story writer. A former candidate for the US House of Representatives from Texas, he was a senior executive in both the Reagan and the Bush (41) administrations, and in 2016 served on the Trump Transition Team.