UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered on December 4, 2024.
The Democratic Speaker of the Minnesota House, Melissa Hortman, and her husband were murdered on June 14, 2025.
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was murdered on September 10, 2025.
The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, was murdered on February 28, 2026.
The common thread in these political assassinations: They did not produce the political outcomes desired by the assassins.
The American health insurance system is unchanged. Supporters of reproductive freedom still govern Minnesota (Hortman’s alleged murderer kept a list of 45 Democratic lawmakers plus Planned Parenthood leaders and grouped some names in a section labeled “added protections for abortions in MN.”) Turning Point USA continues to be an influential right-wing organization, and Kirk has been sanctified as a martyr for the conservative cause by President Donald Trump and other Republicans. The Iranian government continues to be led by militant theocrats.
Throughout history, some people have made mush-brained justifications for political assassination as serving a greater good. But the recent spate of political violence, including Saturday’s foiled rampage of the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, suggests such arguments appear to be gaining newfound traction.
Soon after the Correspondents’ Dinner, recalling the two presidential assassination attempts during the 2024 campaign, some conservatives (and at least one Democratic congressperson) posted social media messages along the lines of, Please stop trying to murder the president.
Yes. But the pithy statement, by design, leaves the impression that only Trump has been the target of political violence, and only figures on the left are promoting political violence. This ignores the Governor Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot (which Trump suggested those convicted were victims of a “railroad job”), the near-fatal attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul (which Trump loved to joke about), the arson of Governor Josh Shapiro’s home, the recent nonfatal shooting at the home of a Democratic Indianapolis City Council member, and other less well-known incidents of violence or abuse targeting state legislators and judges. Last September, Paul Becker and Art Jipson, the University of Dayton sociology professors, observed that since 2001, “approximately 75% to 80% of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths” were caused by “right-wing extremist violence.”
However, since Trump survived two assassination attempts during the 2024 campaign and won a second term, incidents of high-profile far-left political violence have seized the spotlight and attracted some sympathetic commentary.
The purported manifesto from Cole Tomas Allen, who was apprehended at the dinner and appears to be a practicing evangelical Christian, partly justifies his attempt to kill members of the Trump administration as within the parameters of Christian scripture, although he doesn’t give much of an explanation why he thinks assassination is an effective remedy to end Trump’s policies, beyond, “This was the best timing and chance of success I could come up with.” Tyler Robinson, indicted for the murder of Kirk, texted his partner the rationale, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out,” failing to consider that Kirk’s ideas could continue to live, and even receive more attention, after his death.
The diary of Thompson’s alleged killer Luigi Mangione, quoted in the prosecution’s legal filings, show he thought he had figured out how he would succeed where others (such as the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, whom he singled out for praise) had failed: “This is the problem with most militants that rebel against — often real — injustices; they commit an atrocity, either whose horror outweighs the impact of their message, or whose distance from their message prevents normies from connecting the dots … What do you do? You wack the C.E.O. at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents.”
Mangione struck a chord with some fervent critics of the health care industry. He now has so many fans that Luigi: The Musical had a sellout run in San Francisco, and a four-night staged reading in New York City is on tap. And we are still hearing his sympathizers echo his logic.
A few months after UHC’s Thompson was gunned down, Hasan Piker, the ubiquitous leftist influencer, was suspended temporarily from the Twitch platform for saying, “If you cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill Rick Scott,” the healthcare executive-turned-Governor-turned-Senator from Florida.
Earlier this month, during a New York Times podcast roundtable, Piker claimed Thompson’s healthcare business was “engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder”—a loaded phrase, coined by the co-author of The Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels, designed, at minimum, to provoke drastic action. “Because of the pervasive pain that the private health care system had created for the average American,” Piker continued, “I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place.” He was offering a moral justification akin to the crude Babylonian principle of an eye for an eye.
Another roundtable participant, Jia Tolentino of The New Yorker, more closely echoed Mangione’s logic of efficacy. She deemed Thompson’s murder “an effective act of political consciousness-raising” and added that she “was disappointed” Democratic lawmakers didn’t leverage the murder and “immediately take this up [by] pushing a unified message toward universal health care.”
The Thompson murder occurred days before Republicans took over the White House and Congress, leaving Democrats with no legislative power to do anything regarding health care. But let’s set the timing aside. Tolentino—not to mention Mangione—didn’t consider that “normies” reacted to the murder, however narrowly targeted, as a “horror” that “outweighs the impact” of its intended message. An Emerson College poll conducted shortly after the murder asked if “the actions of the killer of the United Healthcare CEO” were “acceptable or unacceptable.” An overwhelming majority of 68 percent said it was unacceptable, versus 17 percent who said it was acceptable. The generational divide was striking, with respondents under 30 almost perfectly split. But a relatively stronger youthful appetite for violence was not enough for Democrats to detect potential political efficacy from macabre exploitation.
At the end of the conversation, both Piker and Tolentino were asked directly if “murdering the C.E.O. of a health care company” was something OK to do. Each replied, “No.” (They were quicker to embrace shoplifting to fight back against economic inequality.) But this was after spending considerable effort finding ways to justify and legitimize murder as a political tactic.
Meanwhile, at the White House, Trump continues to crow about how his Operation Epic Fury murdered Khamenei and dozens of other Iranian officials, ignoring that the assassinations violated America’s treaty obligations and now severely jeopardize our ability to conduct diplomacy. “We’re dealing right now with a totally different group of people, and they’re much more reasonable than previous, much more reasonable,” Trump assured at the end of March, “And that is truly regime change.”
During the bombing raids, Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth routinely delivered press briefings that celebrated “death and destruction,” as if causing death and destruction was in and of itself a great foreign policy success. Iran’s seizure of the Strait of Hormuz and refusal to bend to Trump’s demands have since undercut the administration’s boasts and challenged their belief in the practical value of violence.
Trump and Mangione (and Tolentino) made similar analytical errors. The forces that shape and sustain the elaborate bureaucracies of the Iranian government and American healthcare systems run far too deep to be vaporized by the killing of one or more high-level people. There are no shortcuts to solving difficult political and policy problems. Not even murder.
The independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, after reviewing Allen’s manifesto and interviewing his former classmates, observed:
From Luigi Mangione to Cole Allen, these shooters aren’t the antisocial loners of media imagination. They’re smart, well-liked, and often idealistic. They have no prior criminal record. They take pains to avoid bystander casualties, as Allen reportedly did. But they share one conviction: that the political system has failed, and someone has to act.
Mangione and Allen can be classified as “smart” under certain criteria. Both are computer engineers who graduated from academically rigorous institutions (the University of Pennsylvania and the California Institute of Technology, respectively). Yet both appear to have stupidly succumbed to the egotistical fallacy that they could unilaterally affect political change through deadly violence.
No one besides the criminals themselves should be held responsible for crimes. But a flabby political discourse driven by clickbaiters who amplify shoddy political arguments—through reckless algorithms at giant social media companies or amateurish editorial decisions at major traditional media institutions—risks steering those with delusions of grandeur down dangerous paths. We’ll never be able to eradicate violent ideas from the global conversation, but we’re not obligated to platform them unchallenged.
I’ve been writing about politics for over 20 years, spending much of that time engaging in debates regarding how to navigate the political system and produce positive change. These debates have generally centered on the finer points of policy and legislative strategy. That I feel it necessary to write 1,500 words on why murder is bad feels like we’ve taken another step down the dark path of idiocracy.
