Following the targeted killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan Wednesday, online discourse among progressives almost immediately devolved into dark, ideologically-driven schadenfreude.

Former Washington Post columnist and habitual liar Taylor Lorenz led the way on Bluesky. “And people wonder why we want these executives dead,” she wrote, captioning a news story about Blue Cross Blue Shield announcing a new policy regarding the duration of their anesthesia coverage during certain surgeries. She followed the post up with a celebratory meme featuring a smiling cartoon star surrounded by balloons and the text “CEO DOWN.”

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Lorenz shared another take on the Blue Cross Blue Shield story, posting a photo of its CEO, Kim A. Keck, with the commentary: “I hope people learn the names of all of these insurance company CEOs and engage in very peaceful letter writing campaigns so that they stop ruthlessly murdering thousands of innocent Americans by denying coverage. Healthcare is a human right. We need universal healthcare now.” The following day, she posted a defense of her statements on Substack titled “Why ‘we’ want insurance executives dead.”

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The entire progressive left seemed to rejoice over Brian Thompson’s murder. Shortly after the news of the assassination broke, Gizmodo published an article titled, “Bitter Americans React to UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Murder: ‘My Empathy Is Out of Network’,” which chronicles responses to Thompson’s murder on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and points out that on UnitedHealth Group’s Facebook post mourning its CEO’s assassination, laughing emoji responses outnumbered crying emojis 10,000 to 1,600.

The re-election of Donald Trump “signaled a kind of right-wing populist nihilism as the Republican leader embraced conspiracy theories, threatened to go after his political enemies, and demonized immigrants in wildly racist ways,” the article says. “The sometimes celebratory attitude of such a broad swath of Americans on Wednesday felt like an embrace of that same sort of nihilism.”

Yolonda Wilson, a Department of Health Care Ethics associate professor at Saint Louis University who teaches courses on “Applied Ethics” and “Law and Morality” posted a seven-part thread that starts with, “So, while I’m not rejoicing about the UHC CEO being shot dead in the street, I’m not sad about it, either. People deserve better than the US health insurance industry, and chickens come home to roost.” Since the assassination, she’s reposted tweets critical of Brian Thompson and UHC seemingly nonstop; such posts include, “Wait the guy who shot the United Healthcare CEO BIKED OFF?? and GOT AWAY?? May they never find him and he live a long prosperous life,” and “Brian Thompson ran a company based off exploiting people during the most vulnerable times in their life. I’m not sad he’s dead.”

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Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, who previously worked for The Intercept and The Nation posted “I hope the ceo was on the phone with his insurance before getting in an ambulance to make sure the ambulance and the hospital was in network.” He followed that up with a graph on X showing United HealthCare denies 32% of claims with the caption, “Today we remember the legacy of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.”

Edward Ongweso Jr., a podcast host and senior researcher at Security in Context, an “an interdisciplinary research & pedagogy initiative promoting critical research & policy analysis,” quotetweeted a post by @MidnightMitch questioning whether Taylor had “lost her mind.” “No she’s actually cooking,” he wrote. Then he retweeted a post by Kitty Stremy (a “scientist, poetess, bonne vivante”) which reads: “in both my right and left wing group chats everyone has the same opinion about the CEO. the only people who don’t view this as a positive or the very least understandable course of events are just the people everyone thinks are wrist slapping narcs, which is telling me something.”

When Minneapolis news anchor Julie Nelson, posted that Brian Thompson “was a human being with a family,” Mike Figueredo, host of political podcast The Humanist Report, which has 514k subscribers on YouTube, quotetweeted it with the caption “Fuck his family too.”

Much can be said about the ideologies driving this sort of behavior. While far-left politics are surely at play, Nate Silver may have said it best in his post on Wednesday, when he wrote, “Let’s be honest a lot of Extremely Online people are mentally unwell.”

—Kevin Chaiken