Mirror mirror on the wall. It’s been a week since a masked gunman assassinated the CEO of UnitedHealthcare outside a Manhattan hotel in broad daylight, shocking the nation to rapt attention that only grew more pronounced as the first bizarre details of the story emerged: shell casings at the scene of the crime marked with the words “delay,” “deny,” “depose,” a discarded backpack stuffed with Monopoly money, and the haunting, smiling face of a handsome young man at Starbucks captured on camera just before the hit. But as immediately gripping as America found the story, the murder itself was quickly eclipsed by celebration of the crime, which was not only defended by academics, sociopathic media personalities, and social media influencers, but tacitly endorsed by “respectable” corners of the mainstream press (“Yes, murder is bad, but what can we learn from the killer and his fans?”). Ultimately, the sentiment was echoed and amplified from the highest ranks of American government. The victim in this story was no mere rich person, we were told, which would have been bad enough. He was a rich person working in healthcare, a Bad Industry full of Bad People. Americans are in pain. Americans are suffering! The psychotic online creatures who shape our culture were perhaps not justified in their celebration, but their celebration was understandable. Right?

Jesus Christ.

The media’s standard “both sides” framing of the “joy” that followed Brian Thompson’s assassination, far more than the celebration itself, has placed this country in enormous danger. The communists in my mentions have told me as much. Unfortunately, they’ve once again missed the broader populist trends across America, and misunderstood the amplifying power of the internet. They think this story will help them achieve their goals (class war, socialist revolution). But the internet can’t be controlled. As this discourse normalizes, I have no doubt billionaire former mayors of San Francisco (such as myself) will be at greater risk of violence. But billionaires can also afford private security. Can the same be said of mentally ill Substackers?

A chaos of normalized violence, which now seems poised to rapidly scale culture through social media, would largely fall on the very communist baristas presently excited at the thought. It would fall on the privileged academics posing as “the working class,” and journalists — the most hated people in America — presently attempting a “nuanced” conversation on the topic. Finally, it would fall, as every excess of this nation’s elite falls, on regular Americans. There is no normalizing violence against one specific group of people that doesn’t by extension normalize the concept of violence generally. If it’s okay to kill healthcare executives because they’re evil, it’s okay to kill any “evil” person, and in a country where nobody can agree on what, or who, constitutes “evil,” every one of us has a target on our back.

I’ve noticed most adherents of the “murder brings me joy” contingent of society seem to understand they’re driving change, but not to understand the change they’re driving. Partly this is a matter of stupidity. These are people who genuinely lack the intelligence to comprehend that many people see them as they themselves see healthcare executives. But their ignorance is also partly rooted in a recency bias. After all, we’ve seen an element of this story play out many times over the last couple years, and the dynamics generally fall neatly into the leftist’s Fantasy Land mental model of the world.

The reaction to Brian Thompson’s assassination was and remains a classic moral inversion, a phenomenon I’ve explored for years now in every apparently disconnected theater from the submersible implosion to last year’s terrorist attack in Israel. Not only is a morally inverted reaction gruesome and heinous — immoral, this is to say, by any sane man’s standards — it is explicitly framed by a mob as moral. Then, when sane men understandably respond in horror to positions in favor of mass murder, for example, their reaction is explicitly framed as immoral. We watched this dynamic play out across the internet all week, from Ivy League professors (this bow-tied clown, for example, or this manic pixie dream Marxist teaching out of UPenn), to wildly popular social media influencers and whatever the fuck Taylor Lorenz has become. Ultimately, implicit calls for violence manifested in the United States Senate, when Elizabeth Warren said “violence is never the answer… but people can be pushed only so far.”

Murder of your fellow countrymen is wrong. HOWEVER.

Thursday, in an incomprehensible escalation from a sitting member of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a new framework for thinking about the assassin:

“This is not to say that an act of violence is justified,” she said, “but I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence...”

Your new “not a justification, but” for murder? Violent “experiences” of non-violent actions.

What psychopathic leftists like Warren and Ocasio fail to comprehend is how the average person “experiences” their policy proposals, and how quickly their psychopathic leftist sentiments have begun to mirror across the ideological spectrum. The oligopoly media alliance that once gatekept the Overton Window is shattered. We live on liberated social media, now, which means reaction to violent leftist psychopathy is no longer censored. Sarah Haider hinted at the danger we are now facing in an important, early post on the subject:

Marc Andreessen shared a similar sentiment, to the same professor Sarah critiqued:

Amidst yet another deeply psychotic discourse, both Sarah and Marc attempted an appeal to logic. Please don’t do this, they explained. For all of our sakes, my God, please stop. If a college professor takes so heinous a moral position on grounds evil should be punished, what does this say for anyone who contributes to the heinously evil academic house of cards? Is some financially crippled student justified in seeking vengeance of his own? Is his act of vengeance — while tragic, we would say, while very wrong! — not itself a teachable moment? If not, why not?

As I stewed in this increasingly twisted discourse, I was struck by a thought far darker. In any culture of normalized violence, calls for targeted acts of violence against tribal enemies are not only inevitable, but rational. They are a matter of survival. This week, as class violence has been implicitly and explicitly justified throughout our media and government, I’ve struggled, deeply, with my own feelings in response.

How would I feel if some heinous tragedy befell the bloodthirsting college professor, or the laughing social media influencer? I’m still not so entirely broken as these people, so I’m confident I wouldn’t feel a kind of “joy” in reaction to the death of a millionaire Marxist like Hasan. But would I care? Would I really have it in me to muster a principled call to end the violence? Today I think, and hope, I would. But if another CEO is targeted? And another? And if, in response, Hasan incites further violence?

The human instinct is to fight back, to broaden the discourse from communist guillotines to helicopter rides for communists. The human instinct is to meet violence with even greater acts of violence, which will of course trigger further calls for, and acts of, violence. The human instinct is to extinguish the other side. If socialists truly want us dead, and at this point I think that’s fairly obvious, ignoring the fact can only lead to our death. Or, this is the kind of thought I find myself increasingly incapable of shaking, and the kind of sentiment that will increasingly proliferate online. We are standing, now, at the gates of Hell.

From the moment I watched the shooting, even before we learned the killer’s identity, I felt disoriented. It sounds strange, but there was something about the way the killer stood, I think, and the playfulness of all those haunting early details. There was a mad rush online to graph the story onto our culture war — a leftist killer, or runaway crime in New York City — which never felt correct. Then, a suspect was apprehended, and my early feelings were confirmed. Violent Marxists are still celebrating across the internet, but if this is really the guy? The killer isn’t one of them.

Luigi Mangione, the nation learned this week, is a young, attractive, wealthy high school valedictorian and Ivy League graduate working as an engineer in tech — or, he was. Tanned and muscle-bound, he wrote about fitness, philosophy, history, and (perhaps the smoking gun) psychedelics. He’s well-read, and, for many years, shared his opinions thoughtfully, uncontroversially, and pleasantly online. He often reached out to writers he admired with a friendly note. He wasn’t a communist. He was, I regret to inform you, kind of a tech bro. And if we’re being really honest? He reminded me of a Pirate Wires reader.

The killer’s social media accounts are now locked, but I found them all myself within moments of his identity reveal, and they leave a strong impression of his story. Throughout most of his life, Luigi seemed a kind of centrist, or slightly center-right thinker, open and interested in new ideas, and very intelligent. From what I can tell, he suffered a serious back injury, and never recovered. Concurrently, while he experimented with psychedelics, a life of chronic pain became a part of his identity. He became focused on the healthcare system. Then, over the summer he went missing. And when he was finally discovered, which anyone can see from side-by-sides comparing the sunny happy shirtless hero picture of the man the media has delighted in distributing with photos recently taken of Luigi in prison, he was transformed by whatever malevolence had entered him.

Online, a popular tweet has resurfaced in response —

A common thought, now, is perhaps this man sought psychedelics out to ease his pain, and — stories diverge here depending on your beliefs — they either triggered a serious mental illness or left him vulnerable to literal demonic possession. In any case, a young and healthy man is now broken, and reshaped into an instrument of evil. But the most chilling thing about his story, for me, is no longer the murder. It’s that I found this man before his twisted turn relatable. In Luigi, I see my friends. I see my readers. I see myself. And I see everything awful we are capable of becoming.

For the furthest extremes of the American left, it doesn’t matter that Luigi was a Huberman-loving center-right thinkboi hollowed out by pain and drugs, tragically lost to demons. Marxists have reshaped him into a folk hero, with songs of class war amplified across every corner of the social internet. This is to say, even were there no practically beneficial response to the story, the CEO assassination would have been another Columbine for all of its memetic consequence. Much like school shootings proliferated after the 90s, almost all of which carried some hint of the Trenchcoat Mafia, I believe we’re entering a new assassination period. Probably nothing could have stopped it. Insanely, however, there have also been practical benefits to the murder, as we are now entering a national conversation not on stopping assassination, but on dramatically reshaping our healthcare system, which is what the assassin wanted. Politicians like Warren, Ocasio, and Bernie Sanders are channeling this homicidal rage, or attempting to. They will fail. Violence of this kind can’t be channeled.

There’s nothing we can or even should do about Luigi’s folk song. But our institutions, old and new alike, must certainly not reward murder. We must certainly not work with, or give money to, writers and influencers who encourage or justify murder. And we must certainly not tolerate a “nuanced” conversation on the topic of extrajudicial execution for “class traitors” from our sitting fucking government. What the fuck. Morality is something you either have or don’t, and I am under no illusion I can convince a sociopath to be a better person. My purpose here is not to convince such people there is something immoral in their behavior. My purpose here is just to say there will be a response to the gruesome celebration of murder, and communists won’t like it.

Our choices are to oppose political violence, or prepare ourselves for violence meted out in every political direction. Please choose wisely, and know I’ve never been a Gandhi guy. I’ll be following whichever way you walk.

—SOLANA