Is Mangione the Left's Trump?

On CNN, approving of murder is hardly any worse than voting for Donald Trump. Indeed, voting for Trump may be worse, given how CNN senior correspondent Donie O'Sullivan framed this question to Taylor Lorenz: "I'm sure you wouldn't like to be compared to a Trump supporter," O'Sullivan reassured her, "but some of how people cannot understand why people have sympathies for Mangione" — that's Luigi Mangione, slayer of health care executive Brian Thompson — "strikes me as the same as a lot of media not understanding why people support Trump. Lorenz, a former Washington Post and New York Times reporter who's now an online "influencer," provoked every bit of the outrage she was hoping for with her sympathetic account of Mangione's popularity on the radical left. "You're going to see women, especially, that feel like, oh my God, here's this man who's a revolutionary, who's famous, who's handsome, who's young, who's smart. He's a person who seems like a morally good man, which is hard to find," she gushed to O'Sullivan. Lorenz is nothing if not an attention sponge. She may not have a major media gig anymore, but her journalism has always been more about making the headlines than reporting on them. Yet her appearance Sunday on CNN's "MisinfoNation: Extreme America" was as notable for O'Sullivan's questions as for Lorenz's aiming-to-shock answers. If voting for Trump and making a hero out of a murderer do both arise "because a lot of people are just really, really desperate," as O'Sullivan opined on air, then the real story CNN ought to be covering is the life-and-death difference between the election-winning right and the violent left. Lorenz accepted O'Sullivan's premise: Trump voters and Mangione-lovers are alike, she agreed, because "They want somebody to take on the system. They want somebody to tear down these barbaric establishment institutions." Yet Brian Thompson wasn't an institution; he was a man whose slaughter hasn't changed anything. With Trump, the populist right organized to win at the ballot box and use lawful authority to shake up institutions, which is what the president is now doing. The Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters was uncharacteristic of what has otherwise been a nonviolent political movement for reform. But violence is only too characteristic of left-wing activism in the streets — and of the mentality behind it, as the Lorenz interview testifies. Faced with defeat at the polls and a Republican administration using its mandate to change institutions, some on the left have despaired of politics and turned toward violence, escalating from vandalism to arson attacks against targets like Tesla dealerships and Republican headquarters, as seen in New Mexico recently. Lorenz and O'Sullivan aren't tossing Molotov cocktails, of course, but they're content to put a murderer's fan club on the same level as Trump's voters. Progressives who shun violence should be the first to protest that moral equivalence. But even the nonviolent left has habitually characterized Trump and his supporters in terms that cry out for bloodshed — after all, how can anyone stand by if the country really is in the midst of a "fascist" takeover? The glamorization of Mangione shows another side of the left's penchant for violence over politics — it's exciting and romantic in a way electioneering isn't. While the political right dreams of fine-tuning tariffs, the Taylor Lorenz left fantasizes about "this man who's a revolutionary, who's famous, who's handsome ..." Like Che Guevara, the bloody communist revolutionary who found immortality as a college-leftist pinup, Mangione mixes sex and violence with a narcissistic radical's sense of self-righteousness. It's a brew Lorenz finds intoxicating — and maybe CNN does, too. Certainly, it's good for media buzz. The Trump movement has its emotional and aesthetic side, but it's channeled into actual politics in GOP primaries and general elections. And its more extravagant expressions are found not in the streets but in memes and social media rants. The left is different, increasingly channeling its emotion away from candidates and policy disputes and toward street action and violent fantasies — whether fearful fantasies of a Nazi takeover or thrilling visions of a murderous uprising against power. Or both. Instead of presenting "extreme America" documentaries that treat Trump voters and a murderer's apologists as essentially the same, CNN would do its viewers a service by showing them the difference between a politically effective right and the dangerously adolescent left. Yet the same sensationalism that sustains Taylor Lorenz may be all CNN knows how to sell, too. Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com.