The Evil Revolutionary Left Cheers Murder

The Revolutionary Left is creeping into the mainstream.

The shooting of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, has unleashed a wave of evil from members of the Left. Thompson wasn’t a criminal. He wasn’t even an advocate of death the way abortionists or euthanasia advocates are. (And murder of an abortionist or euthanasia advocate would be unjustifiable morally in a democratic system.) His great sin is that he was the head of a company that exists within a mixed private-public healthcare framework, and that he did his job.

But for the Left, if you hate the system, you are morally justified in murdering anyone who acts within the system. That means that if, like one Bernie Sanders follower, you believe that private healthcare “kills Americans,” you can murder Congressmen. It means that if you don’t like that health insurers often deny coverage for certain pre-existing conditions or non-covered doctors or medication, you can murder the CEO of a health insurance company.

This is revolutionary leftist evil.

It’s evil for a couple reasons.

First, violence is not justified in a democracy, where your say is part of the process. Revolution to overthrow tyranny is justified — but the tyranny must be real, and the violence must be the last resort. Neither is true in this case. If you do perceive America to be a tyranny and violence to be the proper response, that is a call for unending violence until the system itself is changed. It’s a call for revolution.

Second, violence against members of private industry isn’t even a protest of public policy. It’s a protest against the very system of free markets. Thompson was not responsible for America’s healthcare system any more than the head of CVS is responsible for America’s tariff system. Directing hatred against Thompson is not about shaping public policy. It’s about trying to threaten anyone who engages in free markets at all. This person could have just as easily shot a doctor who decided not to perform a surgery, or a bank worker who denied a loan application.

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This was the philosophy of the Red Army Faction in Germany in the 1970s, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang. They weren’t seeking a better world. They were seeking to tear down the world of capitalism on behalf of Marxist evil. They routinely quoted Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Gramsci; they called for revolution. Ulrike Meinhof, a Left-wing radical journalist, led the way, famously stating, “Protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more.”

That philosophy led the Baader-Meinhof Gang to engage in routine assassination of everyone from industrialists like Hanns Martin Schleyer to Dresdner Bank head Jurgen Ponto to American servicemen in Germany. These people can also become tools of enemy regimes, as Baader-Meinhof was. Baader-Meinhof worked with the Stasi and other Soviet agents to foment chaos, and coordinated with Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Palestine Liberation Organization.

The origins of Baader-Meinhof came from the 1968 student protests in Germany. They were Marxist in orientation, influenced by radical race riots in the United States, and allied with radicals all over the globe; Meinhof wrote an essay defending the Munich Massacre of Israeli Olympians by Palestinian terrorists. Stefan Aust, who literally wrote the book on the Baader-Meinhof Gang, pointed out:

The Baader–Meinhof Gang drew a measure of support that violent leftists in the United States, like the Weather Underground, never enjoyed. A poll at the time showed that a quarter of West Germans under forty felt sympathy for the gang and one-tenth said they would hide a gang member from the police. Prominent intellectuals spoke up for the gang’s righteousness [as] Germany even into the 1970s was still a guilt-ridden society. When the gang started robbing banks, newscasts compared its members to Bonnie and Clyde. (Andreas) Baader, a charismatic action man indulged in the imagery, telling people that his favourite movies were Bonnie and Clyde, which had recently come out, and The Battle of Algiers. The pop poster of Che Guevara hung on his wall, [while] he paid a designer to make a Red Army Faction logo, a drawing of a machine gun against a red star.

What do we make of the journalists and academics who proclaim soft support for the murder of Brian Thompson? That we are on the verge of something terrible. After all, this follows hard on the Black Lives Matters riots, which were indulged and even celebrated by many on the Left; the Hamas takeover of college campuses, again indulged and celebrated by Left-wing elite; and now, the not-so-quiet applause for the assassination of a private healthcare CEO.

The toxic brew of radicalism and violence that characterized the 1970s in Germany and the United States is bubbling again. And why not? Many of those who engaged in precisely that violence are now well-respected American academics: Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn found high positions in academia after spending years planting bombs with the Weather Underground.

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Certainly a desperate Left, spurred to action by constant talk of the “fascistic” takeover of Donald Trump, can be counted on to increase their support for violence. Two assassination attempts against Trump in the last six months are merely an indicator of just how deeply this rot is spreading.

This must be stopped. It can only be stopped by a widespread rejection on all sides of the aisle for this type of violence. The shooter in this case should be arrested and given the death penalty. Seedbeds for such Marxist-Leninist violence on college campuses should be defunded. Those like Taylor Lorenz should be rejected from polite society.

The Brian Thompson shooting is a bleeding edge indicator of where the country could be going. All it takes is someone with organizational capacity on the Left to launch America into a new era of domestic terrorism, with the tacit “moral” support of much of the journalistic establishment.