The Left’s Murder Fantasy

A society that greenlights political violence is likely to see more of it.

A society that greenlights political violence by essentially arguing that the systems you don’t like are murderous systems and thus people who participate in those systems must be murdered is greenlighting political violence.

And then, when you have liberal judicial systems that are set up to let criminals off the hook, it gets even worse.

Yesterday, a judge ruled that while the murder weapon used in the murder of Brian Thompson was admissible at trial, a bunch of other evidence should be suppressed.

A New York judge ruled that some key evidence that was seized from Luigi Mangione’s backpack during his arrest at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s will be inadmissible at trial.

The decision is a little bit complex. It is also not particularly well-founded. The evidence that’s been ruled admissible includes the gun, a 3D printed silencer, and a red notebook that allegedly contains a bunch of damning writing.

The evidence to be suppressed, however, includes a phone, Mangione’s passport, a gun magazine, a wallet, and a computer chip.

The judge in this particular case said he agreed with the defense argument that the search of Mangione’s backpack at McDonald’s — without reading him his rights — was unconstitutional because it had been moved away from arm’s reach.

Why? New York law is super-duper-duper weird.

First of all, it’s unclear why New York law should apply, even though the entire search took place in Pennsylvania.

The judge wrote:

Defendant is being tried in New York for a crime that occurred in New York. Under these circumstances, it is clear that New York is the forum state and that New York has a paramount interest in the application of the law. Suppression issues, procedural issues, and evidentiary issues are governed by the law of the forum state.

That’s super-duper weird. If he’d been caught in California, why exactly would the cops in California have to know New York law to properly do their job?

New York’s laws on this sort of stuff are insane. Even the federal law regarding search and seizure is totally crazy.

A case called Mapp v. Ohio — one of those critical criminal law cases you learn in first-year law school — established the so-called “exclusionary rule.” For the vast majority of American history, if there was an illegal search and seizure where the cops broke into your house and they found evidence of a crime, that evidence was still admissible in court. The cop might be punished; there might be a lawsuit against the cop.

But Mapp v. Ohio established the so-called exclusionary rule, which said that if your Fourth Amendment rights are violated, we can’t use the evidence found in court.

The reason this is particularly stupid is that it penalizes the general public for the failures of the cops. The cops fail to fully follow the Fourth Amendment, and now criminals have to be let out on the street unless they “read you your rights.”

I know we all take this for granted now because we’ve watched a bunch of Law & Order episodes, but it really is quite stupid. The idea that you have to be read your Miranda rights again — another ridiculous case, where somebody has to inform you of your right not to self-incriminate, or we’ll take the evidence and throw it out of court — is really, really dumb. It means that many more criminals get off and end up on the street.

In the Mangione case, New York law goes even further. New York law has something called the “exigency exception.” That means you are allowed to search someone without a warrant or any warning if there’s a threat of “exigent” danger.

There’s a guy who’s running away from you, and he’s firing a gun at you. You tackle him and you search his pockets and you come up with drugs. Those would be the “exigent” circumstances.

In Mangione’s case, the judge ruled that the property had to be within the suspect’s immediate control or grabbable area, but the backpack was moved away from him to a table about nine feet away, at which point it was no longer in his control. And so they could not search it without having the evidence excluded.

But later, after they had read him his rights, the evidence found was admissible.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re arrested before somebody reads you your Miranda rights. You immediately blurt out that you committed the crime. That may be inadmissible.

But after they read your rights, if you repeat what you had blurted out, it’s now admissible.

The bottom line is that much of our criminal justice system has been twisted in favor of the perpetrator and against the victims, and that is part and parcel of the broader effort over the course of the last 70 or 80 years in American law to grant outsized rights to perpetrators as opposed to defending the general public from those perpetrators.

And even that is not the really big issue here. The really big issue with Luigi Mangione, of course, is that he has a lot of supporters.

There’s been an entire permission structure that’s been set up largely by the Left that says if you don’t like the systems of American life, systems they view as intractable and unchangeable, people who participate in the systems are guilty.

I’m old enough to remember the Occupy Wall Street protests. Occupy Wall Street was a movement in 2011 that emerged in the aftermath of the Great Recession, and a group of people on the Left — instead of protesting the government’s involvement with Wall Street — decided to protest Wall Street itself.

The idea was that Wall Street was inherently evil. That was a completely misdirected use of mental and emotional resources because, after all, the members of Wall Street are not answerable to the general public. They’re operating in the private sphere.

If you wish to protest public policy, we have a whole city called Washington, D.C., where federal public policy gets made.

But that’s not what the Left was protesting. They weren’t protesting government involvement in industry — government’s heavy hand. They were protesting that government was not doing enough to be involved. They were protesting the existence of the private sector itself.

Thus, when they don’t like the systems, they blame members of the private sector for participating in those systems.

You can see this throughout left-wing politics. You see it in Zohran Mamdani saying ridiculous and insane things about the nature of how the world should work.

Yesterday, Mamdani was at an event, and he was talking about Ronald Reagan saying the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Mamdani said, no, no, no, no. The most terrifying words in the English language are, “I worked all day and can’t feed my family.” He added, “We are going to use the power of government to lower prices and make it easier for New Yorkers to put food on the table.”

The entire left-wing thought structure is that failures are attributable to the private sector.

Government is always and forever the fix.

Thus, if you don’t like the health care system, it is not that the health care system in the United States can be a mess because it is heavily regulated and heavily subsidized, the real problem is that the people involved in the private sector are bad. The people involved in the public sector are good.

This creates a phenomenon that they like to call social murder, which justifies violence. So if, for example, you’re Brian Thompson — a father, a person who raised himself up from not particularly wonderful economic circumstances in his youth to become the head of United Health, one of the biggest insurers in America — and you operate within the law — the law itself is flawed, but you operate within it — you are responsible for death and deserve to die.

So yesterday, outside of the trial of Mangione, some self-proclaimed “Mangionistas” showed off press passes that they had received, according to the New York Post, from Mamdani’s administration.

One said of Thompson, “His children are better off without him. They need to learn to not be like their dad. And enjoy the blood money, kids. … He’s responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden. … It’s not like we don’t understand heroic violence, or, like, when violence is good.”

This is psychotic stuff.

The idea that Thompson, by being the CEO of a major insurance company, was somehow like Osama bin Laden, who literally ordered the flying of planes into buildings in New York, is psychotic.

But this is an increasingly popular view with people on the Left who believe that the private sector is responsible for all of the ills of society and that all the systems that they don’t like are run by people who are attempting to do things like murder.

Hassan Piker, considered a mainstream political commentator by the Left, was recently talking about “social murder” with regard to Mangione.

He stated:

Engels wrote about the concept of social murder, and Brian Thompson as the United Health Care CEO, was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder. The systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty, the for-profit pay-walled system of health care in this country. And the consequences of that are tremendous amounts of pain, tremendous amounts of violence, tremendous amounts of deaths.

And that was a fascinating story for me, because Americans are very draconian about crime and punishment. They’re very black and white on this issue. And yet, because of the pervasive pain that the private health care system had created for the average American, I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place.

If you want more political violence in the United States, the Left will bring it to you.