Elizabeth Warren, CEO-Assassin Cheerleader
“People can only be pushed so far,” sitting Senator Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) told HuffPost on Tuesday, in response to the killing of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of Midtown Manhattan.
“The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the health care system,” said Warren. “Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far,” she added.
Violence is never the answer, BUT is always a strange sentence construction. Generally when you add but it seems like you’re justifying whatever preceded it. Boilerplate condemnation rings a little hollow when you throw that little three-letter word in after. “This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.”
A firestorm followed. Yesterday, Warren went back to the media and clarified: “Violence is never the answer. Period.” And “I should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder.”
Other Democrats, like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, managed to get it right, saying: “In America, we do not kill people in cold blood to express policy differences or a viewpoint.”
One thing this whole discourse has really missed is that the killer, Luigi Mangione, appears to have come from a rich family seemingly with both health care and, ostensibly, the means to handle his medical costs. He appears to have had a successful operation on his back—a spinal fusion which cured his debilitating pain. He’s not some man of the people, some folk hero who was slighted by the medical system—or if he was, he didn’t mention that in his manifesto or anywhere in his hefty digital footprint, including lots of Reddit messages on his experience with spinal surgery. And even if he were, killing a CEO is evidence that you’re clinically insane with very little to teach the rest of us. For Warren to act like this is warranted or understandable behavior is heinous. Mangione wasn’t “pushed so far” by an unfair system; he appears to have been the recipient of a difficult-to-perform and relatively new surgery that helped to cure his pain, the likes of which we only have access to in health care systems that prize medical innovation through profit motive.
Defense bill passes: Yesterday, the House passed an $895 billion defense policy bill despite major opposition from Democrats. Of course, it wasn’t the high price tag that created the controversy: It was a culture war over transitions for minors.
“The hang up in the bill—which took months of negotiations between parties—centers on a provision that would prohibit
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