Maybe We're Not Better Than This

    Brian Thompson, the fifty-year-old CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down on the street in New York the other day, in what appears to be a carefully planned and utterly cold-blooded assassination. I say appears because the shooting was captured on video: The killer, masked and dressed in black, steps out from behind a parked car as Thompson passes. A moment later, Thompson stumbles, falls, and doesn’t get up. 

    It is terrible to watch—and yet, even this literal snuff film is less disturbing than the various critics and commentators, many of them self-described progressive empaths who preach compassion for the marginalized and hashtag their posts with “#BeKind,” who are treating this real murder of a real person as though it were the emotionally cathartic climax of a John Wick movie—the part where the archetypal villain gets his just desserts. The police later revealed that the bullets fired at Thompson had the industry terms deny, defend, and depose written on them—a cinematic detail that only further encouraged the notion that he was killed as vengeance for UnitedHealthcare’s misdeeds. 

    The online reaction has been disgustingly gleeful and frighteningly dark: “My thoughts and prayers are on hold pending prior authorization,” reads one representative (and massively upvoted) comment on a New York Times Facebook story about the murder. Taylor Lorenz, recently of The Washington Post, wrote, “and they wonder why we want these executives dead” on Bluesky before cross-posting the name and photo of Blue Cross Blue Shield CEO Kim Keck to her accounts on multiple platforms (along with a giggling suggestion that her followers engage in “very peaceful letter writing campaigns” against murderous insurance execs). 

    In a viral X post, Columbia University professor Anthony Zenkus—whose profile describes him as an “anti-violence” “trauma expert”—quipped, “Today, we mourn the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down. . . wait, I’m sorry—today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.” 

    Yolonda Wilson, an associate professor who teaches a course on “Law and Morality” at St. Louis University, said she was “not rejoicing” in the brutal murder of this father of two—even as she implied he deserved it. “I’m not sad about it, either,” she added. “Chickens come home to roost.” I’ll tell you this much. I’m starting to feel less guilty about my contention that people suck. 

    This practice of celebrating the destruction of one individual person as a scapegoat for whatever systemic injustice—racism, or sexism, whatever “ism”, or in this case, corporate greed—has been a recurring cultural phenomenon since roughly the first Trump administration, one in which Trump himself had been both chief enforcer and prime target, depending on the day. The popularity of this Manichaean brand of thinking shouldn’t surprise us: It has always been human nature to hunt for witches, particularly in moments when everything seems to be either broken or falling apart. When people feel scared and out of control (as anyone who has ever had the displeasure of tangling with a health insurance conglomerate in the midst of a medical crisis surely has), it’s strangely soothing to imagine that every harm, every injustice, can be traced back to the depravity of a single, mustache-twirling villain who feasts while decent people starve. 

    The only problem is, it’s not true. 

    Months ago, I read a great piece about how politics had increasingly come to resemble a war between rival fandoms, kind of like Yankees/Red Sox or, I don't know, Eagles/Everybody Else: “participation-driven, obsessive, and fueled by the ecstatic joy of rooting for the team you love...or against the one you hate.” At the time, I thought about how the desire to reframe complex social issues as comic book–grade battles between good and evil created fertile ground for replacing facts with conspiracy theories; what I have come to realize is that it encourages us to make monsters of each other. 

    The people celebrating Brian Thompson’s murder by turning him into an avatar for everything wrong with the American healthcare system remind me of nothing so much as Hollywood screenwriters, cunningly manipulating an audience into cheering on unforgivable acts of fictional violence. 

    The story goes something like this, and I can picture the movie version of this murder—a version where we follow the killer into the subway, onto a train, out to a working-class neighborhood in one of the outer boroughs of New York City; Bay Ridge, maybe, or the far reaches of Queens. He enters through the front door of a modest house, hanging up his coat next to a table strewn with papers. The print is too fine to read, but the UnitedHealthcare logo on the letterhead can be seen plain as day, along with the words CLAIM DENIED stamped on every page in red block letters. And that’s when a voice calls out—“Daddy?”—and the killer turns, and there she is: a girl, no older than eight, wearing pink princess pajamas and a soft winter hat on her hairless head. Beside her is one of those rolling IV stands, its tube snaking into her arm; behind her, a woman whose haunted eyes and pale face speak to the imminence of loss. The man nods, almost imperceptibly, and they know—and we know—he’s done something righteous. 

    I can picture it. I bet you can, too. 

    But this isn’t real. It’s just a story, a fantasy, a little fairy tale for ghouls. And the truth? We know what that looks like. We’ve seen it: shot from an awkward angle with poor resolution, bad lighting, and no sound. The truth is that Thompson lurches as the first bullet strikes him, the ungainly little two-step of a human being trying to regain his balance, not yet realizing he will never take another step. The truth is that, at the end, the killer jogs across the street and out of frame—and what’s left is a man, lying on the ground, shrouded in shadow and almost invisible. Dying. 

    It’s not like in the movies at all. 

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com