“Do They Have the Balls?”

Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, was gunned down yesterday on a crowded Manhattan Street. A hooded man walked up to him and coolly shot him down in what was obviously a cold-blooded killing which had been carefully planned. The assassination seems to have been motivated by grievances against the health insurance industry, but facts are few as the authorities seek for the shooter. But I would guess this man was targeted because of his job – the suspect allegedly wrote “deny, defend, depose” on the bullet casings using in the killing, implying anger at insurance business practices. Was this an act of anti-business terrorism? As the suspect supposedly stayed at a youth hostel (of all places) with two other strangers the night before the murder, I suspect this is the work of an amateur. But time should tell.

This fact brings to mind a quandary I have thought of often in the past few years: the dearth of left-wing political terror. When I look at the more extreme elements of campus leftism in the United States today – the pro-Palestinian Hamas supporters, the anti-colonial types railing against “settlers,” those arguing that America and the West are thoroughly and incurably racist – I am surprised that none of them have taken to violence. I remember very clearly, after all, how many of those flirting or embracing “radical chic” in the late 1960s and early 1970s had done so.

There was the Weather Underground which blew up ROTC buildings on American campuses and robbed banks and killed police officers. There was also the Symbionese Liberation Army who kidnapped Patty Hearst and gained so much attention. True, these young college-drop out urban terrorists mostly killed themselves by inexpertly constructing homemade bombs (a “self-own”), or were killed in police shootouts – or sentenced to prison for decades. For example, the Chicago education professor Bill Ayers was such a “new left” terrorist back in the day. The Black Panthers were also active in the USA for a brief violent spell, but they fought with the government (less so) and among themselves (more so), and were a flash in the pan.

In Western Europe it was perhaps worse during the 1970s. There was the Red Army Faction in Germany, Action Directe in France, and 17 November in Greece. The Irish Republican Army flirted with all those groups, even as its concerns were less “communist overthrow of the ruling bourgeoise” and more indigenous to Ireland. The Red Brigades in Italy kidnapped and killed a U.S. Army general and ran amok generally. There was another “Red Army” faction active in Japan from 1971 all the way until 2001.

All these terror groups seemed to have solid connections to the preeminent terrorists of that day – the Palestine Liberation Front, Abu Nidal, etc. – centered in the Mideast. When the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked an Air France passenger jet and diverted it to Uganda in 1976, two Germans terrorists (Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann) were serving on board with five other Palestinian gunmen. The Germans terrorists died alongside the Palestinian ones when the Israelis rescued the passengers in a daring rescue at Entebbe. “One’s man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” Baader Meinhof Gang leader Gudrun Ensslin might have claimed. The PLO, and more recent Islamist terror groups, have been claiming that forever. 

True, those far left terror groups in Western Europe were relatively small and would be almost entirely gone by the early 1980s, just like their American counterparts. Their members would be dead or in prison. There never was much mainstream support for such groups either in America or in Europe, and only a tiny minority of the left would be attracted to it. But it was the fever dream revolutionary anti-imperialist politics of the time that fueled the political terrorism.

There is nowadays a similar passion for radical chic leftist causes, as is clearly seen on American campuses which not only decry Israeli attacks on Gaza as an overreaction to the attacks on Oct. 7, 2023 but also hold violent Palestinian resistance against Israeli “settlers” as justified and righteous. Wearing the keffiyeh is again in vogue among certain circles of young leftists, as it was in the mid-1970s. Righteous violence against the racist capitalist Western machine is popular among fringe elements on campus (at least in theory). But it has not metastasized (yet) into any organizations in America dedicated to revolutionary violence. Be an enemy to the oppressor and a helper to the oppressed. We have not (yet) seen the incarnation of this in terms of organized violence.

True, there were those two lawyers Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman who burned police cars during the George Floyd riots of 2020 and lost their licenses to practice law for it, and many supported their actions. But that was an isolated, spontaneous act by angry individuals, not a planned action by a committed group working towards specific goals. There has not yet been any organized bandi of revolutionaries who joined together to commit “direct action” to combat the enemy and bring about change. “Death to the fascist insect which prays on the life of the people!” the SLA used to preach in the 1970s. It is easy to laugh at such hyperbole. But I hear similar sentiments nowadays online from the hard left. I noticed rumblings about a “John Brown Rifle Club” from some of the usual Antifa types in the Pacific Northwest, but it never amounted to anything (so far).

If the Vietnam-era generated heated political currents which resulted in homegrown terror groups, why don’t the similar anti-racist, anti-capitalist passions of today do the same? I think about this relatively often.

I suspect it is because now there is social media. 

A few years ago I wrote about the “summer of rage” when liberals in the United States were losing their cool over the Dobbs v. Jackson decision superseding the Roe v. Wade one. In that essay I talked about how there were far right groups in the United States who did have guns and might kill you; you should take them seriously, they were dangerous. Then there were the “keyboard warriors” on the online radical chic left. The lefties did not have guns and would not kill you. Instead of trying to hurt you in real life, they would post a nasty tweet about you; they left your physical body alone, as they sought to destroy your public reputation. The focus was with social media, not the real world. In this way performative online rage has replaced real world “direct action” by the committed left. That is how I see it, at least.

There used to be Emma Goldman or Bernardine Dohrn. Now there is Nika Soon-Shiong and Taylor Lorenz. It is not the same thing. The average anti-imperialist leftist in Brooklyn or Berkeley today is more at home in a yoga studio than at the shooting range. They might have a tattoo of the hammer and sickle on their arm. But they are revolutionary poseurs, not the real thing. This is what I have concluded.

But who knows?

On social media networks many of these left-wing “keyboard warriors” loudly applauded the cold-blooded murder of a prominent businessman in Manhattan yesterday.

Might this killing inspire some of these same leftists to take similar “direct action” moving forward?

Do they have the balls to do it in real life?

Or are they merely “keyboard warriors”?

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A WHOLE LOT OF TALKING…

P.S. On December 9th, 2024 police arrested 26-year old Luigi Mangione for the killing of Brian Thompson in New York City. Yes, he was an amateur. Mangione still allegedly had the same gun and silencer used during the crime on him at the time of arrest. (Is he the dumbest wannabe terrorist ever?) Yes, he is going to spend much of the rest of his life in prison. What a waste!

I suspect Mangione is a rich kid who got bored – done with school, but no job, no direction, reading the Unabomber’s Manifesto. Depressed, struggling, alienated? Why not stir some shit up? Do something grandiose? “World, pay attention to my pain!” Well, now Mangione will have a new job title: prison inmate.

Will Luigi Mangione look across the courtroom during his trial at stare down Brian Thompson’s widow Paulette and her two sons? Will he have the sang froid to stand up in the court and proclaim himself a soldier in the struggle for “social justice”? Will Mangione the revolutionary shout at the widow: “Yes, I shot down your running dog capitalist husband!” Bill Ayers or Bernadine Dohrn would have done that when they were his age.

We shall see. But I doubt it. Mangione reportedly started shaking when the arresting officers asked him if he had been in New York City recently. “Hello prison here I come!” – Mangione saw the end of his life as he had known it arriving. “From now on I will live in a cage.” In contrast, Vladimir Lenin would not have flinched. Neither would have Emma Goldman. They knew what life was like locked up. They were unequivocally devoted to the Cause. No apologies.

They were the real thing. Nowadays? Not so much (yet). Instead we have “keyboard warriors.”