On Sunday’s episode of CNN’s MisinfoNation, self-proclaimed “journalist” Taylor Lorenz played apologist for alleged murderer Luigi Mangione — who is accused of gunning down a health care CEO in cold blood. Lorenz shamelessly described Mangione as a “morally good man” and a “revolutionary,” even cracking jokes when addressing criticisms leveled at him.
But there is nothing humorous about murder. Lorenz’s dismissive attitude is not just tasteless; it’s part of a broader, calculated effort by the left to normalize political violence and numb the American public to its rising frequency.
“It’s hilarious to see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone stanning a murderer when this is the United States of America, as if we don’t lionize criminals, as if we don’t have, you know, we don’t stan murderers of all sorts, and we can give them Netflix shows,” Lorenz joked. “There’s a huge disconnect between the narratives and the angles that mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels.”
Lorenz continued: “You’re going to see women especially that feel like, Oh my God, right? Like, here’s this man, who, who’s revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart. He’s a person that seems … like this morally good man, which is hard to find.”
Lorenz even likened the fandom around Mangione to that surrounding President Donald Trump: “They want somebody to take on this system. … They want someone to tear down these barbaric establishment institutions.”
But UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was not a “barbaric establishment institution.” He was the father of two, he was someone’s son, and he was the victim of a murder. But that matters naught to Lorenz, who previously went viral after she said she felt “joy” when learning of Thompson’s murder.
But the left seeks to make political violence acceptable. It’s classic Marxist theory, as explained in these pages by J.T. Young.
“Marxism … sees all human history as a sequence of conflicts between classes,” Young explained. “The classic leftist view … makes violence acceptable when wielded in pursuit of what the left sees as the inevitable revolution.”
Calling Mangione a “revolutionary” wasn’t a slip-up by Lorenz. It’s an effort to make political violence acceptable — so long as it can be used to force the left’s desired outcome.
Take, for example, the near assassination of Congressman Steve Scalise by a cold-blooded, deranged Bernie Sanders supporter in 2017. Charles M. Blow for The New York Times wrote that violence was horrid, but …
“This country has a violent culture, is full of guns, and our federal lawmakers — mostly Republicans, it must be said, because there isn’t any real equivalency — are loath to even moderately regulate gun access,” Blow wrote, later even adding that “some rhetoric is necessary and real” such that “Trump and the Republican-led Congress are attempting to do very serious harm to the country and its most vulnerable citizens.”
In other words, political violence is bad — but Republicans are worse.
It’s the type of incendiary language that can only be described — as pointed out by The Federalist co-founder and CEO Sean Davis — as “assassination prep by the corrupt regime.”
Such language is “an obvious information operation meant to justify and even incite the most extreme measures, up to and including unconscionable violence,” Davis explained.
Since the 2017 Sanders supporter shooting, the left-wing apparatus writ-large has only increased its use of the type of commentary Blow used to malign Trump and Republicans as threats to the country. As I previously reported, The Washington Post’s Opinion Editor-At-Large Robert Kagan wrote in 2023 that a “Trump dictatorship” was “increasingly inevitable” and that “barring some miracle, Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for president.” Kagan spent the article likening Trump and his supports to Hitler and Nazi Germany before posing the ominous question: “Can Trump win the election? The answer, unless something radical and unforeseen happens, is: Of course he can.”
The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein said Trump’s second term “could create the greatest threat to the nation’s cohesion since the Civil War” while The Hill’s opinion contributor Jacob Ware tried to blame Trump for potential political violence in a January 2024 piece warning that “assassination attempts are on the rise worldwide — is the US next?”
So when Trump was nearly murdered during a campaign rally on July 13, 2024, the near-assassination was described by the propaganda press as merely an “incident” or “shooting.”
Dismissing the real political violence was easy, though, because the left-wing apparatus spent years cushioning the blow and desensitizing Americans to political violence by trying to justify it. They laid the groundwork to justify such violence.
In fact, hours after Trump was nearly assassinated a second time, the attempt was excused by members of the propaganda press who linked Trump to unsubstantiated bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio.
“Today’s apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail itself,” NBC News’ Lester Holt said. “Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance, continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants in [Springfield,] Ohio. This weekend, there were new bomb threats in that town.”
CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell made similar comments, along with several other members of the legacy media.
[READ NEXT: Democrats Did The Opposite Of ‘Lower The Temperature’ Between Trump Assassination Attempt]
As it would turn out, all 33 bomb threats were hoaxes. But the left-wing propagandists didn’t care to wait for the facts. Instead they exploited a moment of fear to demonize and blame their political enemy No. 1: Trump. It was an attempt to excuse the potential assassination by victim blaming.
And so, when Thompson was gunned down in cold blood that Dec. 4 morning, it wasn’t shocking to hear so many on the left “but …” their way through a defense of Mangione because Americans had become rather desensitized to political violence because of how it has been normalized.
When the propaganda press treats murderers like martyrs and conservatives like villains, it doesn’t just warp public discourse — it erodes the very moral fabric that keeps a society civil and encourages more political violence.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
