The left’s assassination obsession is escalating alarmingly and is being tacitly endorsed in all the wrong places. Some, like Elon Musk, believe it may be orchestrated.
How else do you explain why lefty tech publication Wired has published a story and helpful YouTube video describing how to build a copycat replica of the ghost gun allegedly used by Luigi Mangione to murder UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson last December?
The senior writer, Andy Greenberg, who covers hacking, cybersecurity and surveillance for Wired, boasts he used a 3D printer to create an “exact clone” of Mangione’s Glock-style handgun, “down to the stippling on the weapon’s plastic grip.”
YouTube let the video rip despite a policy strictly prohibiting content showing how to make firearms, ammunition or gun accessories.
A week after Israeli DC Embassy employees Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim were assassinated by an unhinged leftist in Washington, DC, the Condé Nast magazine’s do-it-yourself gun video is still up on YouTube.
Don’t tell us this is an oversight by YouTube when it regularly cracks down on gun enthusiasts for far less explicit content.
After two assassination attempts on Donald Trump during the 2024 election campaign; when Mangione became a cult heartthrob; Musk had to travel with up to 20 armed bodyguards; and even former FBI Director James Comey flirts with assassination memes, we can see where this is heading.
Popular culture, social media and political and media figures on the left have reacted to their political marginalization since Trump’s election by fantasizing out loud about assassination or making coded references to their dark desires.
If you can’t rub out Trump yourself, then you can make your feelings plain in oblique fashion by fetishizing Mangione as a sex symbol. It’s not as if he is intrinsically more attractive than any other 27-year-old Ivy League brat, or that the evil deed was brave or imaginative. He allegedly shot Thompson in the back as the 50-year-old Minnesota father of two teenage boys was walking down Sixth Avenue to an investor meeting in the early morning of Dec. 4.
But the lionization of Mangione, especially by lustful women, casts the violence as desirable, an aphrodisiac that other unhinged young men might want to emulate.
Left-wing journalist Taylor Lorenz, formerly of The Washington Post and The New York Times, personified the Luigi fangirl last month when she gushed that the accused killer seemed “morally good” and “handsome.”
‘A revolutionary’
“So you’re going to see women especially that feel like, ‘Oh, my God, here’s this man who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart, he’s a person who seems he’s like this morally good man, which is hard to find,’ ” 40-something Lorenz told CNN.
Besotted women bombard Mangione in jail with love letters and photos of themselves, so many that he had to post a message on his donation website asking his groupies to “send no more than five photos at a time.”
At Mangione’s various court appearances, swooning supporters wear “Free Luigi” shirts and caps worn by the Luigi character from Super Mario Bros.
A GiveSendGo fundraiser for Mangione has gathered more than $1 million in donations from almost 30,000 disciples.
There are Mangione fan accounts on Instagram. An online store sells merchandise featuring Mangione’s mug shot on T-shirts and keychains with the slogan “Free Luigi” or the words that Mangione allegedly etched on bullet casings found at the crime scene: “Deny, Defend, Depose.” Women are getting tattoos of three bullets engraved with those words.
Stand-up comic Bill Burr frequently says “Free Luigi” when a camera is on him, including on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Kimmel dubbed Mangione “Time’s sexiest alleged murderer of the year” and “the hottest cold-blooded killer in America.”
A professor of bioethics at Saint Louis University, Yolonda Wilson, tweeted soon after Thompson’s murder that she was “not sad” about it because the company he worked for is “evil . . . chickens come home to roost.”
Democrat lawmakers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren have defended the lionization of Mangione for his cold-blooded murder.
“Violence is never the answer,” said Warren, “but people can be pushed only so far.”
You might call all this assassination chic a harmless fad, but it is more sinister than that. It is a psychological conditioning of the public to normalize political violence.
An Emerson College poll after the murder found that 41% of voters aged 18-29 thought the murder of Thompson was acceptable, while another 24% said it was “somewhat” acceptable.
The suspect in the murders of Lischinsky and Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum, Elias Rodriguez, a socialist anti-Israel activist, openly praised Mangione on his X account: “80% of the country applauds the targeted annihilation of a healthcare insurance exec.”
A man arrested outside the Capitol in January for allegedly plotting to kill officials in the Trump administration told prosecutors he was inspired by Mangione.
Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute has warned of “a structured endorsement of political violence targeting figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. These attitudes are not fringe — they reflect an emergent assassination culture, grounded in far-left authoritarianism and increasingly normalized in digital discourse.”
In a report last month, “Assassination Culture: How Burning Teslas and Killing Billionaires Became a Meme Aesthetic for Political Violence,” the institute found “disturbingly high levels of support for political violence, particularly targeting President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.”
The report says this “assassination culture” has migrated from social media into mainstream discourse.
‘Somewhat justified’
It found that 38% of Americans — and 55% of those identifying as left of center — said assassinating President Trump would be “at least somewhat justified”; 31% (and 48% of those left of center), said the same about Musk. Some 40% of respondents (and 58% of those left of center) believed it was at least somewhat acceptable to “destroy a Tesla dealership.”
Musk is well aware of the threat, recently voicing fear of assassination because he is the world’s richest CEO and also because of his work uncovering corruption in the federal government.
“They’re making it sound like if you kill me, you’re a hero. What they’re doing is evil,” he told the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in February.
He brought up the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pa., surmising that unknown forces or the hive mind might have guided the 20-year-old shooter.
“For that assassin, it’s kind of like that funny-looking sport, curling, you know, where they have the stone on the ice and then they throw the stone and then there’s someone that’s like brushing the ice, but you can’t touch the stone.
“All you can do is just change the path of the stone a little bit, but you keep brushing the ice and you can steer that stone right into the bull’s-eye. That’s what I think happened in Butler with that assassin. Somebody was brushing the ice.”
It’s a good analogy. That’s what all these coy Mangione references are for. They’re just “brushing
the ice.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
