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There’s an absolutely enormous number of things to get to in today’s post for paid subscribers. But before we duck behind the paywall, I want to talk about a story that’s raged across social media for the last week. It’s controversial and political and I think it says something important about the kind of project I’m aiming for here at Infinite Scroll.
Also for paid subscribers - tomorrow I’ll be releasing the first entrants to the 2024 Worst Tweets bracket and getting your input on which bad tweets should make the final cut! Subscribe today if you want to help build the bracket!
Now! Let’s talk about the CEO assassination.
Insurance CEO Assassination
Last week Brian Thompson, the CEO of major health insurance company United Healthcare, was shot and killed in midtown Manhattan. The killer appears to have targeted him specifically and authorities are treating it as a planned assassination.
Social media predictably exploded. And yes, this is the point of the post where I sadly inform you that a significant portion of left-leaning social media openly celebrated a cold-blooded assassination.
I don’t want to detail every joke made or every celebratory post for a couple reasons. First, because tracking down a bunch of edgelord contrarian posting about how murder is good is depressing as hell. Second, I’m a firm believer that dark humor is still humor, and you can joke about nearly anything. I’ve laughed at 9/11 jokes before and one guy’s death is not as bad as 9/11. Sometimes jokes that are chuckle-worthy if you say them to your friends in private sound much worse if you broadcast them to all of social media. And third, when I can help it I try not to blow up small accounts over that kind of joke.
But I think it’s different when people with actual clout and sizeable audiences go beyond jokes and start cheerleading this kind of violence. So in lieu of showing you a bunch of hot takes from online randoms, I’m going to use Taylor Lorenz as the standard bearer.
Lorenz, recently fired1 from the Washington Post and migrated to Substack, spent her week posting things like this:
Maybe you think Lorenz was just caught up in the moment. Or maybe you think those posts aren’t that bad - she’s just pointing out that the health insurance industry has problems which people are mad about. But if you thought you could give her the benefit of the doubt, she also posted this:
This is stochastic terrorism. It is without question a wink-and-nod encouragement to further violence. After an enormous amount of pushback she doubled down further with a Substack post titled Why "we" want insurance executives dead where she argues that murder is bad… but, hey, CEOs probably have it coming… and you should totally not do it, but… you know. She followed up this morning with a gushing post about the shooter’s standom.
There’s a lot I have to say about this. I could talk about how Lorenz is too much of a cowardly pissant to actually say outright that violence is good, so she hides her view behind layers of obfuscation2 and online irony. I could talk about how Lorenz is the kind of person who spends half her life complaining about being bullied on the internet while also cheering on the death of her enemies, the kind of person who thinks that it’s eugenics and genocide to not wear a mask outdoors but that murdering a stranger in cold blood is righteous and cool.
But what I really want to say is how intensely conservative this all is. This crowd is cheering vigilante justice. They believe the world is separated between the Righteous and the Wicked. There are people who are virtuous and good and can do no wrong, and people who are wicked and bad and essentially stained with sin who cannot be redeemed. And those wicked people are not worthy of legal protections, so they get what’s coming to them. These are conservative ideals with leftist wrapping paper. These people do not oppose violence, they just want to be the ones doing it. Of course much like any good Republican chickenhawk cheering on a foreign war, Lorenz and the dirtbag progressives don’t want to get their own hands dirty - but they’re happy to encourage violence from their positions of elite privilege. We’ve talked before about how conservative ideas are often lurking under supposedly progressive faces, and this is one of the best examples I’ve ever seen.
This sort of commentary is all too common in the internet-culture beat. Lorenz is the example par excellence, but you see this kind of contrarian antisocial viewpoint everywhere among online culture writers. It’s unbelievable that it needs to be said, but dissatisfaction with the insurance industry3 is not a license to murder the people who work in it. Grow up.
And if there’s any one thing I want to make out of Infinite Scroll, it’s a culture blog where you don’t have to walk in the door with blind adoration for the dirtbag left. For as many times as I’ve called out conservative hypocrisy and weirdness, I’m also never going to stop calling out progressives when they engage in contemptible behavior like this. Online culture is important. It shapes how we spend our time, what we watch, what we eat, how we think, what we believe politically, and so much more. It should be documented and analyzed intelligently. And you all deserve someone who can bring you that analysis who doesn’t come with a built in assumption that murder is fine when it’s a cool edgy leftish kind of murder.
