How to determine if a savage, violent criminal act against an innocent person is okay

Step one: It is not and never is

I wrote last week that the widespread reaction to the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO makes me hold onto my guns ever-more-tightly: The Left has responded to the pointless, brutal execution of a married father of two by basically saying it was fine because private health insurance is bad. I only wish I were exaggerating. But that’s a completely accurate summary of the chief talking point that has coalesced around the murder of an innocent man, even at the highest and most prominent levels of our public discourse.

For instance: New York Rep. AOC said that it’s necessary for commentators to “understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied [insurance] claims as an act of violence against them.” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said of the killing: “You can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands.” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said the killing points to “people's anger at a health insurance industry, which denies people the health care that they desperately need while they make billions and billions of dollars in profit.” These are mainstream, garden-variety U.S. politicians essentially justifying the summary execution of an innocent man because they don’t like private healthcare. Yes, all of these remarks have been accompanied by some effete, lackluster handwaving about the murder itself: “Violence is never the answer.” “This is not to say that an act of violence is justified.” But you don’t really get the sense that they believe that, do you? Do you really?

It should not be understated how alarming this is, and how dangerous. The American Left has always had a sort of revolutionary flair about it, as most leftist movements do, and there has always been the understanding that its quasi-fringe, its sorta-vanguard, is more than willing to use isolated acts of violence to move the political needle if it can. It’s just sort of understood. But AOC is not the fringe: She’s firmly part of the System, an entrenched representative of the government, a fairly powerful individual in the most powerful joint legislature in the world. Liz Warren is a constitutional law professor and a onetime presidential aspirant. Bernie Sanders is basically the U.S. equivalent of an old alderman from a Swedish Kommunfullmäktige. These are, outwardly, very conventional figures in our society. And they are out there essentially flashing a signal for lunatic wannabe-murderers to start shooting insurance executives in the head at will, using a craven and ridiculous apologia— “people die when health insurance companies deny their claims, which is basically the same thing as murder”—as cover. And that’s really, really bad that they’re doing it. It’s awful, sick, depraved.

You might disagree with that; perhaps you think their equivocations—“This is not to say an act of violence is justified,” etc—are enough to qualify their remarks. This is untrue. And it’s worth it for progressives to consider a corollary to illustrate why this is so:

Picture the executive chairwoman of, say, a major pro-immigration advocacy group, one that has advocated aggressively against most federal immigration laws and which has called for blanket amnesty for the country’s 12 million illegal immigrants. She’s walking home from work one night when she’s set upon, violently assaulted, dragged into an alleyway, and savagely raped. Maybe the perpetrator gouges one of her eyes out just to be particularly sadistic. The criminal is eventually arrested a few days later; we learn that he lives in a Texas border town that has been swamped by illegal immigrants in recent years, and that several of these immigrants gang-raped his sister last year. The immigrants were caught and deported but were immediately let back in, after which they gang-raped another woman in this small Texas town. This man was radicalized by both the horrific personal trauma of his sister’s rape and the searing injustice of an immigration system that can’t even keep out a group of depraved sex criminals for more than 48 hours. So he assaulted and raped the leader of a major pro-immigrant group in an act of unhinged rage and targeted revenge for these terrible crimes, as well as to send a message to the country’s leaders that our immigration system needs to change, now.

There are two responses you could picture to this incident:

Response #1: “That’s inexcusable. This man should be in prison for decades, if not the rest of his life. There are profound problems with our immigration system, and there are victims of injustice stemming from the failure of our border policies, and we can all agree that these things need to be fixed somehow. But there is no way, ever, to justify an act like this, or even rationalize it in any meaningful way. This was an act of hateful, pointless violence by a sick and sadistic man. It must be condemned without reservation and never repeated.”

Or:

Response #2: “Look, nobody should get raped. An act of rape is never justified. But you can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands. This is evidence of people's anger at an immigration system that refuses to properly vet immigrants while allowing numerous criminals into the country unimpeded. You have to understand that people interpret and feel and experience dangerous immigration policy as an act of violence against them. This just shows that we need immediate comprehensive immigration reform, now.”

Obviously the first response is the correct one And be honest: If someone made the second argument, you would immediately think, “Gee, it sounds like this person is sort of excusing an act of hideous rape as a political tool.” And you’d be right! You’d be absolutely right. Because there are some acts that self-evidently cross the line from even extreme political exhibition to just out-and-out violent injustice against people who have done absolutely nothing to deserve it. Spoiler alert: Murdering a health insurance executive because you don’t like health insurance is one of those things! It’s never okay to murder innocent people; there’s no way to justify it, even obliquely as an abstract political question. So our political leaders should stop doing that! Like right away. This is pretty easy stuff!

I am not sure we can expect that sort of self-reflection from people like AOC or Bernie Sanders, who have made lucrative careers out of this sort of diametric political posturing, to the point where they can’t even condemn the execution of an innocent father without implying, “…but he kinda deserved it, right?” But for goodness’s sake, surely the rest of us can avoid it. There is no utility in these kinds of politics, unless of course your end goal is to see more people shot in the back of the head as acts of disgruntled political rage. Which, dismayingly, does seem like a more widely held sentiment this month than it did in November.