UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s murder brings cruelest internet trolls to the surface

America’s worst journalist, Taylor Lorenz, knows who the villain is in the shocking Midtown murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. 

It’s Brian Thompson. 

Health insurance is terrible, she says, “and people wonder why we want these executives dead.” 

Lorenz made her name at the Washington Post by exposing the identity of conservative online commentators with whom she disagreed, then getting very annoyed when people criticized her about it. 

She quit the WaPo after calling President Biden a “war criminal.”

Her defense?

Hey, it was just a meme! 

So it’s tempting to chalk this hatefulness up to one dingbat — one who criticizes people not still wearing a COVID mask as “raw-dogging the air” — but, unfortunately, Lorenz is not alone. 

Among the fellow-travelers on Bluesky and Reddit, celebration of the assassination was common.

“The important thing” about the killing, one wrote, “is that no people were hurt.” 

The father of two boys “deserved to die,” others said, as they swooned over his killer, speculated on his motives, and wondered if Timothée Chalamet would play him in the movie. 

Few even nodded at a “yes, and” argument, bemoaning the death of a human being while criticizing the health insurance system.

No, this man they didn’t know was “evil.” 

“The jokes about the United CEO aren’t really about him,” journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote.

“They’re about the rapacious healthcare system he personified and which Americans feel deep pain and humiliation about.” 

Is it?

Or do the jokes point to a society that has become so desensitized by the coarseness of online discussion, so disassociated from kindness, that a baying mob cheers a man’s murder and cries out for more?