Taylor Lorenz, Luigi Mangione and the left’s – Latest News
On CNN, approving of homicide is hardly any worse than voting for Donald Trump.
Indeed, voting for Trump could also be even much less acceptable, given how CNN Senior Correspondent Donie O’Sullivan framed this query to Taylor Lorenz:
“I’m sure you wouldn’t like to be compared to a Trump supporter,” O’Sullivan reassured her, “but some of how people cannot understand why people have sympathies for Mangione” — that’s Luigi Mangione, killer of health-care govt Brian Thompson — “strikes me as the same as a lot of media not understanding why people support Trump.”
Lorenz, a former Washington Post and New York Times reporter who’s now an online “influencer,” provoked all the outrage she hoped for together with her sympathetic clarification for Mangione’s recognition on the radical left.
“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 like a morally good man, which is hard to find,” she gushed to O’Sullivan.
Lorenz is nothing if not an consideration sponge — she could not have a main media gig anymore, however her journalism has all the time been about making the headlines more than reporting on them.
Yet her look on CNN’s “MisinfoNation: Extreme America” Sunday was as notable for O’Sullivan’s questions as for Lorenz’s aiming-to-shock solutions.
If certainly voting for Trump and making a hero out of a assassin each come up “because a lot of people are just really really desperate,” as O’Sullivan opined on air, then the actual story CNN must be masking is the life-and-death distinction between the political proper and the violent left.
Lorenz accepted O’Sullivan’s premise: Trump voters and Mangione-lovers are alike, she agreed, as a result of “They want somebody to take on the system. They want somebody to tear down these barbaric establishment institutions.”
Brian Thompson wasn’t an establishment — he was a man whose slaughter hasn’t modified something.
Under Trump, the populist proper organized to win at the poll box and use lawful authority to shake up establishments, which is what the president is now doing.
The Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol by Trump supporters was uncharacteristic of what has in any other case been a nonviolent political motion for reform.
But violence is all too attribute of left-wing activism in the streets — and of the mentality behind it, as the Lorenz interview testifies.
Faced with defeat at the polls and an administration utilizing its mandate to change establishments, the left has rapidly despaired of politics and turned towards violence, escalating from vandalism to arson assaults, as in New Mexico not too long ago, towards Tesla vehicles and Republican headquarters.
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Lorenz and O’Sullivan aren’t tossing Molotov cocktails, of course, however they’re content material to put a assassin’s fanclub on the similar degree as Trump’s voters.
Progressives who shun violence ought to be the loudest to protest that ethical equivalence.
But even the non-violent left has habitually characterised Trump and his supporters in phrases that cry out for bloodshed — after all, how may anybody stand by if the nation actually was in the midst of a “fascist” takeover?
The glamorization of Mangione reveals one other facet of the left’s penchant for violence over politics: It’s romantic and thrilling in a method that electioneering isn’t.
While the political proper desires of fine-tuning tariffs, the Taylor Lorenz left fantasizes about “this man who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome . . .”
Like Che Guevara, the bloody Communist revolutionary who discovered immortality as a college-leftist pinup, Mangione mixes intercourse and violence with a narcissistic radical’s sense of self-righteousness.
It’s a brew Lorenz finds intoxicating — and perhaps CNN does, too.
Certainly it’s good for buzz.
The Trump motion has its emotional and aesthetic facet, however it’s channeled into precise politics in GOP primaries and normal elections.
And its more extravagant expressions are discovered not in the streets, however in memes and social-media rants.
The left is totally different, more and more channeling emotion away from candidates and coverage disputes and towards avenue motion and violent fantasies — whether or not fearful fantasies of a Nazi takeover, or thrilling visions of a murderous rebellion towards energy, or each.
Instead of presenting “extreme America” documentaries that deal with Trump voters and a assassin’s apologists as primarily the similar, CNN would do its viewers a service by displaying them the distinction between a politically efficient proper and the dangerously adolescent left.
Yet the similar sensationalism that sustains Taylor Lorenz could also be all CNN is aware of how to sell, too.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.
