Boringly, W&M Students Applaud Murder

It’s strange to be on a campus that openly cheers for murder, but it’s stranger still that Luigi Mangione’s popularity is really no surprise at all. Students are garnering hundreds of upvotes on anonymous social media posts as they celebrate the killing of Brian Thompson, but what’s of actual note about it is that they don’t even feel a need to articulate a reason. It’s assumed. Brian Thompson was a rich white man whom they see as representative of a broken healthcare system that unjustly hurts the poor. Now, whether that view of him is right or wrong is really of no actual relevance to the morality of his murder. In fact, as any sensible person would tell you, a ‘moral murder’ is an oxymoron, and a dumb one at that. It’s like saying that a man had committed a ‘loving act of adultery’ or a ‘humanitarian genocide’. The act was intrinsically evil because murder is intrinsically evil, and no utilitarian language can ever cloud that reality.  

Of course, there is a sense of primitive justice, a savage and pagan passion, that pervades the hearts and minds of those applauding the murder. But it is too generous to say that these students are led by a genuine sense of conviction. The cheering comes less from a passion and more from an atmosphere, one built on grievance and resentment. It is a malaise, a fog that quietly dulls the intellect and consciences of the student body at large. Much like the conflict in the Middle East, they’ll scream and they’ll shout about right and wrong, but it’s obvious that their conclusion was reached far before the arguments for it were ever considered.  

Boringly, Mangione’s W&M supporters fail to view the world in any way except their played-out paradigm: oppressed and oppressor. They see it here with Mangione, and they’ll see it again with the next immoral subversive that comes after him. In their minds, justice fades away at the first mention of class, and right and wrong disappear at the mere whisper of revolution. The Left’s paradigm leaves no room for thought at all; it expects you to resent power or success simply for the sake of it. 

Yet intellectually, it is a nothing, a dead tiresome impulse that cares little for truth and debate. In fact, the grievance that leads to murder, and the resentment that leads people to applaud it, can both really be boiled down to a much simpler word, hate. That deadly thing, the malice that weighs down man, demands bitterness from those it infests. Hate hazes up everything, from sense to will, only calling for ruin. Yet, as hate is rather the absence of love, and not even its own genuine value, it can never be enough to build its own new society. Hate only bears the means to destroy the one we have built already. 

 

Conservative thinker Edmund Burke once wrote poetically that the forces of ‘chaos and old night’ were soon to come to ravage the world. What he meant is exactly the resentment seen in the case of Luigi Mangione, who represents the political and cultural entropy that assails us today. Burke, however, made this Marxist resentment sound dramatic and interesting, whereas in reality, it’s as dull as the doldrums it sees as utopia. 

Hate has become so common a political philosophy that its acolytes have lost all of their flare. While assassinations make bold and flashy headlines, there’s so little thought put behind applauding them that frankly, it’s almost not worth talking about. 

Ironically, though, the fact that Marxist resentment is so tedious might actually be the most interesting thing about it. The grievance culture of college campuses and the class conflict that it preaches as moral law has grown to be tiresome and played out. It offers nothing to think about, nothing to fight for, and nothing to believe in. As mentioned earlier, it is merely an atmosphere; one that feeds on the despair of young men and women as they struggle in a world seemingly devoid of genuine hope and goodness. With this in mind, the Mangione case offers an incriminating condemnation not only of the political world, but the broader culture that informs it. 

Students’ embrace of resentful Marxist dogma shows just how undeveloped, uninspired, and unjust the next generation of Americans has become. Grievance is a pit that they have fallen into, not a lofty ideal that they strive towards. It’s thoughtless, and lacks vision, and it might just sink the world anyway. Evidently, the political struggle in the United States is not so much a clash of reason or will as it is a battle against an atmosphere of entropy.

College students, and Americans as a whole, are faced with one critical choice that determines which side of the line they stand on with men like Mangione. Do they love our country, or do they hate it? Do they want to build up our culture and institutions, or do they want to tear it all down? Though a boring one, resentment is still a plague, and it threatens our world through its stale and thoughtless fits.

Note: Luigi Mangione is at this time only alleged to be the killer of Brian Thompson, and is likely to plead not guilty.