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On CNN, approving of murder is hardly any worse than voting for Donald Trump.
Indeed, voting for Trump may be worse, given how CNN senior correspondent Donie O'Sullivan framed this question 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, slayer of health care executive 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 every bit of the outrage she was hoping for with her sympathetic account of Mangione's popularity 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 attention sponge. She may not have a major media gig anymore, but her journalism has always been more about making the headlines than reporting on them.
Yet her appearance Sunday on CNN's "MisinfoNation: Extreme America" was as notable for O'Sullivan's questions as for Lorenz's aiming-to-shock answers.
If voting for Trump and making a hero out of a murderer do both arise "because a lot of people are just really, really desperate," as O'Sullivan opined on air, then the real story CNN ought to be covering is the life-and-death difference between the election-winning right and the violent left.
Lorenz accepted O'Sullivan's premise: Trump voters and Mangione-lovers are alike, she agreed, because "They want somebody to take on the system. They want somebody to tear down these barbaric establishment institutions."
Yet Brian Thompson wasn't an institution; he was a man whose slaughter hasn't changed anything.
With Trump, the populist right organized to win at the ballot box and use lawful authority to shake up institutions, which is what the president is now doing.
The Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters was uncharacteristic of what has otherwise been a nonviolent political movement for reform.
But violence is only too characteristic 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 a Republican administration using its mandate to change institutions, some on the left have despaired of politics and turned toward violence, escalating from vandalism to arson attacks against targets like Tesla dealerships and Republican headquarters, as seen in New Mexico recently.
Lorenz and O'Sullivan aren't tossing Molotov cocktails, of course, but they're content to put a murderer's fan club on the same level as Trump's voters.
Progressives who shun violence should be the first to protest that moral equivalence.
But even the nonviolent left has habitually characterized Trump and his supporters in terms that cry out for bloodshed — after all, how can anyone stand by if the country really is in the midst of a "fascist" takeover?
The glamorization of Mangione shows another side of the left's penchant for violence over politics — it's exciting and romantic in a way electioneering isn't.
While the political right dreams 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 found immortality as a college-leftist pinup, Mangione mixes sex and violence with a narcissistic radical's sense of self-righteousness.
It's a brew Lorenz finds intoxicating — and maybe CNN does, too.
Certainly, it's good for media buzz.
The Trump movement has its emotional and aesthetic side, but it's channeled into actual politics in GOP primaries and general elections.
And its more extravagant expressions are found not in the streets but in memes and social media rants.
The left is different, increasingly channeling its emotion away from candidates and policy disputes and toward street action and violent fantasies — whether fearful fantasies of a Nazi takeover or thrilling visions of a murderous uprising against power. Or both.
Instead of presenting "extreme America" documentaries that treat Trump voters and a murderer's apologists as essentially the same, CNN would do its viewers a service by showing them the difference between a politically effective right and the dangerously adolescent left.
Yet the same sensationalism that sustains Taylor Lorenz may be all CNN knows how to sell, too.
(COMMENT, BELOW)
Previously:
• 04/01/25: Lawfare Isn't Beaten -- In France or America
• 03/25/25: Will Trump Turn Nationalism Against America?
• 03/18/25: The Dems' Civil War
• 03/11/25: Can Donald Trump Win a Trade War?
• 03/04/25: Europe's Decline Was a Choice
• 02/25/25: How Trump Makes Europe Stronger
• 02/20/25: Tax-payers funding a sham of democracy
• 02/11/25: What Kind of a Populist Is Elon Musk?
• 02/03/25: Can Trump Win Trade Wars Before They Start?
• 01/21/25:
Trump Inaugurates a New Era
• 01/14/25: Dems Aren't Democracy's Party
• 01/07/25: Donald Trump's Worldwide Election
• 12/31/24: Harmless self-deception?
• 12/17/24: Communism thriving, including HERE
• 12/10/24: Birthright Citizenship Is a Breach in the Border
• 12/03/24: Identity Politics, Not Biden, Cost Dems the Election
• 11/19/24: Why Dems Are Losing Tomorrow's Elections Today
• 11/12/24: Dems Are at a Dead End, Unless They Learn From Trump
• 10/29/24: Harris Targets Married Women
• 10/22/24: Vibes Turn Bad for Kamala Harris
• 10/15/24: Why Veterans Are Voting for Trump
• 10/08/24: How Donald Trump Can Win the Popular Vote
• 10/01/24: Iran Targets America's Elections -- and Trump
• 09/24/24: Trump's Would-Be Assassin's Explanation
• 09/17/24: When Character Assassination Becomes the Real Thing
• 09/10/24: Kamala Harris Runs Like a Republican -- and Misleads
• 09/04/24: Where Trump Is Moderate -- While Kam Is Maximalist
• 08/27/24: Donald Trump Is Reagan's Heir
• 08/20/24: Will Voters Settle for Joe Biden's Wing(wo)man?
• 08/13/24: Trump Has to Run Like It's 2016 Again
• 08/07/24: Is Trump Running Against Harris -- or Donald Trump?
• 07/30/24: Kamala Harris' 'Mean Girls' Election
• 07/23/24: Kamala Harris Is the Opponent Donald Trump Wants
• 07/16/24: Ready for Biden's Counterattack?
• 07/09/24: Biden Faces Richard Nixon's Choice
• 07/02/24: Should Biden Drop Out -- or Resign?
• 06/18/24: Separate Sexual Identity and State
• 06/18/24: Nigel Farage Makes the Trump Moment Permanent
• 06/04/24: State that's long eluded GOP turns toward Trump
• 05/21/24: Trump's Sun Belt Hopes and Rust Belt Needs
• 05/14/24: What Trump Sees in Doug Burgum
• 05/07/24: The Vietnam Era Never Ended for Biden's Party
• 05/06/24: Nationalists of the World, Unite?
• 04/25/24: Foreign Policy Splits
• 04/16/24: How pro-lifers stand to lose everything gained in overturning Roe
• 04/02/24: PBS Misremembers William F. Buckley Jr.
• 04/02/24: Who Wants to Be House Speaker?
• 03/26/24: Trump Hunts for a VP Close to Home
• 03/19/24: Princess Kate and Democracy's Discontents
• 03/12/24: Can Biden Buy the Voters?
• 03/05/24: Veepstakes Give Trump an Edge
• 02/20/24: Do Americans Trust Either Party?
• 02/13/24: Vladimir Putin -- A Passive Aggressor
• 01/23/24: Will 'Lawfare' Take Trump Off the Ballot?
• 01/16/24: Will Africa Save America?
• 01/09/24:'The Sopranos' at 25: A new world tragedy
• 01/02/24: Trump, Biden and a Fight for the Heart
• 12/12/23: What Happened to Ron DeSantis?
• 12/12/23: Biden Looks Doomed -- But Is He?
• 12/05/23: A Test for Trump and His Rivals
• 11/21/23: When Inequality Is Fatal for Men
• 11/14/23: Nevermind, The Battle's Over
• 11/07/23: War in the Dem Party -- and at the Opera
• 10/24/23: Israel's Lesson for 2024: A Lib Crackup
• 10/17/23: Libs' Dilemma: Immigration or Israel?
• 10/10/23: Why Bidenflation Defines Bidenomics
• 10/03/23: Will Gavin Newsom Copy Trump?
• 09/26/23: Biden's a Loser -- but Dems Can't Ditch Him
• 09/19/23: Do Sex Scandals Matter?
• 09/12/23: Cornel West Spells Doom for Biden
• 09/05/23: What Trump Does for Democracy
• 08/2/23: Ramaswamy: A Trump Versus Trump?
• 08/22/23: Take 'Rich Men North of Richmond' Seriously
• 08/16/23: How America Kills Its Own
• 08/08/23: The Biden Pardon That Can Spare America
• 08/01/23: Harding, a consevative for the ages
• 07/25/23: Demography Destiny, for Us and China
• 07/18/23: The Frontrunner Who Looks Like a Loser Is Biden
• 07/11/23: Britain's Bad Example for American Conservatives
• 07/05/23: Could We Still Win a Revolutionary War?
• 06/27/23: Civilizations Clash -- in Ukraine and at Home
• 06/20/23: China Comes for the Caribbean
• 06/13/23: Fertility, Family and Bio-Socialism
• 06/06/23: From American Dream to Orwell's Nightmare
• 05/23/23: Ukraine war is an existential struggle --- for the West
• 05/23/23: Learn the Right Midterm Lessons -- or Lose in 2024
• 05/16/23: Feinstein Today Is Biden Tomorrow
• 05/09/23: Trump, DeSantis and Political Courtship
• 05/02/23: RFK Jr.'s Threat to Biden
• 04/25/23: Biden's Lost Generation
• 04/25/23: Who's In Charge of Clarence Thomas?
• 04/11/23: Beyond AI, Our Cyborg Future
• 04/04/23: 2024: 3 Leaders, 1 Way to Win
• 03/28/23: Climate Science Makes a Bad Religion
• 03/21/23: All the Conspiracy That's Fit to Print