by Alex Berenson, Unreported Truths:
Did insurance company executive Brian Thompson deserve to be murdered? The New Yorker can’t quite decide. But Jordan Neely – a violent psychotic criminal – is a “subway dancer.”
Every so often, a few words open a whole world, and worldview.
On Saturday afternoon, the New Yorker weighed in on the killing of United Healthcare chief executive Brian Thompson with this headline: “A Man Was Murdered in Cold Blood and You’re Laughing?”
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I figured the question mark was accusatory: How can you mock this man’s death? Vultures.
I was wrong.
The New Yorker could not quite bring itself condemn the “progressives” who joked about the assassination of a 50-year-old man on a Manhattan street.
The question mark is more a cocked-head observation: Hey, I know people who think this guy Brian Thompson deserved to die. Maybe they’re right? Should having a high-paying job at an insurance company be a capital crime? Let’s talk about it!
Jia Tolentino, the piece’s writer, is too sly to come out and and actually support the killing. (Unlike, say, Taylor Lorenz, formerly of the Washington Post and New York Times, who reposted the comment “Hypothetically, would it be considered an actionable threat to start emailing other insurance CEOs a simple ‘you’re next’?” But Taylor is desperate to get attention for her flailing new Substack. Desperation is ugly.)
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(The face of desperation. The face of Taylor Lorenz.)
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Instead Tolentino cluck-clucks a bit about the “lawless” reaction to Thompson’s assassination while making clear she understands it all-too-well.
She repeatedly equates the killing to the “violence” of Thompson’s job running an insurance company that, yes, sometimes delays or denies claims for payments for medical procedures. To wit:
It’s just a matter of where you locate the decay—in the killing, or in the response to it, or in what led us here.
In the last lines of the piece – what reporters call the kicker, the place where they can leave readers a taste of what they think even in supposedly objective news articles, Tolentino writes:
It’s hard not to be curious about what, if anything, might happen to UnitedHealthcare’s claim-denial rates. I was at a show in midtown Manhattan on Thursday night, and when the comedians onstage cracked a joke about the shooter the entire place erupted in cheers.
Yes, Tolentino’s kicker is “the entire place erupted in cheers.”
I’m just telling ya what I saw, see. I wasn’t cheering myself. Or maybe I was? You’ll have to guess!
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(Did he deserve to die? Well, on the one hand, he was a human being, a father, a husband. On the other he was a white man in a fleece who made a lot of money in an industry a lot of people don’t like. So. Who can say, really?)
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Tolentino’s crafty stance on Thompson’s murder is disgusting, for lack of a more euphemistic word.
But it isn’t the most disgusting part of her piece.
No, that comes in a throwaway line about the Daniel Penny case.
Penny is the Marine veteran now on trial for the May 2023 death of Jordan Neely, a violent and mentally ill criminal who was menacing riders inside a subway car when Penny put him a chokehold. In the previous decade, Neely had been arrested 42 times, including for punching a 67-year-old woman in November 2021.
Did I mention Penny is white and Neely was black? And so the usual suspects tried to nail Penny to the usual cross after Neely’s death. There were even a few protests last year.
But anyone who has ever been on a subway train when a mentally ill person is yelling and demanding money – that is, just about anyone who’s lived in New York and isn’t a billionaire – knows how unpleasant the experience can be. Does the guy have a knife? A gun? Are those flecks of spit from his mouth going to land in mine? There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do but put one’s head down and feel a mix of shame and relief when the vagrant moves along to bother someone else.
Read More @ alexberenson.substack.com
Originally Posted at https://www.sgtreport.com