Killers, Folk Heroes, and Who Counts as a Sympathetic Victim
The story of the man who went to New York last week and murdered a health insurance executive continues to fascinate the country, for reasons horrifying, grimly amusing, morbid, and somehow almost (but not quite) understandable. In my column earlier this week, I noted that there is a meaningfully similar data point from 2010, when a deranged madman with a grudge about his taxes flew a plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, killing a grandfather who worked for the tax service.
The most obvious similarity between the two murders was that the decedents worked for two notably unpopular entities: a huge health insurance company in the New York case, and the federal tax collection agency in the Austin case. In both, there was an immediate response from a lot of people that boiled down to something like this: "I know we're supposed to care, but do we? Do we really? I mean, isn't the supposed victim in fact the enemy?" The recent dark humor has included variations on the CEO's death being from various "preexisting conditions" (or saying that a person whose heart has been pierced by a bullet "naturally then stops working"), whereas in 2010 it was essentially just about hating taxes ("Well, he did work for the IRS, after all!")
Given that obvious similarity, the difference that I noted in Tuesday's column was that the more recent case of schadenfreude-on-steroids has been followed by a chorus of condemnation of those who smirked (or worse) about a fellow human being's death, whereas the Austin killing never quite led to a "reaction to the reaction," as I put it. The reaction? "Good riddance!" The reaction to the reaction? "How can you be so callous as to say such a thing?" Why does the latter not happen every time? Why did one situation see a nearly immediate reaction to the reaction -- which, again, involves people rushing to condemn those who made light of the murder -- but the other one never did?
I addressed this question only briefly in that earlier column, mostly to rule out a few possibilities. I noted in particular the differences in the amount of personal agency that each victim would have been able to exert to change policy within their respective organizations. CEO's have a lot of power (but, as I will point out below, maybe not enough), and IRS employees have none. That, however, should have made the deceased IRS employee more sympathetic, not less.
The question more generally is captured in the headline to this column. That is, there are plenty of killers and other criminals out there, but it is difficult to figure out what makes them folk heroes. Surely a large element of the answer has to include how sympathetically people in society view the victims of the crimes; but it also has to do with how people view the legitimacy of the entity they worked for, because these crimes are ultimately about having one targeted individual personify the larger "enemy," whether it is Big Government, Big Health, or anything else.
As a starting point, I was initially tempted to attribute the reaction to the anti-CEO reaction as a simple matter of economic class. The people who seemed to be most eager to condemn the near-celebration of the murder (with "near" sometimes not an appropriate modifier) are in large part fans of big business and the wealthy. I noted that one of the (oddly ineffective) condemnations came from a New York tabloid. That tabloid is, unsurprisingly, a Murdoch-owned cheerleader for everything that Republicans care about.
This means that part of the battle over public perceptions could be based on the standard right-wing rejection of the very idea that corporate health insurance companies are evil, which is always a difficult defense to pull off. For example, given recent news, the YouTube algorithm this morning fed me a New York Times video op-ed from early in 2024 that explained how American health insurers have run amok in using "prior authorization" to delay and deny care, leading to preventable deaths and permanent disabilities. And, of course, record profits.
Because there is so much bone-deep, bipartisan public antipathy toward health insurers, the reaction against those who approved of the killing needed to include reminding people that the person who died was a human being, a husband and father, a "civilian" before he became a general in a war on sick people. One plausible way to view this might be to say that, for many of those who reacted to the reaction, a CEO is one of the few people who "count." That is, we never think much about the nobodies who suffer and die every day, but when an Important Person dies or is harmed, then suddenly it is a human tragedy.
Although there is much to commend that explanation, it is of course not true that the political right in this country condemns attacks on all privileged people. After the brutal attack several years ago on Paul Pelosi, an octogenarian whose skull was fractured by a hammer-wielding maniac who had broken into the house to kill then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump managed to turn the incident into a sick joke. Trump's rally crowds would giggle and cheer as Trump made tasteless fun of the near-fatal attack.
The Pelosis are very wealthy, and one of them is very famous. Perhaps this is the proverbial exception that proves the rule, but I somehow doubt it. The disapproving reaction to the reaction is not about the fame or wealth of the victim, or not all about that. There is also the matter of what the killers/attackers were trying to accomplish.
In a surprisingly excellent segment on her show yesterday, MSNBC's Joy Reid interviewed Jason Johnson, a regular contributor to that network who is also a journalism professor at Morgan State University. Johnson pointed out that "we worship vigilante violence" in the US, from Charles Bronson's psychotic antihero in the "Death Wish" movie series to every kind of "I'm willing to do what needs to be done" lone wolf.
Although the interview did not discuss the case of Kyle Rittenhouse at any length, his story was one of the first examples that came to my mind as I was thinking about how enthusiastically the right in this country celebrates violence. Who did Rittenhouse kill? Two protesters in a chaotic scene that began with a protest against the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. Rittenhouse was acquitted because the jury decided that he legitimately feared for his life. Even if that was the right verdict, however, the jury was not allowed to consider the larger context, which was that Rittenhouse had put himself into danger by going to the protest in the first place, bringing his rifle for the stated purpose of protecting a stranger's property from possible damage.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Rittenhouse became a folk hero on the right, invited to political events and celebrated for being an anti-anti-racist warrior. In the Reid-Johnson interview, Reid ran a clip of Fox host Laura Ingraham doing an impressive 180 by first condemning people who are not upset about the CEO having been killed in New York and then (without even taking a breath) speaking positively about the acquittal of a man who choked a homeless man to death in the subway. That killer (and he was a killer, just not legally a murderer) was also an immediate folk hero on the right, apparently because he somehow embodied the idea that "we" get to kill "them" even when they do not pose a mortal threat.
Professor Johnson made the important point that the man who killed the health insurance CEO did absolutely nothing that would in fact make health insurance work better than it does now. I think it was in "The Grapes of Wrath" (although I might be wrong about the source) that a character talked about shooting the banker who was going to evict him from his house during the Great Depression, only to be told that he would be shooting the wrong person. Well, who should he shoot? The bank's president in New York? No, that would not stop the eviction, either.
So the point is that no matter the schadenfreude in which some people are indulging, this killing did nothing to make matters better for anyone. And it was a cold-blooded killing of a human being. The reaction to the reaction is therefore appropriate here, because even if one can imagine extreme cases in which certain murders would be worth celebrating, a pointless murder is a stupid thing to cheer on. Not because United Healthcare is innocent, but because the only way to change the health care system is to change the health care system. But the people (like Ingraham) who are most eager to wag their fingers at everyone else would fight tooth and nail to prevent any company's profits from being threatened by genuine reform of that system.
It is important to bear in mind, however, that those who are celebrating the "healthcare killer" and calling him a modern hero are not themselves killers. They are, at worst, exercising their right to be unsympathetic. That might feel icky to people like me, but it is not a crime. And as I conceded on Tuesday, I have been cheered up by the news of certain people's deaths. John Oliver regularly makes jokes celebrating the demise of Henry Kissinger, for example. Everyone has limits to their ability to say that "every death should be mourned."
There is a reason that Robin Hood's legend has such staying power. He took action against an unjust system, and the people loved him for it, making him the folk hero of all folk heroes. It was clear who was good and who was evil. But legendary tales lack nuance for a reason. Life is nothing but nuance.
The American right loves to cheer on violence, so long as the victims are "the right people" -- black protesters, college students, "the libs." It is thus a bit much to hear them say that it is simply horrible for people to feel no sympathy for a person of privilege. That does not make the murder any less of a murder, but it does help to highlight just how much hypocrisy is in the air when the people who voted for Donald Trump condemn others for celebrating violence.