Luigi Mangione’s alleged cold-blooded assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in midtown Manhattan in December provoked some sickening reactions from social media users, infatuated women, late-night talk show hosts and others—what my colleague Teri Christoph called the “left's ghoulish death cult.”
Many felt Mangione’s brutal crime was justified because A) he’s allegedly attractive, B) some folks don’t like the healthcare industry and C) he had back pain. Oh poor baby—lots of people live with debilitating pain, they don’t go around shooting people they’ve never met from companies they’ve never done business with and leaving devastated families in their wake.
There is simply no way to justify such a depraved murder, and yet far too many do exactly that in this case.
Leave it to Hollywood to come up with the wrong response. A Thursday night episode of the long-running show “Law & Order” depicted a Mangione-like character who gunned down a health industry executive. Was he a villain, which is the only moral take you could have on the subject? Not necessarily to NBC:
In a new episode which aired Thursday night, NBC's Law & Order attempted to evoke sympathy for a murderer modeled after Luigi Mangione, the real-life assassin who shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in cold blood in 2024.
Thursday's episode, entitled "Folk Hero," began with fictional healthcare CEO Logan Andrews, the head of a company called OptiShield, walking down the street and talking on his cell phone about "healthy margins, healthy profit, healthy stock price." A man wearing a mask and hoodie similar to the one worn by Mangione then shoots him in cold blood on the sidewalk.
With breakneck speed, the killer, named Ethan Weller (Ty Molbak), becomes a hero in the city. Young people cheer him and wear his jacket in solidarity. Weller is tracked down and caught moments before he is about to kill a second healthcare CEO.
WHAT A DISGRACE! No wonder NBC is losing it's audience!
— Christine Rush (@christinerush) March 23, 2025
NBC‘s ‘Law & Order‘ Paints Luigi Mangione-Like Character as a Folk Hero https://t.co/SSSt8rP5zM via @BreitbartNews
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Now one could argue that so far, there’s nothing insulting: they are just fictionalizing reality, and Mangione is indeed a folk hero to twisted souls. But here’s where they show their true colors:
Law & Order episodes usually end with a jury pronouncing "guilty" and the killer being taken away in handcuffs. Not so this time. In this episode, before the verdict is rendered, the prosecution gets nervous that the jury has been deeply moved by the defense's arguments. The show then ends without revealing what the jury decided, leaving the answer of "guilty" or "not guilty" a mystery for the audience.
By purposefully leaving such a key element out, they are implying that the case is "nuanced." It’s not. It’s cut and dry and black and white—if Luigi Mangione did what prosecutors allege (with a mountain of evidence to back them up), then there is no nuance at all: he’s guilty and should never enjoy another day of freedom in his life. Brian Thompson certainly won’t.
The fact that so many have lost sight of what should be a simple and timeless concept—“thou shalt not kill”—is a damning indictment of a strange (usually progressive) culture in our society. One that has the mindset that it’s OK to torch cars and Telsa dealerships because they don’t like the CEO’s political philosophy.
“I feel like this open-ended episode played incredibly well,” actor Jesse Metcalfe told TVInsider. “It really works for this episode. We don’t really take a stand on what the verdict should be.”
"We don't really take a stand." What a weak, spineless viewpoint.
Unfortunately, much of Hollywood has no moral center, and they’ve proven it once again here.
A sign of deep societal rot: infatuation with a murderer. Luigi Mangione is a poster boy for Gen Z ignorance and mental illness, believing he had the moral right to take a life because he possessed enough rage.
— Kimberly Ross (@SouthernKeeks) February 24, 2025
There’s nothing attractive about homicidal maniacs. pic.twitter.com/BgzK3HWRsP
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