Barack Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is known for the famous quote, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Far less known but even more important is the rest of his observation.
“And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
Since the election, Democrats have been running around the barnyard like chickens with their heads cut off. They’re lashing out at each other, even calling each other names in a desperate effort to make sense of their loss.
Some Democrats appear to have found the answer: use the murder of a healthcare CEO as a springboard to reclaim their “revolutionary roots.”
You might recall Occupy Wall Street, the incomprehensible, slightly humorous “revolutionary impulse” that occupied left-wing brains for a few months in 2011. It collapsed in record time because of the simple fact that no one was in charge.
But while it lasted, it energized the radical left in America. Here, finally, was their “revolutionary moment.” There was no Vietnam War where their parents and grandparents were bloodied in the streets during demonstrations, but there were evil rich people. Targeting them proved very popular among the college-age lemmings who were easily seduced by the gimlet-eyed radicals who really, really meant to bring it all down and set up their perfect society.
Eventually, the kids lost interest, the media realized that there was no “there” there, and the “movement” (if it ever was one) died aborning.
But the outpouring of nihilistic joy at the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has brought the spirit of Occupy Wall Street roaring back.
“It’s the Occupy Wall Street 2.0 at this point where you have the original wave of the ‘everybody gets a trophy’ generation … hitting the real world and suddenly realizing that everybody from their teachers to their professors at college had pretty much lied to them about the way that the real world works,” QUX Technologies CEO Keith Hanson told Fox News.
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“And now I’m starting to see an uptick in the resentment and the vitriol towards corporations and to corporate CEOs,” Hanson continued. “And I guess it would make sense that this is kind of the next wave. I mean, this is basically the proletariat rising against the bourgeois class and taking what’s theirs. And it’s concerning.”
All it needs now is a little push to become a mass movement, which is just the sort of thing that Democrats are looking for to ride the wave back to power.
It’s a delicate balance that Democrats are trying to achieve by sort of condemning the killing of Thompson but in the next breath saying that it’s completely understandable.
Business Insider:
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York told Business Insider on Wednesday that the rapturous online response to the shooting and the valorization by some of the suspect, Luigi Mangione, was indicative of a “mass bubbling of resentment around the precarity that people have been living with.”
“Of course, we don’t want to see the chaos that vigilantism presents,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We also don’t want to see the extreme suffering that millions of Americans confront when your life changes overnight from a horrific diagnosis, and people are led to just some of the worst, not just health events, but the worst financial events of their and their family’s lives.”
“I think for people who are surprised, it’s a wake-up call for how much of this exists in our society,” AOC added.
AOC and her colleagues are going in a direction that could lead them to eventually speak approvingly of the kind of violence visited on Mr. Thompson.
“There’s so much animosity and hatred of this system that people are looking beyond maybe their typical moral scope to meme this guy, or to praise him, because the issue is just so pervasive,” said. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) “That’s something to take note of.”
Is that really true? Or are Democrats taking advantage of anonymous online hate to whip up outrage on a national basis?
As bad as insurance coverage is for many millions of people, it’s not bad enough to send more than a tiny fraction over the edge and see them shooting insurance industry employees.
Democrats are playing with fire in hinting at a justification for murder. You can’t say you’re not excusing someone for killing people and then in the next breath say they have good reason to do so.
If Democrats think they can ride the wave of resentment and frustration at American health insurance back to power, they should think again.
