By Chad Davis from Minneapolis, United States — UnitedHealthcare Corporate Headquarters, December 8 2024, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=156535375

Heartless criminals and fascist extremists see a very narrow sliver of reality — and only when it’s convenient.

Right wingers and plutocrats discovered empathy for a brief moment when a health insurance company CEO was murdered a few months back. Yes, he was the CEO of a company making huge profits by denying healthcare to very sick people. In fact, United Healthcare was, by some accounts, the worst offender in an industry replete with villains.

He did not deserve to be murdered. But those who pointed out his less than laudatory record were not condoning murder. They intended to prevent United Healthcare from continuing its deadly and cruel behavior.

And yeah, some people were less than crushed that he was murdered. To me, Brian Thompson’s life was worth exactly the same as anyone else’s. So, yeah, every United Healthcare policy owner who didn’t survive due to denial of care was every bit as important to me as he was.

But even in death, rich people are treated as more important and others don’t count. That’s the values, the sick values, of our sick culture.

People Who Have Spouses and Families

Those who temporarily discovered empathy pointed out that Thompson had a wife and children. This supposedly made it an especially egregious act. And to point out his complicity in the suffering and death of others was huffily dismissed as insensitivity and bad taste.

I don’t think that Brian Thompson deserved to be killed just because he was separated from his wife. He may (or may not) have been a less than stellar husband or parent. Nobody is perfect. He still did not deserve what happened to him.

Neither do the victims of United Healthcare. They deserve exactly the same empathy — and arguably more — than the late CEO. That said, we can find flaws in the lives of every human being.

But if you support pardons for those who injured and wounded people in the violent January 6th insurrection, you are not entitled to give moral judgement that deifies the CEO and vilifies victims of ICE.

Like Thompson, many of the insurrectionists have spouses and families and loved ones.

But so did those wounded and killed by that violent mob.

So did Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly kidnapped by ICE terrorists (who intended to kidnap and torture someone else) and delivered to an El Salvador concentration camp. Garcia was a 29 year old Maryland resident, married with three children. Then his family was mistakenly torn apart by ICE and the Trump administration suddenly decided he was a member of a gang. Garcia was never even charged with a crime. He was simply grabbed and made to disappear.

A mother with a husband and two children was taken by ICE and flown to Honduras. Both children were United States’ citizens and one of the children has cancer.

For the most part, people who care about Thompson and the violent insurrectionists of January 6 fully support the brutalization of Garcia and pretty much all people abused by ICE. The simple fact is this: they hate immigrants and have no human feeling for them — even small children who happen to have citizenship and are not even nominally “illegal.”

As Long As You‘re Empathy Is Ideologically Narrow, I Don’t Want To Hear Your Moral Outrage

There’s a phrase by the radical right: “Fuck Your Feelings.”

That’s a pretty unsympathetic attitude. These are people who supported a violent insurrection and the wounding and killing of police officers protecting government officials, yet they claim to be champions of the law. But that only applies to people of foreign descent (mostly brown ones) who’s papers are not in order.

For these people, white yahoos who kill police officers are just fine. They deserve pardons.

The truth is, laws can often be wrong. So, I don’t believe that laws should determine our behavior. There were racists Jim Crow laws. And there are still racist laws today. All racist laws SHOULD be violated.
In Germany in the 1930s, there were antisemitic Nuremberg Laws. They, too, should be violated. But laws against killing people? Those are good laws. Nobody should kill a police officer or a CEO.

Or a health insurance policy holder.

Most of us have a pretty good moral compass. Not so MAGA fanatics, plutocrats, or other ideologues who have lost touch with their humanity.

Wake up. The tide is turning. People everywhere are turning against fascism, against violence, against greed, against cruelty and against murder. No amount of hypocritical appeals to law or patriotism or caring about a CEO because he has a family but not someone named Garcia — well, that’s just bullshit. We aren’t listening to that crap anymore.