COMMENTARY: An attempted attack on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner points to a deeper trend: In a polarized West, violence is becoming thinkable again.
It was in a 1950s motorcycle picture that the exchange is made. Marlon Brando, the “Wild One” in the movie’s title, is asked what he and his fellows are rebelling against. Brando’s character, Johnny, answers, “What’ve you got?”
If we’re not quite in an age of revolution in the West, there are many acting, or play-acting, as though we are. Ivy League graduate Luigi Mangione, who went to Penn, the same school as President Donald Trump, has become something of an icon on the left for murdering insurance executive Brian Thompson in 2024. Trans-identifying young people have shot and killed children in religious schools in Tennessee and Minnesota.
The New York Times, the most influential newspaper on the planet, recently featured a fawning interview with leftist influencers Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino, justifying Mangione, embracing Marxism and endorsing “microlooting” — robbing stores and (in Piker’s case) even national museums — as some sort of principled stand against the powerful. Both Piker and Tolentino, like Mangione, come from upper-middle-class or wealthy backgrounds, but that doesn’t seem
