Back in July, following an eight-month fetishization of Luigi Mangione on the far left, another gunman in New York City killed several people, including a mother of two school-age kids who happened to work at—uh-oh—Blackstone. It was, unambiguously, a horrifying tragedy. But on the Luigi Left, reaction to the gruesome murders was not only neutral, or ambivalent, but celebratory, and explicitly supportive of the killer. (One prototypical post featured the woman’s image with the word LUIGI’D stamped over her face, along with the caption “Death is not always tragic.”) This was no small group of crazies, either. Some version of the reaction was shared thousands of times across X, Threads, and Bluesky on the grounds that cartoonish caricatures of “the rich” were, in a sense, physically harming the poor. Therefore, killing the rich was an act of self-defense.
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Become a SubscriberQuestion: Is this Abundance?
Potentially, I mean. Can this be Abundance? Can center-left liberals, who claim they want to introspect and reform and actually build a lot of housing and infrastructure, and generate new resources rather than punitively redistribute us all into stagnation, open their tent in such a way that there is room for committed, eat-the-rich communism and sensible housing policy alike? Can they not only wrench the youth of their party from Hasan Piker’s armpits, but actually get Hasan, a real authentic bad-boy socialist, to join them? What do you say, fellow kids, mass murder but make it YIMBY?
