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A CEO Was Shot Dead. These People Cheered.
A CEO Was Shot Dead. These People Cheered.
(Screenshot via NYPD)
This is real life. Not ‘John Wick.’
By Kat Rosenfield
12.06.24
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The Free Press
The Free Press
A CEO Was Shot Dead. These People Cheered.

Brian Thompson, the fifty-year-old CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down on the street in New York Wednesday, in what appears to be a carefully planned and utterly cold-blooded assassination. I say appears because the shooting was captured on video: The killer, masked and dressed in black, steps out from behind a parked car as Thompson passes. A moment later, Thompson stumbles, falls, and doesn’t get up.

It is terrible to watch—and yet, even this literal snuff film is less disturbing than the various critics and commentators, many of them self-described progressive empaths who preach compassion for the marginalized and hashtag their posts with “#BeKind,” who are treating this real murder of a real person as though it were the emotionally cathartic climax of a John Wick movie—the part where the archetypal villain gets his just deserts. The police later revealed that the bullets fired at Thompson had the industry terms deny, defend, and depose written on them—a cinematic detail that only further encouraged the notion that he was killed as vengeance for UnitedHealthcare’s misdeeds.

The online reaction has been extremely gleeful and extremely dark: “My thoughts and prayers are on hold pending prior authorization,” reads one representative (and massively upvoted) comment on a New York Times Facebook story about the murder. Taylor Lorenz, recently of The Washington Post, wrote, “and they wonder why we want these executives dead” on Bluesky before cross-posting the name and photo of Blue Cross Blue Shield CEO Kim Keck to her accounts on multiple platforms (along with a cheeky suggestion that her followers engage in “very peaceful letter writing campaigns” against murderous insurance execs).

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Kat Rosenfield

Kat Rosenfield is a culture writer at The Free Press and author of five novels, including the Edgar-nominated No One Will Miss Her. Prior to joining The Free Press, she was a reporter at MTV News and a columnist at UnHerd, where she wrote about American culture and politics. Her work has also appeared in Vulture, Playboy, The Boston Globe, and Reason, among others.

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