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Yesterday Luigi Mangione was arraigned in Manhattan. An adoring throng greeted Mangione outside the courtroom, and “[a]t least two dozen women packed the courtroom for the twisted heartthrob.” Mangione appeared to enjoy the proceedings:

A grinning Luigi Mangione appeared to yuk it up in a Manhattan courtroom Monday as he pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

What to make of Mangione’s popularity with a not-insignificant portion of the American public? Heather Mac Donald takes a stab at it. She cites the same poll data that we did here: 41% of registered voters under 30 found Mangione’s murder to be “acceptable,” as opposed to 40% who found it “unacceptable.” Heather writes:

It’s no surprise that age is inversely correlated with support for left-wing assassination, since the younger the voter, the more recent his exposure to the American education system. The pro-Mangione reaction epitomizes the dominant traits of contemporary academia: narcissism, a juvenile view of economics, the inability to think in terms of principle and precedent, and ignorance about the civilizational triumph that is Western due process.

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style, Humbert Humbert wrote. But Heather finds fault with Luigi’s:

Mangione’s manifesto reflects his Ivy League education (he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania): it is poorly written (“I do apologize for any strife of traumas”), riddled with cliché (“clearly power games [are] at play”), and self-important (“Evidently I am the first to face it with such brute honesty”). “It had to be done,” Mangione asserts, fashioning himself as the instrument of cosmic justice: “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”

But for the purest distillation of how the academic establishment analyses issues of right and wrong, one turns to Mangione’s faculty fans. Their self-blindness was as striking as their capacity to justify murder.

The fact that numerous professors have applauded Mangione’s murder is appalling, but, given what we saw following October 7, not surprising.

Heather’s long piece eloquently sets out the case against vigilante assassination, which I guess is a public service. But it is depressing that we have come to the point where we have to explain why murder is a bad thing.

Of course our education system is awful, but when a near-majority of young adults think that murder is A-OK as long as the “right” people are being killed, we are looking at something closer to civilizational breakdown. These people presumably had parents, who evidently taught them nothing. My guess is that a large majority of those who applaud Luigi did not attend Sunday School and do not now attend church or synagogue. Likewise, I’m pretty sure that very few of them were Boy Scouts, or participated in any other activity that might have helped to inculcate even the most rudimentary moral sense.

It’s a big topic, much bigger than a single murder, however depraved. When illegal alien Sebastian Zapeta-Calil burned a young woman to death on a New York subway, reportedly a number of bystanders recorded the victim’s horrible death on their cell phones, but did nothing to help. But, in their defense, they didn’t actually cheer on the murderer. Which puts them several notches above the leftists who applaud Luigi Mangione.