Brian Thompson

There were lots of shocked people when state terrorism charges against Luigi Mangione – the man accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson – were dismissed on Tuesday. I wasn’t one of them. As the partner of a homicide victim and an advocate for victims for more than 20 years, I’ve seen firsthand how New York’s penal code is a disaster. It doesn’t just fail victims; it rewards predators. It protects the violent. It gives them loopholes and light slaps on the wrist. And then we all act surprised when killers like Mangione benefit. Here’s a reality check that most people don’t know: punching someone in the face is not considered assault in New York. It’s classified as “harassment” – not even aggravated harassment.

In July’s Spectator, I covered the peculiar case of individuals supporting Luigi Mangione, now in custody for the public murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. A month later, Lara Brown wrote about the similarly curious trend of people falling in love with online chatbots. Neither of us, I think, ever imagined that there could be a situation in which both of these stories would combine. Yet it looks like nothing about our dystopian world can surprise me anymore, because I have discovered it is indeed possible. A woman has fallen in love with a Luigi Mangione chatbot.

When a white mom called a black kid the N-word the immediate expectation was that she’d be canceled, possibly arrested. It was not that just a few days later she would have $700,000 in the bank.Shiloh Hendrix accused a five-year-old Somali boy of rummaging through her diaper bag in Rochester, Minnesota, last week. “Did you call that child the N-word,” a man who filmed her asked. “Yeah,” Shiloh snarled back, “if he’s gonna act like one.”She didn’t back off. She repeated the accusation, then turned on the man filming her with a string of insults. The video quickly went viral. But Shiloh didn’t follow the usual playbook of hunkering down to weather the online storm. She fought back. On GiveSendGo, Shiloh painted herself as the victim.

Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down by Luigi Mangione in New York City on December 4. Surveillance footage hit the internet within hours. Wild speculation spread about the strange gun in the killer’s hands. The elongated barrel, the chamber movements that signaled repeated gun jams, the lack of recoil. Was it a veterinary euthanasia gun? As it turned out, it was a homemade gun, commonly known as a “ghost gun," printed using 3D technology. And, as the furore over Mangione dies down, it’s his weapon that remains the subject of violent disagreement and debate. Two months before Thompson’s assassination, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the great ongoing ghost gun case — Garland v. VanDerStok.

As President-elect Donald Trump charts plans to carry out mass deportations of illegal aliens, Democrats across the country are deciding whether or not they want to cooperate with the effort. Trump and his border czar, former acting ICE director Tom Homan, are reportedly mapping out a sophisticated operation that would include assistance from local and state law enforcement, ICE agents and potentially the National Guard and other military assets to identify and remove people who are in the country illegally, which number in the tens of millions. The wrench comes in with the local and state part of the equation; will Democratic officials order their law enforcement officers to stand down?