“His slaughter is now a source of ongoing glee for the sort of people who listen to (and sing along with) Piker. There may be other forces at work in the brains of those who pity Lindsay Clancy, a child-killer without a political agenda. Yet it’s hard to avoid comparing her apologists with Luigi Mangione’s left-wing admirers. Mangione became a folk hero to anti-capitalist radicals after he killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024. Clancy’s case lacks the overt ideological angle, but emotions run deeper than ideas. Mangione and Clancy have both benefited from a warped sense of sympathy for the underdog and greater identification with the killers’ plight than with that of the victims. It’s been argued that this is a projection of “Main Character Syndrome,” the narcissistic belief of many people, in this age of social media, that the whole world is nothing but a film in which they are the star.” ~~ Daniel McCarthy

“Historians often act like Lenin’s tyranny was a bolt from the blue: Who would have expected a bunch of socialists to be so bloodthirsty?  Admirers of Lenin, in contrast, often paint him as a great innovator – at least as a strategist.  A dictatorship of the proletariat run by a vanguard party of bourgeois intellectuals?  Only Lenin could have conceived it.  When you read 19th-century Russian literature, however, “Leninist” memes clearly predate the birth of Lenin.  Contrary to many historians, Lenin’s atrocities were foreseeable.  And contrary to Lenin’s admirers, his strategy of atrocity was pure cliche.” ~~ Bryan Caplan

“The embrace of socialism — an extremist ideology — among mainstream Democrats both in office and in the electorate is the logical extension of Democrats’ policies. As I’ve previously written, the DSA isn’t necessarily inventing any new ideas or positions. They’re merely taking positions already embraced by much of the Democrat Party and just following them through to their logical conclusion. ” ~~ Brianna Lyman