These women are ideologues masquerading as journalists.
These women are ideologues masquerading as journalists.
H ow hard is it to get press credentials from New York City’s government? Apparently, the bar is in hell.
Outside the Manhattan Supreme Court where defendant Luigi Mangione’s hearing was held Monday, a gaggle of cartoonishly dressed young female activists, calling themselves “Mangionistas,” showed up to celebrate the cold-blooded murder of a health-care executive, going so far as to equate his work with terrorism. Rather than critically report on the legal proceedings, the band of Mangione stans came to advocate for the accused’s acquittal.
“I’m saying f*** Brian Thompson,” so-called journalist Ashley Rojas said of the slain United Healthcare CEO. “I don’t give a flying f*** he died.”
“His children are better off without him,” her friend Lena Weissbrot told the camera. “They need to learn to not be like their dad, and enjoy the blood money, kids. He’s responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden, and I remember Americans celebrating when Osama bin Laden was killed. It’s not like we don’t understand heroic violence . . . ”
“I mean, why do we protect the Second Amendment?,” another young woman, Abril Rios, chimed in.
Tell me your education failed you without telling me. That amendment she thought she so cleverly invoked was designed for the citizenry to use to resist government tyranny and for self-defense, which Mangione’s alleged action certainly was not. And to say Thompson’s profession was the moral equivalent of 9/11 was a more overt villainization than even radical leftist streamer Hasan Piker offered when he told the New York Times that Thompson had committed “social murder,” borrowed from Marxism co-founder Friedrich Engels.
These women are not curious fact finders looking to share updates on the Mangione case with the public, but ideologues masquerading as journalists. Which is obvious to anybody willing to see them for what they are.
“Over the past several years, we have repeatedly seen individuals carrying press credentials using them during demonstrations and events to harass police officers, intimidate members of the public, interfere with law enforcement operations, and shield activist behavior behind the label of ‘journalism,’” former New York City Mayor Eric Adams wrote on X. “That undermines the credibility of legitimate reporters and creates serious public safety concerns.”
During his administration, Adams proposed stricter rules for administering press passes. But after self-avowed socialist Zohran Mamdani became mayor, he scrapped the proposed changes, calling them “an attack on the press.” Now, Mamdani can have keffiyeh-wearing, capitalism-excoriating influencers at press events, so there’s always a de facto protest presence to stir up trouble.
What was so objectionable about Adams’s revisions? They would have required applicants to be employed by or affiliated with a media platform (i.e., newspaper, magazine, news agency, press association, wire service, etc.) owned or operated by a news-gathering organization, or be a member of a journalism association. To be sure, the new rules would have disqualified the trio of bloodthirsty theater kids, who claimed to be “independent,” according to their badges. Adams also recommended that press credentials be denied, suspended, or revoked for applicants who make “verbal or physical threats against another” or place “another in reasonable fear of physical injury.”
The young women were quite clear that they believed Thompson’s killing was justified on the grounds that his health insurance company had allegedly refused to cover life-saving care for patients to maximize profits. Such demonization and dehumanization is an invitation for future vigilantes like Mangione to take matters into their own hands if they deem a company’s product, which is sold to a willing consumer, to be predatory.
“We’re fed up with being exploited and treated like cattle basically, blood sacrifices, to line the pockets of health insurance executives and the politicians that they bribe with our money that they’re stealing from us,” Weissbrot said to the cameras. “Other countries have had revolutions for far less. We’re pretty much the most cucked and submissive population in all of human history.”
Yes, health insurance deals with the fragility of human life, a morally heavier business than accounting or carpentry. Reasonable critiques of the health insurance industry are one thing. It’s a convoluted amalgam fraught with inefficiency that is subsidized by the taxpayer. It’s a far cry from free-market competition with clear pricing signals and provider-to-consumer connections. The government has only gotten more involved over the years, with the cost of coverage growing dramatically since President Obama’s Affordable Care Act was passed. Even the leftist Mangione simps should be able to see the correlation between health insurance becoming messier and greater government intervention.
But Weissbrot tried to suggest that the whole country is ready to riot over corruption in the health-care system. She said the “majority” of people support Mangione. If that’s true, then why do 81 percent of insured adults like their health insurance, according to a 2023 survey?
What these women, Piker, former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have in common is the delusion that the ultra-wealthy have only become successful through nefarious means. If they can’t see how an executive’s money stems from his direct personal labor, then it must be unearned or stolen. The truth, however, lies in all the quiet yet real material gains that they enjoy in America, produced by innovators who saw opportunity and forged new frontiers at great risk when others were merely content to complain and burn it down.