Miranda Devine: The left's assassination fixation only further normalizes political violence

The left's obsession with assassination is escalating alarmingly, and it's being tacitly endorsed in all the wrong places. While some, like Elon Musk, believe it may be orchestrated, others are simply too afraid to speak out against it. Take Wired, a lefty tech publication that recently published a story and helpful YouTube video describing how to build a copycat replica of the ghost gun allegedly used by Luigi Mangione to murder UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson last December.

The senior writer, Andy Greenberg, who covers hacking, cybersecurity, and surveillance for Wired, boasts he used a 3D printer to create an "exact clone" of Mangione's Glock-style handgun, "down to the stippling on the weapon's plastic grip." YouTube let the video rip despite a policy strictly prohibiting content showing how to make firearms, ammunition, or gun accessories. A week after Israeli DC Embassy employees Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim were assassinated by an unhinged leftist in Washington, DC, the Condé Nast magazine's do-it-yourself gun video is still up on YouTube.

Don't tell us this is an oversight by YouTube when it regularly cracks down on gun enthusiasts for far less explicit content. This isn't an accident; it's a calculated attempt to normalize political violence and make it seem harmless. Popular culture, social media, and political figures on the left have reacted to their political marginalization since Trump's election by fantasizing out loud about assassination or making coded references to their dark desires.

If you can't rub out Trump yourself, then you can make your feelings plain in oblique fashion by fetishizing Mangione as a sex symbol. It's not as if he is intrinsically more attractive than any other 27-year-old Ivy League brat, or that the evil deed was brave or imaginative. He allegedly shot Thompson in the back as the 50-year-old Minnesota father of two teenage boys was walking down Sixth Avenue to an investor meeting in the early morning of Dec. 4.

But the lionization of Mangione has sent a disturbing message to young people: that violence against political targets is acceptable, even justified. A recent poll found that 41% of voters aged 18-29 thought the murder of Thompson was acceptable, while another 24% said it was "somewhat" acceptable.

The suspect in the murders of Lischinsky and Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum, Elias Rodriguez, a socialist anti-Israel activist, openly praised Mangione on his X account: "80% of the country applauds the targeted annihilation of a healthcare insurance exec." Another man arrested outside the Capitol in January for allegedly plotting to kill officials in the Trump administration told prosecutors he was inspired by Mangione.

Rutgers University's Network Contagion Research Institute has warned of "a structured endorsement of political violence targeting figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. These attitudes are not fringe — they reflect an emergent assassination culture, grounded in far-left authoritarianism and increasingly normalized in digital discourse."

The normalization of assassination

The report says that this "assassination culture" has migrated from social media into mainstream discourse. It found that 38% of Americans — and 55% of those identifying as left of center — said assassinating President Trump would be "at least somewhat justified"; 31% (and 48% of those left of center), said the same about Musk.

Some 40% of respondents (and 58% of those left of center) believed it was at least somewhat acceptable to "destroy a Tesla dealership." Elon Musk is well aware of the threat, recently voicing fear of assassination because he is the world's richest CEO and also because of his work uncovering corruption in the federal government.

"They're making it sound like if you kill me, you're a hero. What they're doing is evil," he told the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in February. He brought up the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pa., surmising that unknown forces or the hive mind might have guided the 20-year-old shooter.

"For that assassin, it's kind of like that funny-looking sport, curling, you know, where they have the stone on the ice and then they throw the stone and then there's someone that's like brushing the ice, but you can't touch the stone. "All you can do is just change the path of the stone a little bit, but you keep brushing the ice and you can steer that stone right into the bull's-eye."

This analogy is apt when describing the coy Mangione references that are spreading like wildfire online. They're just "brushing the ice."