Screenshot, Fox News.
Fatherland/FOX News and the post-republican Republican party of the insurrectionist Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump embrace the legitimacy and necessity of political violence.
They look forward to the Trump’s pardoning of fascist thugs who tried to carry out a Trump-sparked coup on January 6, 2021.
At the same time, they claim to be the “party of the working-class” in its struggle with a high cost of living, economic insecurity, and even (believe it or not) “the ruling class of this country.”
But their “populist” pose is a lie. The MAGA party is a plutocratic, gangster capitalist, and fascist entity that offers giant tax cuts and deregulation for the wealthy capitalist few. It works 24-7 to direct mass anger not at capitalist elites but at brown-skinned immigrants, Black Americans, uppity women/feminism, gay and transgendered people, leftists, liberals, progressives, “radical left” (right) academia, and intellectuals.
Case in point: FOX’s treatment of Luigi Mangione, the young heartthrob assassin of the CEO of the nation’s leading parasitic health insurance company.
Mangione’s victim was the head of a top corporation in an industry that infamously denies needed health care to masses of ordinary people out of its ruthless commitment to investor profit. United Health Group and its industry competitors have a giant body count and have helped throw millions of Americans into crippling medical debt.
Mangione’s crime was driven by passionate anger at what the insurance mafia has done to other Americans (and perhaps to himself).
Let me be clear about something: murdering someone in cold blood – even the CEO of a mass-murderous insurance racket — is not a noble act. It’s pathological.
We need a popular socialist revolution, not individual acts of revenge.
That said, the mass support and even adoration that Luigi Mangione is receiving in the wake of his terrible action is far from surprising for a very simple reason: private for-profit health insurance is a lethal, mass murderous capitalist racket, way beyond the Mafia of old. Millions upon millions of everyday people understandably HATE what this vicious capitalist industry has done to their health and savings.
I’m frankly surprised that an assassination like the one Mangione carried out hadn’t taken place sooner given the long pathological record of the health insurance industry and the insanely widespread availability of guns in the United States.
But I digress.
Surely the “populist” political violence advocates at Fatherland/FOX News are on board with the Mangione fan club, right?
Nope. Quite the opposite.
FOX’s Sean Hannity on Mangione: “murder, assassination, vigilantism? It’s wrong. It’s despicable. Cheering for the murder of an unarmed man is beyond sick.”
FOX News’ Nicole Parker: “for anyone who sympathizes with a murder, that is completely upside down in our American society. There are people that need to reevaluate their inner soul and their moral compass.”
FOX News’ Laura Ingrahm: “wackos are treating the killer as a folk hero. Actual praise for the murder itself!”
FOX News guest: “you don’t have the right to go out and kill somebody and, you know, take vigilante justice in your own hands, so it’s really disturbing to people across the country as they tune in and hear people excited and saying there’s joy from this.”
On top of all this, FOX is using Mangione’s degrees from an Ivy League school (the University of Pennsylvania) to identify elite higher education with radical leftist terrorism.
Hey, what’s the problem here, FOX?
The Republifascists are way into political violence and even vigilante justice. Trump and FOX still to this day defend January 6, when the orange-brushed Dear Leader sent thousands of angry Trumpenvolk to attack the US Capitol, chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”
FOX’s beloved hero Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump wanted the violent insurrectionists armed with military assault weapons!
FOX is happy that Trump is going to pardon many if not all the convicted January 6 putschists after he gets back in the White House.
Trump pardoned an open murderer and war criminal, Eddie Gallagher, during his first presidency, much to the horror of US military officials.
Trump embraced the teen vigilante fascist Kyle Rittenhouse, the militia member who murdered two people with an illegally owned AR-15 at a Black Lives rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August of 2020.
Trump made a point of visiting Kenosha in Rittenhouse’s honor on the last night of the 2020 presidential campaign. Trump hosted the young racist killer at Mar a Lago in 2021.
Rittenhouse has been given a hero’s welcome again and again at Republi-fascist gatherings and on FOX News itself. He’s a folk hero on the right.
The Amerikaner Fatherland cohort is more than fine with the ugly and occasionally murderous history of paramilitary vigilante groups who patrol the US-Mexico border.
FOX and Trumpenvolk party are all about political violence.
At the same time, United Health Care and the broader insurance mafia are clear and present threats to the health, lives, and economic security of millions and millions of the middle- and working-class Americans the Republi-fascists and FOX claim to represent.
Plus, the right is way into guns, guns, guns.
So what gives? Why isn’t the dashing young killer Luigi Mangione a hero at FOX and in Trump world?
Because the MAGA crowd’s populism is counterfeit. It’s a cover for their fascism, and Luigi Mangione murdered someone from the wrong cohort for the Republi-fascists.
Let’s be clear: fascists are NOT anti-capitalists. They are for capitalism without previously normative bourgeois electoral, parliamentary, and rule-of-law democracy. They are for capitalism with open and undisguised authoritarianism in the political superstructure. They are for capitalism overlaid with open white supremacism, patriarchy, misogyny, and nativism. Their populism is a façade.
They are into violence but not violence against corporate CEOs and especially not against white male CEOs.
They are not into killing rich white men in the ruling class. Not at all. Wrong target. They are about hating independent women, gays, Blacks, nonwhite immigrants, Native Americans, trans folks, liberals, leftists, feminists, Democrats and non-Trump “traitors” in their own party.
And that is why the handsome devil Luigi Mangione is not a hero at FOX News but pug ugly Kyle Rittenhouse is.
