No one who has followed the news over the past 14½ months should be surprised at the support Luigi Mangione is receiving for his cold-blooded and premeditated murder of Brian Thompson. Similar support was shown for the cold-blooded murders, rapes and kidnappings of 1,450 Jews by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.
Radicals, anarchists, bigots and other extremists condemn killings only of people they support. They praise killings of those they oppose. It’s much like those who support speech “for me but not for thee.”
These hypocrites claim that laws and moral prohibitions against murder are designed to protect them and those they support, not those they oppose. This hypocrisy is rancid but irrelevant to those for whom the end justifies any means, including cold-blooded murder.
This selfish approach to law and morality has been common throughout history. Nazis, Communists, anarchists and other extremists use law and morality as tactics to serve their narrow ideological ends. They abandon or distort law and morality when it serves their interests to do so.
Killing insurance CEOs, Israelis or other “undesirables” brings “joy” to hearts of those who quickly condemn justified killings in self-defense if done by those they oppose. Would it surprise anyone if many of those who praised Thompson‘s killer, were among the most vocal haters of Daniel Penny, who acted in self-defense.
When I was in law school, my professors taught me to ignore motives in evaluating legal decisions. They taught me to reject ad hominem critiques, which reject sound arguments because they are motivated by improper considerations. Sixty years of experience has shown me they were wrong.
Actions, attitudes and philosophies should be judged, at least in part, by the history, motivations and hypocrisies of those who offer them. Clever lawyers, philosophers, politicians and others can come up with arguments that justify nearly anything. If they offer such arguments merely to win a partisan point, having offered the opposite argument to win an earlier point, their hypocrisy and double standard should be exposed.
Some of these arguments may be technically correct, but they themselves shouldn’t be trusted. Like a broken clock which is right twice a day, biased media, such as The New York Times, is sometimes right, but it shouldn’t be trusted without verification.
Those who argue in favor of the killing of some innocent people but against the killing of other innocent people —such as those who justify the unprovoked mass murders of Oct. 7 but condemn Israel’s self-defense measures — should be exposed as hypocrites. So too should those who justify the killing of CEOs but condemn Penny’s self-defense actions as hypocrisy.
A dangerous aspect of the pervasive hypocrisy that we are experiencing is that it manifested among so many young university-educated students and graduates. That too is not surprising because many hard-left academics expressly reject principle, neutrality, objectivity and even truth. They see these classic virtues as part of the white supremacist, patriarchal, imperialist mindset that is designed to maintain oppression based on race, gender, sexual orientation and other such factors.
The phony new academic discipline of “intersectionality” regards double standard hypocrisy as a virtue, so long as it serves the interests of the oppressed groups that are favored by its perverse ideology. Situational ethics, rather than neutral principles, has become the norm among many professors, who are influencing today’s students.
The greatest danger is that this double standard hypocrisy that justifies the killing of CEOs, Israelis and other perceived enemies of woke intersectionality will encourage the copycat killing of more innocent civilians.
It is only a short stop between praising the killing of “undesirable” CEOs and Israelis and actually picking up a gun and hunting them. So we must take seriously this pervasive and dangerous hypocrisy, especially among the young, who may include our future leaders.
Some of the worst ideologies in history have begun in universities. Hitler, Stalin, Castro and Pol Pot were supported by students and their professors. Universities are the breeding ground of both good and bad ideologies. Today, too many are on the wrong side of history, morality and truth. They must be rebutted in the marketplace of ideas.
Those of us who believe in truth must do a better job of advocacy and persuasion. Our future may depend on it.
Dershowitz’s latest book is “The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies: And How to Refute Them with Truth.”
