I’m not going to editorialize about the actual assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, but I think it is important to look at the reactions of American elites and their mouthpieces (i.e., the mainstream media) in contrast to the reactions of many millions of working class people because it really encapsulates our current political reality. I will also give you a rundown on why the assassin’s weapon malfunctioned since so many people are talking about it.

Both conservative and liberal media outlets are united in their condemnation of violence against elites; this should not be surprising, but at the same time, this is a moment where theory meets reality in an extremely parsimonious way. As you would expect, the Democrats are either condemning violence or staying quiet, which yet again proves that they are not “the left” in any sense. The leftist response would include something to the effect of “this violence is the natural consequence of material conditions” regardless of whether they condemn violence, but Democrats have specifically not said that; they’ve only condemned the violence. As far as I can tell, Republican politicians are simply keeping their mouths shut about it.

Meanwhile, normal people are celebrating the assassination, and even making fan art of the assassin. A post about the assassination by UnitedHealth Group on Facebook currently has about 5000 sympathetic responses and 70,000 laughing emoji responses. Someone placed a helium balloon at the site of the assassination with the “CEO Down” and smiling star meme on it, and the Daily Mail tried (and failed) to make it into a terrifying harbinger for their audience (i.e., they imply that the assassin is a threat to the Daily Mail’s audience).

A noteworthy exception to all this would be this article from the Independent:
When a medical insurance CEO was gunned down in the street, some people celebrated his death. What does this tell us about American healthcare?

What this gets down to is that most people agree with leftist positions on most things, they’ve just been deeply confused by propaganda that has successfully pointed their anger in the wrong direction. Once anger is pointed in the wrong direction, conflicts between different groups of people become real problems. While I’m certainly frustrated with the 80% of Americans who don’t think politics are important enough to deserve their attention, I can also sympathize with anyone having trouble finding truth in the sea of disinformation we are all swimming in.

If you present someone with a political choice, and make sure to strip the options of their official political labels, people consistently choose the leftist option. We see this in Missouri all the time. If you ask people whether we should make abortion legal or raise the minimum wage, they make the right choice, but when it comes down to choosing the Republican or the Democrat — well, there was never a right choice, was there.

Stephen Colbert once said, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” or something like that as a joke against conservatives, but it wasn’t true. Reality, in fact, has a clear leftist bias. Those moments where neoliberals or conservatives are correct happen because they have chosen to move left, not because they were true to their stated political ideology.

What is particularly interesting about the Democrats moving from liberal to neoliberal during the 1980’s is that neoliberalism fails to understand the purpose of social democracy — namely, to provide working class people with enough material success that they never choose to start executing the elites in the streets. Put another way, the primary purpose of social democracy is to protect the elites. This is why many (possibly most) leftists are hostile towards social democrats (e.g., Bernie Sanders, AOC) despite the other benefits of social democracy (like a reasonable degree of comfort and security for working class people).

Neoliberals have entered into a fantasy where they believe they have such mastery of propaganda (e.g., the media) and violence (e.g., the police) that they no longer have to fear the people, and it just isn’t true. The only way to engage in the kind of unrestrained capitalism (including control of the cudgel of government by elites) we’re experiencing now without evoking a violent response from the average person would be to somehow hide reality from us all. They’re trying to figure out how to do just that; Grimes calls it “the simulation”. Yes, they’re trying to stuff us all into the matrix. I don’t think it will work.

The only thing neoliberal and conservative elites have succeeded in doing prior to the CEO assassination has been to misdirect that violence toward marginalized people. I don’t just mean people of color, women, or the LGBTQ community. Rural and working class white, Christian men are also marginalized in hypercapitalist America. In fact, nearly everyone is marginalized by neoliberalism. This misdirection causes social chaos and electoral outcomes that the elites do not expect (because they believe in neoliberalism).

All of this suggests quite strongly that the left can win. The key is probably to be explicit and honest about concrete changes that we want, and then promote those ideas rather than trying to promote a particular leftist ideology or political system. One of the few useful comments we’ve received on our posts was from a guy saying, essentially, “I agree with most of what you say, but socialism doesn’t work.” People need the details of what we actually want to do in order to see past the fog of anti-left propaganda. You can’t just say you want “socialism” because most Americans don’t know what that means, and — let’s be clear — most leftists don’t have a clear and practical conception of what that means in the context of the USA.

Now, regarding the handgun malfunctions. The guy seems to be fairly experienced with handguns. He has the whole “tap, rack, reassess” procedure down, but that doesn’t make him what I would call a “professional assassin” in the sense of a John Wick or James Bond. A professional assassin would have understood the relationship between a suppressor and a handgun that uses the Browning tilting-barrel method of operation and would have adjusted his equipment to eliminate those malfunctions. Specifically, he could have used a gun that used a different method of operation or he could have used a Nielsen Device, also known as a “booster”, to make the gun run correctly.

The reason a suppressor will usually cause failures with a Browning tilting-barrel handgun is because of how those guns work. When the gun first fires, there’s a great deal of pressure and that keeps the barrel and slide locked together until the bullet has left the barrel; this delay reduces felt recoil relative to a direct (undelayed) blowback gun. Then, there’s still enough force to push the slide back, but not enough to keep the barrel and slide physically locked together, so the barrel moves back very slightly and tips up in the front and down in the back (this tilt is what unlocks the barrel from the slide). Because they are no longer connected to each other, the slide reciprocates fully and loads a new round.

However, if there’s a big honkin’ weight on the front of your barrel, it can neither tip nor move very slightly backward to the degree it was meant to. That slows down the slide’s movement, causes extra wear to the slide and barrel, and causes a malfunction. The video below explains this in detail, along with a nice solution to the problem.

The issue is less likely to have been bad ammunition or subsonic ammunition because we know that the weight issue is so consistently a problem. A suppressor actually increases back pressure in the gun, which makes it more likely to cycle subsonic ammunition successfully (actual results would vary depending on the details of the ammunition, gun, and suppressor). But please consider that if the shooter chose subsonic ammunition without testing that specific ammunition (and changing to a weaker recoil spring to compensate) then that, again, points to the shooter not being a “professional assassin” in the way we commonly think about that.