Summary
Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was fatally shot in a premeditated attack outside the New York Hilton Midtown before speaking at an investor conference.
The gunman, still at large, fired multiple times, leaving shell casings marked with the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose.”
Authorities suggest Thompson was targeted but remain unclear on the motive. His wife confirmed prior threats against him.
Analysts speculate a possible vendetta tied to his company. The case raises questions about executive security, as Thompson lacked personal protection despite known risks.
Every single billionaire has working class people in their direct employ. Just saying.
Many household objects can be used as weapons. Just saying.
I finally understand what certain people mean when they talk about “good guys with guns”.
Insurance companies hate this one trick.
But no honestly, why are they acting like CEOs are fucking important?
Just parasites is all they are.
Apparently the board (?) still held the meeting the CEO was on his way to when he got got.
So… this isn’t even a “trick” in that regard.
CEO gets paid to not show up to meetings.
More at 11?
Maybe?
I wonder if his death will be covered by insurance.
Delay, deny, defend?
That’s because they’re the real ruling class in this country.
I don’t give two flying fucks about the investigation of this case. A dead shitty CEO of a company that has openly declined more coverage to those who’d need it most, is good news to me and all that I want to know.
Kudos to the gunman.
I’d say, the gunman is a world hero.
Thoughts and tariffs
This is why the gioutine comments are cute, and yes, the system isn’t working for nearly anyone…
But this is not the company I want to keep. The antivax liberal moms rallying with neo Nazis over masks should demonstrate there are boundaries to strange bedfellows.
Dude is a psycho killer.
psycho seems a bit much. I usually think of that as indiscriminate mass killing. Not targeted killing towards one leader of a economic army that is looking to annex your economic family and knowing you likely are forfeiting your life for it. Like I don’t think you could stop psycho killers in a society by having universal health care but that would have kept this guy from doing this desperate thing.
Upvote bc your point is legitimate. And my opinion however is that alliterative words like that on shells is like manifesto level creepy. Like, okay, you’re going to murder this dude for these reasons, I’m following along… and now you’re like doing all this micro work on your weaponry… That feels like a Rorschach level move… leaving messages on bullet shells for… who? Those details change my whole perspective. Maybe it’s just me.
I mean I see it. Hes desperate about the situation of our society and again I think he saw it being very likely he would be dead. So he wanted to be clear about what drove him. Manifestos are not always crazy. Im floored at how the unibombers is starting to make certain amount of sense given where we have gone with pollution and climate change.
Yeah we’re probably on the same page generally. The unibomber comment resonates. I’ve had the same thought in recent years. But it’s better to think about Timothy McVeigh. The before image of that childcare center has been burned into my mind since back then. Those are the outcomes I’m thinking about. Especially as a parent. I hoped for this day my whole youth but as I got older I dreaded seeing the world around me proving me right about our inevitable path. Now we’re here and I don’t like it. I really believed in voting, even after 2000. I underestimated Cambridge Analytica, and Putin, and don’t understand how Zuck hasn’t had his skull pushed in harder than his asshole in a penitentiary for treason.
McVeigh would have been a different story if he had directly assasinated the head of the ATF though
🍽
Thoughts and deductibles to his family.
Sorry, thoughts are not in network with your health care plan.
nice.
CEOs around the world scrambling to hire security.
CEOs of security companies are popping champagne bottles.
Plot twist. The shooter owns a high level personal security business and was just drumming up potential clients.
As of about a month ago there had been ~320 murders in NYC this year.
Yet this single one has captured the media’s attention nationwide and cops seem to be heavily focused on this one.
Because modern society at pretty much every institutional level sees the wealthy and powerful as not just more important than us, but they dont even see us. Hell, compare this to school shootings that only make local news now.
Historically, societies like this end in an incredibly brutal fashion. And until the wealthy and powerful really can build terminator style robot armies…
The masses are always going to win.
It’s kind of the natural consequences of hyper concentration of a finite and essential resource. People rarely sit around and starve voluntarily, and once the majority are starving, people start acting like a mob.
We see it day to day over minor stuff where people just refuse to follow societial norms. Everyday we’re shown that rules don’t really matter, and none of the people who matter are held accountable. If someone isn’t physically stopped from doing something, they take that as permission. Hell, that was the defense of most 1/6ers.
The social contract was invalidated a long time ago, people are just now realizing it. And that’s the only thing that really seperates us from animals.
Crashing out is gonna be the norm pretty fucking soon, I don’t think we have 4 years or that trump will be able to hold society together.
There’s a very high chance we’re gonna live in some interesting times.
I think the biggest thing to emphasize - and you mentioned it but I think it bears repeating over and over - is that when the system fails to enforce justice, people will seek justice themselves. This is the social contract you mentioned. I think we should expect more of this until the system is reformed and people like this do face justice within it.
“When peaceful disobedience doesn’t work the people don’t stop being disobedient, they stop being peaceful.”
Will you ever see Tesla Optimus aka Tesla Bot the same way again?
That’s obviously the end goal Musk is going for.
But I’m by no means the first person who realized the only thing the masses have going for us is sheer overwhelming numbers, and the day the wealthy have robot soldiers we’re fucked because by then they won’t need our labor either.
We go from being individually expendable to the entirety of us being expendable.
It’s gonna happen eventually, so we can’t just keep alternating between neoliberals and fascists, regardless of which one is in charge when it happens, we’re all still fucked when the wealthy and powerful don’t need us.
Poor people just need to cobble together EMP weapons if there are robot oppressors. Robots couldn’t be wirelessly controlled or have any wireless antennas without being EMP vulnerable.
If that becomes a problem, they’ll just control them with AI. Who cares if it’s a little inaccurate if it’s only killing poors?
It would still be hard to build an EMP proof chassis that completely surrounded it though. A Faraday cage needs a connection to ground wiring to work properly for example.
So we’ll be able to defeat them like the original Daleks. Separate them from the ground, and fry them
Dude. This event is like a page out of Batman. If you don’t think this is news, I can’t imagine what you think is.
There’s a very high chance we’re gonna live in some interesting times.
That was a well written post, but DAMN am I sick of living in interesting times!
I want boring times please for awhile. BORING times.
Not really.
Look up the origin of the FBI. Hoover was a low level clerk when he was handed the reins. He didn’t have much of a budget but he did have the willingness to sit and do a lot of research.
When the time came to go after Emma Goldman the government had reams and reams of paper ‘proving’ how dangerous she was.
From now on, the CEOs will travel with security squads, and President Trump will authorize them to shoot to kill anyone who comes in fifty feet of the VIP.
This is more likely to be a one-off, like Gamestop.
It will take just a bit more pressure for people to also walk in squads. There’s plenty of guns to go around.
Let me guess. You’ve never actually been in a gunfight, or been in the ER after a gun fight.
How is their medical experience relevant?
Correct. That doesn’t stop me from being able to use my imagination to see what the material conditions some people face could make them do. I do it by putting myself in these shoes. Consider people who’ve lost loved ones because of one of these fellas. Some might feel they’ve nothing left to lose, entertain suicide, decide to take a bastard or two instead. As conditions get worse, the number of such people will grow. I don’t think people who care about ending up in the ER would be part of this.
I wish I could live in a world where there’s no such thing as ricochets and friendly fire deaths.
Try expanding your imagination to include things like that. Life isn’t a movie or a video game where every bullet only hits the intended victim.
Also, WW1 started because one brave shooter decided to stand up and be counted.
Unintended consequences are a bitch.
All of this makes sense but none of it will change the mind of the person who shot the guy recently or the next one, or the number of such people the system creates. I’m merely pointing out that the system creates these people and they will kill others. The person who killed the CEO recently was already beyond the reasoning you’re suggesting. There’s no point considering these rational reasons when we have proof some folks don’t stop because of them. Instead I think it’s useful to look at what conditions got a person to disregard them. If we want to make a prediction we could observe how those conditions are likely to develop. I think that part is obvious. So I conclude the system will create more such people. If they get numerous enough, I speculate they might start organizing into groups too.
It will take just a bit more pressure for people to also walk in squads. There’s plenty of guns to go around.
Read some history. The Minute Men thought they could stop the British. It didn’t work. The Redcoats were stopped by a British style army and the entire French navy.
Also, you can’t talk about squads and lone gunmen at the same time
`
A bit of a tangent, but Gavrilo Princip wasn’t really the cause of WW1 (and WW2 which was on some level is an extension of WW1).
His actions were the spark and he has gone down in history for his assassination, but in an abstract, analytical sense his actions had nothing at all to do with the beginning of WW1.
I don’t agree.
Individuals and their actions matter.
Look at what this thread is about. We wouldn’t be talking if the shooter hadn’t acted.
The state of healthcare in the US is exactly the same as it was yesterday. But the discussion has changed dramatically
The tensions between the USSR and the West were as bad as the ones pre-WW1. Individual actions kept things from going into all out war.
People are interested in it (see Lemmy as an example), and news outlets publish stuff that gets clicks. What’s so hard to believe about that?
The media is treating it like a national tragedy, Walz was giving his condolences for some reason, and so are lots of other politicians.
It’s like when those billionaires all died in that submarine and the powerful people that run the media and politics treated it as some huge event and spent crazy money investigating.
They acted like it’s was 9/11, because to them $'s are what matters, so when one person with the same amount of $ as 100,000 people, they act like 100,000 average people die.
Do you not see that? The difference between how a wealthy person and a poor person are treated?
America used to have wealth worship, people still to some extent go to the Biltmore mansion to marvel at how nice robber barons lived centuries ago, or binge watch Downtown Abbey. But nowadays the vast amount of people upon hearing something bad happened to a billionaire, will at best say they dont give a fuck.
The contrast between what people are saying, and what they’re told by their leaders and the media isn’t jivving. And it’s obvious.
Look at history…
When societies are at the stage we are now, very very few bare any resemblance to that in just a decade or two. For better or worse, shit is likely to substantially change soon.
Edit:
To put it as simple as possible, the masses are told implicitly every day they don’t matter and only the wealthy do. Eventually people will start acting like their lives really don’t matter.
Which is bad for everyone, and has been happening for a while now. We’re just approaching the tipping point where “crashing out” is the majority opinion
The media is treating it like a national tragedy,
LOL! This doesn’t surprise me. The media is totally clueless
The media is treating it like a national tragedy
That’s my point. The media runs on clicks, and people are clicking.
Do you not see that? The difference between how a wealthy person and a poor person are treated?
How could I not see that? In your top comment you blame the media for this. We’re saying the same thing, but I’m just pointing out why the media acting like it is.
We’re on the same page, but sometimes it’s easier to be defensive and downvote. I hope you’ll see what I’m saying.
That’s my point. The media runs on clicks, and people are clicking
People aren’t reading the articles…
And media isnt run for profit anymore, billionaires all bought them up to control the narrative, I thought everyone was on the same page about this by now, it’s not 2015 anymore. It’s almost been a decade.
but I’m just pointing out why the media acting like it is.
No, you’re incorrectly assuming why they’re doing this but are 3-4 decades behind current motivations.
We’re on the same page
We’re not, but I’m trying to get us there.
Do I need to explain why this guy:
https://corporate.comcast.com/news-information/leadership-overview/cesar-conde-2
Wants people to think killing a corrupt CEO matters more than millions dying for corporate profits?
Oh ok
It is normal for politicians to offer condolences to a deceased person who was rich out of respect and not to tarnish his image.
Now, with regard to the death of the CEO of that company, it does not affect much because those who made that decision were more people. It is like when a high-ranking government official dies, it does not change much.
It is normal
I agree.
I’m saying it’s a problem.
But this isnt some random rich guy, it’s the head of the 9th largest corporation in the world that is predictably dirty. Do you understand how insane that is?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnitedHealth_Group#Criticism_and_controversies
This guy
iswas the problem.Edit:
Also top 60 in lobbying…
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/unitedhealth-group/summary?id=D000000348
Bought off both sides and people still wondering why they’re winning.
This post really rings true. This is the small rumbling before the big quake.
The reason everyone is offering condolences and claiming this is bad is because the government is supposed to have a monopoly on violence, and that offers protection to the elite in society. Even on radical left lemmy, you can be banned for implying this is a good thing.
This person was at the top of a pyramid that lied to and deceived millions of people and made life absolute hell for people undergoing medical problems. He was responsible for that misery. He created hell on earth for those people. He was not that different than a mass-murderer, knowing full well what his policies would do, only his actions were legal.
His company delayed, denied, and defended, and the assailant had an answer to deny and an answer to defend but there was no delay, just a quick deposing of this guy. It was obviously symbolic.
It’s funny because the founding fathers of the US had enough of the bullshit from England and so they decided to rebel and used violence to create a New Republic… but their violence made them patriots and heroes. It’s just interesting… I haven’t seen 1 person call the assailant a hero yet. It’s not like the Founding Fathers of the US used rhetoric and voting to persuade England to stop its brutality.
I bet a lot of people are secretly thinking that assailant is a hero. (In accordance with lemmy’s policies, I am not saying he is a hero and instead am saying the assailant is very bad and violence is always bad.)
But we’re in such gilded-age end-times right now that the corporate media always parrot the idea that violence is always bad… (with the implied part being the government, backing the elite oligarchy, is the exception) and the populace has internalized that thinking out of fear.
We have democracy in this country and should vote in leaders that actually make legislation that is sensible, but it’s impossible because the bottom 40 percent of society are brain-washed by religious delusions that the elite thrust upon them in order to make them easier to control. The problems in society are caused by religion and it’s just impossible to make the stupidest bottom 40 percent of people stop believing in bullshit.
The elite have given people a choice: gun rights and policies for the rich… or no guns and policies for the poor. There is no middle class pro-gun party and it’s by design. We need to have liberals start embracing the NRA because any gun regulation seems toxic to middle America, and for good reason. To anyone who say the Democrats are not an anti-gun party, you’re lying and everyone can see through it. Any gun regulation is a slow decent to zero guns for regular people, and working class middle America knows it, which is part of why we keep ending up with these horrible leaders allowing health care in the US to descend into an abyss.
I haven’t seen 1 person call the assailant a hero
I’ve seen it in a few threads, and they’re right.
Any gun regulation is a slow decent to zero guns for regular people
It’s not. There is not chance of that happening in your lifetime.
The elite have given people a choice: gun rights and policies for the rich… or no guns and policies for the poor.
No they haven’t. There use to be lots of violent left-wing groups. Black Panthers, SLA, Japanese Red Army etc
We need to have liberals start embracing the NRA because any gun regulation seems toxic to middle America, and for good reason
Wrong. . The NRA is NOT protecting American’s right to buy a gun. The 2nd amendment does that. It would take 3/4 of the states to do end that right, and about 80% if the country would have to agree. There is no chance it would happen.
What the NRA IS doing is opposing sensible gun restrictions what would reduce mass murders
Walz was giving his condolences
Ouch. Walz pushing crocodile tears for a guy like that, when Walz’s day gig is arguably representing the will and good of all Americans. Or I thought that was the league he was trying to play in. Thats a real drag, I thought maybe he had some character and some sort of inherent dignity, but maybe I was just seeing what I wanted to see.
Thats Disappointing, Walz, but I’m sure you’ll get some future campaign bribes out of it, which is what this is all about.
That said, very few of those murders were
notpoint blank assassinations in public during the day. That’s sort of a bigger deal.Edit: Me not inglesh gud.
deleted by creator
Oops. I’m an idiot and I need more sleep.
I hope this is a start and that it will continue. They have left no other alternative
a n a l y s t s
Was the CEO drinking? Might have brought it on himself.
Did you see what he was wearing? Was basically asking for it really.
The case raises questions about executive security,
Of course this is the lesson. Not that everyone hates you, your company, the business, etc. It’s not our actions. We just need security.
Pretty soon they are going to need security droids like those in the movie Elysium. They are already working on that.
Since the US is headed for 4 years of a made-for-tv style society, I guess this slots right in.
…but not the feel-good, happy ending kind, rather the soul-crushing dystopian oppressed kind.
