A few months ago, the name Luigi Mangione was one of those things that, unless you knew him, would guess belonged to a character on a Soprano's ripoff. You wouldn't know who he was, and why would you? He was just some guy.

Then he took a gun and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of New York.

Almost immediately, there were legions of people celebrating him. He became a rockstar in some circles.

Now, Bill Maher is calling out those circles.

Maher points out that the very people who are celebrating Thompson's murder are people who lost their ever-loving minds when Sarah Palin used crosshairs over the districts of Democrats she'd targeted back in 2010, especially after the shooting of Gabby Giffords. 

The shooter wasn't motivated by Palin, but they were ready to blame her for the violence just the same.

The very same people who complain about microaggressions and claim they're threatened when anyone carries a gun in public are celebrating the public assassination of someone. It's different, you see, because they didn't like Thompson.

“But now vigilantism is okay when it’s someone you want dead?” Maher asked, and it's a fair question.

Mangione is alleged to have 3D printed a firearm, done the same with a suppressor, then took it onto the streets of one of the most gun-controlled cities in the nation. He then murdered a man who doesn't appear to have done any direct harm nor anything else to Mangione so far as I've been able to determine. He just decided to murder this man because of what he represented.

Had this been the head of, say, Planned Parenthood or Ben & Jerry's or literally anyone at all the typical anti-gunner adores, they'd have screamed bloody murder. But they didn't.

The media talked a bit about privately made firearms, colloquially known as "ghost guns," but there wasn't even a solid push for gun control from the usual suspects, much less the rank-and-file progressive.

That's because they don't have an issue with violent crime in and of itself.

Violent crime is fine when it happens to people they dislike. So few of these people said anything about Thompson's murder except, perhaps, to celebrate it. The smart ones at least stayed quiet, but a lot of these folks weren't that smart.

Maher called them out on their hypocrisy, which is important because Maher himself is a liberal. "And so, here I am again, feeling like an old-school liberal at odds with the new politics of the far left. Because it wasn’t that long ago when liberals thought shooting people who don’t share your politics was bad, or at least a microaggression," he starts off the segments by saying.

So this isn't the result of a conservative or libertarian taking issue with this, but someone who is still ostensibly on their side of the aisle.

To me, that's the most disturbing thing we saw in 2024. It wasn't necessarily shocking, but it was still troubling. Mangione's alleged actions weren't the totality of it, either. There were a lot of people more upset that the twerps who tried to kill President Trump failed than they were about anyone taking a shot at a presidential candidate.

But again, it wasn't shocking. 

It's nice to see Maher call it out, though.