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Editors’ Note: The essay below is penned by Conlan Salgado, a recent college graduate and a contributor to The Prickly Pear. Conlan is an astute political observer and highly informed conservative. His essay deserves careful reading. We recommend reading Mr. Salgado’s excellent articles published in The Prickly Pear.

I was recently bemused at the indignation of retail pundits who breathlessly could not believe the Left’s ugly celebratory reaction across social media to the murder of United Health CEO Brian Thompson.

To illustrate my point, I compiled a list of categories of persons the Left has publicly and recently celebrated or would celebrate killing:

1) Unborn children and unwanted infants
2) Donald Trump
3) Men
4) Donald Trump
5) White people
6) Donald Trump
7) Political figures one disagrees with
8) Donald Trump
9) CEOs
10) Donald Trump
11) Jews

Apparently, we had to reach no. 9 on the list for certain individuals to realize the left’s genocidal tendencies. In fact, on the far left, killing seems to be increasingly accepted as the preferred alternative to winning elections, reforming healthcare, marrying, engaging in responsible sex, tolerating natural inequality, and defeating the leader of the MAGA movement.

As regards the motives of the alleged murderer, I will not speculate, except insofar as to state that he probably did not like insurance companies. In the final analysis, motives are always private and always personal.

To the question of why the left considers murder as a legitimate form of resistance, several possible explanations might be offered. On the historical side of things, it would be useful to point out the modern Left’s origins in the French Revolution. In an impressive debate against Christopher Hitchens, David Berlinski reminded us that after renaming Notre Dame Cathedral to the Temple of Reason, the French Revolutionists went out and killed 50,000 innocent people not DESPITE the fact that they considered themselves worshipers of reason, but BECAUSE they considered themselves worshipers of reason.

His point was that it becomes very easy to kill other people once you have decided that you are, by definition, reasonable; just as it is fairly easy to kill people once you have decided by definition that you are good, or just, or on the “right side of history.” For those of us who never believed the ridiculous proposition that fascism is a rightwing ideology, the industrialized murder regimes of the 20th century are a continuation of this historical argument.

My inclination, however, is to find the explanation in the Left’s ideology of power and resentment. On the one hand, it is a natural feature of human nature to scapegoat failures. An example is to blame black poverty and crime on white people.

On the other hand, the postmodern Left’s philosophy of power has always been skeptical of the democratic premise that power can be delegated to others who will use such power to uplift others.

Power naturally tends to more uncouth ends—domination, control, the belittling of enemies or dangerous elevation of self. For the Left, the-will-to-power (an inherently selfish tendency) is the primal energy of human action—call it will, call it motivation, call it whatever you like.

Stretching all the way back to Nietzsche—greatest of postmodern philosophers—the idea was that power realized how ugly it was, and donned various aesthetics to justify itself: truth, beauty, goodness, rightness, etc. Nietzsche famously said that truth was a movable set of metaphors and conventions.

In other words, power disguises itself as beauty or righteousness in order to make itself both acceptable and appropriate. In the contemporary era, the postmodern Left would argue, “legitimacy” is the latest face paint that their power puts on to distract from its hideousness.

“Meritocracy” is another way of saying “White power is wholly legitimate”; or perhaps “male power”, or Jew power, or rich people power. The point being that the entire democratic process is a way for dominant ideological groups—white people, males, rich folks—to transfer power to trustworthy proxies who act appropriately in their interest alone while at the same time pretend those interests are both popularly supported and implemented in conjunction with the will of the whole.

It is likely that you’ve heard sexism and misogyny and racism as explanations for Mr. Trump’s win. Well, there you have it!

But where does violence fit into the leftist scheme? In one word, law . The Law is yet another bafflement, another sleight-of-hand by which power establishes itself as “proper”. Each new category of “justification” also expands the vocabulary of censorship used by those in power. Criminal, ugly, false are all registered as ad hominem attacks by which the social elites delay confrontation with the ideological proletariat.

Criminal behavior is anti-establishment activism. Ugliness is an aspect of revolution. Falsehood is the eloquence of the marginalized.

Do you see? For the Left, the justification of power is just a rhetorical strategy.

The alleged killer of CEO Brian Thompson is a hero precisely because he challenges the normal exercise of power. The entire history of capitalism is violence justified by various aesthetics: Luigi Mangione is a hero because he used violence-as-violence to fight a system of organized violence.

Luigi was not only brutal, but ironic. His act of murder was a confession of understanding and resistance.

Christ conquered death by death. The left obsesses over this point quite heretically: to use the weapon of oppression against the oppressor is a sacred act.

For those who wonder whether a common culture might be achieved for all Americans, we draw upon Pierre Manent’s essential insight about what a community is: a group of people with a common “task” or “agendum”.  The Left considers the task of society, its “agendum,” to be essentially oppression. The task of the leftist is therefore inherently anti-social (“No justice, No peace”).

Its credo is almost entirely borrowed from Christianity and shallowed out: just as the sinner spends the rest of his life “in prayer and fasting”, a just society is one which redistributes resources (the meek shall inherit the earth) while committing itself to penitential acts, acts of anti-whiteness as repentance for anti-blackness, acts of anti-manhood as repentance for anti-womanhood. Indeed, grand theft from the rich and the privileged is the greatest act of repentance.

The more cynical of the left’s critics might summarize the whole thing as a project of cynicism, of opportunism, of emotional puppetry. Philosophers hate this answer. People of common sense suspect its truth.

The Left’s ideology is at once religious and sociological, ideological and action-oriented. The Left does not believe in a community except as a coalition of power. To paraphrase a Marxist translation of the Bible:

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for righteousness is bloodshed.