by Jeff Cunningham
The left’s glamorization of political violence begins as performance, but history shows how quickly chic nihilism can become something far darker.
Brian Thompson’s shooter suspect in hostel CCTV. (security camera, Wikimedia Commons)
On the morning of May 18, 2026, on the granite steps of Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building, three chic women arranged themselves like starlets at Cannes. The heels. The practiced hip-thrust. Weight cocked to one side, chin down, eyes up. With enough mascara between them to repaint Gracie Mansion. But the most revealing part, the part that showed the most skin, was the laminated press credential blessed by the office of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. It certified they were card-carrying members of the working press. Only they were not here to cover a criminal. Luigi’s Angels, or as they call themselves, more affectionately, the Mangionistas, were there to worship a charismatic idol and to defend his violence.
Brian Thompson was the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. Was is the operative word here. He was walking to his company’s investor conference in broad daylight. A bullet went into his back. He arched and stumbled and hit the concrete hard. Then the killer stepped closer, took a look and fired again into the man’s leg. The cold December sidewalk against Thompson’s face, the blood spreading, the bystanders frozen, the normal morning around him with its coffee cups and crossing signals, while the spine that had just been torn through sent up whatever a body sends up in its last conscious minute. The shooter walked off and rode his bike through Central Park.
Outside the courthouse, the three women told reporters, breathlessly, what they thought of the dead man. “F-ck Brian Thompson,” said Ashley Rojas. “I don’t give a flying f-ck he died. F-ck his mom.”
Lena Weissbrot pronounced his two grieving children “better off without him,” told them to enjoy the “blood money,” and rated the murdered executive responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden. To watch a group of women cheer, loud and unembarrassed, for the assassination of a man who was guilty of holding a job somebody did not like looks like a crazy one-off kind of crime.
Except that it isn’t. We heard it in 1932. In Berlin.
In the breakthrough election of July 1932, British historian Dick Geary documented, some 6.5 million German women voted for the Nazis, nearly half of the party’s 13.7 million votes, and they did it even as Hitler promised to drive hundreds of thousands of them out of the workforce to make room for men. They voted in force for a movement that despised their independence. By the time the regime held power, some 13 million of Germany’s 40 million women were active in its organizations, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The surge ran strongest among young women and first-time voters who had never been political before.
That dynamic fits another electorate closer to home. Eight decades later, the CIRCLE project at Tufts University found that 82% percent of women under 30 in New York City voted for Mamdani against 65% of the men, a gap so wide it has stopped being a curiosity and become a movement, and one so 1932 that the comparison no longer feels like a coincidence. The Chicago Tribune, cabling from Paris on the German 1932 election results, described the Nazi program as “anti-Republican, anti-Semitic, and anti-capitalist.” The Nazi Party had a more official name – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – and it ran against finance and big business as hard as it ran against Jews. Where have we heard that lately?
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who twice came in second in the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating process, calls the wealthy “the billionaire class” and says they have spent 40 years “looting the country.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells a cheering hall that “no one ever makes a billion dollars; you take a billion dollars.”
The shape is familiar: a productive people, a small moneyed few who produce nothing and drain the rest, a demand that the few be stripped and made to pay. Where the Nazi press wrote of the parasite bleeding the productive nation, the contemporary U.S. “progressive” Democratic denounces the billionaire, the corporate parasite, the bloodsucking insurer, the Wall Street ghoul. Some even go so far as to name several prominent Jews. The point is not that today’s democratic socialists are Nazis. It is the demonizing grievance that built the movement, a productive nation set against a parasitic moneyed few, is a theme. And themes recur.
Mamdani’s own record supplies the text. He spent months refusing to condemn “globalize the intifada,” conceding at last only that he would “discourage” a movement that led to the murder of so many Jews. He also had the temerity to liken the phrase to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a comparison the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum pointed out was historically outrageous and deeply offensive to survivors. He has backed the boycott of Israel since college. He declines to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. He told a Democratic Socialists panel that when the boot of the NYPD is on a New Yorker’s neck, “it’s been laced by the IDF.” It would be naive to call this the language of the death camp. But the same office that parses Israel so carefully also handed a press badge to the woman who said, “I don’t give a flying f-ck he died.” That is not a mindset interested in sensible solutions.
Mamdani’s own wife supplies more of it. Rama Duwaji, the illustrator he married in early 2025, has been documented liking posts that celebrated the October 7 Hamas attack and one that called the New York Times investigation into the sexual violence of that day a “mass rape hoax.” She illustrated an essay for a writer who has called Jews “vampires,” “demons,” “ghouls,” and “parasites.” The through-line runs into Luigi Mangione, the defendant who wrote in the notebook he was carrying when apprehended that the “parasites simply had it coming.” Vampires, demons, ghouls, parasites: This is not language that is merely adjacent to Nazi antisemitism. It is the same language, transcribed without a single substitution. Here is where anti-free market rhetoric and anti-Jewish hatred stop being a theory and start becoming a hit list.
In the months around Mangione’s arrest, an arsonist firebombed the home of Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor while his family slept, for what the governor “wants to do to the Palestinian people.” A gunman shot two young Israeli embassy staffers, a couple about to be engaged, outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, and chanted “Free Palestine!” as he was handcuffed by police. A week later, an Egyptian living in Colorado firebombed a march for the Israeli hostages, and an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor died of her burns. The cult of violence on the extreme American left is not a metaphor.
We call it madness because madness is consoling. Madness is rare, it is individual, it is always somebody else. But the celebration of a killing is no glitch in human nature; it is one of the oldest and most dependable things about us. It is what let Stalin starve millions and call it progress, and it has stood beneath every public stoning, every sacrifice on every altar since people first gathered to watch someone die for the good of the group. The horror is that the impulse is among the most ordinary things we do, and that it always begins with decent people deciding that the death of someone outside the circle is deserved. The women on the steps are not an aberration. They are the system’s most reliable signal of what is coming. They are not the noise. They are the tell.
The lesson is not about women or female nature. The Hausfrau who pulled the lever for Hitler and the young American who livestreams her devotion to Mangione share a single vulnerability: Under the right conditions, an otherwise non-violent woman, devoted to chic causes, will give herself completely to a charismatic man who frames killing as the solution to her perceived problems. The irony is that she often seeks liberation and ends up handing over her own agency. She is not the author of a totalitarian movement. She is its warmth, its alibi, its stooge, and she is the last to know it. That is why a press pass is not a small story. Confronted with the outrage, Abril Rios declared that no pressure would make her bow to her “oppressors.”
There may be a reason it is happening now. The world has grown too complex to hold in the head, a blur of systems and supply chains and feeds and AI trillionaires that no one can fathom, much less trace to a source, and the mind under that load looks for an exit. The simplest exit ever devised is a charismatic man who has already done the thinking, and an enemy who, conveniently, seems to deserve whatever he gets. That second half is the lie, the one that gets perpetrated every generation: the substitution of a hated group for an innocent one, the murderer dressed up as the new sheriff in town. For a moment, the mind that wants the madness to stop in a single click, a decisive ending, is the whole appeal. So we shoot Kennedy. We shoot his brother. We shoot MLK. We shoot Reagan, Ford, and Trump. The chic women applaud. This is the cult of the simple answer when the true answer has become too heavy to lift.
Karl Marx wrote that history arrives the first time as tragedy and the second as farce. Berlin in 1932 was the tragedy. Three women in heels doing a hip-thrust for the cameras on a courthouse step, badges on their chests, cheering a man who shot a father of two in the back, is the farce. But the farce is not the harmless version of the tragedy. It is the tragedy that has not yet remembered what it is. 1932 is a date. It is also a temperament, and the temperament is back.
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This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire on May 26, 2026.
Photo: Luigi Mangione appears in Manhattan Supreme Court for a suppression hearing as both sides prepare to wrap up arguemnts.
December 18 2025
Curtis Means for Daily Mail/ Pool
Jeff Cunningham
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/05/28/dressed-to-kill-women-of-the-left-and-the-cult-of-violence-worship/
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