“This country was built on violence. We’re a very violent country.” So said “The View” host Sunny Hostin recently in an effort to make sense of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

“And it’s just undeniable that that’s the case,” Hostin continued. “And so, I’m not, unfortunately, surprised that people are celebrating the use of violence. I’m not surprised that this young man thought that change could be accomplished through violence.”

Hostin then inadvertently went on to make the case for pardoning all the January 6 prisoners, stating, “One in four Americans say violence against government sometimes is justified.”

At least Hostin, though, seemed to express some uneasiness about the assassination and about where we are as a nation. Not so with former Washington Post “journalist” Taylor Lorenz, who appeared on Piers Morgan’s show to express the “joy” she felt upon considering this premeditated murder of a very well-liked 50-year-old American businessman and husband and father of two. “I do believe in the sanctity of life,” Lorenz said, “and I think that’s why I felt, along with so many other Americans, joy, unfortunately. Maybe not joy, but certainly not empathy.”

“I felt, along with so many other Americans, joy…”

Piers Morgan is left astounded as Taylor Lorenz gives her thoughts on the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

:tv: https://t.co/4ZCtndddDg@piersmorgan | @TaylorLorenz pic.twitter.com/46OAoZmRG9

— Piers Morgan Uncensored (@PiersUncensored) December 9, 2024

Yikes. No wonder she’s hopped around from the Daily Mail to Business Insider to The Daily Beast to The New York Times to The Washington Post to Substack.

But it’s one thing for talkingheads and provocateurs like Hostin and Lorenz to stir the pot, to express sympathy for the devil. Where it starts getting dicey is when our elected representatives begin to justify such cardinal violence. And that’s precisely what happened with more than one Democrat.

“This is not to say that an act of violence is justified,” began Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. You know what’s coming next — a “but.” “But I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them.” Insurance contracts and medical bills are violence?

Massachusetts Senator and former Democrat presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren likewise weighed in during an appearance on MSNBC with Joy Reid. “What happens when you turn this into the ‘billionaires run it all’ is they get the opportunity to squeeze every last penny,” Warren began. “And look, we’ll say it over and over: Violence is never the answer. This guy gets a trial who’s allegedly killed the CEO of UnitedHealth[care]. But you can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands.”

Sen. @ewarren on the UnitedHealth murderer: “Violence is never the answer. This guy gets a trial who’s allegedly killed the CEO of UnitedHealth. But you can only push people so far. And then they start to take matters into their own hands.” pic.twitter.com/xgtBPqDE0Y

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) December 11, 2024

Ah, but. Yes, Warren denounced the assassination, but she couldn’t leave it at that. She had to equivocate. Had to express her deep-seated hostility to American business.

National Review’s Charles Cooke concurs: “It’s always the ‘but’ that gets you. There you are, hurtling through the start of the sentence, making all the right points, saying all the necessary things, conveying all that needs to be conveyed, and then, Bam!”

“It wasn’t a slip of the tongue,” notes The Washington Times. “Warren made similar comments in an interview posted the same day by the Huffington Post, calling the shooting a ‘warning.’” Warren weakly walked that one back: “I should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder.”

This would seem to have gone without saying. Again, Warren is a sitting U.S. senator. And she wasn’t the only one. Vermont’s Bernie Sanders weighed in, too, explaining that the “anger at the healthcare industry tells us is that … you cannot have people in the insurance industry rejecting needed healthcare for people while they make billions of dollars in profit.”

So much for that cooling saucer that the Founders envisioned for the upper chamber.

We’ve reached a very dark place, and columnist Nathanael Blake wonders how those on the Left would be behaving if the tables had been turned:

And many on the left (along with a few on the right) were really, really happy to see a health insurance executive get murdered, or at least happy to spin excuses and justifications for the killing. Their adulation was anticipated by the accused, who according to an account of a police report, ‘likely views himself as a hero of sorts.’ And those inclined to try to dismiss this as a one-off ought to consider how the left would react if the right responded with half of this glee to the shooting of an abortionist.

Indeed, we can wonder, but the violence is disproportionally loaded on the Left. Think about the George Floyd riots. Think about the Jew-hating pro-Hamas violence in our cities and on our college campuses. Think about the near-assassination of a Supreme Court justice when a deranged young leftist couldn’t stomach the High Court’s righteous overturning of its own abominable Roe v. Wade. Think about the pro-abortion violence that was meted out at pregnancy resource centers and even at churches.

Ultimately, it was yet another Democrat senator, the increasingly iconoclastic John Fetterman, who spelled it out simply: “If you gun someone down that you don’t happen to agree with … hey, you know, I’m next, they’re next. And people want to celebrate it. It’s twisted.”

The question is: Is anyone on his side listening?

(Updated)