Why am I not surprised that Taylor Lorenz has Che Fever?

And why am I not surprised that she's trying to claim she never had it in the first place?

If you missed David's post on Murder Chic this morning, be sure to read it now. A clip of Lorenz discussing the weird Karen love for assassin Luigi Mangione went viral yesterday for Lorenz' apparent fandom of the man who shot a stranger in the back for politics. Lorenz attempted to explain to Donie Jackson why progressive women find Mangione so dreamy:

Taylor Lorenz on murderer Luigi Mangioni: “Here’s this man who, who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart — he’s a person that seems like a morally good man, which is hard to find”pic.twitter.com/o2rmSu1MNV

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) April 13, 2025

By early this morning, Lorenz had begun to backpedal:

Lol I didn't even "praise" him I said that there are millions of Americans who rightfully view our healthcare system as barbaric and have made him into a hero. I even stipulated that we don't know his true ideology yet bc he hasn't spoken. https://t.co/ADEHqBXglo

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) April 14, 2025

Ahem. What does this passage represent, if not praise: 

Here’s this man who, who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart — he’s a person that seems like a morally good man, which is hard to find[.]

Revolutionary! Young! Handsome! Smart! Those are known in the writing biz as compliments, or to use another word, praise. 

And even best of all, Lorenz refers to a back-shooting political assassin as someone who "seems like a morally good man." On what basis? Did Mangione engage in public debate over health care? Offer resources to others to help them access it? The singular accomplishment for which he is known and the only basis for this conclusion is Mangione's alleged murder of a health-care exec who snuck up on his target and then ran off like a pussy. 

And then he wasn't even that hard to find, thanks to Mangione's idiotic decision to flirt with a barista after murdering his victim in the most cowardly way possible. 

Lorenz then tries to spin her praise by shifting it to her own political agenda. "There are millions of Americans who rightfully view our healthcare system as barbaric," Lorenz writes, "and have made him into a hero." Yes, and Lorenz is included among the "millions" quite clearly by her own words. This is nothing but a cheap rationalization for political violence. It doesn't matter what cause Mangione may or may not have had in mind -- we use the ballot rather than the gun to conduct politics in the US. And anyone who cheers violence in politics, even through cheap rationalizations, contributes to the destruction of democracy in favor of mob rule and the tyranny it never fails to produce.

Mangione is nothing new. The Left has always turned violent psychopaths into cultural icons as long as they ostensibly supported the Left's causes. Che Guevara got transformed into a literal fashion icon for decades, despite his bloodthirsty march through 20th century history in support of some of the worst regimes and terrorist groups of his era. My friend Nick Gillespie reminded everyone more than a decade ago of Guevara's nature:

Born in 1928 and gunned down in 1967 by drunken Bolivian soldiers, Che rarely missed an opportunity to make life miserable for those who opposed him. During the fight against the Batista regime, Che ordered the summary executions of dozens of real and suspected enemies, becoming the very thing he said revolutionaries must be: a "cold-blooded killing machine." As a leader in post-Revolution Cuba, Che became known as the "butcher of La Cabaña" prison, where he oversaw hundreds of murders of political prisoners and "counter-revolutionaries."

When he became the effective czar of the Cuban economy and attempted to create a "new man and woman," or workers fueled by revolutionary ideals rather than conventional workplace incentives, his plans failed catastrophically and helped make Cuba the economic basket case it remains to this day. Along the way, Che did more than his share to help ban rock and jazz music as "imperialist" forms of expression. Such actions mark Che less as the youthful idealist portrayed in the acclaimed film version of his own Motorcycle Diaries and more as a repressive, murderous thug, a Caribbean version of the Taliban.

By the mid-1960s, Che left Cuba to export armed revolution to Africa and South America, all without success. If his violent death at 39 secured his romantic martyrdom to a cause that now thankfully flourishes only in Cuba and North Korea, it is his iconic, beret-bedecked image from a 1960 photo that persists everywhere in popular culture, from Mike Tyson's torso (the boxer sports a tattoo of Mao along with Che) to beer and booze labels to belt buckles to the T-shirts worn around the world. 

A couple of years before that, Nick ripped Hollywood and the fashion industry for promoting the Che lie:

The Left loves its murderous "revolutionaries," and Mangione is only their latest crush. They've run through the Mansons, the Weathermen, the Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof, and the Symbionese Liberation Army, just to name a few. If Antifa were dumb enough to take off their masks, no doubt a handful of them would also achieve icon status on the Left. They might even get their photos onto fashion items and have clueless entertainers toting them around to promote murder and mayhem, as long as their politics aligned properly.

The problem with Che Fever is that it sets the incentives to deliver on that prophecy. That's why we're seeing an explosion in violence, such as the arson at Josh Shapiro's governor's mansion, assassination attempts on Donald Trump, attacks on Tesla owners and dealers, and the thuggery of Hamasniks on college campuses. The Taylor Lorenzes of the media use them to promote La Causa and hail the violent nutcases as brave soldiers for change. And that's because the moral compasses of the Taylor Lorenzes of the media skew toward cowardly backshooters and Molotov-cocktail throwers as "morally good," whether they admit to it or not.