On Tuesday, a judge ruled that Luigi Mangione, the murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, should not be charged with first-degree murder.

The question was whether there would be another charge of terrorism added; it was dropped.

Clearly, Luigi Mangione shooting Brian Thompson — and leaving a note talking about how this was designed to effectively terrorize people who are part of the health care system — was an act of terrorism. It was a politically motivated murder with the intent of driving terror into the hearts of people who are part of the capitalist system or part of the health care system.

The judge in this case, Justice Gregory Carro, put out a statement explaining why the legal definition of terrorism was not met. The judge stated, “The defendant’s apparent objective, as stated in his writings, was not to threaten, intimidate, or coerce, but rather to draw attention to what he perceived as the greed of the insurance industry …”

The judge’s statement is a permission structure for violence. I would ask, how would you define drawing attention to what you perceive as the greed of the insurance industry through murder?

This was definitionally terrorism. If it wasn’t to “threaten, intimidate, or coerce,” then why was someone murdered?

Mangione didn’t write an Op-Ed in The Nation about the health care system; he murdered a man. And he murdered a man, yes, with the intent to threaten, intimidate or coerce people who were members of the health care industry.

If you take this judge’s argument and you extend it to literally any terrorist group around the world, it means that there is no such thing as terrorism. It writes the definition out of existence. You could say, “Radical Islamic terrorist beheads a Wall Street Journal reporter. Well, you know, he wasn’t really meaning to threaten, intimidate, or coerce others. He was really attempting to draw attention to what he perceived to be Western intolerance.”

What a bunch of absolute garbage. 9/11 terrorists under this definition would not have been terrorists, because obviously, “Osama bin Laden was just trying to draw attention to the predations of American foreign policy in Saudi Arabia” or some such nonsense.

The permission structures for terrorism and violence are there. They are deeply embedded. They’re embedded. It is largely relegated to the Left, but there are some on the Right who are willing to countenance this sort of stuff. That’s just the reality.

This is why there were crowds outside of the courthouse when it was announced that Mangione will not face life in prison without the possibility of parole. He could easily get out while he is still 50 or 60 years old after shooting a man in cold blood in the back and then in the back of the head.

There were people celebrating that in New York City on the streets. You want to know why Zohran Mamdani could be the mayor of New York City? This is why.

Scavengers, demons. That’s what this is. There were people on the Right who were angry at me when I said that the capture of Luigi Mangione needed to end with the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, and that anybody who celebrated the death of Brian Thompson was doing something evil. Some people on the Right objected to that, and tried to create permission structures, saying, “Well, yes, he shouldn’t have done that. But, you know, there are real grievances. And if you ignore those grievances …”

It was largely relegated to the Left. But there were some horseshoe theory people on the Right who were doing that routine. The Mangione case is a key tipping point case for political violence in the United States.

And you can see those permission structures emerging in the world’s worst ways on social media. Social media has been a bane on our existence.

Until those permission structures disappear, violence like this may well become more commonplace.

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