Matt Walsh (6:33)
These people are euphoric over the murder of a man with a family, supposedly because they're not happy with his company's insurance coverage. Even though most of these people know absolutely nothing about. They hadn't even heard of the company until this happened. But they've been told by other people on TikTok that they should be happy the guy's dead. And so they are. Because on top of being sociopaths, they are just brainless sheep. But now, like Taylor Lorenz, they're turning their attention and their threats towards other CEOs. And it appears to be working. Within hours of the online campaign to harass and threaten the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield, the company announced a reversal of its planned policy on anesthesia coverage. They now say they're going to halt their proposed limits on coverage for anesthesia during surgery. The company put out a statement reading, quote, there's been a significant widespread misinformation about an update to our anesthesia policy. As a result, we've decided to not proceed with this policy change. To be clear, it never was and never will be the policy of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield to not pay for medically necessary anesthesia services. The proposed update to the policy was only designed to clarify the appropriateness of anesthesia consistent with well established clinical guidelines. Now, on the surface, this looks like a victory for the assassin and his supporters. The assassin kills one insurance company CEO. The next day, an insurance company rescinds its plan to limit coverage. It's the kind of thing that seems like a major victory if you have no idea how the health insurance industry actually works. The catch is that as a result of this reversal, anesthesiologists no longer have any incentives to stop overbilling, which has been a major problem in their field in recent years. Blue Cross Blue Shield, along with other insurance companies, was trying to force anesthesiologists to accept the standard per procedure Medicare rate for their services. Anesthesiologists hated that idea because they'd prefer to keep charging high rates for hours that they weren't even working. And now, because of a harassment campaign by left wing activists in the wake of a CEO's murder, these anesthesiologists have won. In other words, the same people who complain that healthcare costs are too high might have just made it a lot easier for anesthesiologists to jack up healthcare costs even further. It's a development that underscores the complexity of the situation. You know, there are plenty of nuances that are lost when you're reenacting the French Revolution and murdering people in the street instead of discussing complicated issues like reasonable people are supposed to do in this democracy that the left told us was so important. Now, to be clear, there's certainly evidence that companies like UnitedHealthcare are becoming much more aggressive in denying certain kinds of claims. A Senate report from this year, for example, found that, quote, in 2019, UnitedHealthcare issued an initial denial to 8.7% of the post acute care prior authorization requests it received. By 2022, it denied 22.7% of all such requests, an increase of 172%. Its 2022 denial rate for skilled nursing facilities was nine times higher than it was three years before. The Democrat led Senate committee concluded that Medicare Advantage insurers are intentionally targeting a costly but critical area of medicine, substituting judgment about medical necessity with a calculation about financial gain. Now, what the report doesn't mention is that United Healthcare has profit margins of around 6%. After tax, it's really under 4%. And that means that as a matter of basic finance, they're not driving up profits to some ridiculous degree like any business. They have a lot of operating costs. They assume risks. If they started approving every claim, they go out of business overnight. Of course, the other important element here that Democrats overlook for obvious reasons is that Democrats are the ones who implemented coverage mandates which inevitably raised the price of insurance for everybody. We saw that immediately after Obamacare, which was supposedly to lower everyone's premiums. In reality, it increased them dramatically. Now, the point I'm making here is not that UnitedHealthcare is blameless, or that the insurance industry in general shouldn't be criticized, or that the CEO that was just killed is some kind of saint. I have no idea what kind of guy he is. I mean, he could be the very face of evil, or he could be a decent guy, or he could be somewhere in between. I have no clue. What I'm saying is that there are no open and shut, clear cut solutions to this problem. Any kind of solution requires real debate and discussion and trade offs, okay? And murdering executives in the street is not the way to bring that about. What do you know? Okay, when you've got a really complicated issue like healthcare costs, you're not gonna solve that by just killing somebody, okay? It will not make anything better. Not a single thing will be made better. And that should make you wonder why exactly the left is so supportive of Brian Thompson's murder. If they don't actually care about fixing the health insurance industry, which they don't, then what do they care about? It'd be one thing if these left wing activists had the view that sometimes when things get bad enough, an assassin needs to step up and take someone out for the good of the community. Now, I'm not endorsing that view, obviously, but at least there's a kind of moral coherence to that. Okay? If they really believed that United Healthcare is essentially murdering people and profiting from unspeakable moral evils, then you can see why some of these depraved leftists might get excited by the prospect of eliminating one of the company's executives. But any semblance of coherence goes out the window the moment you zoom out 100ft and you look at how these same activists are reacting to the trial of Daniel Penny. Now, if these people really thought that it's good and righteous to eliminate a clear and present danger to the community as they do with the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, which they say is a danger to the community, then why exactly do they have any objection to what Daniel Penney did? Why did they storm the subways in protest after Jordan Neely's death, chanting no justice, no peace? Why have they been outside the courthouse for every day of deliberations, pressuring the jurors to convict? Why isn't Taylor Lorenz writing articles about how it's normal to be happy that Jordan Neely is dead? Why isn't that article, it's normal to be happy when a violent psychotic hobo is dead? Why didn't she write that article? Why aren't the Columbia professors telling us not to mourn his death? Now, even if we assume that Daniel Penny actually murdered Jordan Neely, which is not true, but just for the sake of argument, by their logic, what would be the objection? I mean, even if you pretend that Daniel Penney put a silencer on a pistol, waited until 6am When Jordan Neely started walking into a Hilton hotel and then shot him in the back, why exactly would the leftists be upset about that? Shouldn't they celebrate that? I mean, there's no way to dispute that Jordan Neely was a menace to the community. He violently assaulted multiple people, including women who were just trying to take a ride on the subway. He was threatening an entire subway car full of innocent passengers the day he died. Yeah, he was also a Michael Jackson impersonator, supposedly. But on top of that, he was an abuser of women and others. He was in every respect, a net negative on society, a clear threat to the safety and wellbeing of the working class. So why exactly is anyone on the left upset that Daniel Penney took action to eliminate the threat posed by Jordan Neely while they're busy swooning over the assassin of the United Healthcare CEO in Manhattan. How does that work? Well, there's really only one way to make sense of it. In their world, Jordan Neely as a black drug addict criminal has a life of greater value than a white male health insurance CEO. Nobody wants to say that out loud, but it's true. If Brian Thompson had been the CEO of the same company, everything's the same. But he was a black woman. You would not be seeing any of the gloating in celebration. You'd probably be seeing the opposite, in fact. That the Washington Post would be working overtime to find the assassin and dox everyone in his family. They'd rehire Taylor Lorenz and have her track down the white supremacist killer. Along with every single social media post he's made since he was in kindergarten. They probably solved the case in about 10 minutes. But as it stands, his victim happened to fit in a demographic profile of a greedy subhuman colonizer. In other words, he was white. Didn't even matter to them that this CEO was probably liberal. His company's PAC certainly donated a lot of money to Kamala Harris. That wasn't important to them. So what we're left with is murderous, unrestrained, anti white race hatred under the guise of concern about health insurance costs. A problem that none of these people actually have any interest in fixing because all they do when they're in power is make insurance premiums higher. Their primary interest is destabilizing the country by dehumanizing as many white people as possible. And if that means killing some of them, so be it. In fact, that's just a bonus that explains the response to what happened in Butler and explains the response to what just happened in midtown Manhattan in front of the Hilton Hotel. If you're a white, conservative Christian and you think that these people wouldn't gloat the same exact way, if you were murdered while you were on your way to work, then you have no idea what the left is capable of or what they really believe. Now, at this point, we don't know why exactly Brian Thompson was executed. But we do know why exactly these ghouls are celebrating his assassin. Even as they demonize men like Daniel Penny pay attention to what they're saying. Spend some time reading their euphoric posts on social media. And soon enough you'll find that even if you're not the CEO of a major health insurance company, they will have no problem coming for you. Next, let's get to our five headlines. 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The suit filed in New York City New York Supreme Court on Wednesday, accuses the Long Island Marine veteran of negligent contact, assault and battery that caused injuries and Neely's death last year. Neely's father, Andre Zachary, demands judgment awarding damages and a sum which exceeds the jurisdictional limits of all lower courts which would otherwise have jurisdiction. According to a lawsuit. It was filed yesterday, Wednesday as jurors and Penny's four week long Manhattan trial broke for a second time without reaching a verdict. Okay, so Daniel Penny obviously has bigger fish to fry at the moment, but if he's acquitted or there's a hung jury or something, God willing, I love to see him respond to this lawsuit by countersuing, countersue the father, Andre Zachary, for being a terrible father who failed to raise his son and allowed him to become a homeless, violent junkie. That's what I'd like to see. Now, we're obviously used to seeing this sort of thing when, when you have these racial martyrs and suddenly the family comes out of the woodwork. Family members that by all accounts were not involved in the person's life, didn't care, didn't give a damn. Suddenly they're weeping and wailing on tv. Suddenly they care about the person who they never did anything for when they were alive. We're very used to seeing this, but in this case it's all the more egregious because Neely was homeless before he died. He was a drug addled hobo screaming incoherently on the subway. That is a direct indictment of his father. His father left him to wallow away as a homeless lunatic. Just left him to die on the street and now he wants to cash in. Now, if Neely had just died, overdosed on the street corner somewhere, I doubt his father would even go to the funeral. You have to wonder. Now, you know, there's an article, a very long article about Jordan Neely's life and backstory in New York magazine. And the article tells us that Neely's dad, Andre Zachary, had been in a volatile on again, off again relationship with his mom. Big surprise. And it says that he would, quote, waste his money and sleep around. That's the father. Eventually, Neely's mom apparently was murdered. And at that point, Zachary was not part of his son's life at all. The article says that Neely went to go live with his dad when he was 18. When Neely was 18. But his dad apparently denies this detail. But it says in the article that Neely at the time was a Michael Jackson impersonator. He was doing these performances, and his dad asked Neely to give him some of the proceeds from his Michael Jackson performances. They got into a big fight, and a year later, Neely was staying at a homeless shelter at the age of 19. And now that same guy, this deadbeat, wants to cash in on his son's death. A death that almost certainly could have been avoided if he, the father, had actually cared for his son and had been involved in his son's life and raised him. Okay. It's not that hard to avoid. I mean, you can't guarantee it. I mean, even with great parenting, you can't guarantee your kids are going to turn out well. It's technically possible that you could be a great parent and a very involved parent and your child still ends up being, you know, a druggie on a street corner, but it's very unlikely. And with my own sons, there's plenty of things I worry about in general with my kids. I'm not worried that in the not too distant future, any of my kids are gonna be on a subway somewhere, drugged out of their minds and screaming random threats like, I feel very, very confident that's just not gonna happen because I'm their father and I'm there and I'm raising them and their mom is raising them. So if that happens with your kid, it almost certainly means that you have failed as a parent. Just spectacularly failed. You failed in every way. You did not do even a little bit of the job that you're supposed to be doing. And the thing is, by the way, I don't think that Neely's father is necessarily pretending to be upset that his son died. I would hope that he's actually upset. I would assume that. I mean, even if you're a bad father who didn't care for your son, you know, you should still be sad that he died. If you're a human being at all, you'd be sad. So his emotions are, you know, maybe for the most part, genuine. But whatever anger he feels should be directed at himself, not Daniel Penny. In fact, Daniel Penny, Daniel Penny is the one who should be angry for a lot of things and at a lot of people, but probably mostly at this guy. At the dad, you didn't do your job, dad, so Daniel Penny had to step up and do it for you. That's the thing. If you don't want your kid to potentially end up dead on a subway after a struggle with someone who had to restrain them, then just make sure your kid doesn't become a drug addled, violent hobo. You know, it's not that hard. Okay, Here's a article from Politico. It says President Joe Biden's senior aides are conducting a vigorous internal debate over whether to issue preemptive pardons to a range of current and former public officials who could be targeted with President Elect Donald Trump's return to the White House. According to senior Democrats familiar with discussions, Biden's aides are deeply concerned about a range of current and former officials who could find themselves facing inquiries and even indictments. The White House officials, however, are carefully weighing the extraordinary step of handing out blanket pardons to those who have committed a crime, both because it could suggest impropriety only fueling Trump's criticism, and because those offered preemptive pardons may reject them. But they've looked at Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff and others as people that Anthony Fauci getting preemptive pardons on the way out the door. So we could be looking at a pardoning spree unlike anything the world's ever seen, or at least that this country has ever seen. And we've seen some pretty extraordinary pardoning sprees, by the way, from presidents in the past. But it looks like Biden's probably about to do something that dwarfs all of that. He already started, obviously. And that brings up an interesting question about whether the pardon power should even exist. Biden has already abused the power to an extreme degree. He's about to abuse it even more, it seems like. Is the answer that the power just shouldn't exist at all? Is this just a thing that nobody should be able to do as president? Now, if you're a libertarian minded person, you would say, no, it shouldn't exist, right? This is not a monarchy. Presidents are not kings. It's crazy to give one guy the power to just wave his magic wand and pardon anyone he wants for any reason he wants. Why should he have that power? Why should the president be empowered to just point at any random person and say, no, they don't get, you know, they can't go to jail. Not them. It's crazy. It's a power that can only be abused because it's inherently undemocratic and authoritarian. It's a holdover from a monarchic system that we fought a war to overthrow in this country, and so it shouldn't exist. That's the libertarian view. Right. I'm expressing kind of the. What we might call the libertarian view of this. On the other hand, you know, if you're, let's say, Michael Knowles, you would say that monarchy isn't a bad word. And just because something is monarchic doesn't make it bad. And besides, you'd argue the pardon power is a last line of defense against injustice. For example, we're all hoping that Trump pardons many of the J6ers even more. I'm hoping he pardons pro lifers who were persecuted by Biden. And if presidents can't pardon, then those people would be doomed. They would have no hope. So you could argue that the pardon power may be used in unjust ways sometimes, but it can also be a tool to remedy injustices. So those are the two arguments I hear, and I think there's credibility to both of them. My view is maybe a bit in between these two. I certainly wouldn't support abolishing the pardon now, which I assume would take a constitutional amendment anyway, which isn't gonna happen. But I wouldn't support it because Trump has to be able to use it for the reasons I just said and to address and undo many other cases where Biden persecuted and targeted his political enemies. But I do think there are some problems inherent to the system. The system where one dude wields the power to let anyone out of jail just by decreeing it, as long as they committed a federal crime or were accused of one, or not even accused, but as long as they may have theoretically. The problem, though, is the same one we find in many other areas of government. There's that famous quote you hear all the time, I think, from John Adams, who said that our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people and is inadequate to the governing of any other kind of people. And we're finding out why he said that and what exactly makes our system inadequate in that scenario. And this applies not just to the people, but also to those in power. In other words, the problem with the presidential pardon is that it was conceived and instated by moral, dignified, religious men. And as long as men like that have that power, there are certain lines they just won't cross. Doesn't mean it won't be abused. But there are just certain things they wouldn't do. But what happens when you, when you're governed by undignified, shameless, power mad nihilists? Well, then the pardoning power becomes a problem. And that's where we are. That's, that's how we ended up here, I think. All right. Daily Wire has this report. CNN devoted multiple segments on Thursday to coverage of a Washington Post report about President elect Donald Trump's defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth criticizing him for drinking beer during a Fox and friends segment about St. Patrick's Day. The story came just as NBC News ran a hit piece citing a number of anonymous sources but apparently not bothering to speak to his former co hosts and colleagues at Fox News accusing Hegseth of drinking to excess on a regular basis. Then the article points out that over on CNN for their New Year's Eve coverage, they get totally plastered. I mean, they get Anderson Cooper and his co hosts get annihilated on camera. And that apparently isn't a problem. So this is the latest allegation against Pete Hegseth that they're hitting him for drinking to excess, allegedly drinking on air. Here's one of those CNN segments.