America’s worst journalist, Taylor Lorenz, knows who the villain is in the shocking Midtown murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

It’s Brian Thompson.

Health insurance is terrible, she says, “and people wonder why we want these executives dead.”

Lorenz made a name for herself at the Washington Post by revealing the identities of conservative online commentators with whom she disagreed, and then getting very annoyed when people criticized her for it.

She left the post after calling President Biden a “war criminal.”

Your defense?

Hey, it was just a meme!

So it’s tempting to attribute this atrocity to a dingbat – someone who criticizes people who don’t still wear a COVID mask as “polluting the air” – but unfortunately Lorenz is not alone.

It was customary among fellow travelers on Bluesky and Reddit to celebrate the assassination.

“The most important thing” about the murder, one wrote, “is that no people were hurt.”

The father of two boys “deserved to die,” others said, as they raved about his killer, speculated about his motives and wondered whether Timothée Chalamet would play him in the film.

Only a few even nodded at a “yes and” argument, lamenting the death of someone and at the same time criticizing the health insurance system.

No, this man they didn’t know was “evil.”

“The jokes about United’s CEO aren’t really about him,” wrote journalist Ken Klippenstein.

“They are about the predatory health care system that he embodied and about which Americans feel deep pain and humiliation.”

Is it?

Or do the jokes suggest a society so desensitized by the crudity of online discussions and so disconnected from kindness that a jeering mob cheers a man’s murder and screams for more?