The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson portends something dark in the reaction of the public, New York University professor Scott Galloway told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Wednesday: a deep-seated rage over inequality in America and the risk that the nation could be heading for instability over it.
This comes as people not only celebrate the murder online but target people who are perceived as helping the police bring the suspected killer to justice.
"Scott, I mean, were you surprised by the kind of rage and vitriol that we saw online after this murder?" asked Cooper. "I mean, the idea that a McDonald's employee or police officers who arrested this guy are getting threatened is crazy."
"Yeah, on initial blush, anytime you see the murder of a — and this was an innocent man, and the kind of despair that his family and anguish is going to feel, yeah, it's incredibly upsetting and shocking," said Galloway.
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He continued by saying that, to him, was the story — not what was going through the shooter's head.
"The story was, is really about the response. But when you think about it, when you go on or think about its kind of second-level effects, I think it all reverse-engineers to one thing, Anderson. And that is — quite frankly, is income inequality. And that is when we get to the levels of income inequality we have in the United States, throughout history, they've always self-corrected. That's the good news. The bad news is the means of self-correction are usually one of three things: either war, famine, or revolution."
"I would argue that this, along with some other movements, whether it's Black Lives Matter or the Me Too movement, are really going after the 1 percent," Galloway added. "And I just think there's a lot of rage out there ... two-thirds of bankruptcies, medical debt plays some role in. So the rage, as you think about it, I don't want to say what the way it manifested is understood, but you can understand the rage, if you will."
Watch the video below or at the link here.