Left-leaning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore doesn't support the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — but he feels the public anger this crime brought to the surface about the health insurance industry is "1,000 percent justified," reported The Independent.
Moore is well known for his 2007 documentary "Sicko," in which he explored how the U.S. health care system exploits and neglects vulnerable people. The accused killer of Thompson, Luigi Mangione, cited "Sicko" himself, saying it "illuminated the corruption and greed" of insurers.
Mangione himself comes from a family that is likely even wealthier than the slain CEO.
Since then, the landmark Affordable Care Act has reined in many of the worst ways health insurance companies used to abuse people — but that doesn't mean people don't still have reason to be angry, he said.
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“It’s not often that my work gets a killer five-star review from an actual killer,” Moore wrote in Substack. “Do I condemn murder? That’s an odd question. In Fahrenheit 9/11, I condemned the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi people and the senseless murder of our own American soldiers at the hands of our American government.”
The killing was undeniably wrong, he emphasized. That being said, “Some people have stepped forward to condemn this anger. I am not one of them. The anger is 1000 percent justified. It is long overdue for the media to cover it. It is not new. It has been boiling. And I’m not going to tamp it down or ask people to shut up. I want to pour gasoline on that anger.”
The public response to the killing has included a vocal chorus of online activists celebrating, as well as attacking anyone who helped police capture Mangione, with the McDonald's where he was caught getting hit with a deluge of bad reviews about "rats in the kitchen."
