A recent survey showed that half of college students approve of the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
The poll, released by Generation Lab in January, asked 1,026 college students for their opinions on the murder from Dec.19-23.
Of those surveyed, 15 percent said they see Thompson’s cold-blooded murder as “totally justified” and 33 percent said they view it as “somewhat justified,” for a total of 48 percent.
[RELATED: University of Florida students host ‘Luigi Mangione look-alike contest’]
Regarding Luigi Mangione, the suspected murderer, 12 percent see him “extremely favorably” and 38 percent see him “somewhat favorably,” for a total of 38 percent.
Their opinions of the murdered victim were decidedly worse–52 percent see Thompson “somewhat negatively” and 29 percent “extremely negatively,” and 45 percent said they “sympathize more” with Luigi Mangione than with Thompson, compared to only 17 percent who sympathize more with the victim than the alleged murderer.
The poll’s findings come after another poll in December organized by Emerson Polling from Dec. 11-13, which found that 41 percent of college-age Americans view Thompson’s murder as “acceptable.”
Another December poll conducted by The Economist and YouGov also found that 39 percent of young Americans have a positive view of Mangione.
Mangione has been lionized by certain college and university professors.
Professor Nathan Moore of Northern Virginia Community College, for example, justified the murder, glorified Mangione, and seemed to justify the use of political violence in order to achieve leftist policy goals. Moore later apologized in a statement to Campus Reform, saying he did not want to “condone or encourage violence in any way,” and that he removed the videos in which he made his original inflammatory comments.
Julia Alekseyeva, a socialist professor at the University of Pennsylvania, also glorified Mangione and called him an “icon,” though she also later apologized and called her original comments “completely insensitive and inappropriate,” adding: “I do not condone violence and I am genuinely regretful of any harm the posts have caused.”
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
