Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. This episode, we’re doing something a little bit different. We thought we’d do an experiment. And so I’m very pleased to be joined by my colleague Douglas Murray. Douglas is senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. He’s a journalist and the bestselling author of eight books. Now eight books, right? Yeah, I think that’s the total.
Douglas Murray: Right.
Charles Fain Lehman: Including The War on the West, The Madness of Crowds, and his most recent book On Democracies and Death Cults, which came out earlier this year. And we thought… We had the opportunity to pick Douglas’s brain. And so we thought we’d have a one-on-one conversation, talk about some of the issues that have come up on the show, the sort of core to what MI and CJ are interested in, but also that what you’re interested in. So thank you for taking the time.
Douglas Murray: It’s great to be with you.
Charles Fain Lehman: So I want to start us off by turning our attention to, I think, a story that drives to a number of themes. It’s been a big focus of ours at CJ, and I’m curious for your thoughts on. As you may be aware, last week, New Yorkers were shocked by a mass shooting at 345 Park Ave. It took the lives of four New Yorkers, including an NYPD officer, an off-duty NYPD officer, the perpetrator, guy named Shane Tamura, who killed himself during the act. It seems like based on the reporting that has come out since then, he was trying to target the NFL offices in the building. He believed himself to have a football-related injury and was trying to draw attention to that. At least that’s the theory of the case. New details have emerged since we last talked about this on the show, which indicate that he had a long history of mental illness, including two police visits back in Nevada where he’s from over fears he was armed and suicidal.
But part of what has drawn my attention to this story is the internet sort of in the immediate aftermath lit up in celebration of the murder of Wesley LePatner, one of Tamura’s victims, who’s a Blackstone executive who’s involved in their work on real estate. Social media users posted that she had been, I think the phrase is Luigied, evoking Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson. So there are a bunch of different threads that I want to unpack here with you and get your thoughts on.
I think we can start with the story itself. I think there’s something really evocative. My colleague, sometime panelist Jesse Arm raised this to me the other day, which is like, this is a guy who was walking down the street in the middle of Manhattan carrying an assault rifle. Nobody stopped him. He walked into a building. He had a history of serious mental illness. You’ve written about urban disorder, urban dysfunction. You and I have talked about this before. I’m curious about what you see that incident as symbolizing, how you think about how we get to a point where a guy can basically a crazy guy can unchecked kill four people in the middle of Manhattan and this is in some sense is normal.
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Author: Ruth King
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