By Dean Maddox, Public Safety & Crime Reporter

If you want to know how far off the rails American politics has gone, look at the circus outside the Manhattan courthouse right now.

There is a crowd of self-proclaimed progressives rallying — not for justice for a man who was murdered in cold blood — but for Stephen Mangione, the man on trial for stabbing the CEO of United Healthcare to death.

They’re mad because they claim police “violated Mangione’s rights.”

And the reason they’re putting on this insane clown show is because his victim was wealthy.

That is the entire ideology.

Let us be clear: There is nothing moral about celebrating a murderer because his victim was a CEO.

This is not activism. This is moral collapse masquerading as politics. And once you see that sickness, you realize it is everywhere.

Scroll Facebook for five minutes and it is the same envy dressed up as economic theory.

Look at a recent Wall Street Journal post explaining why top CEOs make what they do. The report was a straightforward breakdown of responsibility, risk, scale, and performance. But the comments section? A jealous echo chamber:

“Executives are not wealth creators.”
“It is the workers.”
“The ruling class manipulates everything.”

If these people truly believed what they are saying, they would be running their own companies instead of arguing online. But they are not. Because running even a small business — let alone a Fortune 50 corporation — takes a kind of discipline and pressure tolerance most people simply do not have.

They would collapse the moment someone asked them to stay past 5:00 PM.

This is not actually political philosophy or a movement. It’s jealousy masquerading as virtue.

The kind of jealousy that convinces people a homicide suspect is a folk hero if the victim had a high income.
The kind of jealousy that teaches Americans to despise achievement while worshipping grievance.
The kind of jealousy that wants equality, not by lifting people up, but by pulling successful people down.

And here is the truth no one on TikTok will admit:

Most of the people screaming about CEOs do not hate them because they are evil. They hate them because they are proof that hard work, risk, and responsibility still matter, and that stings far worse than any injustice they claim to care about.

This is a generation that got “participation trophies” growing up. They’re used to being told how wonderful they are and how much they deserve. Now that their gender studies degree only earned them a job at Starbucks they want revenge. They want to take others down to make themselves feel better.

America was never built on that spirit. This country was built on the idea that anyone can rise if they work, sacrifice, and take risks. Not that you should celebrate when someone more successful ends up dead.

If defending a murder suspect because of the victim’s tax bracket is what passes for activism now, then yes:

We are rotting from the inside out.