World view - Brian Thompson, not Luigi Mangione, is the real working-class hero

One of the more moving stories in The New York Times last week is an account of the life of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO who was gunned down on Dec. 4 outside of a New York hotel.

- By BRET STEPHENS

Thompson "grew up in a working-class family in Jewell, Iowa," a tiny farming community north of Des Moines, Amy Julia Harris and Ernesto Londoño reported.

"His mother was a beautician, according to family friends, and his father worked at a facility to store grain."

Thompson's childhood was spent "going row by row through the fields to kill weeds with a knife, or working manual labor at turkey and hog farms."

Those details are worth bearing in mind as some people seek to cast his killing as a tale of justified, or at least understandable, fury against faceless corporate greed.

One ex-reporter, Taylor Lorenz, said she felt "joy" at the killing. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, offered that "violence is never the answer" but "people can only be pushed so far."