The recent shooting death of the UHC CEO has sparked a rare moment of bipartisan unity: Americans, regardless of political leanings, agree that our healthcare system is a disaster. This unity, however, poses a significant threat to the status quo, where corporate interests thrive on division and distraction.
Ben Shapiro’s attempt to defend the late CEO and condemn the crowd’s reaction was met with fury—not just from the left but also from his own audience. This backlash reveals something crucial: many Americans, even conservatives, are fed up with a system that prioritizes corporate profits over human lives.
For decades, political commentators like Shapiro have fueled outrage over social issues—LGBTQ rights, bathroom debates, and book bans—not to solve these “problems” but to distract voters from uniting over the systemic issues that hurt us all. It’s easier to rage about a rainbow flag than to explain why your insulin costs more than your car payment.
The graphic on the right showing Americans wildly overestimating minority group sizes highlights the success of this strategy. Fear and division are manufactured to keep us from asking hard questions about healthcare, wages, or corporate influence. And when the outrage machine falters, as it did this week, the cracks in the system start to show.
For a brief moment, we’re reminded that the real fight isn’t left vs. right—it’s people vs. profit-driven systems. The question is whether this moment of clarity will last or if the outrage machine will pull us back into the cycle of distraction because the last thing those in power want is 350 million Americans to realize their collective bargaining power.
Until we stop letting them divide us, the system will remain unchanged, and the people will continue to pay the price.
