It's Monday, December 16, 2024. I'm Albert Mowler, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

The urgency of several worldview issues takes us back to two of the big stories of the last week.

This has to do, of course, number one,

with the arrest of Luigi Mangione, the lead suspect in the case of the murder of Brian Thompson,

the insurance executive days before in the city of New York, a cold-blooded, calculated killing

that took place with full film and documentation. The second issue has to do with Daniel

Penny, who was arrested in charges that go back to an incident on a subway car in which he put

a man who appeared to pose a threat into a chokehold that man eventually died. He was charged

with multiple crimes, but he was later found

not guilty by a New York jury of one of the charges. The other charges had been dropped,

but then came a spate of controversy, and it is unfolding with some very big issues we need to consider.

First of all, let's go back to the arrest of Luigi Mangione, and let's go back to the response to the murder,

because all of a sudden there are some big, big issues on the table.

Almost immediately, there was a scandal of a sort that all of a sudden began to develop

when announcements of the executive's murder were actually greeted with, thumbs- up, smiley faces, and furthermore,

even other more blatant signals of support for the murderer in this case rather than sympathy

for the murdered. You had headlines that appeared in the New York Times, quote,

the rage and glee that followed a CEO's killing should ring all alarms.

Even at the New Yorker, a headline, a man was murdered in cold blood, and you're laughing?

Well, at first glance, it might appear that this is mostly just a phenomenon of social media.

Because social media, especially with all the bots and the unnamed accounts and frankly all the reckless and even

worse than reckless things that happen just about every hour on social media. This appeared perhaps

...