HBO’s left-wing late-night host just defended a man who pleaded guilty to murder.

The entertainment industry’s contempt for ordinary American values keeps sinking to new lows.

And John Oliver’s on-air praise for an admitted killer should leave every decent person red with rage.

Oliver Calls a Confessed Killer “Hot” and Refuses to Condemn the Murder

During his recent return episode of Last Week Tonight on HBO, John Oliver devoted his main segment to UnitedHealthcare, timing it deliberately around the upcoming December sentencing of Luigi Mangione, who pleaded guilty to fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City in 2024.

But Oliver did not stop at criticizing an insurance company.

He looked straight into the camera and said, “Luigi is hot. There’s no way around that.”

Then he went further, telling his audience, “But it’s not just that Luigi was handsome. One reason many found it hard to completely condemn the murder is that so many Americans are furious with UnitedHealthcare.”

Read that again. A man who hosts a major television program on one of the most prestigious cable networks in the country just told his viewers that murdering a corporate executive is hard to completely condemn.

Mangione pleaded guilty. This is not a case where the facts are disputed. He admitted to the shooting. And Oliver’s response, on a nationally distributed program, was to call him attractive and suggest the killing carries some moral ambiguity worth exploring on television.

The left has spent two years making Mangione into a folk hero. Supporters showed up to his arraignment in shirts reading “I love Italian boys” and “Cougars for Luigi.” An Instagram account called him an “Ivy League hottie” and “the Robin Hood that we never knew that we needed.” A TikTok creator called him “a regular, everyday person becoming our hero, our vigilante.” Oliver cited all of this approvingly, as if the audience enthusiasm itself provides justification.

And a sign depicting Mangione as a saint was projected onto a New York City building. Oliver found this worth reporting with something closer to admiration than alarm.

Oliver Used a Killer’s Guilty Plea to Push Government-Run Healthcare

After running through anecdotal examples of UnitedHealthcare denying claims, Oliver concluded that “UnitedHealth Group should not be allowed to exist” and called for the United States to adopt universal healthcare modeled on systems like Canada’s.

This is the predictable endpoint of the argument Oliver spent the whole episode constructing. Start with sympathy for Mangione. Move to outrage at the insurance company. Arrive at single-payer government-run healthcare as the solution.

But government-run healthcare does not eliminate the problem Oliver claims to be outraged about. It relocates the decision-making from a private company to a government bureaucracy, strips patients of the ability to seek alternatives, and produces exactly the rationing, wait times, and denial of care that Oliver pretends he finds unconscionable. Canada’s system, which Oliver praised, regularly leaves patients waiting months or years for procedures that Americans can access quickly. The government’s answer to care denial is simply to make it official policy rather than a corporate decision.

The real scandal is not that one insurance company denies claims. The real scandal is that a regulatory and tax environment built by both parties has produced a market so distorted that patients feel trapped. Market-based reforms, health savings accounts, and genuine provider competition would give Americans actual options. What Oliver wants instead is to hand all of those decisions to a federal bureaucracy that answers to no one and fires no one when it fails.

But Oliver did not engage with any of that. He used a man who admitted to murdering someone in broad daylight on a Manhattan sidewalk as the emotional engine for a single-payer pitch.

Hollywood Has Made a Celebrity Out of a Man Who Admitted to Killing Someone

The broader pattern here deserves attention. Oliver is not some fringe voice. Last Week Tonight reaches millions of viewers. HBO promotes it. Awards shows celebrate it. And the man hosting it just spent a significant chunk of his return broadcast treating an admitted killer as a complex, sympathetic, and attractive figure whose crimes are difficult to “completely condemn.”

The entertainment industry operates on the assumption that its political instincts are morally superior to those of the Americans who watch them. That assumption has produced late-night programming that functions less as comedy and more as left-wing advocacy with a laugh track. The ratings decline that has followed is not accidental. Americans watch to be entertained. They do not tune in to be told that a man who shot someone in the back deserves their ambivalence because the victim worked for a company that made decisions they disliked.

There is also something worth saying about the selective moral outrage on display. The same cultural institutions that treat Mangione with sympathy have spent years demanding that Americans condemn political violence in the strongest possible terms. They built entire media cycles around the events of January 6, treating every participant as a dangerous extremist. But an admitted killer who targeted a corporate executive gets the “Luigi is hot” treatment and a national television segment weighing whether the murder is really so condemnable after all.

The double standard is not subtle. It reflects a genuine belief, common in certain left-wing circles, that violence against the right targets is understandable and perhaps even inspiring.

Oliver capped the segment by invoking Canada’s healthcare system as a model to follow. He did not mention that Canadian patients are routinely placed on waiting lists so long that some die before receiving treatment. He did not mention that Canadian courts have found their own government’s healthcare rationing unconstitutional in certain cases because it denied citizens access to care they could not legally seek privately. The outcome of handing control over life-and-death medical decisions to a government bureaucracy is not better care. It is managed scarcity with no accountability and no exit.

Calling a confessed killer hot. Arguing his crime is hard to fully condemn. Using the whole exercise to pitch socialized medicine. That is the product HBO is proud of. And the out-of-touch elites who produce it and celebrate it could not be more removed from the values of working Americans who actually have to live with the consequences of the policies Oliver promotes.

Sources: Breitbart, “HBO Host John Oliver Gushes Over Admitted Murderer Luigi Mangione: ‘Luigi Is Hot'”; NewsBusters, “John Oliver on Mangione: ‘Luigi Is Hot'”; Variety, “John Oliver Takes Swipe at David Ellison and His ‘Business Daddy’ Larry Ellison on ‘Last Week Tonight'”