On CNN, approving of murder is hardly any worse than voting for Donald Trump. Indeed, voting for Trump may be even less acceptable, given how CNN Senior Correspondent Donie O’Sullivan framed this question to Taylor Lorenz: “I’m sure you wouldn’t like to be compared to a Trump supporter,” O’Sullivan reassured her, “but some of how people cannot understand why people have sympathies for Mangione” — that’s Luigi Mangione, killer of health-care executive Brian Thompson — “strikes me as the same as a lot of media not understanding why people support Trump.” Lorenz, a former Washington Post and New York Times reporter who’s now an online “influencer,” provoked all the outrage she was hoping for with her sympathetic explanation for Mangione’s popularity on the radical left. “You’re going to see women, especially, that feel, like, oh my God, here’s this man who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart, he’s a person who seems like a morally good man, which is hard to find,” she gushed to O’Sullivan. Lorenz is nothing if not an attention sponge — she may not have a major media gig anymore, but her journalism has always been about making the headlines more than reporting on them. Yet her appearance on CNN’s “MisinfoNation: Extreme America” Sunday was as notable for O’Sullivan’s questions as for Lorenz’s aiming-to-shock answers. If indeed voting for Trump and making a hero out of a murderer both arise “because a lot of people are just really really desperate,” as O’Sullivan opined on air, then the real story CNN ought to be covering is the life-and-death difference between the political right and the violent left. Lorenz accepted O’Sullivan’s premise: Trump voters and Mangione-lovers are alike, she agreed, because “They want somebody to take on the system. They want somebody to tear down these barbaric establishment institutions.” Brian Thompson wasn’t an institution — he was a man whose slaughter hasn’t changed anything. Under Trump, the populist right organized to win at the ballot box and use lawful authority to shake up institutions, which is what the president is now doing. The Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol by Trump supporters was uncharacteristic of what has otherwise been a nonviolent political movement for reform. But violence is all too characteristic of left-wing activism in the streets — and of the mentality behind it, as the Lorenz interview testifies. Faced with defeat at the polls and an administration using its mandate to change institutions, the left has quickly despaired of politics and turned toward violence, escalating from vandalism to arson attacks, as in New Mexico recently, against Tesla automobiles and Republican headquarters. Lorenz and O’Sullivan aren’t tossing Molotov cocktails, of course, but they’re content to put a murderer’s fanclub on the same level as Trump’s voters. Progressives who shun violence should be the loudest to protest that moral equivalence. But even the non-violent left has habitually characterized Trump and his supporters in terms that cry out for bloodshed — after all, how could anyone stand by if the country really was in the midst of a “fascist” takeover? The glamorization of Mangione shows another side of the left’s penchant for violence over politics: It’s romantic and exciting in a way that electioneering isn’t. While the political right dreams of fine-tuning tariffs, the Taylor Lorenz left fantasizes about “this man who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome . . .” Like Che Guevara, the bloody Communist revolutionary who found immortality as a college-leftist pinup, Mangione mixes sex and violence with a narcissistic radical’s sense of self-righteousness. It’s a brew Lorenz finds intoxicating — and maybe CNN does, too. Certainly it’s good for buzz. The Trump movement has its emotional and aesthetic side, but it’s channeled into actual politics in GOP primaries and general elections. And its more extravagant expressions are found not in the streets, but in memes and social-media rants. The left is different, increasingly channeling emotion away from candidates and policy disputes and toward street action and violent fantasies — whether fearful fantasies of a Nazi takeover, or thrilling visions of a murderous uprising against power, or both. Instead of presenting “extreme America” documentaries that treat Trump voters and a murderer’s apologists as essentially the same, CNN would do its viewers a service by showing them the difference between a politically effective right and the dangerously adolescent left. Yet the same sensationalism that sustains Taylor Lorenz may be all CNN knows how to sell, too. Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.