How Luigi Mangione became a hero to many

The killing of Brian Thompson - the late UnitedHealthcare CEO - raises the question of which killings are seen as tolerable, and which are not.

Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of Brian Thompson, the late CEO of US health insurer UnitedHealthcare - well, you’d have to have taken an impromptu excursion to the Andromeda galaxy if this story has passed you by.

Now to avoid any misunderstanding, or indeed any claims that I’m glorifying or inciting violence, I don’t support killing people. That being a consistent theme in my work, it has been interesting to observe that many of the people who are focused on this specific killing as a particularly obscene outrage are often the very same people who have actively advocated the industrial scale slaughter of the Palestinian people for the last 14 months.

On the subject of which killings are seen are more or less tolerable: an article in The Atlantic - whose editor, incidentally, is a former Israeli prison guard - is headlined: ‘Decivilization May Already Be Under Way’ with the subheading: ‘The brazen murder of a CEO in Midtown Manhattan—and the cheering reaction to his execution—amounts to a blinking-and-blaring warning signal for a society that has become already too inured to bloodshed.’

Well, as one twitter user, puts it:

“Surely it suggests more in the way of "decivilization" when the world's leading génocidaire can hardly get through a speech to Congress for all the standing ovations?”

That’s referring to how the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was loudly cheered and serenaded by US politicians back in July when he addressed them, after having exterminated tens of thousands of Palestinians - and indeed, given ‘decivilization’ is mentioned, having eradicated the foundation stones of civilisation in Gaza.

And if we’re discussing killing machines, that - more to the point - surely includes how the privatised US healthcare system - and as a socialist, it’s systems I’m interested in, rather than individuals - has condemned so many Americans to death. This is what 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Engels would have called “social murder”, anger at which has clearly driven the response to Luigi Mangione’s violent act.

A lot of discussion has focused on, well, people lusting after him. That’s been helped along by buff shirtless pictures, and the truly bizarre decision of the Pennsylvania police to keep releasing mug shots of him has fuelled it too, some of those comments veering into pornographic territory.

Here’s one example of this on TikTok.

What I’m interested in is what could be called the Luigi Mangione Phenomenon. He has become celebrated on social media in a way which almost never happens with killers, unsurprisingly. Contemporary killers are rarely venerated, and this killing is rather different most.

Previous statistics from the FBI showed most Americans were killed by someone they know; they also showed 42% were killed during arguments, while another 23% were in criminal circumstances such as rape, robbery or burglary.

And if we’re going by what is officially defined as terrorism, the figures show it’s far right extremists have committed more ideologically motivated homicides than so-called “far left” or radical Islamist extremists, with 227 such attacks since 1990, compared 42 attacks by those termed far left

Now this is not it should emphasised a “far left attack”.

It’s always interesting when someone who does not have the ‘normal profile’ of a killer becomes a killer, In this case, it’s someone who is not - apparently - a leftist in any meaningful sense at all. He seems like the sort of guy on a dating app like Hinge to select ‘Moderate’ from the drop down box, a sort of tech bro.

He’s someone whose friends have come out to laud him on a human level. One of them, Tracy Moel, posted this clip of him:

She wrote alongside it:

"Luigi Mangione is probably the most google keyword today. But before all of this, for a while, it was also the only name whose facetime calls I would pick up. He was one of my absolute best, closest, most trusted friends. He was also the only person who, at 1am on a work day, in this video, agreed to go to the store with drunk me, to look for mochi ice cream."

Another posted a picture of them together with the caption:

“he’s not a monster. I can’t put into words on how worried I am for you right now. They have this story all upside down.”

He seems to have been an athletic frat boy from a wealthy background who academically excelled and who was well liked, with no prior evidence of violence, who studied computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, who was into making computer games.

What we do know is that, as the Daily Beast piece together, he was laid off by a Californian car resale site in 2023, and dealt with debilitating back pain requiring surgery, that he was sometimes bedridden which one friend says was ‘heinous’ because of the ‘giant screws’ needed.

Indeed, an X ray of his back with those screws can be seen adorning his twitter header.

He’s been reported to be an active Reddit user, often posting in Reddit communities about spinal pain.

That reportedly comments such as:

“When my spondy went bad on me last year (23M) it was completely devastating as a young athletic person.”

The ‘spondy’ - i had to google - refers to the spine.

He also posted:

“Keep trying different surgeons. ‘Nobody will operate on my back until I’m at least 40’ is nonsense coming from a medical professional who lacks perspective.”

“Tell them you are ‘unable to work’ / do your jo.“We live in a capitalist society. I’ve found that the medical industry responds to these key words far more urgently than you describing unbearable pain and how it’s impacting your quality of life.”

He’s undeniably won a significant following, including amongst his fellow inmates, and while I think it’s fair to say we know a lot of convicts will get hassle in prison, that is unlikely to apply to Mangiole - as evidenced on US cable show NewsNation:

Respect abounds on social media. US drag queen Aquaria tweets:

hold up…. @JoeBiden … I see what you’ve done for Hunter, and I think the American people would like to request one small final favor pwease

Another tweets:

We finally have someone to replace all those Christopher Columbus statues with.

Well, for a start Christopher Colombus is responsible for far more murders than Luigi Mangiole.

Right-wing commentators are outraged. The headline for Zoe Strimpel’s piece in the Telegraph speaks for itself:

“Luigi Mangione’s disgusting Gen-Z fan club makes me fear for our society’s future”

The subheading goes on:

Millions are salivating over the alleged assassin of Brian Thompson in a disgusting display of our society’s disintegration.

Dramatic!

But the best example of the let’s say differing approaches to outrage came from Fox News. listen to this:

Daniel Penny of course is the former Marine who was acquitted of fatally choking a homeless man on the New York City subway.

The fact is, the US health care system - dominated by private health care insurers who exist to turn the most basic human needs into an excuse for profits - kills people and inflicts terrible suffering, which is why this killing has - let’s just say it - struck a chord

Let’s read the leaked manifesto of Luigi Mangione, posted in fuel on the Substack of top notch US journalist Ken Klippenstein:

Exclusive: Luigi's Manifesto

“To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

You can see what this tapping into. 51% of Americans have a very or somewhat negative view of the healthcare industry, with 31% opting for very or somewhat positive, while 62% correctly believe all Americans getting healthcare is the responsibility of the federal government, with 36% disagreeing.

The bullets used by Luigi Mangiole were reportedly inscribed with ‘deny’, ‘depose’ and ‘defend’ - words well known by Americans, associated with refusals to offer health care by health insurance companies.

The US healthcare system is wasteful and inefficient, requiring a huge bureaucracy, money which could be better spent on - say! - providing decent healthcare.

As the National Women’s Law Centre put it back in may 2023 - Refusals to Provide Health Care Threaten the Health and Lives of Patients Nationwide

Back in 2020 it was revealed as much as a quarter of the population were delaying getting the medical help they needed because of surging costs - with the inevitable associated avoidable deaths that accompany such a fact.

To understand the sentiments stirred up here, it’s worth looking at this TikTtok of the parent of a terminally ill 4 year old child.

The fact is that mass social murder is baked into capitalist societies in different ways, which can be seen in particularly stark terms in the more unrestrained capitalism of the United States.

We’ve mentioned the mass killing of people abroad, facilitated by our politicians, legitimised by our media outlets - and then there’s the mass killing of people at home by depriving them of their most basic and fundamental needs - like, well, yes, health care.

The left has an answer here: mass movements which use collective power to transform society, rather than lopping off rich individuals at the top.

Sure, it is objectively true that this killing has certainly raised attention of the horrors of the US healthcare system. Whether that now ends up as a net saver of lives as a result: well that remains to be seen.

But with such profoundly unequal and broken societies, if we fail to address the catastrophic distribution of wealth and power and rights - that is, through collective movements which secure tangible wins - then this sort of violence will become much more common.