Last Wednesday at 6.45am, the CEO of health insurance company UnitedHealthcare was assassinated in the street outside the Manhattan Hilton where he had been staying. Surveillance footage showed the shooter masked, wearing a nondescript hoodie, and using a silenced pistol.
On Monday, Luigi Mangione was arrested at a Pennsylvania McDonalds. A worker called police based on the resemblance to the security camera footage.
Mangione had major back surgery as an adolescent. It’s not clear if this is linked to his targeting of the health insurance executive.
An unverified manifesto has also appeared online. It criticises UnitedHealthcare in the context of neuropathy and failed treatments suffered by the mother of the manifesto author.
Mangione was private-school educated and from a well-known Baltimore family, with his cousin sitting in the state legislature.
Since his name was released, amateur investigators have dug up a tonne of material from Mangione’s quite prolific online presence.
The most striking is a Goodreads review of Ted Kanczynski the Unabomber’s manifesto. Mangione wrote that Kanczynski “maimed innocent people” and was “rightfully imprisoned.”
He then pasted a long quote from a Redditor about Kanczynski. The quote says that Kanczynski “had the balls to recognise that peaceful protest has gotten us nowhere, and at the end of the day he’s probably right.”
The quote and the review end: “‘Violence never solved anything’ is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.”
The original text was written and posted on Reddit in the ostensibly mainstream r/climate forum in response to a prompt about Kaczynski. “Kudos to your comment for helping inspire real action,” one highly-rated reply said to the original post in the aftermath of Mangione’s arrest.
Unsurprisingly, Mangione’s approval for violent political action is a recurrent theme. He retweeted dialogue from the Batman trilogy.
Joker: “If you kill me, you’ll save all those people.”
Batman: “If I kill you, that means I’m no different from you.”
Joker: “Have you ever heard of the trolley problem?
Elsewhere, Mangione’s online present has a disaffected Fight Club energy. In one long post, he speculated on how Japan could resolve its “fertility crisis” by encouraging sports and “real human interaction” and regulating pornography culture.
Like a minor version of the “decolonization is not a metaphor” tweets in support of the 7 October 2023 attacks, the assassination has revealed substantial rhetorical support for political violence among the US left.
I suggest this is the underbelly of the US left categorising everything from offensive speech to economic inequality as violence, or structural violence. What’s forgotten is that actual violence is so much more harmful than a negative statistical outcome.
Generalised political violence is not only a nightmare to live through, but is also tremendously difficult to uproot. There is a timeline very close to this one in which Donald Trump’s head was blown off and JD Vance is the president-elect. Luigi Mangione’s supporters might have cheered Trump’s attempted assassin, but that timeline is a much darker place than where we find ourselves right now.
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