(Alleged!) Heartthrob Assassin Luigi Mangione Not The Leftist You Were Looking For
His Twitter feed suggests he was more of an 'Intellectual Dark Web' kind of guy.
On December 6, writer and Elon Musk acolyte Tim Urban tweeted, “We live amongst a good number of people who are no different than those who ordered thousands of beheadings during the French Revolution. They just don’t currently have the power to do what they want.”
This was accompanied by a screenshot of a Taylor Lorenz tweet reading “And people wonder why we want these executives dead,” referring to the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield’s decision to not cover anesthesia past a certain time limit.
I imagine it probably surprises Urban to learn that the alleged assassin Luigi Mangione, currently under arrest on suspicion of shooting the United Healthcare CEO dead clearly admired Urban, retweeting him and sharing links to his work on a fairly constant basis.
I know, right? We all assumed he’d be some kind of left-wing communist or anarchist, or at least someone with a long history of being angry about our lack of universal healthcare. At least a Bernie guy, or something. But no. Judging by Mangione’s Xitter feed, he was far more inclined towards people like Urban and Jonathan Haidt — right-leaning centrists of the Bari Weiss-ish “I used to be a liberal, but then people started demanding too much equality and I had to bail!” variety.
Mangione wasn’t concerned with class warfare so much as he was concerned with the usual issues that that type of guy is concerned with — things like birth rates and “wokeism” and misunderstanding what we mean when we say “toxic masculinity.”
I’m not all that surprised by this development, because I actually think someone with Mangione’s sort of intellectual (and economic!) background is almost more likely to be broken by our healthcare system than those of us who have been aware of its horrors for years now. Not to be vicious, but his previous concerns were not real problems. They are problems made up by men who are so fucking blind to the actual suffering in the world that they have made hobbies or even actual careers out of of being outraged over people responding to or trying to alleviate suffering, oppression and inequalities in ways they find personally off-putting.
Of course, it’s also worth noting, in light of his actions this week, that Mangione also retweeted a few posts about “the trolley problem.”
His last activity on Twitter was in June of this year — a couple of retweets of talks and discussions by Jonathan Haidt and Peter Thiel — around the time some of his friends and family report that he went “radio silent” on them.
While we don’t have the full story yet, what we do know so far is that Mangione had a back injury, which was exacerbated by a painful spinal surgery that left him in even more pain. Spinal fusion surgery can cost anywhere from $60,000 to $250,000 without insurance, and insurance companies have been known to do pretty much anything possible to avoid covering them. We don’t know for a fact that his claim was denied, but it does seem pretty likely.
We also know that, after that, Mangione delved into books about both back pain and the health insurance/medical industry, and that he cut off contact with his friends and family. We know that, in his manifesto, he condemned companies that “continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.”
I don’t actually disagree with Tim Urban’s comparison of people today who are furious about healthcare with the people of the French Revolution, but not in the way that he means it. I just think there’s only so much misery people can take, and that it is irrational for anyone to think that they can simply go on forever pushing people past their threshold for pain, poverty, hunger, oppression or injustice without them eventually pushing back, and often pushing back with violence. The term “hangry” exists for a reason.
These kinds of gross inequalities can ultimately only be resolved one of three ways: the genocide of the oppressed group, violent revolution against the oppressors, or agitation leading to a significant nonviolent social, legal, or economic change. Most of us tend to prefer that third one!
Sure, there are those (and Mangione may at one point have been one of them) who clearly pine for a solution in which the oppressed graciously accept their lot, never doing anything to annoy or inconvenience their oppressors, to the point that said oppressors are so dazzled by their selflessness and nobility that they decide to return the favor by treating them better — but, unfortunately for them, in the history of the world, that has not happened, even once.
Otto Von Bismarck famously adopted the first socialized healthcare system in response to the fact that people in his country were so poor and so miserable that socialism was starting to look really good to them. The New Deal was, in part, a response to the rise of socialism, communism, anarchism, and Huey Long-style populism — and it worked. People were made comfortable enough that radical change and revolution lost their appeal.
I’m not saying that everyone is now going to (or should) rise up and kill all of the insurance executives, but I am saying that our society is playing with fire in trying to keep this going forever.
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This guy went from zero to Michael Avenatti in 0.3 Scaramuccis.