New York police have charged 26-year-old Luigi Mangione with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, five days after a masked gunman shot him to death on a Manhattan street.
Police arrested Mangione in Pennsylvania on Monday. The alleged killer was carrying a gun, a silencer, a fake ID matching the one person of interest used to check into a hostel before the murder, and a handwritten manifesto mentioning UnitedHealthcare by name.
Mangione cut off contact with his friends and family in June, according to multiple sources, prompting his mother to file a missing person’s report in November. The young man’s background explains neither his mysterious disappearance nor his alleged capacity to commit murder. By most metrics, Mangione had everything going for him.
Born to a wealthy family, Mangione graduated valedictorian of his 2016 high school class at the prestigious and expensive Gilman School. He subsequently graduated the University of Pennsylvania, according to The New York Times, with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science.
Though social media posts indicate Mangione experienced debilitating back pain beginning in 2022, he underwent successful spinal surgery for the problem almost a year before he dropped off the map. On Reddit, Mangione claimed the procedure had alleviated his pain almost immediately.
The three-page document Pennsylvania police discovered in Mangione’s backpack suggests the author, presumably Mangione himself, had developed a deep hatred for health care companies and their oppressive influence on Americans.
After assuring the police they acted alone, the writer accuses insurance companies, specifically UnitedHealthcare, of “abus[ing] our country for immense profit.”
The writer claims such companies “get away with it” because “the American public has allowed them [to],” and declares himself the first to confront these “power games” with “such brutal honesty.”
“I do apologize for any strife or traumas but it had to be done,” The New York Post quotes the document. “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”
Mangione’s social media activity carries little, if any, of the manifesto’s malice. It does, however, suggest Mangione identified with some anti-establishment ideas.
In April, he quoted Aldous Huxley’s famed critique of capitalism, Brave New World, on X. On Goodreads, a website where readers share and review books, he quoted “Unabomber” Ted Kaczinsky’s manifesto.
Mangione further praised Kaczyinski’s ramblings in a Goodreads review.
Mangione’s motive for allegedly killing Thompson might be opaque, but the manifesto’s justification for murder should sound familiar.
It’s all about helping the oppressed overthrow the oppressors.
This is the same worldview that drove America’s descent into antisemitism. When Hamas killed more than 1,200 Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, student groups at elite schools like Columbia and Harvard justified the massacre by deeming Israel “the oppressor” and the terror group “the oppressed.”
This narrative prompted activist and student groups to make supportive graphics and chants referencing the parachutes Hamas soldiers used to gun down civilians across the Israeli border. It allowed journalists, activists and professors to justify Hamas’ actions as “decolonization.”
It also enflamed the prosecution of Daniel Penny, the young man who restrained a man threatening violence on the New York subway. Penny faced criminal charges after the altercation contributed to the death of Jordan Neely, a man with schizophrenia and a history of violence.
Many characterized Penny’s actions as those of a white oppressor against an oppressed black man. When a jury acquitted Penny of criminally negligent homicide on Monday, Black Lives Matter activist Hawk Newsome opined:
Here, Newsome endorses violence against white people as the justified retribution of oppressed black people.
One of the myriad problems with this ideology is its lack of moral absolutes; The morality of violence depends solely on whether the person being hurt is an “oppressor” or someone being “oppressed.”
The assassination of Brian Thompson is the logical product of this moral ambiguity. His life depended on one person’s unilateral assessment of his role in society. Once the killer identified Thompson as a parasite, his worldview gave him moral authority to carry out a death sentence.
It’s easy to dismiss Thompson’s murder as the actions of an unhinged idealogue. But it that were true, why did the internet erupt in praise of the masked vigilante?
More on the morally-bankrupt celebration of murder in Part 2.
Additional Articles and Resources
A Year’s Slide into Antisemitism, Examined
Manhood is on Trial in the Daniel Penny Case
Indoctrination Station: New York State Education Department Pushes Critical Theory on Students
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