The cult of Luigi Mangione shows no sign of wavering. Now deified in street murals as far from Manhattan as Bethnal Green, every image of the alleged assassin triggers an outpouring of affection and eroticism. We can presume the same will emerge from his latest federal court hearing, scheduled today (though photos from this appearance are forbidden). “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 he’s this morally good man, which is hard to find,” the journalist Taylor Lorenz said on CCN this week, discussing Mangione. Months on from his arrest, why does he continue to inspire such devotion?
My complicity in his cult began from soon after I first learned his name. In the days after United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated in Manhattan, I was in Brooklyn meeting Ben, a guy I had dated for a while. This was our inaugural attempt to become friends. It was going ok, a little awkward, until we got onto the subject of the manhunt underway, at which point we both lit up with interest. It couldn’t be – could it? – that the motive behind the murder was actually ideological. Surely the killing would turn out to be far more prosaic, carried out by some guy whose wife Thompson had slept with.
We had spent the night of the election together, Ben and I, not so long ago. That night, it felt grindingly clear that the structures of power that define the US are so far removed from those of us who wish to change them, that the only logical option was to ignore them as much as possible. People were discussing the concept of the “inner émigré”, one who has enough privilege and enough despair to turn away from a public sphere that is as fascist and decayed as ours, and who lives only in the private realm.
So it seemed utterly implausible to me that the murder might have been the result of moral conviction. Was it possible that someone would see the state of this world and take such action about it, with the near certainty of ending or ruining their own life? The following day it emerged that the bullets used to kill Brian Thompson had been inscribed with the words “Deny”, “Defend” and “Depose”, a reference to the tactics used by healthcare companies to evade payouts. “Huh!” I texted Ben, “I guess it was ideological.” Later that day, once viral images of the suspected gunman – his mask pulled down, grinning at a hostel receptionist – circulated, I said: “Oh my God, and he’s hot as well.”
I wasn’t the only one to notice. Mangione’s Twitter and Instagram accounts were pored over, as were photos of his handsome, smiling face and ripped abs. His grab-bag assortment of political allegiances were analysed – he admired the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s politics, and the venture capitalist Peter Thiel – as onlookers rushed to understand if his alleged crime was carried out in service of the political motivations we shared, or ones we didn’t. For many on TikTok and other platforms, Mangione became something of a socialist icon – Forbes magazine described him as a “social media folk hero”.
Some of his admirers are hardline radicals who support retribution against any CEO as necessary tools for revolution. Others are chronically online people who enjoy the transgression of making a pin-up out of a person that Fox News will say is the devil. What is surprising, though, is how widespread the approval of his actions seems to be. One poll from soon after the shooting found that 41 per cent of people aged 18 to 29 thought the killing was either “somewhat or completely acceptable”. Ordinary people who shouldn’t, according to the received wisdom about radicalism and the fringes, be celebrating violence of this kind, are doing just that. Or at least they are shrugging and saying: sometimes you get what’s coming to you.
It is difficult to comprehend this from the outside. But, as a recent immigrant to the United States, I am acutely aware of just how obscene and devastating the American healthcare system is, how it is a blight on all but the wealthiest of citizens. Stark and strange enough is the basic fact that your ability to receive medical attention is tied to your employment status. Those – like me – who are not employed with insurance are paying hundreds but often thousands of dollars a month for basic coverage. Medical care costs have risen by 120 per cent since the year 2000, while United Healthcare investors simultaneously see their stocks surge. And health outcomes in America are worse than in nations which spend significantly less. In 2016, a Utah father posted a hospital receipt, showing that in addition to the $10,000 charge for giving birth itself, a $40 charge was added to hold his newborn baby. This is a particularly absurd example, but a useful one in showing how fundamentally antisocial such a system is.
Many are upset by the celebration of Thompson’s death, and the carnival atmosphere which followed it. I can’t say I take pleasure in someone’s murder, regardless of any allegiance with the moral conviction which inspired it. But I do not understand the bafflement among pundits and politicians that this celebratory reaction might be possible. Why, given the nauseating conditions of violence which prop up America every day, so visibly and so unapologetically, would this not be the case? They speak of the chilling nihilism of supporting a murderer – and it is chilling that the conditions of everyday survival in America are so bleak for so many that they inspire widespread sympathy for an extreme act of violence like this one.
We should also be chilled by the nihilism Mangione was responding to. The lives destroyed by the greed and incompetence of healthcare conglomerates are not semantic or hypothetical, they too are actual, as actual as Brian Thompson’s. But the value of life is not accorded equally in the USA. It is the rights of corporate America, rather than the rights of people, that are enshrined above all. The fact that a murderer has become the avatar for this fact doesn’t make it any less true.
[See also: Luigi Mangione’s twisted radicalism]
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