He embodies a popular rage. Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo
Imagine if Luigi Mangione had shot the CEO of a company that made light bulbs, or dishwashers, or breakfast cereal. Perhaps a few ideologues on Twitter would have hailed the killing as a justified strike against the one percent. But most people would have deplored it as a cold-blooded murder, or else ignored it entirely.
Yet America is openly applauding the assassination of United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson. A DJ at a Disney Channel-themed show in Boston last week played the song “He Could Be The One”, as the crowd erupted in cheers as Mangione’s mugshots were screened on the wall. Prisoners at the Pennsylvania facility where Mangione is incarcerated shouted “Free Luigi” and “Luigi’s conditions suck!” to a reporter outside. Tweets and posts glorifying Luigi abound, and what’s notably lacking from the conversation is any of the usual post facto discussion about gun control — this despite the fact he allegedly used an untraceable 3D-printed “ghost gun”. The takeaway is clear: many Americans are ready to support violent opposition to the health care system.
Mangione embodies a popular rage that has reached boiling point. This is not the rage of political extremists or ideological zealots; it is the rage of the normie. As an act of political communication, Mangione’s crime was remarkably effective. His purpose in killing Thompson was instantly obvious, and it was welcomed. Social media was flooded with tales of insurance woes — huge ambulance bills, coverage for crucial care denied. Though the problems in US healthcare are complex and not limited to the insurance companies, they are often the avatar of the system’s dysfunction. This is a country where the average family paid $23,968 for a private insurance plan in 2023, and 41% of adults have medical debt. The decisions of these distant, inscrutable corporate apparatchiks can have catastrophic consequences for patients.
There have been other signs that this frustration is reaching a tipping point. The rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, for example. Long written off as a crank for his opposition to vaccines, Kennedy’s long-shot presidential campaign resonated with a surprisingly large group of voters burned out by the Covid era. It garnered him enough influence to be tapped as Donald Trump’s nominee for health secretary. But the political class has ignored what it means that someone like RFK has gone mainstream, spending the election cycle focused elsewhere: Joe Biden’s age, wars abroad, Donald Trump’s legal troubles.
Healthcare affects Americans across party lines. But in Washington it is a partisan one, and sweeping changes to the system like the Affordable Care Act have been rare and hard-won. Now some politicians are talking about it again, including long-time healthcare crusader Bernie Sanders. “Finally after years, Sanders is winning this debate and we should be moving towards Medicare for All,” Rep. Ro Khanna, a Sanders ally, said last week. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, another progressive, came close to justifying Mangione’s action in an interview when she called it a “warning” that “if you push people hard enough, they… start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone”. But the response hasn’t been limited to the Left. The most powerful Right-leaning media figure in America, Joe Rogan, called the insurance industry a “dirty, dirty business” and “fucking gross” last week. Mangione’s action started to feel like — maybe, possibly — a catalyst for real change.
The question is whether or not the frenzy around Mangione can coalesce into some kind of sustained movement. He is already inspiring copycats, including Briana Boston, a 42-year-old Florida mother who was arrested last week for allegedly threatening Blue Cross Blue Shield after the health insurance company denied her claims. “Delay, deny, depose,” she is alleged to have said, echoing the words Mangione wrote on the shell casings of his bullets. “You people are next.” Meanwhile, the 2020 book from which Mangione borrowed the phrase, Jay Feinman’s Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It, shot to second place on Amazon’s nonfiction bestseller list last week.
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SubscribeGive that man a knighthood!
I upvoted your comment because I think that it’s sarcastic. Hope my take was correct.
I’m only half joking unfortunately. I can condemn the murder while sympathising with the motives behind it
From the US: This is no hero, this is a coward loser that shot a man in the back at point blank range then all but peed his pants when confronted by the cops in a Mc Donald’s.
They talk about trump pumping up the crazies, but he doesn’t hold a candle to the Democrat blob.
I think you might have watched a few too many cowboy films!
I think you do not understand the reality of the grief of this man’s family and if you are one of those Lefty empathy types you are clearly a hypocrite…
Yes, history knows this type of men: spoiled and narcissistic, usually from rich families, embracing extreme ideology and violence and willing to prove themselves as courageous by killing unarmed people, satisfying in this way their sadistic reflexes and expecting to become heroes and cover themselves with glory – at least, in the eyes of their reference group.
Talk about gaslighting. If you are looking for layers of apparatchiks just look at any government run healthcare system.
This whole thing is just more proof the Left doesn’t believe in “Democracy.” They believe in something like the “General Will” that sounds like the will of the majority but actually means mob rule by the loudest voices which is harnessed by a top-down Vanguard.
IDK. This seems like a social media media meme. In a recent poll, only 17% of respondents considered the killing acceptable or somewhat acceptable. While it’s true that 41% of people aged 18-29 were favorable, I suspect much of this is driven by social media, and generalized anger at the establishment.
There’s your generational problem. Half were teenagers getting used to social media politics while the other half were at college celebrating Islamic State.
I would suggest that, at least partly, the reason for young people to be more supportive of killings is that death for them is a rather abstract concept.
Given that the prefrontal cortex might not be fully developed until the age of twenty-six , younger people often don’t have the capacity to see the consequences of their behaviour and decisions (aka responsibility). The consequence of this is that they have no idea of their own mortality and therefore the mortality of other people.
Or the wisdom of later stages in life: “What goes around comes around.”
True.
Another factor is the noisy prominence of far left “young people,” who are the ones seemingly endorsing Hamas, and are often at very selective, very expensive universities.
My teenage son and his friends tend to be very traditional, and are sometimes conservative-leaning, but are either ignored by the US’s mainstream media, or wisely keep their views to themselves, having grown up in the era of “Me too,” and radically left cancel culture.
Leftists in general in the US are very prominent, and tend to believe most of what they hear from “official” and “trusted” sources.
Conservatives and classical liberals self-censor, to avoid being fired or ruined.
It is really good news that your son and his friends have not been poisoned by leftist ideology!
Unfortunately, what I observe here, in Europe, is very similar to what you describe.
I know quite a few young(ish) people from well-to-do families, which made it realtively easy for them to study in elite universities and then land well-paid jobs.
They are on a massive scale rabidly and extremely left-wing. What shocks me even more than this is that they sincerely don’t understand what this ideology means in practice and can never provide a working argument to defend their views.
Examples abound and I will give you just one (and maybe not the most striking). I said to one of them, “In communist countries, you had only one employer. And this was the state. If you were considered disloyal to the state, you would lose your job and would never be able to find another one. I knew people who were left without any income and were able to survive only because their friends helped them and also because their spouse was still allowed to work.”
The reaction? “Oh no, that’s absolutely impossible. This just cannot ever happen”.
And, as you say, they just mechanically repeat what they are supposed to say, i,e,, what they hear from MSM and the powers that be.
It is really sad… And truly frightening, too.
If the young people are seemingly endorsing Hamas, the reason might be that they are better educated in contemporary history than any right wing bigot, and they know who the actual terrorists are. See
State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel by Thomas Suárez
Hamastitution in action ⬆️
Very astute. I have a theory that wars will continue to happen because of this principle. Every gew generations have become distanced from its realities.
I think that your theory is very solid, as it does have a high degree of explanatory and predictive power.
One of the other factors might be the willingness of the powers that be to get rid of part of the most explosive demographics: young, testosteron-fuelled men ready to risk their own lives and not caring much about other people’s lives.
This was the case with the vikings in the past.
In more general terms, I am inclined to think that if an oppressive regime wants to take hold of a country, then unleashing a war would be highly beneficial in order to achieve this goal: martial law would allow the suppression of all democratic mechanisms, the population would be highly demoralised, concentrating on their mere physical survival, and the young men would be thrown into a meatgrinder. This will significantly undermine the ability of the population to rise up against the regime, especially given the decimation of the most active demographic group capable of rising up – i.e., men, and especially so young men..
The elite encouraged BLM protestors to destroy city centres in 2020 murdering around 40 people. Why should they be surprised that other Americans now believe that violent protest works?
BTW Joe Rogan has expressed his support for Sanders in the past. That hardly makes him ‘right-leaning’. RFK Jr’s is not so much opposed to vaccines as opposed to untested vaccines being forced on people, such as the Federal Government vaccination programme on children. He has asked for test results for these vaccines to be published, just to prove that the tests have been done. Years later the test results are still to be published. The implication – that the US government pays Big Pharma to pump untested chemicals into children – is so startling, that journalists seem unable to comprehend its magnitude.
Yes, I don’t think many people realise just how inadequate the testing regime is for conventional vaccines… let alone the novel genetic therapy mRNA COVID “vaccines” that governments in lockstep all tried to force on us.
It goes further back than BLM riots, all the way to that which followed Martin Luther King’s brilliant, non-violent protests and his murder. He changed the path of America.
But a large group of people subsequently celebrated and justified unlawful violence, ranging from race riots to anti-war riots to draft dodging to universities corrupting the grading system to maintain students’ deferments. Underlying all of chaos of the period was the loudly expressed belief that, if you individually, sincerely believed your cause or behavior was proper, ignoring the law was not only justified, but in many cases admirable.
Confirmation of the societal change came with President Carter’s blanket pardon of the draft dodgers and the election of President Clinton who without any doubt was a draft dodger. And so it continues on. In my opinion, the mob actions of not murder, but of social attacks leading to firings, shunning, and blocking hiring and retention (particularly in universities) has been the result of this contempt for norms. Perhaps there are some glimmers of sanity reappearing, but it will take time to restore respect for law.
“Yet America is openly applauding the assassination of United Healthcare CEO ,“
Reference for this, please ? The conservative press has been pretty clear that Luigi is a murderer. a very non-scientific casual scan of my google news doesn’t indicate a groundswell of support for the man.
The Kaiser Family Foundation Survey conducted a survey in 2023 to understand how Americans think about their coverage. It found that 81 percent of insured adults rate their health insurance as “excellent” or “good.” Only 3 percent rate their health insurance as “poor.”
“Right leaning” + Joe Rogan = clueless journo whose sense of history is less than 6 months. A former Bernie sanders support who was disillusioned by the cardboard Candidacy of Kamala does not make an arch conservative.
The one solid point made in this article is the deafening silence about ghost guns and gun violence.
“It found that 81 percent of insured adults rate their health insurance as “excellent” or “good.”
Those will be the ones who’ve yet to face the need to make a big claim.
…and he shot the guy (Brian Thompson) in the back. Coward.
Very few Americans experience or even witness gun violence. Two thirds of our gun deaths are suicides. Excepting a few statistically rare but breathlessly reported events, the other third are heavily concentrated among the urban poor, and are generally petty squabbles among illegally armed young men. The majority of both victims and offenders are, tragically, African American.
Firearm ownership in rural areas, where there are hunting grounds, gun clubs, and firing ranges, and a tradition of firearm use is far higher.
Gun crime rates in rural areas are also exceptionally low. Unlike the depictions of American lives in the movies, very few of us are either cowboys or gangsters.
Looking at venerable conservative website Powerline right now, they have celebratory Mangione memes aplenty, eg a mock X tweet from Burger King “We don’t snitch”
To be useful as a collective noun ‘Normies’ should be a big enough group to be significant. As a generality the Republicans (approx 50% of the adult population) don’t support the murder, most Democrats don’t (perhaps 30% – 40%?). The author of the article fails to make the case.
Correct – “normie” here means the opposite of what it typically means. People who support murder to make a political point are abnormally immoral and/or stupid.
I think the frustration people have with healthcare corporations isn’t just about the denial of claims but about the bloated salaries of CEOs. Brian Thompson earned $10.2 last year for doing what? That just adds insult to injury, doesn’t it?
It’s a private enterprise. They can pay whatever they want. Why does somebody else’s wealth trigger you so much? The only reason they have so much business is because of the ACA. It encouraged monopolization. All Big Government policies favor Monopolies because the government sets the directives for the companies to follow. Look up “Command Economy” sometime.
I’m not in favor of controlling the wages of private companies either, but in certain essential industries such as healthcare, I do think they ought to be held to a higher standard. I’m not sure exactly how to do this, but when a healthcare insurance provider makes a 20+ bln dollar profit in one year, while doing their damnedest to deny people their coverage, it seems like it needs a good look.
All this journal seems to do recently is celebrate a distinct generational problem of promoting violent terrorism.
I imagine this is because the commissioning editors are Millennials wanting to keep a handle on their budget by commissioning Zoomers.
What a shallow and manipulative article.
Everything in it is subordinated to the glorification of a cold-blooded murderer with extreme leftist views.
An interesting (and silenced) aspect is that those who exalt Mangione do not mention anything about him being in possession of an illegal gun , nor about the subject of gun violence.
These are the very same people who are vociferous supporters of gun control, especially after yet another mass shooting (often by an individual with leftist politics).
Exactly. Mangione is a sleazy spoiled cold blooded murdering pos. F*ck Mangione and f*ck those who support cold blooded murder.
Yes, and the sooner he falls into oblivion, the better.
A DJ at a Disney Channel-themed show in Boston last week played the song “He Could Be The One”, as the crowd erupted in cheers as Mangione’s mugshots were screened on the wall.
Wow – sounds like a really wholesome event. Good, clean fun for all the family.
I get why Americans want to talk about their healthcare system and why this murder was the trigger for that discussion (something had to be…) but celebrating Mangione in any way at all for his act is, if anything, more gross than the health insurance business.
This is the most ignorant, uninformed essay posted at UnHerd to date, and that is saying something. Mangione is a fu**ing cowardly murderer. He is popular like John Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde. For the same reasons.
OTOH Dillinger and Bonnie & Clyde weren’t cowards like LM.
Insurance doesn’t work.
The interposition between a service and the consumer blocks price signals causing bloating costs of the service.
American health care is the most expensive in the world, to solve the problem requires bring down these costs, but how? Every part of the system is geared towards maximum billing.
The NHS ‘religion’ in the UK might annoy ideological purists, but it may be a bulwark against revolution in hard times.
The problem with US “healthcare” is that it *is* a system; ie, a cartel in which the market has been all but crushed by government regulation and interest groups lobbying to restrict consumer choice.
The Affordable Healthcare Act – or ‘Obamacare’ as people call it – muddied the waters further by insisting people bought healthcare insurance whether they wanted/needed it or not.
Medicine is not a natural monopoly, so there’s no reason for government to be involved in it (beyond punishment for fraud etc)
Really? Then why do the insurance-based systems in Germany, France, Switzerland etc. produce so much better health-care outcomes than the blessed NHS? Those defending the NHS always want us to look in the wrong direction – across the Atlantic rather than across the English Channel.
These are highly regulated, no similarity to US free for all. Yes, maybe a better solution than NHS.
Insurance works just fine. Every home and car owner has it, but what is NOT present there is the govt factor that mostly serves to drive up health care costs. It happens in any market where govt becomes a player.
I love how the Left gets to be the solution to the problem it starts. That’s called weaponized failure.
Maybe you’re unfamiliar with the difference between the American and French Revolutions. The American Revolution wasn’t a call for larger government. It was to be free of centralization. We didn’t use the guillotine here. Nor did we create new months of the year or tear down churches and form a “Cult of Reason.”
You have a prang and need to get your car repaired. It is covered by your insurance. The mechanic knows this and ups the price a bit. Are you going to spend your time shopping around – you have nothing to gain by doing this.
The insurance company is happy to pay out. They will just increase premiums for all to cover the cost. In addition, the more expensive a service is then the more likely people are to feel the need to buy insurance, an increase in the market size which suits them fine.
So you, the mechanic and the insurance company are in a little plot against the public interest. This is the dynamic.
You’re ignoring that an extremely high number of legislators in all countries come from legal backgrounds and support expansive liability and indemnification laws. Insurance is the defense for the common person against being legally bankrupted by a major accident.
Who is going to pay for the busted car and the bodily injury if not insurance. How is the family on a fixed income going to pay?
Not saying there is a solution. There isn’t one, only trade offs.
The US has gone for unregulated health insurance with the consequences we see.
That is all.
It’s hardly “unregulated.” The ACA is a government imposed system to extend both private and public insurance.
The ACA is 900 pages of law. I don’t know how you can call that some kind of free market principle.
The American health insurance industry needs to hire some of the NHS’s PR people.
Narrative is about what I would expect from someone who has worked for Buzzfeed and The Atlantic: sophomoric and without merit.
I don’t think so. A few wackos on social media make provocative comments. I believe 99.9% of the US think he’s an evil nut.
what’s notably lacking from the conversation is any of the usual post facto discussion about gun control
Because ‘gun control’ has always been a straw man argument. Guns are not new and if anything, they are harder to get today than years ago. Not that long ago, one could mail order a rifle and have it delivered to their home.
There is no talk about guns here because that’s not the ‘useful’ narrative. The talking points are instead about but NOT how govt intrusion into health care has contributed mightily to spiraling costs. Either way, the unhinged support for a killer is not “normie” behavior or anything close to it. It’s a few social media users desperately seeking attention in the worst way.
“…Mangione took direct action toward the representative of an easily understandable and widely hated target, in line with the “propaganda of the deed” ethos of turn-of-the-century anarchists such as the Italian militant activist Luigi Galleani…”
No. Practically no one in the general public, Mangione included, has a good understanding of insurance, or of fiscal and tax policies, or of America’s high tech, heavily regulated, inelastic, and astonishingly expensive health care systems. We are living under Obamacare, not the Grant Administration, and in a social welfare state, not the era of Robber Barons.
So, he decided to shoot an innocent man in the back.
Young Luigi, Jersey Shore gym-honed but also boarding school privileged, is hardly an everyman. His narcissism and psychopathy are well outside the norm, and his understandings are very limited, as well as utterly deviant.
He’s a villain, not a hero.
And is a militant more like Gavrilo Princip, who touched off WWI, rather than Galleani.
It reminds me of a certain three-letter member of Congress who used to be Sandy from Westchester. Sandy grew up comfortably and went to a pricey college before being recast as a random bartender whose most notable action was to stop Amazon from building a place that might have employed constituents.
Why are you bringing New Jersey into this? The dude’s from Maryland, went to the University of Pennsylvania, and lived in Hawaii. What, just because he’s Italian and exercises he’s from Jersey?
“Jersey Shore” was a “reality” TV show on MTV, where the actors were gym honed young adults, and were perhaps a bit less than refined.
I have an inconvenient truth. Violence works. The poor live with it daily, and it shapes and controls their lives. In the more affluent nations, physical violence morphs into political violence of a certain kind. Magione whacks the CEO but what about the folks killed in the riots in Seattle, Portland, Minnesota, ETC? Is this any different? Who was responsible and will they be held accountable?
I do not condone the CEO murder but folks have correctly pointed out that there were “negative” outcomes from UH denying 32 percent of claims, so is the unfortunate CEO guilty of murder, manslaughter, or negligence?
It seems there is a wave of “violence”, not all physical, starting to form across the globe. It will be interesting to see if it becomes a Tsunami or break gently at the shore.
UH does not ultimately deny 32% of claims. That number has been thrown around social media based on a single source that published it. No other source will be found to confirm it. UH falls in the middle of the pack for final claim denials. Even the US government’s ultimate claim denials for Medicare and Medicaid are about the same as UH.
Not that I support what Mangione did, but there does seem to be a relationship between the behavior of corporate elites (and their elected puppets) and how secure they feel themselves to be. You might be somewhat less inclined to put the screws to people if you have to organise a security detail every time you leave the office, and are nervously looking over your shoulder much of the time. I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that the moment the urban terror threat was largely lifted in Europe in the early 80s, was the same moment most governments of the time began to seriously chip away at the post-war welfare state.
More recently, however, the strategy employed by elites has shifted. In the immediate aftermath of the “Occupy Wall street” protests, corporations fell all over themselves embracing identitarian causes, saying the problems are all due to us not being “diverse” enough, or tolerant enough; promoting the idea that we should be more amenable to being screwed over by a black woman CEO, than by a white male one. (It’s tempting to speculate on what the reaction in the legacy media would have looked like had the CEO of United Health been a black woman.) Anything to divert attention away from any sort of class-based analysis. This strategy has worked admirably well for over a decade now, but its days may be numbered.
I believe that, as a society, we must refuse to allow a brutal daylight extra-judicial assassination to be the “beginning of a conversation”, I think it’s disgusting. If this man had lost a loved one through some disgusting insurance chicanery would I sympathise with his position more? Absolutely, though it woudn’t change the point. You cannot have acts of violence mark the beginning of civil discourse about positive change. The problem of course, as outlined by others here in the comments, is that America has already embraced the age of ‘mostly peaceful’ protests to bring about radical change that earnest political campaigning seems powerless to achieve.
If you are one of the people who think the shooter was right to kill Brian Thompson, ask yourself, would you be okay if he were CEO of a weapons company? How about big-pharma? Oil company? Chemical manufacturer? If you condone one of these murders, where is your line?
One final point: from my relatively distant perspective here in europe, I don’t see any sign of a groundswell of support for this murder at all from the American news sources I read, and actual right wing thought-leaders (Joe Rogan as right wing, lol, explains a lot about this article really) such as Megyn Kelly have been unequivocal about their condemnation for this shooter. I suggest the author’s journalist bubble is giving her a fairly myopic perspective on the mood of the American people on this one.
I suspect that the author is sort of alluding to a wider problem – that the growing tensions in western capitalism between the increasingly wealthy exploitive class, the parasite class of the Left and its identitarian ‘victims’, and the ‘normies’, the responsible classes who work, look after their families, health, etc, pay their taxes, and so on, are approaching breaking point. If so, she’s chosen a poor, if headline grabbing, example.
If one gives in to cheering on the lawless mob – explicitly supporting “might equaling right” in broader society – then it’s only a matter of time before the mob comes for the one, with pitchforks and torches.
Intellectually-gifted psychopaths and sociopaths – and the physically strong – inevitably rule any mob over time. Precisely because they have no internal moral or adhered-to ethical rules that are sufficient to hold them back from removing such “moral weaknesses” from their organizations over time.
Obtaining pure power over others – and gaining unearned wealth and privilege – is their only interest.
It seems that every generation needs to learn this lesson. It requires the inexperienced going from their young-and-Pollyanna-ish dreams of joining ‘the resistance’ and feeling the self-righteous adrenaline rush of kicking a disfavored person while their down, to, later, bearing their own scars from the very same jackboots of their own former friends.
The Revolution inevitably eats its own.
I hope the newer ‘resistance’ generations learn this lesson sooner rather than later so we can return to respecting law and order in society.
Sacco & Vanzetti + Leopold & Loeb
“Sen. Elizabeth Warren, another progressive, came close to justifying Mangione’s action in an interview when she called it a “warning” that “if you push people hard enough, they… start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone”.”
However, you won’t hear the left making the analogous point in relation to July’s protests against continuous mass immigration.
Celebrating Mangione is grotesque and obscene. Period. It attests to a deep-rooted moral bankruptcy in society at large and amongst millions of fellow citizens. The celebration of BLM and its murderous, destructive riots is another manifestation of this horrendous attitude, as is the genocidal reaction to Israel’s response to 07 October 2023 by vast swathes of Western society.
“Yet America is openly applauding the assassination of United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson.”
That’s as far as I’m going to go in this article. You are either an idiot or some one given to grotesque levels of generalization. You can find some people doing anything. That doesn’t make them “America”.
“Lived experience” AKA “feelings”.
What utter bullshit.