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Just over a week ago, no one knew who Luigi Mangione was. After being revealed as the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4, he quickly became one of the most polarizing figures in American pop culture.
To some he is an anti-capitalist nemesis. To others, he is a Marxist folk hero exacting revenge on the unchecked greed of American health insurers. Indeed, he is a damaged young man struggling with a variety of serious health issues, whose family and friends desperately tried to contact him after he disappeared in the weeks and months before the murder.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham described those who have rallied behind Mangione as “crazy people.” But in memes shared on TikTok,
Even the century-old Communist Party USA – far from the political force it was in its early days – used his arrest to denounce America’s profit-driven health care system, while The Daily Show audience audibly booed when the host Jon Stewart announced Mangione’s arrest at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.
“This is what it must have felt like to hear Robin Hood stories in about 1370,” read a viral post on X by architecture critic Kate Wagner about the manhunt for Mangione, which has been viewed nearly two million times.
The widespread approval of Thompson’s killing, which has shocked many pundits on the left and right, has only one real precedent in modern American history: when Navy Seals killed September 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden in 2011.
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“People hate their health care in the United States,” said Ed Ongweso Jr, senior researcher at Security in Context, an international project of scientists based at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. “It is not surprising to me that some people celebrated the murder as a form of catharsis, but I am surprised by how many people do so openly and resist attempts to smear the murder.”
Ongweso was clear that the near-ubiquitous contempt for the American health care system had virtually no political equivalent. In a bitterly divided country, Democrats and Republicans seem to agree on one thing: America’s health care system sucks.
“You see him being celebrated across the political spectrum because most people understand how much death, suffering and misery our healthcare system causes,” Ongweso said. “They have seen a loved one humiliated by it, they have been humiliated by it.”
Unlike most of the developed world, the U.S. health care system is provided entirely by private companies and there is no universal single-payer system for non-seniors. Most Americans must either pay individually into an insurance plan or purchase insurance through their employer. Plans can cost hundreds and (often) thousands of dollars per month, depending on the extent of users’ needs and the plans offered by insurers.
“Commentators and talking heads don’t seem to understand the reaction because they don’t see these industries as violent,” Ongweso continued. They clearly understand that someone has been murdered, he said, “but are struggling with the idea that the public views what these companies are doing as murder on an industrial scale.”
A former roommate of Mangione has said that he had chronic back problems after a surfing injury and therefore hated his health insurance. An X-ray he placed on his X-ray suggested he was suffering from a misaligned spine. His manifesto expresses a clear hatred of the ‘parasites’ that run health insurers.
In the past year alone, UnitedHealthcare, which insures 29 million Americans, has faced substantial scrutiny for antitrust violations, denial of illegal coverage due to flawed artificial intelligence programs and insider trading.
But extremism researchers have raised alarm bells about the general applause for deadly political violence in the middle of Manhattan.
“I am alarmed by the overwhelming amount of celebration I have seen online from people applauding what is essentially an act of vigilante violence,” said Jared Holt, senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “Many people have real and valid reasons to despise health insurers and corporate greed, but I worry that so many people seem to think that shooting someone in the street is a valid response to that anger.”
There is cause for concern: data indicate a global increase in political killings and violence, especially in the West.
During the last US presidential election campaign, there were two serious assassination plots against Donald Trump. One involved a gunman grazing the now president-elect’s ear with a bullet that nearly killed him.
Mangione, who has an Ivy League degree and comes from a wealthy family with deep connections in Republican politics, doesn’t exactly fit the stereotype of a radicalized lone gunman. But his popularity has already far eclipsed any potential Trump killers who aren’t household names.
“The suspect, who police now believe to be Mangione, was a fit young man and I think it would be a mistake to overlook the extent to which the story was likely set in motion,” Holt said.
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Mangione’s other characteristic is one that plays a major role at every point in American life: his race. If he had been black or Latino, this story would probably have played out very differently. This raises the question of whether celebrating his version of whimsy is consistent with hero worship of a white savior.
Mangione, for example, was arrested alive and without incident. But black people, even without the fame of being deadly murderers on the run, are statistically the most likely to be killed by police in the US.
A 2023 study from the nonprofit Mapping Police Violence found that Black people are three times as likely to be killed during a police interaction, while nearly twice as likely to be unarmed in those same incidents. Mangione, on the other hand, was arrested with the suspected murder weapon on his person.
Mangione’s presence on social media reveals some insight into a possible motive. Although he hated corporate greed, he also had an affinity with right-wing magnate Peter Thiel, wrote a largely positive review of the Unabomber Manifesto and promoted arguments against government welfare programs.
According to Holt, there is much about Mangione that is still unknown.
“I think the most important part of Mangione’s online history is the six months of silence before the shooting,” he said. “We won’t really know what tipped the scales for Mangione until his life over the past six months comes into better focus.”
