As I know from experience as a witness, few murder trials these days proceed without video clips of the accused shortly before or after the crime—a sign, perhaps, of how much of modern life now unfolds within the view of one camera or another. Still, it remains comparatively rare for a murder itself to be caught on film, as was the case with Brian Thompson, the late chief executive of UnitedHealth—gunned down on the streets of Manhattan on the morning of December 4, 2024.
This was a shot that rang, if not quite round the world, then at least round TikTok and other social media, once the identity of the prime—indeed, only—suspect was revealed: a handsome Ivy League graduate named Luigi Mangione.
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Few murders could have been more premeditated than that of Thompson. If the evidence against the suspect is confirmed—bearing in mind that no one is guilty until proven so in a court of law—the killer came to New York with the express purpose of carrying out the crime. Executing it required advance knowledge of the victim’s movements, which must have involved some research. This was no impulsive act, no rush of blood to the head, as so many murders are. On the contrary, it was cold-blooded and calculated.
The suspect allegedly wrote a kind of apologia for the act, which struck me as no credit to his expensive education.
This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, Basic C[omputer] A[ided] [Design], a lot of patience. . . . I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. . . . Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. . . . It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.
At first, these words seemed like the addled maunderings of a man under the influence of alcohol, anxiolytic drugs, or perhaps strong opioids: but maybe this is the standard now expected from, or at least reached by, Ivy League postgraduates. The apologia is a mixture of poor syntax, worse reasoning, and grotesque self-importance. At any rate, if the author of the manifesto is the same man who shot Thompson and appears in the video, he did not seem physically uncoordinated at the time of the shooting or while riding the electric bicycle on which he allegedly fled.
Nor did he appear to be in incapacitating pain. This is significant, because an initial explanation of his conduct was that he suffered from a serious back condition requiring surgery, which had allegedly been denied him; but in fact, he had undergone that surgery—initially, at least, with success. As it turns out, moreover, he had never held a policy with UnitedHealth. His grudge, then, was not personal, even if the surgery’s results fell short of his expectations. (If every patient disappointed by back surgery killed someone in health care—say, their surgeon—there would be widespread carnage.) Nor was the suspect a product of desperate poverty, driven by rage at lack of opportunity. On the contrary, he was a scion of privilege.
In a sense, the suspect’s actions—if he is found guilty of them—were disinterested. He had nothing to gain and everything to lose; his attempted escape suggested no taste for martyrdom. Had he escaped, he might have spent the rest of his life congratulating himself on the blow he had struck for suffering humanity—or at least for suffering Americans.
Counterfactuals are, by definition, impossible to prove; plausibility is the standard by which they are judged. And it is surely plausible that, had the suspect been an impoverished, middle-aged man of unattractive appearance, there would have been far less sympathy or support for him among the young. Yet, if he turns out to be innocent, as he has pleaded, that interest will likely vanish: his supporters would be deeply disappointed. Sympathy for Luigi Mangione thus rests on two props: his handsome appearance and his presumed responsibility for killing Brian Thompson in a supposedly good cause.
Had the suspect been an overweight, balding 45-year-old, I doubt the Independent Florida Alligator—the University of Florida’s student newspaper—would have published an article so soon after the murder that began: “Hundreds of UF students gathered at the Plaza of the Americas on Thursday afternoon for a Luigi Mangione lookalike contest, showcasing Generation Z’s unique ability to transform somber news into a source of shared humor and entertainment.”
“Gen Z tends to support young people standing up for a cause they believe in,” a biochemistry student said—which, the newspaper suggested, might explain the generation’s positive reaction to Mangione’s actions. “People might think it’s pretty privilege,” the student observed, “but also he stands for a cause.”
One of the event’s promoters, a 20-year-old biology junior, said that she organized it as something to look forward to during final exams. “I was afraid at first that people would take it the wrong way, but in the end, a lot of people had fun.”
One contestant, a computer science and mathematics student who remained anonymous, used the opportunity to give a speech: “I want to say that the American health-care system has destroyed Americans. It is insane that the media will say that the CEO, a man who has killed hundreds of thousands of people, is the innocent one. I am so thankful that people like you have come together to realize and celebrate someone who has done something that is a beautiful thing.”
Loudness of applause determined the contest’s winner, who said: “A lot of people are struggling economically. A lot of people are struggling socially. And so the health-care industry has caused a lot of these struggles. We’ve been exposed to violence, and we’ve been exposed to the very worst society has to offer from the top down for many years. It’s an inevitability, not a surprise, in my opinion.”
The article is revealing in its mix of frivolity, moral earnestness, and intellectual evasion, traits that seem to afflict so many today. Of course, the Alligator is only one student newspaper, with a circulation of 14,000, at a single university, albeit one of good repute; but sympathy for, and even agreement with, the suspect’s alleged actions among the young is by no means confined to Gainesville, the seat of the university. Polls show that, following the killing, a significant share of students and young people either approved of, or did not disapprove of, Thompson’s murder.
The importance to Generation Z of having fun, being amused, and turning a recent cold-blooded murder into a source of amusement is clear. That many people at the lookalike competition enjoyed themselves was considered a sufficient answer to any criticism. Fun is its own justification.
The combination of moral earnestness and intellectual looseness is particularly dangerous. When Generation Z praised its “unique ability to transform somber news into a source of shared humor and entertainment,” it sidestepped the question of what kinds of somber news are appropriate for such treatment. Would Generation Z have found such a source of humor in George Floyd’s death, for instance? I suspect not—some subjects are considered off-limits. In that light, treating Brian Thompson’s murder this way amounts to an implicit claim that the deed was, at the very least, morally justifiable—if not outright praiseworthy.
Shooting a man dead is about as earnest an act as one can imagine. Yet the author of the apologia (if he was indeed the killer) admitted that the issue was “more complex,” adding, “I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.” One might expect that someone willing to kill for supposedly ethical or political reasons would have his reasons clearly worked out. Absent that, one could reasonably suspect bloodthirstiness in search of a cause.
The victim was a wealthy man of comparatively humble origins; the suspect, the son of affluent parents who had not yet come into his own wealth, but who—like many rich revolutionaries—had aligned himself, at least in theory, with the poor and downtrodden. “Evidently,” he wrote with startling grandiosity, “I am the first to face [the injustice of the health-care system] with such brutal honesty.”
Mangione wasn’t just a pretty face; in the eyes of some, perhaps many, of the students, he had stood up for something and done a heroic thing. Both victim and perpetrator were traitors to their class—the victim in a bad way and the perpetrator in a good way. The victim had joined the class of capitalist bloodsuckers, while the perpetrator had struck a blow against that class’s parasitism. Moreover, the perpetrator was an agent of something much greater than his mere decision to obtain a gun, stalk the victim, and pull the trigger. “Frankly,” wrote the suspect, “these parasites simply had it coming.” If it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else. As the winner of the lookalike contest put it, “It’s an inevitability, not a surprise, in my opinion.”
The tension between supposed historical inevitability and individual action that ignores normal moral restraint is an old one. Lenin believed that the end justified the means—that the establishment of complete Bolshevik power was the whole of morality, and everything else mere bourgeois sentimentality, a fig leaf for established, prerevolutionary power relations. This mode of thinking is far from uncommon, especially among the educated. Those indoctrinated into a Manichaean view of the world—four legs good, two legs bad—are highly susceptible to it, and there is little doubt that a kind of truncated Manichaean historiography, together with notions of historical inevitability, has entered, or been insinuated by prolonged propaganda, into the minds of many young people, not only in America but across much of the West.
In London, a portrait of Mangione as a slayer of evil was painted on a wall; similarly, an enormous image of him—depicted as a saint-like figure and captioned “Free Luigi”—was projected onto a New York building the night before his first court appearance. Other examples could be added. And here is a post found on the left-wing French news site Mediapart:
Brian Thompson is somehow the unfortunate lesson of an inevitable tragedy. For Mangione, the American dream is not the universal solution that it claims to be. For him, the rejection of this ideology derives not from a simple disavowal, but from a deep disillusion. In killing this “Buddha” [Thompson being the model that, if met, should, according to a Zen Buddhist proverb, be killed], he did not destroy a divine figure but a system of beliefs that prevents true freedom. This gesture symbolizes a necessary break with imposed doctrines, a putting back into question a sacralized truth disconnected from human realities. Mangione therefore opens a search for a path that is more personal, more authentic. In denouncing the contradictions of the American dream, he has freed thought from an ideological straitjacket and invited everyone to search for his own truth. His act transcends the individual to become a collective symbol: a society can advance only by abandoning its illusions.
For this French writer, the death of a man (of whom he knew nothing) by cold-blooded murder apparently was not a truth connected to reality.
It wasn’t long before another murder—again supposedly committed for the sake of humanity—took place, this time in Washington. Elias Rodriguez stands accused of shooting and killing two employees of the Israeli Embassy attending a meeting at the Jewish Museum. His actions, too, were disinterested in the sense that he had nothing personal to gain; they were driven purely by ideological conviction—though, of course, the tendency toward such ideation is always tied to the psychology of the individual who embraces it.
Holding a degree in English from the University of Illinois (one can imagine what he absorbed there), Rodriguez reportedly posted on social media that he bore no responsibility for Donald Trump’s election, since he had voted for Hamas. He praised Mangione’s actions, claiming that 80 percent of the population approved of them. He also implicitly endorsed the trope of historical non-responsibility: “Violence does not have to happen, but if it does, then it should.” In this view, violence is depersonalized, detached from human agency. It simply exists, like the shingles virus, waiting to erupt when conditions are right. Less physically attractive than Mangione, Rodriguez garnered less immediate sympathy, but because his cause was the Palestinian one, he may yet win the popularity, or sympathy, stakes worldwide.
Violence like that allegedly committed by Mangione and Rodriguez is small in scale but intended for broad impact. It is thus natural to wonder where the anger and hatred needed to carry it out comes from—and whether it represents something new.
The first thing to remember is that pretexts for such violence have always existed and always will, so long as Man remains a political animal. If I were inclined to commit violence, the world would readily supply a justification, so long as I were self-important enough to imagine myself responsible for righting injustice or alleviating suffering wherever it appeared.
The second thing to remember is that, in human affairs, there is no new thing under the sun; what changes is prevalence, not type.
To understand the killings allegedly committed by Mangione and Rodriguez, it is worth returning to Joseph Conrad, who—drawing on his intimate knowledge of Russian revolutionary violence—offers a diagnosis in his 1906 short story of concentrated brilliance, “The Informer.” Why do people with every prospect of a satisfactory life under the present dispensation adopt causes that, for them, are wholly abstract—and then resort to extreme violence in pursuit of those ends? The answer that Conrad offers is hardly flattering: frivolity, boredom, sentimentality, moral exhibitionism, narcissistic self-dramatizing, and self-importance.
The tale follows a wealthy aesthete introduced to a fellow connoisseur of Chinese porcelain, an aristocratic anarchist of refined taste and radical ideas. Over dinner, the anarchist remarks, “There’s no amendment to be got out of mankind except by terror and violence.”
Pressed on how he reconciles his politics with his luxurious lifestyle, he explains that his wealth comes from sales of his revolutionary tracts to the bourgeoisie. “You know that my writings were at one time the rage,” he says. He continues, “Even in England, where you have some common-sense, a demagogue has only to shout loud enough and long enough to find some backing in the very class he is shouting at. You, too, like to see mischief being made. The demagogue carries the amateurs of emotion with him. Amateurism . . . is a delightfully easy way of killing time and feeding one’s own vanity.”
Among the anarchist’s London followers is a young upper-class woman—devoted, sentimental, and brimming with righteous indignation. Yet the anarchist views her with contempt: “She had acquired all the appropriate gestures of revolutionary convictions—the gestures of pity, of anger, of indignation against the anti-humanitarian vices of the social class to which she belonged herself. . . . This charming, generous, and independent creature had never known in her life a single genuine thought.” When her lover, exposed as a police informant, kills himself, she abandons the cause.
The narrator asks what became of her. “ ‘She went into retirement; then to Florence; then into retreat in a convent. What does it matter?’ ” the anarchist replies. “ ‘Gestures! Gestures! Mere gestures of her class.’ ”
Life imitates art, which imitates life, which imitates art—in an endless circle.
Though exhibitionist in nature and inspired by emotion that is at once intense, shallow, and bogus, gestural politics are not harmless. Their effects can be real and lasting. Shooting even one person or a few persons can have profound and unpredictable consequences, as Europe discovered after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on June 28, 1914. Austria-Hungary’s Dual Monarchy was highly imperfect, but its destruction and replacement by regimes that were no better and often worse were not worth the slaughter of World War I. The whole point of terrorism, in the eyes of terrorists, is that its effect should be out of all proportion to its scale or scope.
The world will always offer pretexts for political violence by Enragés of various stripes, for the world as it is will always be a disappointment by comparison with an imagined perfection, or even mere betterment. Righteous indignation is a beguiling and gratifying, but misleading, emotion. It rarely allows for a sense of proportion and is a powerful promoter of self-importance and self-aggrandizement. Unfortunately, thanks to our educational systems, which seem increasingly like madrassas of radicalism, there have never been more young people like Luigi Mangione and Elias Rodriguez willing to listen to the siren song of direct action—the propaganda of the deed, of making a difference at any cost.
Top Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images
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