An assassin for our time (PART ONE)

Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old who (allegedly) gunned down CEO Brian Thompson, is a watershed figure, a would-be Unabomber who was both less - and more. I fear we'll see more like him.

(FIRST OF TWO PARTS)

Luigi Mangione was arrested only yesterday.

But we already know a lot about Mangione, the 26-year-old Marylander who allegedly shot healthcare executive Brian Thompson dead in Manhattan last week¹.

Mangione is privileged, successful, and bright, the notably handsome scion of wealthy Maryland family. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020, he decamped for California and Hawaii, supporting himself as a coder.

In other words, at least from the outside, Mangione had every advantage.

Then something went wrong. And Mangione (again, allegedly) covered his face with a mask and executed a 50-year-old father of two on a New York street. Police arrested Mangione Monday in a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, a long way from the Hawaii penthouse he called home in 2022.

The crime is inexplicable.

Or is it?

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(Finding answers. With your help.)

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Progressives have called Thompson’s killing motivated, if not outright justified, by the failures of American healthcare and the greed of the insurance industry. (On Sunday, I called out the New Yorker for its ugly take, which included this explicit moral equivalence: Thompson’s murder is one symptom of the American appetite for violence; his line of work is another.)

But, his looks notwithstanding, Mangione has turned out to be a singularly unattractive messenger for the argument that health insurers are behind America’s medical crisis - much less the leftist fantasy that insurance company executives should die for the industry’s sins.

Progressives hoped (yes, hoped) Thompson’s assassin would turn out to be a poor blue-collar worker with a kid who died after being denied chemotherapy.

Instead they got an Ivy League graduate who went to a fancy private high school, hurt his back in Hawaii, and had the finest, or at least most expensive, care available, spinal fusion surgery. The surgery seems to have worked about as well as back surgery generally does - somewhere between kinda and not really.

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(Handsome devil!)

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No one has yet produced any evidence that any insurer ever denied Mangione any necessary, much less life-saving, treatment. As an added bonus his family owns a Maryland nursing home that recently had to repay Medicare $55,000 for hiring someone with fake credentials and failing to report it.

On the other hand, Thompson was a University of Iowa graduate who worked hard for decades to reach a top job at a major public company.

The executioner, not the victim, is the card-carrying member of the elite.

Nor do we have any evidence that any outside group radicalized Mangione, much less encouraged or directed this attack. To the contrary, police have reported he claimed to be acting alone in a three-page note he was carrying when they arrested him.

So how exactly did a far-from-extraordinary Ivy League graduate wind up on a Manhattan street, playing judge, jury and executioner? What turned a 2016 private school valedictorian into an anti-corporate domestic terrorist with a ghost gun and silencer?

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(Thinking hard, writing fast. For less than 20 cents a day.)

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At least at this moment, the answer appears to have complex personal and political threads - and to be symptomatic of the strains of drug libertarianism and (sometimes faux) populism roiling American politics, roiling America itself.

Mangione fell hard - and fast.

He seems to have seen himself as a new generation’s Ted Kaczynski, the anti-capitalist and information technology bomber known as the Unabomber. But where the Unabomber had a philosophy, twisted but still recognizable as a coherent set of ideas, Mangione had only personal grievance.

In this he perfectly symbolized his generation’s pathologies.

He was (allegedly) the first of a new breed of terrorist.

But he may not be the last.

(FIRST OF TWO PARTS)

1. Mangione is innocent until proven guilty, but by all accounts police recovered overwhelming evidence against him when they arrested him.