[Pictured: Luigi Mangione is escorted into Manhattan Criminal court for his arraignment on state murder and terror charges in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Monday, Dec. 23, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)]
By Thomas King
What’s at stake in the Luigi Mangione case is where despair ends and tactics begin. On December 4th, an unidentified shooter (now suspected to be Mangione) exposed the alibis through which social power avoids being put right on the spot— as Raoul Vaneigem once wrote. We must resist any misattribution or denial of what this moment reveals; to do otherwise is to conceal how systematic terror breeds desperate acts of political violence in America. This demands that we reject the shoehorning of the alleged gunman’s inconsistent politics into a neat ideological framework, or the digging into his past as doing the state’s work. The truth behind the shooter’s actions lies in the parasitic design of a healthcare system that sacrifices lives to fuel its machinery. After an election where healthcare barely registered for either party, the desubjectivated entity took with him a gun, his despair, and, unsurprisingly, struck a chord with the public consciousness. The praxis was simple. Pain can radicalise anyone. ‘What do you do?’ he wrote.
Let’s not be deterred. Private health coverage spending will exceed $1.5 trillion this year as life expectancy declines. Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, a measure the Democratic Party (aside from Bernie Sanders) has only sought to protect, UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, increased its annual share buyback program by 217%, funnelling $54 billion into stock repurchases. In 2023 alone, it pocketed $22 billion in profits on $371 billion in revenue—equating to $25 per share—and paid out $7.29 per share in dividends to investors. UHC had the highest denial rate of any U.S. insurance company, at 32 percent. Personal testimonies describe instances where the company denied coverage for essential treatments, including medications and hospital stays, despite their critical necessity for recovery. UHC was accused of using rigid algorithms to cut off payments despite ongoing care needs and was sued for a bot with a claimed 90 percent error rate. Meanwhile, a U.S. Senate committee found that UHC and other insurers intentionally denied critical nursing care to stroke patients, prioritising profit over survival. We lay bare the shooter’s motive when we recognise the healthcare system as a productive force of socialised violence. We must also recognise this violence as producing sad passions: fear, depression, and the suicidal urge. Franco Berardi reminds us, “Only by calibrating the abyss of the American unconscious can we decipher the roots of the social ferocity that is now in full manifestation.” From this point, we might decide where and to whom we must turn.
The so-called ‘dark corners of the internet’ are, in fact, very bright. Talking heads decry the blurring of celebrity and criminality in the lionisation of Mangione, as if it's a new phenomenon, as if it marks a troubling new phase in the normalisation of violence in America. If violence is indeed normalised in America, it is because U.S.-supplied weapons kill civilians and fuel genocide. It is because both political parties have spent decades eroding public trust in the rule of law. It is because so-called ‘liberal democracy’ is on shaky ground. It is because neoliberal governance thrives on the precarity and commodification of relations. It is because, while Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro claims there is no place for violence, he signs his name on missiles. It is because Zoe Strimpel fears for the future because of ‘Gen-Z’ support for Mangione yet writes that ‘the Israel Defence Forces are the most moral soldiers in the world’. Why is violence only acceptable when carried out—or backed—by elites against the working class and marginalised? Why does a U.S. Congress report deem it necessary to issue a “call to arms” for bipartisan public support to reclaim the United States’ crumbling global hegemony? If we are witnessing the normalisation of political violence through chaotic revenge, it is because the reasons for revolution are staring us in the face. It is because pain and sad passions ignite the active forces within them.
We are fighting a war of information where major media outlets have become arms of the national security state. Mangione’s alleged manifesto remained hidden until Ken Klippenstein published it, despite being in the possession of major media companies, just like his notebook is now. Days later, the New York Times refused to publish Mangione’s image, citing fears of "amplifying the crime and inspiring others," according to Andy Newman. Meanwhile, other media outlets scramble to frame Mangione's alleged actions as 'bizarre' and 'brazen'— desperate to portray him as terrifying and erratic, because acknowledging the truth of the event would force them to recognise that he is, in fact, no different from the average American voter. Even those who appear to empathise with the cause often revert to reductive moralising.
A quick search of Luigi Mangione's name floods the screen with headlines like ‘Who is Luigi Mangione?’, ‘What we know about the New York killer,’ or ‘Tracing the privileged family of Luigi Mangione.’ This is journalism at its most insidious. Had Mangione not been arrested, the shooter may have become a stronger symbol of class antagonism—his image untainted by the specifics of his story. It is why we must resist such attempts to dilute his image. That said, as Will Conway, co-host of the Acid Horizon podcast, pointed out, the flood of comical or provocative edits and politicised videos surrounding the shooter’s assassination reveals how the truth of a politicising event disrupts the biopolitical fabric, where anyone can shape the mythology surrounding the propaganda of the deed. These posts fight back against those who seek to control the narrative, which is why the Times attempted to disarm the public in the name of national security, but it was already too late.
Americans are conditioned to love men who look like Mangione, which is why they dominate narratives in media and culture. If Mangione weren’t white, the universal support he now receives would undoubtedly shape a very different narrative. So, resisting the dilution of the motive also requires, as we should independently of this case, resisting the embedded racism that makes his attractiveness conventional. An obsolete romanticism—seemingly innocent, though it isn’t—will only help sustain the forces that shape who becomes a symbol of resistance and who doesn’t. We must remember the work remains unfinished, and the revolution will have no face. Destituting the political apparatus doesn’t rest on the murder of Brian Thompson— the world is full of Thompsons. With that said, this incident might have done the world a huge favour. It has given a nation, relentlessly beaten down by a for-profit healthcare system, a renewed sense of unity and a reinvigorated cause. What matters now is what we do next.
Vaneigem wrote,
“My sympathy for the solitary killer ends where tactics begin; but perhaps tactics need scouts driven by individual despair. However that may be, the new revolutionary tactics — which will be based indissolubly on the historical tradition and on the practice, so widespread and so disregarded, of individual realisation — will have no place for people who only want to mimic the gestures of Ravachol or Bonnot. But on the other hand these tactics will be condemned to theoretical hibernation if they cannot, by other means, attract collectively the individuals whom isolation and hatred for the collective lie have already won over to the rational decision to kill or to kill themselves. No murderers — and no humanists either! The first accept death, the second impose it. Let ten men meet who are resolved on the lightning of violence rather than the long agony of survival; from this moment, despair ends and tactics begin. Despair is the infantile disorder of the revolutionaries of everyday life.”
References
UHC Stats. Health Insurance, UnitedHealth, Shareholders, and Buybacks. Jacobin, December 2024. https://jacobin.com/2024/12/health-insuranceunitedhealth-shareholders-buybacks.
Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life.
Berardi, Franco. The American Unconscious and the Disintegration of the West. Substack. https://francoberardi.substack.com/p/el-inconsciente-americano-y-ladesintegracion.
Strimpel, Zoe. The Israel Defence Forces Are the Most Moral Soldiers in the World. The Telegraph, April 27, 2024. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/27/israel-defence-forces-mostmoral-soldiers-in-the-world/.
