Just over a week ago no one knew who Luigi Mangione was. After he was revealed as the alleged assassin of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, on 4 December, he quickly became one of the most polarizing figures in American pop culture.
To some, he’s an anticapitalist arch villain. To others, he is a Marxist folk hero exacting revenge against the unchecked avarice of American medical insurance companies. To yet more, he’s a damaged young man struggling with a variety of intense health issues, whose family and friends desperately tried to reach out to him after he disappeared in the weeks and months before the killing.
The Fox News host Laura Ingraham described those who have rallied behind Mangione as “nutbag people”. But in memes shared across TikTok, X and Instagram, he’s an Italian “daddy” and “brat” with washboard abs and a Cheshire cat grin.
Even the century-old Communist party USA – far from the political force it was in its early days – seized on his arrest to denounce the for-profit US healthcare system, while the audience of The Daily Show audibly booed as 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 like 1370,” read a viral post on X from the architecture critic Kate Wagner about the manhunt for Mangione, which has been viewed nearly 2m times.
The widespread approval of Thompson’s assassination, which has shocked many pundits on the left and right, has only one real precedent in modern American history: when Navy Seals killed the 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden in 2011.
“People hate their healthcare in the United States,” said Ed Ongweso Jr, a senior researcher at Security in Context, an international project of scholars housed at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. “It’s not surprising to me that some people celebrated the assassination as a form of catharsis, but I am surprised by how many people are openly doing so and pushing back against attempts to scold it.”
Ongweso was clear that the near-ubiquitous contempt for the US healthcare system had almost no political equivalent. In a bitterly divided country, Democrats and Republicans seemingly agree on one thing: America’s healthcare system is bad.
“You’re seeing celebration of him across the political spectrum because most people understand how much death and suffering and misery our healthcare system causes,” Ongweso said. “They’ve seen a loved one humiliated by it, they’ve been humiliated by it.”
Unlike in most of the developed world, the US healthcare system is provided entirely by private companies and there is no universal, single-payer system for non-seniors. Most Americans must either individually pay into an insurance plan or get insurance through their employer. Plans can cost hundreds and (often) thousands of dollars a month, depending on the extent of users’ needs and the plans being offered by insurers.
“Commentators and talking heads don’t seem to understand the reaction because they don’t see these industries as violent ones,” Ongweso continued. They clearly understand that someone was murdered, he said, “but struggle with the idea that the population views what these companies do is murder on an industrial scale”.
A former roommate of Mangione’s has said he had chronic back problems after a surfing injury and resented his health insurance plan because of it. An X-ray he featured on his X header photo suggested he suffered from a misaligned spine. His manifesto expresses clear hatred for the “parasites” running health insurance companies.
In the last year alone, UnitedHealthcare, which insures 29 million Americans, has faced a substantial scrutiny for antitrust law violations, illegal coverage denials resulting from faulty artificial intelligence programs and insider trading.
But extremism researchers have rung alarm bells about the general applause for lethal political violence in the middle of Manhattan.
“I have been alarmed by the overwhelming amount of celebration I’ve seen online from people who are applauding what is fundamentally an act of vigilante violence,” said Jared Holt, a senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “Many people have real and valid reasons to despise health insurance companies and corporate greed, but I am concerned that so many people seem to think shooting someone dead in the street is a valid response to that anger.”
There’s reason to worry: data points to a global rise in political assassinations and violence, especially in the west.
The last US presidential election campaign saw two serious assassination plots against Donald Trump. One involved a shooter who grazed the now president-elect’s ear with a round that very nearly killed him.
Mangione, who has Ivy League degrees and comes from a wealthy family with deep connections in Republican politics, doesn’t exactly fit the stereotype of a radicalized loner gunman. But his popularity has already far eclipsed any of the would-be Trump assassins who are not household names.
“The suspect, who police now believe to be Mangione, was a fit young man and I think it’d be mistaken to overlook the degree that likely propelled the story,” said Holt.
The other feature of Mangione is one that plays an outsized role in every single point of American life: his race. If he were Black or Latino, this story would likely have played out very differently. This raises the question of whether celebrating his version of vigilantism falls in line with the hero worship of a white savior.
Mangione, for example, was arrested alive and without incident. But Black people, even without the notoriety of being lethal assassins on the lam, are statistically the most likely to be murdered by police in the US.
A 2023 study by non-profit Mapping Police Violence showed that Black people are three times more likely to be murdered in a police interaction, while they are close to twice as likely to be unarmed in those same incidents. Mangione, on the other hand, was apprehended with the suspected murder weapon on his person.
Mangione’s social media presence reveals some insight into a potential motive. While he disliked corporate greed, he also had an affinity for the rightwing tycoon Peter Thiel, wrote a mostly positive review of the Unabomber’s manifesto and promoted arguments against government welfare programs.
According to Holt, there’s a lot 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 truly know what might have tipped the scales for Mangione until his life during those last six months comes into better focus.”
