December 10, 2024 - 10:10am
When UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in Manhattan last week, speculation ran wild. Was it a hit? A disgruntled customer? Now, in the 24 hours since 26-year-old Luigi Mangione was arrested and charged with his murder, the media has begun to piece together some answers.
The words “delay” and “deny” were reportedly written on shell casings found at the scene of the crime, taken from the title of a book critical of the health insurance industry. However, Mangione is the scion of a wealthy family and an Ivy League graduate with degrees in computer science, and in America we are supposed to believe that political violence is the sole preserve of the Trumpenproletariat. Since Mangione doesn’t fit that profile, efforts were made to paint him as a Right-wing fan of Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. However, a cursory glance at his X account shows he also followed Ezra Klein and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as Substacker and UnHerd contributor Gurwinder Bhogal, who described his conversations with Mangione on X.
Mangione’s high intelligence then led to comparisons with fellow Ivy Leaguer Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. Internet sleuths found what appears to be a four-star review from Mangione for Kaczynski’s treatise Industrial Society and Its Future, which contains this observation quoted from another reader: “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.” The New York Times also reported that a handwritten manifesto found on Mangione’s person contained a condemnation of the companies that “continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it”.
Yet Kaczynski is hardly the only example of a highly educated person willing to inflict violence on a society he finds corrupt. It is a tradition that goes back a long way. Fyodor Dostoevsky made Stavrogin, the central character of his great study of revolutionary violence The Devils, an aristocrat. At the time, Russia was experiencing a wave of violence at the hands of students and the children of minor nobles that would ultimately lead to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Intellectuals were also participants in the second wave of Russian violence that erupted in the early 20th century, which led to the deaths of thousands; when the intellectuals finally seized control of the country, the death toll reached into the millions.
Well-educated practitioners of terrorism can also be found among the radical groups of the later 20th century. The members of the murderous Red Army Faction in Seventies Germany were almost all university graduates. Bill Ayers, co-founder of the bomb-planting Weather Underground, was the son of a CEO and graduate of the University of Michigan, a so-called “public Ivy”. Ali Hassan Salameh, one of the men behind the 1972 Munich attack, was educated in Germany and married to 1971’s Miss Universe. Meanwhile, Mohamed Atta, leader of the 9/11 attackers, studied architecture in Cairo and town planning in Hamburg.
Of course, for all that these radicals were college graduates, their beliefs were strikingly Manichaean and simplistic. The advantage of being highly educated is that you can rationalise violent and dark deeds while dressing up your personal grievances in theory.
And as the last couple of years have revealed, rationalisations of violence are quite common among America’s credentialed elites. Radical rallies are most strongly concentrated on Ivy League campuses, while Taylor Lorenz, former star reporter at both the NYT and Washington Post, was foremost among the numerous individuals arguing that killing an insurance CEO was an understandable reaction to injustice. The good news is that most of America’s bourgeois radicals are content with cosplaying and rhetorical bomb-throwing. Brian Thompson was just unfortunate to encounter somebody willing to go much further.
Daniel Kalder is an author based in Texas. Previously, he spent ten years living in the former Soviet bloc. His latest book, Dictator Literature, is published by Oneworld. He also writes on Substack: Thus Spake Daniel Kalder.
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SubscribeThe good news is that most of America’s bourgeois radicals are content with cosplaying and rhetorical bomb-throwing. Brian Thompson was just unfortunate to encounter somebody willing to go much further.
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It only seems that way. Before you know it, these educated idiots will start a grandiose bloodbath.
We have to nip them in the bud
Do you have shares in healt insurers or are you very rich?
Perhaps he’s just a normal person – the kind of people that traditionally suffer if violent left wing intellectuals get anywhere near power.
You are much closer to the truth than you suspect.
My grandmother ran 28 kilometers from the village to a small town at night with my two-year-old mother in her arms, from where she left on the first train. The next morning she was to be “dekulakized” and sent to Siberia. She was lucky, her brother worked in GPU, he warned her.
My paternal grandparents did end up in Siberia. Grandmother died two years later and grandfather remarried. You can’t survive alone in the Siberian village.
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As the result, even one of the best Soviet universities did not knock out of me my instinctive contempt for the overly intellectual left wing public.
The thing that I (as a non-American) find most fascinating about all this is not the motivations of Mangione, but the lack of sympathy for Thompson.
As a non-American, you may not realize just how bad our healthcare system is and how abusive the practices of healthcare insurance companies like the one headed by Mr. Thompson are. That may not justify murder, but it goes a long way towards explaining the lack of sympathy. He made millions heading the company that had the highest rate of refusing to pay for needed treatments.
Unaffordable health care, unaffordable housing, stagnant wages while the value of capital and assets exploded. I think Americans – and the rest of the world for that matter – have to consider it is part of a bigger picture that seems to be getting worse and worse.
There is no money for health care and public spending is too high. How come? An aging population? Or is it perhaps because 50 trillion of wealth was transferred from the bottom 90% to the top 1% between 1975 and 2018?
The speculative, crony and oligarchic tendencies of the current economic system are starting to undermine very basic liberties, democracy and the social contract. Often under the guise of upholding principles such as private property and free markets, conveniently ignoring that a lot of big capital actually floats on top of public money, especially since 2008 and 2020.
Exactly. This isn’t “capitalism”. In America it is becoming an oligarchy. Monopolistic large corporations working in cahoots with big government and wealthy families.
Perhaps capitalism as you imagine it isn’t really a stable system. Unless kept on a leash in some way it tends to decay into oligarchy.
After all, it shouldn’t be a great surprise if the rich and powerful use their wealth and power in support of their own interests.
Who are these angels we can trust to keep capitalism on a leash? The people you seem to count on are all too eager to cut themselves in on the deal, whether this is called cronyism or a far more sinister ism.
Exactly. Who is going to “ethically administer” this “empathetic” and “cheap” care system.
Well, the “father of capitalism” Adam Smith as well as other classical liberals such as Locke saw these potential problems already. If you read them carefully you will find some good balanced suggestions. Of course they could not fully predict what capitalism would morph into, so later thinkers also have to be considered. At the very least we know we can do better than this because of the Postwar Consensus (’45-’75), AKA “the Golden Age of Capitalism”.
I believe the heart of your issue is focusing too intently on isms and too little on human nature. Capitalism is just a system. No one ever claimed it was incorruptible, just that it benefitted regular people far more than any other means of organizing an economy.
That Golden Age, by the way, 1) worked so long as the US was the prime mover of almost everything since it was among the very few places without a post-war rebuild, and 2) ushered in the welfare state as we know it today and created a dependency-cum-entitlement mentality.
Not at all. Thinkers like Adam Smith were not stupid and actually obsessed with trying to figure out human nature and how to deal with it in a complex society. Of course, understanding human nature remains a highly complex and fuzzy subject to this day. But I agree that if we truly want to discuss the issue we have to be much more specific as even the definition of capitalism itself is quite fuzzy. In many cases I feel that people disagreeing about these things are not even talking about the same concepts.
Maybe you’re right about the welfare state creating a dependency-cum-entitlement mentality. But one only has to look at who was bailed out in 2008 (and who wasn’t) to know who the true profiteers of that nanny state actually are.
The profiteers come in two primary flavors – the very poor and the very rich. The common denominator is a political class that perpetuates the former while allying with the latter. That’s what I meant earlier by cronyism.
This was repeated during Covid. The independent shops were forced to shut down but the big boxes were deemed essential. Churches were shuttered but liquor stores, weed dispensaries, and porn shops were not. A massive wealth transfer for the already rich with numbing agents and stimmy checks for everyone else.
You’re just bundling together two groups you don’t like, and perhaps feel angry with. Whatever you might think about the very poor, they are not “profiteers”.
Well, neither solution is perfect and both have their drawbacks. I think the problems of capitalism can be ameliorated if certain radical steps are taken, particularly the abolition of the corporation. That form of organization protects investors and owners from the full consequences of the actions taken by the business. They can lose their investment but no more. It thereby encourages excessive risk taking behaviors, because investors/owners/capital spreads their investment and their risk among many businesses, and they benefit because only a few of those risks have to pay off. To please investors, businesses take more risk than they otherwise would, even banks that should know better, hence the various speculative and financial bubbles and the fallout when said bubbles burst.
I would abolish corporations. If it exists, if it does business, somebody has to own it, and somebody has to answer for it. It’s not rocket science or economics, it’s basic common sense. That’s the only way the invisible hand can do it’s work. People make more responsible choices if there are serious consequences for bad choices. If a person can just lose $500, they may make one set of choices. If that same person can lose $500 and their house and see their family fortune ruined, they’ll probably not make the same choices. Note that collective ownership will not be disallowed. People can still own businesses collectively and thereby spread out the risk, but they won’t be protected from losing their personal wealth if the business goes bankrupt or does something odious and criminal that causes damages. I suspect a lot of the bad behavior from capitalism is in fact driven by the distorted incentives that the corporation creates and the widespread use of corporations by the wealthy to effectively shield their wealth from various elements of risk and/or accountability.
For the record, Adam Smith hated corporations and considered them to be monopolistic and anti-capitalist. Still, as much as the theoretical appeal of that strategy appeals to me, the implementation would be a Herculean task that would entail serious short-term risk and some sacrifice from all involved. Getting from where we are now to a more ‘pure’ form of capitalism would be a monumental undertaking. Failing such a ‘radical’ solution as the abolition of corporations, the next best solution is to make them directly answerable to elected politicians, and to invest in Congress the authority to break up monopolies, punish corporate misconduct, etc. Making them directly answerable to the people’s elected representatives in a more formal way would also encourage more responsible choices, and it would encourage executives to consider the will of the people and the consequences of their business choices on the nation as a whole. It wouldn’t be perfect, far from it, but it would give corporate executives an incentive to consider something other than their wealthy investors. This is probably the more ‘socialist’/left wing choice and probably much easier to accomplish in the modern world with a much lower risk of destabilizing the economy in the short term and triggering a depression.
That is not why he was killed. The person who killed him had no problem affording health care. I would reread and try to consider the central point of the article.
My response was unrelated to the incident and the suspect.
Well said
Aye. This is why we frankly need an old school democrat like those who fought for labor laws and passed the New Deal, a Democrat who isn’t afraid to play the class warfare card and risk the wrath of the international oligarchs. It would have been interesting to see what a Sanders/Trump election would have looked like in 2016 or 2020. That would have been a real choice between competing visions in the post-globalist era. I still think Bernie could have won the election both times, but again perhaps not. Maybe the oligarchs in that case would have accepted and adapted to the changes in the world much more quickly and sided with Trump. Ultimately, I suspect the oligarchs will prefer Trumpian populism to what Bernie would have done. Bernie would have taken the bull by the horns and taken on wealth in the most direct way possible using traditional socialist tactics, tax, spend, redistribute, regulate, and break up businesses that are too big and distorting markets. Under Trump, they can still make money and be as greedy as they like so long as it’s done within the context of the national interest and so long as everyday Americans share in the profit. It’s easier to fake loyalty to a country and its people than it is to literally give away one’s wealth and accept a limit on one’s greed. Americans, both the rich and the poor, will be perfectly willing to throw other countries under the bus for our collective benefit. Trump’s tariff threats are a taste of the future. Then again, I suspect a Sanders regime would probably do much the same, but with a more people oriented approach.
Which way is better? Which way is more effective? Which is morally preferable? I don’t have the answers to such questions. I can say definitively I would infinitely prefer having that debate on a national stage rather than the current dynamic of Trump and populism vs. a Frankenstein monster of neocons, Clintonites, corporations, social engineers, globalists, and ivory tower intellectuals banging the drum for a political/economic philosophy that is well past the sell by date and looking moldier, staler, and less appetizing by the day.
“May not” justify finding a scapegoat and appointing yourself his executioner?
That may not justify murder, but it goes a long way towards explaining the lack of sympathy.
That is a nice demonstration of the “rule of but,” in which everything that precedes the but can be discounted.
The commenter asked about the lack of sympathy. I tried to explain how it could exist even though the killing is/was a criminal murder. Not discounting anything.
“It may not justify murder…”
Correction: It DOES NOT justify murder. Ever.
In a civilized nation with democratic means and laws, should one desire change, one is expected to get busy in performing their civic duty.
Change the laws that allow such corporate behavior.
Sadly, leftist teachers and professors have ceased teaching civics to the rising generations and, in its place, are teaching them how to be “social justice activists.” This translates to working outside the law and disrupting/disabling democratic political compromise to ensure that only their selfish desires are met.
The results are not a surprise: The most radical leftists, much like this murderer, feel completely justified in becoming terrorists within society. And they get their dopamine hits as other radical leftists cheer them on. Similar to the rapturous applause occurring on the Left as they show their approval for this murderer.
These activists were the genesis of the destructive and lawless Riots during 2020-2021. Throughout which over 20 innocent people were killed, over $2 billion in economic damage was caused to mostly mom-and-pop stores, and some of America’s greatest cities (e.g. SF, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, etc) began their death spiral as economic blight overtook them. Yet, the lesson from Radical Leftists was: Take ‘free stuff.’ Meaning ‘free stuff’ that belongs to others. And, if these innocent people – who are living by the actual laws of society – get in your way, destroy them.
The current cycle of progressivism – that ignores laws and ownership – encourages Net Takers from our civilization rather than Net Producers to our civilization.
If one thinks this path is wise, consider their ‘Autonomous Zones” during the “Summer of Love” that collapsed into murder and mayhem within mere weeks because progressive Net Takers overcame any incremental gains produced by progressive and conservative Net Producers within the Zone’s boundaries.
Anti-Colonialism is a colonizing ideology. It colonizes and appropriates resources, drains them and then seeks scapegoats.
Ha, this is good. Well put sir.
LOL at this commenter… There are over 40,000 dead children and civilians in Gaza caused by U.S. involvement, and not a single tear from us. Dude, have you been living under a rock?
The mantra has been: We do not care!
They were too stupid and started a war they could not win. Low IQs probably due to rampant endogamy
As usual, those who complain about microaggressions are only too happy to applaud a macroaggression.
Imagine a healthcare system that’s marginally better or about equal to your NHS or any of the other public health care systems in Europe. Imagine the wait times can be just as long depending on where you are and it can be just as difficult to find a doctor that’s even accepting new patients. Imagine the red tape and the filling out forms and the waiting around for ‘clearances’ and ‘authorizations’ is just as bad as it is in your country (unless of course you live in Scandinavia, where you have a system that’s actually good-if that’s the case, imagine the crappiest, poorest, most mismanaged part of your system). Now imagine that instead of a bunch of underpaid, overworked, bureaucrats to criticize and a government that’s at least theoretically answerable to elected leaders, you have insurance companies who have latched onto the system like a tick on a dog’s back and who reap huge profits from the taxpayers and consumers and who aren’t accountable to anybody unless one wants to fight a years long probably losing battle in court. Imagine that what they sell is not healthcare or any facsimile thereof, but rather they sell promises written on bits of paper, and when called upon to honor those promises which their customers have paid for, they frequently fail to honor such promises. Imagine that even when they do pay, they leave people who live paycheck to paycheck with four and five digit bills AFTER the insurance company pays ‘their share’. Imagine that these same companies commiserated and conspired with government bureaucrats and crony politicians to write the Obamacare law that codified all this and is almost universally hated by both customers and the actual doctors and nurses who provide care. Imagine every doctor you speak to agrees that the system is broken and we need to do something else. Now, imagine that you read one of the executives of these companies has been shot by a disgruntled customer who was denied coverage or some wannabe Robin Hood.If you can imagine all that, maybe you can see why America gave this a collective ‘meh’.
A lot of jobs come with risks. Football players risk life altering brain injuries. Truck drivers and delivery people risk death or injury in car accidents. Construction workers risk injuries from falls, power tools, etc. Furniture movers risk back injuries and lifelong pain. Electricians risk, well, electrocution. Police risk getting murdered and fire fighters run into burning buildings. People mourn the people who get hurt, but they aren’t shocked when that they do. It’s unfortunate, but not really news. Given the current political and healthcare climate in the USA, being an insurance executive means being a hate sink. It means being wary of people who seem to know who you are. It means fencing your yard and buying a security system because angry people who feel cheated by the system are a fact of life, and some may go to great lengths to extract vigilante justice for themselves or others. He knew, or should have known, the risks when he accepted the job. As far as sympathy goes, there are plenty of injured/killed firefighters, police officers, construction workers, furniture movers, and football players, etc. who are way ahead of insurance executives on my hierarchy of sympathy. For that matter, there are abused children, starved dogs, and kids with cancer who are more worthy of sympathy as well. Most Americans, whether they admit it or not, have such a list, and most of them would put insurance executives at or near the very bottom.
Also, people get murdered every day in America. The stats I just looked up show that there are about 68 homicides a day in the US, that’s about one every 21 minutes. For many urban dwellers, murder is a routine occurrence. We don’t stop the presses and have a national day of mourning for every crackhead that gets shot over their drug tab. Violence in America is common enough that it gets ignored, particularly when the victim doesn’t command much sympathy. It can be racial as well, with the press showing up and circling like vultures for every little white girl that gets raped and murdered, sometimes for years on end as with Jonbenet Ramsey, while the larger number of inner city minorities who suffer the same fate never seem to generate the same media circus even at the local level. There are enough murder victims of all stripes in America for the insurance executive to not merit much of our attention, let alone sympathy.
None of this changes the fact that murder is a crime that should be punished and terrorism should be condemned in all cases. The guilty party should be punished according to the law, and we should all recognize that terrorism is not a good way to accomplish social and political goals. Americans may not be deeply mourning the loss of an insurance executive, but we aren’t throwing a parade for the murderer either. Whether this qualifies as terrorism is debatable. The alleged killer targeted and killed one specific person. He didn’t blow up a building to kill the guy and whoever else might happen to be there. If this was an act of terrorism, it has to fall on the low end of the spectrum.
If it is not central to human history it is at least central to the enlightenment tradition that radicals fighting against a status quo – argued to be repressive – shape the world. Now, I’m not saying this guy is one of them and I’m not calling for anything of course.
However, the fact is we live in a Western world shaped by thinkers such as Rousseau, Paine and Locke. They all argued that, to reach certain goals, protests and sometimes even violent means can be justified.These ideas were brought into practice by revolutionaries such as Robespierre, Washington and Jefferson. All these people fit the pattern of well-read intellectuals. Were they all just “Rationalizing violent and dark deeds while dressing up your personal grievances in theory”? Well perhaps, who knows? But a status quo also rationalizes its power and use of violence using all kinds of constructs that might actually be unjust and corrupt. Who still believes in the God given rights of the aristocracy after all? Or slavery. Nietzsche would go a step further and argue there is no good and evil in the first place, just the will to power.
An uptick from me, not least for that last line.
Pathological
Maybe I should emphasize again, if it wasn’t clear, that I am not saying that any of this is ‘good’. I am not personally justifying and condoning anything, merely giving historical and philosophical perspectives on the subject at hand.
The “radicals” are also elites and have the same lack of empathy towards the lower classes, which is manifested by the governments they have subsequently installed. It’s trading one bag of crap for a worse bag of crap, to put it in crude vernacular.
Robespierre is the correct analogy here. This is not a “Democratic movement” and its not based on principles of justice.
Exactly, poor people do not have the time or resources to ever go against the power structure—never! The Third Estate’s bourgeoisie were in the same group as the peasants; the only difference was education.
Revolution is always the act of the privileged and the elite!
I don’t think trying to divide us and see each other as enemies is going to work much longer. The super rich people in power that are squeezing us are the enemies.
Yes because Class Warfare is a unifying principle. That’s why Russia, China, NKorea and Venezuela are such loving, peaceful enclaves.
I would say that the West had a much more intense history of actual “class warfare” than any of these places. Don’t forget that throughout the 18th, 19th and early 20th century revolution was always looming in much of Europe. Even in the US the labor movement was quite radical at some point. In fact, it was this class struggle that initially inspired the totalitarian Leninist states, not the other way around. However, the big difference is that the West itself took a reformist approach based on concessions.
Might be some truth to that but outside of France, it typically didn’t devolve into a purity competition of vicious retribution. It seems people that speak so much of “Democracy” have little use for it in practice.
The advantage of being highly educated is that you can rationalise violent and dark deeds while dressing up your personal grievances in theory.
and to paraphrase an old philosopher – once you have convinced yourself of absurdities, it becomes easy to carry out atrocities.
Of course there might be a simple, uncontroversial explanation for Mangione’s actions: like Kaczynski, he has significant mental health problems.
Let’s not pretend that this is just another example of capitalism gone a bit crazy. This man’s business was taking money for medical insurance from people and then doing everything in his power to refuse the pay out when they became ill.
When a criminal has good looks and youth he becomes a folk hero. Look at the Menendez bros…ted bundy….the cannibal in Milwaukee….as the radio host said, he’s thrown away his life….I guess he got what he wanted…
It seems he had a personal score to settle . Other articles point to a long standing back injury surgeries and possible disputes over insurance. Maybe he snapped . There is the possibility too that he was taking pain killers or opiates and his judgement may have been impaired. Such a terrible shame to see two lives destroyed by it.
This is not really political is it? I doubt this bloke is the perpetrator anyway. There’s dome great sleuthing on X that puts this article to shame.