The murder of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson has set off shockwaves across America. This week we look at the story’s online impact, people mythologizing the alleged killer, its intersection with conspirituality, and the healthcare system in America writ large.
Show Notes
Jen Gunter on insurance denial for her premature babies' oxygen needs
Exclusive: Luigi's Manifesto - Ken Klippenstein
Savings: Quarter of Americans Have Few, One in 10 Have None | Statista
The Burden of Medical Debt in the United States
View of U.S. Healthcare Quality Declines to 24-Year Low
MDVIP/Ipsos poll shows Americans are struggling with the healthcare system
UnitedHealthcare CEO gunned down in Manhattan sold company stocks just before DOJ probe made public | The Independent
Conservatives Face Backlash From Followers Over UnitedHealthcare Murder - Newsweek
Before fatal subway chokehold, Jordan Neely was on NYC’s list of homeless individuals with dire needs | CNN
Kaiser Study on Health Insurance Satisfaction
NIH Debunks Myth that 60% of Bankruptcies are Medical in Nature
Luigi Mangione’s Anger Wasn’t Neatly Ideological
Gallup Poll on Health Care Satisfaction
Ipsos Poll on Health Care Satisfaction
Mental Illness is 13.5 times More Likely In Lone Wolf Shooters
Narcissism, Fame Seeking and Mass Shootings
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remski.
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For about 10 days, the cable news cycle and online media were dominated by the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4th.
The grainy security camera footage was straight out of a suspense thriller.
Then came the New York and federal manhunt that offered a reward.
We saw hostel and Uber photos of the suspect.
Details like the engraved bullets found at the scene and the Monopoly money-stuffed backpack found in Central Park added to the intrigue.
Was he a hired hitman, a political assassin, a shadowy hero activating class consciousness against the exploitative elites?
Comment sections and social posts were reported on as ratioing the murder victim and boosting the shooter.
Once Luigi Mangione had been apprehended, his handsome and ripped online photos triggered a wave of fetishization, while his activity on the Goodreads website fueled speculation about his real politics.
To me, this all very quickly dehumanized both Thompson and Mangione into being culture war surrogates.
And speaking just for myself, this is Julian, by the way, I found how some people lionized the killer and derided the dead man disturbing.
Coverage of the crime also became a launchpad into conversations about the sorry state of American health insurance, which is good, but not when it justifies vigilante violence.
Today, we'll dig into some data and media analysis and, spoiler alert, we're going to have some areas of major disagreement.
Yes, we will.
This is Matthew.
The murder released a surge of emotions from folks immiserated by predatory insurance and also, I think, holding a pent-up rage at generations of elite unaccountability.
From oil spills to lies about WNDs to Epstein Island to trader-driven financial crashes.
So I also saw the trolling and the thirst trapping, but also a kind of grim vindication, bleak schadenfreude, and predictions of open class war.
And also stories from doctors on Reddit basically saying, oh, actually, you don't hate these companies enough.
So to me, it's not a culture war mess so much as ripping the bandage off the tension between individual and social murder.
And to me, both men were actually humanized as we learned more between the troubles of the shooter and the ultimate equalizing vulnerability of the oligarch, which is usually hidden by money and bureaucracy.
And I think one point that I want to make is that in the vein of the real versus the illusory, which is our beat, the assassination also provided a startling structural parallel to the paranoid fantasy of QAnon by highlighting a real-world vision of the elite Okay,
there's a lot to cover here, and when we were framing this episode in our meeting last week, I made it clear that I mostly want to focus on health insurance, but I will give my overall statements, and there's a lot to be unpacked in this.
So if I were to...
I'll create two simple heuristics for myself before I get into some data here.
First of all, American healthcare is fucking awful and it's just people are really suffering because of it.
And the second, my only statement really with regards to the shooter is men don't shoot men in the back.
So I'll use that as my guiding principles and now let's look at some data.
Beginning with UnitedHealth Group, which is UnitedHealthcare's parent company.
Because they provide coverage to 49 million Americans, myself included, which makes them the largest health insurance company in America by revenue.
They earned $189 billion this year, and they own 14% to 15% of the commercial health market.
They also, as has been going around, have the highest denial rate among insurers offering plans on ACA exchanges, and they rejected 32% of claims while the industry averages 20%.
Now, this is only on the ACA or the public market exchanges because you can't actually know the overall denial rate.
That's private information.
So if you get your coverage through your employer or if you buy it on the private market, they do not have to disclose that information.
And my fear, which I've been posting about, is that if the Trump administration completely dismantles ACA, that is one of the things they're going to take away is the reporting mechanism for that.
So right now we know UHC is the largest denier.
We might not know that in the future.
Now, that is big picture data.
We're going to return to it at the end of this segment, but I'll just say that my own run-in with UHC happened two years ago when my wife started getting breast cancer screenings.
And because my wife, like 50% of women in the world, has something called dense breast tissue— UHC doesn't cover most of the screenings for that.
They do the very basic screening, but anything after, which is required for women with dense breast tissue, they don't cover.
So we were thousands of dollars out of pocket for a basic screening service.
And now, and I'm sure a lot of other people experience this, every year when that screening time comes around, We have to say, okay, what can we afford this year to make sure you don't have cancer, which is fucking awful.
Atrocious.
Now, last comment on this.
UnitedHealth Group, though, is doing just fine.
The CEO, Andrew Witte, made $23.5 million in compensation last year.
He also wrote a fucking god-awful op-ed in the New York Times, which I posted on our I did a short video about that.
You have the chief financial officer, John Feck, $16 million.
The former president and chief operating officer, Dick Dirk McMahon.
He retired in April and he was pulling in $16 million a year.
Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO who was murdered, would have made $10.2 million this year.
And as a company, the CEO to median employee ratio at UnitedHealth Group is 352 to 1. And that's median.
That's not even the lowest employee rate.
That's just the median level.
And, you know, it wasn't enough, that ratio, allegedly, because at the time of his murder, Thompson was under investigation for insider trading, right?
So it's not just that this is, like, a crappy capitalist business, but like all crappy businesses, it's going to be filled with, you know, shady dealings as well.
And I just have to say that as the Canadian on staff...
I can't tell you how angry and nauseated I am on behalf of, well, you guys, but also anyone who lives under this insanity.
I can't imagine the stress, which is a disease factor, after all, of paying up front on a credit card, knowing full well that it might not be covered, or being surprised by a bill in the mail for something I was told was going to be covered, or I thought was going to be covered.
And it's so normalized.
Like, Right down to the euphemisms, like, I had to learn what the word copay meant, which sounds like you're going Dutch on a date, right?
It sounds like you're sharing something with somebody.
Or you just used one, Derek, out of pocket, it sounds like you have it in your pocket to begin with, right?
It's so incredibly different from the life that people live with some measure of socialized medicine, and I... I just can't imagine the stress that it causes.
I can!
I mean, we saw it.
We're seeing it play out.
I agree with all of that.
I mean, politically, I believe healthcare is a human right.
It should be socialized.
For-profit medicine and for-profit health insurance is inhumane.
It needs massive regulatory reforms.
And United clearly has top-tier, unethical business practices.
In the case of this killing, I heard a left of center narrative about online responses that said, look, most people are very unhappy.
They're even enraged about the quality of their health insurance.
So just look at the comments.
And that explains people, you know, in some cases celebrating, in some cases just saying, you know, he had it coming and I have no empathy for him.
To me, this becomes tricky territory because people motivated to create social media posts or to make online comments represent a quite specific sample.
So that made me wonder how much of this reporting, based on that activity, created a kind of vibes-based consensus for ideological reasons.
So as a quick thought experiment, this is what came to my mind.
What if this was the killing of Anthony Fauci?
And all the other details were roughly the same.
It's not hard to imagine that there would be a similar phenomenon playing out, including plenty of online celebration, dehumanizing the victim, lionizing the killer.
And we'd be reporting on that very critically because murder is wrong.
But in that case, it would be because the inevitable anti-vax and COVID grievance claims about him being a corrupt elite who had it coming would be easy to debunk.
Well, and that is the difference because Fauci is in the opposite business of denying care.
Yeah, exactly.
So when the barometer of rage exemplified by online activity at times implied a justification for the vigilante murder of Brian Thompson or was used to signal an awakening of class consciousness, it made me just want to dig into the data a little bit.
And it turns out that reliable data on how people rate their health insurance is hard to parse.
For example, a KFF study from June of 2023 found that 81% of 3,605 people rated their experience with their health insurance as excellent or good.
And for diversity, that survey group was equally divided between insurance plans through work, Personally purchased ACA plans, Medicare and Medicaid, so we had a diversity of ages and income brackets.
Despite that overall positive rating, nonetheless, 58% said they had had insurance problems in the last year, with patients seeking reimbursements for mental health care having the highest prevalence of problems.
Now, of that 58% who said they'd had health insurance problems in the past year, about half, so 29% of that whole group I think?
Now, some have criticized this particular study as being too conservative and as being the one that the health insurers use to kind of hide behind.
But I haven't seen anyone point to problems with the methodology, so that's hard for me to assess.
But what about other studies?
And Derek, you pointed me towards a couple.
There's a December 9th Gallup poll in which only 44% rated healthcare in general, and that's not their insurance experience, as excellent or good.
At the same time, 71% in that group did rank the care they actually had received as being excellent or good.
In that poll, the overall rating of excellent or good for insurance coverage specifically was 65%, and that had gone down from 68 in 2001. An Ipsos poll from February had some interesting findings too.
And this is a different vector, right?
With over 60% saying health insurance lacked transparency and that the billing policies and deductibles were too hard to understand.
So there'll be links to all three of these studies in the show notes.
I'm just trying to find, like, what's the data?
What are people actually experiencing beyond just, like, the comment sections?
That's what I could find.
It's not a crystal clear picture yet.
Derek, I know you have some pointers in terms of what I might be missing so far.
You started this with a correct premise, not to confuse online commenters with data.
I think that's really important to acknowledge because it's so easy to get pulled into your algorithms and misunderstand what's actually happening.
I do have a problem with the insurance experience that you cite, though.
And it's not your fault.
It's built into the system.
It's baked in.
Because I don't think people generally recognize how prevalent the insurance industry is in the entirety of healthcare.
So in our next segment, I'm going to kind of parse research and medicine with healthcare.
But for now, what I'm about to break down is even more convoluted.
So your 81% study that you cite, which is the only one that asks those specific questions that we could find, is about insurance premiums and coverage.
But nearly every aspect of care involves the insurance companies sticking themselves in between hospital systems and providers and patients.
So just a couple other data points before I break that down a little bit.
32% of Americans are satisfied with the healthcare system overall.
61% say that the system is a hassle.
53% say they're treated more like a number than a person.
I say this often because I worked in an emergency room for two years.
When you go in, the first thing they ask is your insurance, not your name.
So there's a dehumanization aspect of that.
69% say the system has major problems or is in crisis, and only 19% are satisfied with the cost.
And that last one is specifically and particularly really important.
First of all, you have things like pharmacy benefit managers.
These are people who are hired to negotiate with hospitals and doctors and providers and with pharmaceutical companies.
That determines the costs of pharmaceutical drugs.
Now, they'll say that they're fighting for the consumer, but they're hired by the insurance company.
What they're trying to do is they're trying to keep what the insurance company pays down as low as possible.
When I read a stat That says 19% of people are satisfied with cost.
The insurance industry is directly playing a role in that, not only with the pharmaceuticals, but with procedures, with co-pays to visits, with every aspect of the hospital system.
They are involved with that.
You also have surgical costs.
You know, and then I found a different study that also include between 2011 and 2017, out-of-pocket expenses for outpatient surgeries increased by 50%.
So that is also fueling some of this rage we're seeing.
Then you have to factor in in-network versus out-of-network costs.
So with UHC... I'm in the Providence Hospital System here in Oregon, and I can go in their network, but if I want to see a specialist outside, that's going to be hundreds of thousands of dollars more.
And then you have the fact that Providence Hospital System actually hires out-of-network companies, places them in their hospitals, Directs you to them but does not tell you that they are actually out of network.
So one time when I got blood work done, I went to an out of network provider inside of my hospital system, did not know and got hit with hundreds of dollars of fees due to that.
And there's no transparency up front about that?
Like you didn't know before you walked in to have the blood drawn?
That's another on my bullet list.
Holy shit.
Price transparency is a big problem because when I had my meniscus surgery done a few years ago, I researched meniscus surgeries and it can range in the U.S. between $3,000 and $15,000 depending on where you are.
Now, I got mine at UCLA, which is a very premier hospital system in Los Angeles.
And my co-pays were $3,000.
So that means that the surgery itself was much more expensive than that.
And then you have coverage policies, which is a whole other can of worms.
So here's the last thing I'll say about this.
Insurance is sold in America with the idea that Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are sold.
You're paying into this system When you're healthy, you're paying into the system so that it's a safety net for when you're not healthy.
The care is there when you need it.
Now, the irony of this is the KFF study you brought, Julian, and then some other ones show that people who need more medical care are less satisfied with the system.
That should be the opposite if the system was working as the insurance companies market it to people.
But the fact that the more people need it, the more they have to pay shows that the entire system is broken.
And the only place where that was not the case was with Medicare and Medicaid.
especially as you got older.
So that's an interesting sort of contrast in terms of something that is providing actually much better coverage.
Derek, I think all of this is so important.
I did not know about pharmacy benefit managers.
And the extent to which the insurance companies have actually inserted themselves into this whole thing.
It's really a scam and it's atrocious.
For a century, the insurance industry, which started in 1929 broadly, they have always been a wedge between providers and patients.
So this is by design and it's only gotten worse.
You know, with regard to satisfaction questionnaires, I can't say that I understand study design.
It does seem to me that for a population that's chronically underserved and price-gouged and also interrupted, like, you know, sort of They're intervened upon between their experience and their practitioner.
But at the same time, they're also crucially dependent for their health and their lives on this particular industry.
The question of how do you feel about your health insurance seems to me like it's a Stockholm Syndrome-like question.
It's like, how do you feel about your captor who can keep you alive and who can do these things for you, but they might not?
I just don't understand the premise of the question.
And I find that the actual hard numbers about like, What people's medical debt actually is.
We're going to get into that.
What the actual medical debt trauma is, that's much more salient to me, it seems.
This is where I want to agree with Julian and his premise for what he was doing, because it is a very difficult question, Matthew, and it is hard to understand.
Because so much of it depends on your employer, just like retirement savings and 401ks.
But a few years ago, I was hired by a startup that got its employees...
The number one Blue Cross Blue Shield program, no deductible, fully covered for myself and my partner.
And if I had kids, they would be fully covered as well.
That was the employer's decision to say, you know what?
We're going to cover all of this as an agreement of you being an employee here and we're going to take care of you.
That is rare.
But so Julian, like someone who has that, where you don't have to worry about deductibles or co-pays or any of those things...
Yeah.
During that year and a half when I was at that company, my experience was very good compared to the five other insurance companies I've had since COVID began.
And that is what's so frustrating about this system because I've been on the public market.
I've been under my own insurance.
I've been under that company's.
Now we're under my wife's.
And at every step, you have to say, what is my experience going to be like now?
And there's a range of responses that you'll have.
Matthew, that's sort of a chilling picture you're painting.
Are you suggesting that people who are answering a survey about how they feel about their health insurance might be afraid to tell the truth or might fawningly give false positives because they're scared of repercussions?
In the KFF study that you referenced, the first bullet point was 81% said that there was satisfaction.
And then the second bullet point, main takeaway, was something like 58% of people had had major problems with their insurance in the past year.
Those two answers are incoherent to me.
I don't know how you get 81% saying, yeah, it's pretty good.
It wasn't major problems, it was had a problem.
Well, some of them were major, like denial of care.
So I just don't understand how those things...
And satisfaction with the insurance, it's oblique.
It's like, with who?
With the people that you're speaking to, people who are trying to be kind in customer service?
It doesn't seem like it's a direct pathway to the actual medical pain of that economy.
Yeah, no, as I said, it's hard to parse and it's hard to find decent data on this.
We did our best.
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I was really struck here, and Matthew, I know we had some overlaps here.
I was struck by the role that media speed and dynamics between news reporting and the internet played in this story.
The public very quickly had access to that security footage of the murder itself.
And then to photos that were coming in of the suspect.
And news reporting included the unfolding storm of social media responses, which is just an interesting thing, right?
This becomes part of the story.
And all of that to me created almost like a reality TV Rorschach effect that we were participating in something culturally, right?
Yeah, it's an unforgettable 10 seconds.
It's like a grainy cutscene out of a video game.
It's brutal, but it's also mathematically clean and inexorable.
The smoothness of the action speaks to what appears to be clear intent.
And there was a report that when Mangione was approached by cops in the McDonald's, he started to tremble, but you can't see any lack of resolve in that clip.
It's a really straightforward decision.
Yeah, and apparently those kinds of guns are very hard to use, and there were several things he was doing.
I've seen people who know about those guns that show that he was very well-practiced.
Yeah, he trained.
You know, I think technically the response to the event that we're speaking about has to follow the event, but it really doesn't explain the instantaneous nature of that response.
Like, people seem to have been activated by it, and maybe, you know, we could say they had a pre-existing condition called ongoing awareness of injustice because the feeling is just there to be released as though it's breaking a dam.
Yeah.
And I think in the speed of everything, a very simple distinction becomes hard to make, which is between Thompson and Mangione as people and as symbols.
And that confusion has a technological accelerant, you know, because we have this intimate scene, the shooting, and then the spectacular scene that goes viral.
And it's already abstract because it's a surveillance camera source.
And I think the fact that it's captured on a surveillance camera makes everything more eerie because...
These cameras are now everywhere.
They depict a world that is once familiar and alienated.
And in this case, the gaze, which is usually of state origin, is kind of used against itself politically.
So I think there is additional zest in this realization that the state has captured like a picture of its own precarity.
And then there's an immediate conflict that's provoked in this juxtaposition between the human and the spectacular.
And I think this is the heart of it for me.
It exposes the collapsing together of two things that Frederick Engels pointed out in 1845 in The Condition of the Working Class in England in talking about the difference between individual and social murder.
He said, We're good to go.
And I think that captures the dilemma that explodes in an online moment like that.
So before we go deeper into the discussion of possible motives and how the public killing of Brian Thompson was framed politically, we know that there's evidence that emerged as the story unfolded, and it's important to just touch on it.
Significantly, there were those three bullet casings at the scene that had been engraved with the words deny, delay, and depose.
There was a backpack looking like the shooters that had been stuffed with Monopoly money found in Central Park, and by now we all know that a 26-year-old man named Luigi Mangione was arrested in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, McDonald's on December 9th.
His bag contained a 3D printed gun, a silencer, a fake New Jersey ID. And a 262-word written document about the American healthcare system characterized as a manifesto.
And I have a salient passage here.
It was published by Ken Klippenstein.
And my caveat here is just I'm a little conflicted about quoting his manifesto, as I would be with regard to any shooter, because the only reason why his words are getting repeated is that he killed someone.
I respect that, and I disagree because I think the concerns about gratifying him or inspiring copycats have got to be balanced against the overwhelming public interest in why did he do this thing?
And with manifestos from racist or fascist shooters, misinformation experts will say, don't publish it, don't spread it around.
I'm not really hearing that from them on this.
It's a judgment call.
My personal bias in this case is that if the cops and the corporations don't want you to publish it, maybe because most of it is a straightforward statement that might make sense to some people, it's a pretty good reason to publish it.
What he writes in it is, this is just an excerpt, frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.
A reminder, the U.S. has the number one most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank Roughly number 42 in life expectancy.
United is the, this is indecipherable, but largest company in the U.S. by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, and Walmart.
It has grown and grown, but has our life expectancy?
No, the reality is these, indecipherable, this was handwritten by the way, have simply gotten too powerful and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.
My caveat is, why did you use a New Jersey ID? That's fucked up.
We got drones.
The drones are flying over my sister's house.
She's got video.
It's fucked up.
I want to bring this back before we go into the final section about the figure of Mangione, because he has not really interested me as much as I think you two guys, but But what's really interested me was what my main focus in life is, which is health and healthcare and how fucked up our system is.
So I kind of want to wrap this around to a speculative idea I have that relates to conspirituality.
A day or two before that manifesto, which we believe is real, was published, there was a fake manifesto that was circulating online, and it was called The Allopathic Complex and Its Consequences.
Yeah.
You jumped all over it.
As soon as you saw that, you're like, oh my god, this is it.
Were you disappointed it wasn't the real one?
No, no, actually.
As I'll say, it was actually very emotional, and you could actually understand motives more if this were the real one.
It's 1,699 words as compared to the 262 that you just read, Matthew.
And I first found it because someone shared it with me because a woman was reading it on TikTok and she had posted it into the Internet Archive.
So then I went and I read it and It feels like it was written by a Two parts that jump out to me that really hit me when I was reading it.
First, the title.
Allopathy is a generalized slur against modern evidence-based medicine, and it's quite common in wellness circles.
It strayed a lot from its original meaning.
It was coined by Samuel Hahnemann, the creator of homeopathy.
And it basically just means that opposite cures alike.
So in allopathy, if you have diarrhea, you take something to stop the diarrhea.
In homeopathy, you take something to promote diarrhea, even though the ingredient is not there any longer.
So anyway, Hanuman had good reasons for this, I will actually say, because he was seeing bloodletting and phrenology and all these quack cures going on in hospital systems, and he thought they were problematic.
So I actually understand that.
So he called their version allopathy, and he said, no, no, we're going to do homeopathy.
But anyway, it has come to mean something that is just anything evidence-based is now considered derogatorily by wellness influencers.
So the title, Allopathic Complex, really jumped out at me.
That's someone of Luigi who we know was seemingly all over the place politically, but a little more in the bro science space that he would use it would be quite surprising to me.
Now, the bigger question here to me, why I think it's wellness propaganda, is the manifesto confuses chronic disease etiology and research with the insurance industry.
And they're both part of the complex in this reading.
So, Julian, before we were going about how it's hard to disentangle, well, here I'm looking at it from another angle.
And so the writer of this fake manifesto invents Luigi's mom's struggle with chronic pain.
And it's a struggle that, to your point, Matthew, it hits.
You read it and you're like, fuck, you can imagine that happening to someone.
The writer writes,"...each appointment was promised to be fully covered until the insurance claims were delayed and denied.
Allopathic medicine did nothing to help my mother's suffering, yet it is the foundation of our entire society." But one thing wellness influencers do, we've covered this for years, is they pretend science and medicine have figured everything out.
And that's just not true.
If you look at medical history, which is one of my pastimes, I love reading about it, we are really far advanced thanks to 19th century revelations like vaccines, antibiotics, and public health protocols.
and we all benefit from these, but that doesn't mean we have everything figured out.
Credible doctors and researchers know this.
Wellness influencers have a tendency to set up this binary of a hero and villain, however, and since medicine doesn't understand facets of chronic disease, the influencers exploit this gap in knowledge.
Luigi's fake mom's pain is real to us because so many experience it, and it's frustrating, so I get that.
Yet the author is discussing the insurance industry and then immediately pivots to evidence-based medicine, which I believe is an intentional conflation.
I could do an entire episode on the American insurance industry, but let's just say, again, the modern version of it started in 1929 in Dallas.
And it was basically an agreement between 1,500 teachers who wanted to have a doctor system that they could rely on, and it has evolved from there.
So what's sacrificed when the writer of this fake manifesto conflates the origins of a disease, disease ideology, with our horrible insurance system is that good medical practices like vaccines and other preventive measures gets confused with the with our horrible insurance system is that good medical practices like vaccines and other preventive measures gets confused And the frustration and rage aimed at the latter is very understandable.
So what's sacrificed when the writer of this fake manifesto conflates the origins of a disease, disease ideology, with our horrible insurance system is that good medical practices like vaccines and other preventive measures gets confused with the greed with our horrible insurance system is that good medical practices like vaccines and other preventive measures gets And the frustration and rage aimed at the latter is very understandable.
The intentional blurring of medicine and public health is something that I feel like we need to keep identifying and pushing back against because this conflation lies at the heart of Maha.
The intentional blurring of medicine and public health is something that I feel like we need to keep identifying and pushing back against because this conflation lies at the heart of Maha.
Basically, that is what they are doing.
And so instead of focusing on socialized medicine, alleviating poverty, providing employment and housing, and not creating a system in which 14 million adults carry a medical debt of over $1,000, the total debt now in America is $220 billion.
Well, if you keep conflating those things, it's going to really confuse people.
And I believe that is what we're seeing right now with this Make America Healthy Again movement.
Before he was apprehended, the shooter had for some already become a symbolic class war folk hero.
Thereafter, after he'd been apprehended, some women and gay men crushed out on the emerging social media photos of him on TikTok and his Instagram.
This is their posts on TikTok and Instagram videos, and they fetishized his crime.
Video footage of him exiting the police car in cuffs was memed to sexy music.
His name and image were everywhere in the media, which is a bit uncharacteristic in modern times for a shooter, as the conventional wisdom says, to deny them the notoriety and fame that they may be seeking.
Left of center voices that I follow, who are usually quite focused on gun control in the aftermath of shootings, were instead lambasting liberals and conservatives who were bothered by the celebration of a murder.
Well, why would you think they would pivot to gun control?
Aren't they usually focused on fascism after mass shootings?
I mean, the gun wasn't illegal, so far as we know.
He had no priors.
It's not an AR-15 in a school.
It's not a random incident.
They focused on the politics.
Yeah.
Typically, these voices in the aftermath of shootings do talk about gun control because that's an issue of left-of-center people.
With regard to legality, I mean, there's a lot of legislation making its way through the legal system in terms of how to handle ghost guns because they're a big deal.
It's not just pistols that you can assemble at home and 3D print.
You can do it with AR-15s as well.
And finding a way to regulate and have laws in place like with any other guns is going to be really important moving forward.
And then for their part, right-wing media condemned what they in turn characterized as the amoral left, losing their humanity to praise an act of obvious evil, as if the lionizing of Kyle Rittenhouse never even happened.
Well, it did happen, but some of these guys paid for it because, you know, and some interpret this as a sign of the class solidarity potential of the spectacle.
Right-wing dipshits like Ben Shapiro got punished by their own followers for condemning Mangioni.
Yeah, I mean, that's a juicy tidbit.
I think it's, you know, some followers, we can't really know for sure what the ratio is between them and commenters who were just following this huge story and came in to troll Ben Shapiro, which I salute them for.
carpetbaggers or not, the ratio was brutal.
And the top comments are all things like, I've got a few here, starting to realize your entire career is built off getting ordinary working folks to hate each other.
I'm canceling my Daily Wire subscription.
Awesome.
You're alone on this, Ben.
This just affirms your position and stance against the working class.
This is a class issue.
Stop trying to make it a left versus right issue.
I applaud anyone who goes after Ben Shapiro.
He deserves it.
I found this super short clip illustrative of something interesting.
Do you think she gets it or not?
We'll dig into it later.
The Instagram posts from nutbag people, which I was sent in the commercial break earlier, Crazy.
He's cute.
And people celebrating this, this is a sickness.
Honestly, it's so disappointing, but I guess we shouldn't be surprised.
Gentlemen, thank you so much.
And up next, the other big news out of New York, Daniel Penny.
A lot of people think he's a hero, and tonight he's not guilty.
My take next.
Wait, is nutbag people the handle of the person, or is she speaking broadly?
Because that's a great handle if it's actually one person.
You know, these Instagram posts by at nutbag people.
So that was actually progressive YouTube political host David Pakman, just in an old YouTube short.
He has 2.7 million subscribers.
I like his stuff a lot.
He was sharing the immediate juxtaposition in Fox News host Laura Ingram, whose voice we heard there, framing of who's a hero and who's a villain.
And it was done sort of, you know, without any self-consciousness.
He goes on to point out that whichever of the two killers you're cheering for seems to be defined along partisan lines.
And the connection here is that Daniel Penny, who on the same day as Mangione's arrest was acquitted in the 2023 chokehold killing of Jordan Neely on a New York subway train after Neely had made threats to other passengers.
Yeah, Jordan Neely was on New York City's top 50 list of unhoused people with dire needs.
So a lot of people knew him as a beloved street performer.
And Penny, a Marine vet, held him in a military train chokehold way longer than trainers recommend because they know how deadly it is, while several bystanders warned Penny that Neely had gone limp and was dying.
Yeah, so in terms of the Fox News coverage that ensued, when Ingram came back, her segment was titled, There's Hope for New York After All!
She applauded Penny's acquittal for a trial she said never should have happened.
And then Penny himself perpetuated conspiracy paranoia about why he had been made to stand trial when interviewed the next day on Fox by Jeanette Pirro.
Then...
On Saturday, Penny was invited by J.D. Vance to attend the Army-Navy football game with Trump, Elon, and Tulsi in their private box behind what I presume is bulletproof glass, and he did so.
It's coming.
So here's the thing for me.
What gets seen as populist vigilante justice against a corrupt system seems to be a sliding signifier.
I know Penny is not claiming that he choked out Jordan Neely to strike a blow against the elites, but he then does go on Fox News and say, oh, the elites wanted to punish me because their bad policies in this terrible city are the reason why I had to do what I did, and so I've exposed them.
But I think both heroizing either of these guys is wrong.
Like, do we disagree with the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse and abortion clinic snipers but justify Mangione?
Do we decry Matt Walsh publishing the names and photos of surgeons who've done gender surgeries on minors as inciting stochastic terrorism when it does then lead to all these bomb threats against hospitals?
But then poo-poo the same reaction to wanted posters with other health insurance CEOs' faces and names being put up in New York City after this shooting.
Who gets to decide who deserves a bullet in symbolic execution?
Do disturbed individuals, which is what I think is going on with Mangione, We get to be the judge, the jury, and the executioner, and we accept them if we find that it aligns with our politics or our moral compass about the victim.
There's a principle here, and call me naive, say I'm finger wagging, but I think it should transcend partisan loyalties.
Yeah, I wouldn't call you naive, Julian, but that's a lot there.
So let me take these in order.
So first on the point of celebrity, Penny gets to go to the big Army-Navy game, but you're not going to see any mainstream politician visit Mangione in prison or speak out on his behalf.
Not that I would expect them to, but what I want to point out is that support for him is coming from below and not above.
And I think you asked, you know, do we disagree with the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse, but like, you know, we justify this guy.
I think there can be an equalizing morality that can be a feature.
I'm not saying you're doing this, but it can be a feature in common centrist arguments that can be used to attempt to shame or discipline the left.
Like, I don't want to live in a world of random shootings, and yet I do.
I don't want people to be murdered in ways that spark chaos, and yet they are.
We are all vulnerable.
Things go off the rails.
So I would never use the word justify.
I would never use a spirit of encouragement.
But there's also no kind of mental gymnastics that I can do that would make me view each of these acts as the same because the motivations are completely different.
Like, I can't do...
Lone shooter horseshoe theory, where everyone who commits violence from whatever political angle is equally insane or delusional because the world is unequal.
Penny is basically doing cosplay, improvised police work.
Mangione is carrying out an industry decapitation.
That's what he says.
These are very different acts that cut in different directions, and they exact retribution on very different actors.
I think you also brought up this really interesting thing about Matt Walsh's doxing surgeons who do gender surgeries.
And then there are the wanted posters of the CEOs.
And I think if that feels like a gotcha, it's because it's based on a notion that I or somebody who doesn't equalize those things would be bothered by somebody suggesting that If I do these things differently, I'm hypocritical or that Matt Walsh and I are using the same reasoning for the same purpose.
I know we're not.
I don't have to tone police people because Matt Walsh is a fascist.
So the key to me here is always asymmetrical violence.
Has Walsh's doxing of trans healthcare practitioners led to attacks and bomb threats?
Yes.
Same thing with libs of TikTok.
But what are the actual incidence rates of anti-fascist shootings?
Like, they hardly show up in the public record.
There's one study that shows that in the post-9-11 era, there was only one reported murder attributed to a left-wing extremist.
That was in 2020, when somebody self-described as Antifa shot and killed a member of a right-wing extremist organization.
So in the actual world, those posters, they mean different things.
They have different implications.
They call on different cultures.
They speak to different people.
I'm not going to fight Matt Walsh by complaining about his posters.
I'm going to fight Mount Walsh on his views.
Do you see some similarity between I'm going to publish the names and photos of these people that I've identified as being worthy of attack, and I'm going to sort of dehumanize them in this way that incites violence, that that's happening in both cases?
I think there's a similarity on the surface, yeah.
And I think it's very easy and clean to make the presentation that you're making.
And I think that the people that those posters are speaking to are vastly different in their temperaments and their ideologies, their willingness to commit violence.
They're coded differently because they're two different audiences, right?
It's like, yes, they look the same and they're going to play out differently.
I don't see this as a contest between moral principles and partisan loyalties, because that makes it sound like there's only one normative morality.
I think there are two incompatible moral frameworks here.
There's the moral framework that looks at the individual murder, and there's the moral framework that looks at the social murder.
And what I'm noticing...
Uh, about this, this sense that, well, maybe people are failing to be sufficiently outraged at the hit job is that there, these appeals to, well, we live in a civil society.
We live in a nation of laws.
And I think that what an event like this exposes is that these are experiential states that depend on people's experience of things like police brutality, landlord harassment, denial of care for profit versus how the carceral state works.
And then they're also like bearing witness to like zero corporate heads of anything being held accountable for anything, whatever, whenever.
And they also know their government is out there in the world committing targeted extrajudicial killings by drone strikes.
So that's the world that they see.
And so it's a little bit less orderly, I think.
Yeah, it's, it's a layered argument, not to be too overly simplistic, but to me, an exploitive industry in need of reform or even deconstruction, because I'm in favor of nationalized healthcare, it doesn't justify vigilante murder.
The point of being a nation of laws is that you don't get gunned down, Matthew, for supporting infant murder in the eyes of fundamentalist conservatives, and in turn, you don't get to gun down whoever you get in your head as the enemy of the people.
And I just don't know about – I have all sorts of sympathies with you about geopolitics and war, but I don't know if collapsing them into how we maintain and remedy the kind of civil society we want to live in is a mistake, especially when the other side – In the coming months, I predict we'll have a parade for the January 6th insurrectionists when they are released.
They're not going to stop, though, Julian.
They're not going to stop.
No moral show on your side is going to demoralize them or shame them.
They're not going to stop.
No, I don't think they're going to stop.
I think escalating and using similar kinds of justifications for partisan violence on our side takes us more in the direction of like pre-Franco Spain than I want to be in.
That's why I say I don't think there are similar justifications.
And I also like – I think there is a false binary as well between condemning Mangione or justifying him.
I don't think those are the only options.
I favor things like understand, learn from.
And with regard to civil society or a nation of laws, these things make it sound like everybody is living in the same landscape.
Like everybody is individual, equal moral actors, each equally responsible for mitigating levels of violence and suffering.
And they're not.
It's like nation of laws.
It's permissible for Brian Thompson to go about his business, which legitimately denies care and kills people.
And if they complain, our nation of laws lets him squish them in court like bugs, right?
Well, Matthew, I think we've covered that from a good few angles.
We've both had a chance to sort of think this through together.
Thank you.
I want to share a clip here of how two left-leaning news and politics channels that I enjoy following covered the story.
I mean, that's what the conversation needs to be on right now.
And that's why there's a conversation about, well, how much are people celebrating?
Because what a lot of the wealthy people don't know, and a lot of the spokespeople in media don't understand, is that most people, when they heard that news story, they understood that as a crime scene in more ways than just a guy was shot.
They also understood that a giant villain who victimizes everybody, not by his poor decisions, although his seem worse than the standard parasite at the top of one of those companies, that entire structure is built to prey on people who need help.
If Democrats are actually serious about getting back into power and truly delivering for the nation, they will heed the message that was sent loud and clear this week and fight to cut these parasites off once and for all.
By making our country more humane, they will save lives, including, potentially, the lives of a CEO or two.
So, first we heard there from an episode of the Progressive YouTube channel with 1.6 million subscribers, The Majority Report.
On December 11th, and that episode was titled Death of a Villain in all caps.
And the person we heard there was producer and co-host Matt Bletch, who referred to health insurance CEOs as parasites several times during the 11-minute segment.
And I agreed with a lot of the analysis, but I think we're in the territory of dehumanizing a category of people in the wake of one of them being murdered on the street.
I think the title, Death of a Villain, is a little ham-fisted and in poor taste, but there are many different ways of using a term like parasite, right?
Yes, but as journalists, I think using the same word to disparage a class of people that was just used in the manifesto of a killer you're reporting on repeatedly indicates something disturbing, especially considering that it says those parasites simply had it coming.
Yeah, I just want to point out that Marxists have always pointed that particular term at tycoons to diffuse the dehumanizing fascist use of the term, which intends to separate off marginalized groups.
So the Marxist response to Jews or immigrants being called parasites has always been to say, no, no, no, that's a misdirection that destroys solidarity.
The real parasite is the boss who steals your labor.
So that's not...
That's a very old argument.
It comes right from the shop floor in labor politics.
That's a good argument.
I appreciate the distinction when you make it there, but I think in general discourse, most people don't read Marxist literature, right?
So how would they know that so I can see where the confusion would lie in that sense?
Maybe that's a media studies question.
People need to be really good consumers of political discourse.
They need to be up on their Marxist rhetoric if they're going to understand what's happening on YouTube.
Just like we have to be up on vaccine science individually, right?
Because we're not going to be relying on public health officials, are we?
There's an equivalency that I don't agree with.
That's a really good distinction.
It is one of the challenges that health researchers deal with all the time, is how do we speak in a way that everyone can understand?
I feel like if you're a Marxist, I don't know, do the same questions?
Do Marxists say, how can I make this understandable to people so we meet them where they're at?
Yes, absolutely.
So let me just say, too, that it's understood to be internal speak as well.
And also, it comes out of this period of time in which capitalism itself is equated with a biological disease.
It's cancerous.
It's tumorous.
This comes right back to the age of trying to push back against social Darwinism.
And so there's a long history there, and I'm just saying that if there are people who are exposed to that term, which I think maybe Mangione was because he was widely read, then it's working against the usage that you're going to hear from Donald Trump.
And, you know, it's kind of lost to history that there's a distinction there, but I just want to make it anyway.
Well, I'm sorry, but I just have to say, in terms of Mangione being widely read, most Yeah, sure.
Yeah, sure.
So the second half of the clip that we just heard, that was Crystal Ball editorializing on Breaking Points, where she's the progressive half of a political commentary discussion with libertarian conservative Sagar Ingeti.
Breaking Points has 1.4 million subscribers.
I was really struck by the emotion in her voice.
I don't know if you guys picked that up without being able to see her face, but she got quite emotional at the end.
And she characterized the killing and the social media response to it as a message that was sent this week about the need for better healthcare, as well as, of course, also adopting the word parasite and parasites from Mangione's short manifesto.
Okay, well, let's talk about his influences, Julian, or what people think his influences are.
Look, for me, by Friday, the class struggle framing that some were applying had slipped a bit because it turned out that the billionaire murder victim was from a very humble background, while the killer grew up with wealth mostly gained from his grandfather owning nursing homes, of all things, and country clubs.
It seems he was never actually a customer of UnitedHealthcare.
Online evidence shows that he did struggle with IBS and depression and insomnia and a debilitating back injury that led to fusion surgery.
I'm familiar with that back injury.
It is absolutely awful and severe.
There have been no assertions that he had insurance claims denied in regard to his condition personally.
And then with regards to his history on Goodreads, The Guardian described him as a heterodox, politically homeless moderate who loves Joe Rogan but hates Jordan Peterson.
It showed that he had read not Marx and Engels but Dawkins and Harari and the Unabomber who he gave four stars to on Goodreads.
And I saw someone comment that they just couldn't believe he couldn't bring himself to give him five stars.
On X, Mancione posted conservative takes on birthrate declines and on pornography and then retweeted Peter Thiel decrying wokeism but then apparently also respected Alexandra Ocasio-Castro.
Yeah, and I think the trail rounds off at a certain point because about six months before the murder, he drops off the map.
He goes offline.
None of his friends know where he is.
This is after he seeks some Zen type of peace on a trip to Japan.
His mom files a missing persons report.
And the actual last messages that we have from him are on the shell casings, the Monopoly money in the abandoned backpack, and the 262 words.
I don't know if you saw this.
Last night on CNN, they had this guy Gurwinder.
I forget his last name.
He goes by Gurwinder on X. Did you guys see this?
No.
This is kind of a public figure on X. He's very smart and is well-known for being able to crunch a lot of information down into these tweet threads that are basically like, You know, understanding everything about the world and personal growth kind of stuff.
And he's sort of in that tech bro leaning group of people.
And he had formed a relationship with Mangione through a lot of back and forth messaging and then had a two hour kind of FaceTime.
Right.
While he was in Hawaii, I think.
Yes, while he was in Hawaii.
And he said that he would say 90% of that two hour conversation was about Mangione's fear of becoming an NPC. So that's an interesting additional point.
For me, I see him fitting more and more the profile of a familiar lone wolf assassin, a young guy in terrible pain who went off the rails.
He became intensely isolated and preoccupied with his grievances.
He then meticulously planned and executed the murder of a stranger with a level of flair and symbolism that suggests he wanted the notoriety that these kinds of figures often crave.
And I know this is sometimes a contentious topic.
I just want to point to the Rutledge Handbook of Terrorism and Counterterrorism cites studies showing that lone wolf killers are 13.5 times more likely to suffer from some kind of mental illness than those involved in ideologically driven groups.
And we know that the first major episodes of serious mental illness often happened to people in their late teens and early twenties.
He was 26. Brad Bushman's 2017 paper on narcissism, fame-seeking, and mass shooting, which has been cited over 41,000 times, so it's pretty well regarded, catalogs multiple studies and data points showing that lone wolf killers are often highly narcissistic.
They believe themselves to be superior.
They act out as a way to impact the world and become famous, and often even become famous in their death, and they're fine with that.
The pattern tends to be one, this is what Bushman lays out, of having suffered narcissistic wounds via personal losses, diminishment of status, withdrawing into isolation Yeah, as a principled revolutionary political icon.
So Julian, we've clashed on this before, and we will right here now as well.
So I looked at the studies that you're talking about, and both of them focus on mass shooters, right?
So these are people who kill many unknown victims at the same time, often not knowing who will be killed.
So I just want to know why they are relevant to you here, because it doesn't line up with any of the known facts in Manjuni's case.
Lone wolf killers.
Yeah, but the studies themselves talk about mass murderers, events that involve mass murder.
We're talking about people going to schools or jihadis who are doing mass shooting events.
Well, I'll put it this way.
For me, my perspective on an event like this in which a person enacts a grievance-based killing of one or more people and leaves a manifesto explaining why they did it that has a symbolic kind of meaning, the questions that underlie this sort of thing are the same for me.
How could we have prevented this?
Through better mental health resources and community involvement.
I get the distinction you're making.
It's a valid one.
I think the objections that I have are around concerns about mental health, or concern about mental health is mobilized in a particular way.
Like on one hand, it sounds like what you're saying is quite compassionate, and in relation to Mangione, it might well be.
But here are two thought experiment type questions for you.
First of all, why aren't we talking about Brian Thompson's mental health profile?
Why aren't we talking about Brian Thompson's mental health profile?
In the wake of this murder.
Brian Thompson is not a 26-year-old young man, valedictorian, advanced degree, smart, handsome, who makes the decision to isolate himself for a period of time and then meticulously plan and carry out the murder of a stranger in a way that who makes the decision to isolate himself for a period of time and then meticulously plan and Right.
That's a very particular psychological profile.
It's a rare type of human being who does that.
And it stands – I don't think comparing it to somebody who has risen through the ranks in the corporate world whose ethics we disagree with makes sense psychologically.
It's not just disagreeing with.
It's about what kinds of mental states get exposed and pathologized.
Like, what kind of mental state do you have to be in to be a tycoon who denies care to people?
Like, why is that hidden from us?
Second thought experiment.
Why are we talking about Daniel Penny's mental health profile?
Because Daniel Penny did not isolate himself and plan and enact a grievance-based killing and then leave a manifesto.
Daniel Penny was sitting on a train.
He saw someone who was unwell, who was threatening, who was scaring people on the train.
As it turned out, those intuitions, what he was picking up from the guy are validated by the fact that he did really have a background of committing violent assaults on the train.
And he restrained him.
And I think if he had been more measured in his restraint, we wouldn't even really be remembering who he was because he would have just been someone who leapt into action to try to save the day.
Sadly, he ended up killing the guy.
I'll say, too, I do not forgive Daniel Penny any of it, and I think he should be charged, because as someone who was equipped in the way he was physically, he knew what he was doing.
That said...
Absolutely.
I have been in situations in my life in many places, Skid Row in Los Angeles, walking through there.
I've been around homeless, disoriented people, people who are mentally unwell in many places, and none of them have ever been as scary as on a subway because you are compressed with a lot of other people.
And it is an environmental question where you are disoriented in your own ways in these different situations.
So I'm not doing that to excuse him, but I will say that taking an instantaneous moment on a subway is vastly different than a premeditated murder in this situation.
Well, this is part of what I'm getting at because Mangione tells you rationally, step by step, what he's doing and why.
And so he must be insane, right?
Daniel Penny chooses to overpower and choke an unhoused person that he's never met before for 50 seconds after he goes limp and defecates himself.
And nobody is asking whether he has antisocial personality disorder.
So what's the difference there?
Why are we focusing on Mangione's mental health?
I think you're absolutely right.
We should say, what is going on with this military vet that he could have such disregard for this person that he's choking out?
When people are saying, hey, you could kill him, that he goes, eh.
I'm going to hold on to the choke for now.
I agree with you.
Yeah, what kind of mental health would you have to have?
Because I spent my entire childhood, Derek, riding the Toronto subway system with unhoused people.
And never in a million years did it occur to me that any of the times that I was scared that It would be okay.
If I had seen somebody get murdered in front of me, that would have been the most traumatic thing that had ever happened.
Because when things like that did happen, it would take a couple of burly guys taking the initiative to box the person in and to wait until the stop came and then get the security guards.
It's not such a big deal.
I disagree.
I disagree with not a big deal.
Again, because it's situational.
I was on a subway car two months after 9-11 when someone set off a smoke bomb in my car.
And when you're in a situation of terror and panic, and when you're in a situation where you're doing something, it's much different than being around.
I mean, I don't think in 12 years in New York City, I probably never rode a subway car that didn't have a homeless person in it.
Not every level rises that to occasion.
I'm just saying that's a bit of a false equivalency.
And I just want to add here, Matthew, I get the thrust of what you're doing, and I mostly agree with it.
I think that in the case of Neely and Penny, this was a person with a violent past, and he was, according to witness accounts, saying that he would kill people and saying that he was not afraid to die.
And he was a very, very scary presence in that confined space.
And I understand how someone with a certain kind of military training...
Might act on impulse and follow through on what they've been trained to do.
And I do find that really scary.
I think that how we integrate people with military training and especially with combat experience back into a civil society is a very difficult question that doesn't get looked at carefully enough.
I mainly want to reject the assumption that Mangione and Penny and Thompson are not rational political actors.
Yeah.
Because that's what the mental health discussion does.
It says, Mangione, he can't possibly actually believe or make sense.
Before the manifesto was actually published by Klippenstein, people on CNN and other major networks were saying, oh yeah, we've seen the manifesto.
He's clearly got psychiatric issues.
And that's just not the fucking case.
That's not what those 262 words show.
So the thing is, is that mentally ill narcissist is one category we've got.
Political icon is another category.
It's a false binary, right?
Like, they're not the same category.
So I want to look for a more neutral way of assessing Mangione.
Like, how would we know that we weren't applying the studies that you've brought to engage in a kind of confirmation bias that, oh yeah, this guy was obviously, obviously sick.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I hear you.
I mean, look, there was a shooting yesterday, right?
I'm sure you followed it.
So there was a young woman yesterday in Wisconsin.
Oh, in Madison, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Who killed a teacher and another student and then shot herself.
I would have no problem betting a year's salary that she had serious mental health issues.
She wrote a manifesto too.
The manifesto is political in nature.
It hasn't been confirmed yet, so we don't know for sure, but it's pretty political.
It's misandry, right?
It's all men are parasites, actually, is the term she used, and especially black men.
I don't see her as a rational political actor.
And the fact that she killed two people instead of one, I don't think is like the massive dividing line.
I think that people who do this kind of thing You know, Branko Marchetic in Jacobin has another view on this notion of whether or not it's really about mental illness or political zealotry, and I find it kind of chilling.
He says, we tend to think of political violence as being committed by zealots.
Radicals on the extreme end or the other of the political spectrum where ideology leads them to carry out acts that most people would never contemplate, shooting or bombing to advance the goals of a movement or a group.
But we're starting to see in 21st century America violence carried out not by ideological extremists, but by individuals with the profile of your typical swing voter.
And he's speaking specifically about Mangione.
And, you know, I just find that...
It acknowledges the political reality that he's coming from, and it doesn't have to wade into this territory of, well, is he actually insane because he thinks that this is a reasonable response to social murder?
That's interesting.
So it's not a mental illness concern, and it's also not a political extremist concern.
It's a sort of ordinary, sane person who is a middle-of-the-road swing voter.
Well, it speaks to the bipartisan nature of what maybe Marchettish would call the class war context.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
And that's not really extreme.
I mean, yeah, it is really interesting, right, Matthew?
I mean, with both of these, certainly with one of them, I need to go back and look at the second one.
But these attempted Trump assassinators, they're also very hard to peg. in terms of the stuff.
They're diagonalists, just like him.
Yeah.
But look, there are lots and lots of people who are clearly, there are plenty of people, even a majority, who are very upset about X topic or Y topic.
The one amongst them who uses that as a justification for enacting a symbolic killing, knowing that they're throwing their own life away.
That to me is just, it's a particular profile.
And I can't quote unquote normalize it.
And to me, it's very different from an act of political resistance, even though I think it can be painted that way and can almost be romanticized that way.
Yeah, I don't think I'm romanticizing it to simply say that this is what he presented it as, right?
But how do I really feel, right?
Like, am I buying the green Luigi toque?
No.
Yeah.
Last week, my feed turned up footage from a Disney Channel-themed dance party, and the DJ was spinning Hannah Montana's He Could Be the One, right?
And he's dancing in front of a 20-foot LED screen of Mangione's mugshot.
And the poster on social media captioned it with, We have no idea what has been released.
Now, Amazon is sold out of his backpack.
The hoodie jacket is gone.
And so is the Luigi green toque with a cartoon L on it.
A bunch of TikTok folk musicians have pretty much made viral numbers by cutting some good tracks on the whole thing.
And as my comments here have pointed out, I'm on board with the rage that gets focused on the symbolic head of a predatory industry that commits legalized social murder because the law allows for unbridled greed.
And so this question that we're tussling with is, how do we understand someone taking arms like this?
What is it?
What does it accomplish?
What precedent does it set?
And so on.
I think so many people on the left hold on to the hope that class awareness will erupt again, and that the precipitating revolutionary event that everyone is waiting for is happening right now.
Well, hold on.
What would that look like?
Well, it could look like anything.
Might it look something like this?
It could look like something like this, but it's very vague, and this is what I'm getting at.
There's a real yearning that can't really attach itself to anything because it's based on a very large, morbid, persistent, depressing awareness of disgusting wealth inequality, the carceral state, ongoing imperialism, ecological collapse, precarity, and then rationed healthcare is like the knife in the heart.
And so this yearning is rooted in the question, how long can this go on for?
have this title today, which I think is a banger, Your Revolution is Out of Network, is that I was reading an extremely depressing but enlightening little book by the philosopher Byung Chul Han called Capitalism and the Death Drive.
And there's a chapter in there called Why Revolution is No Longer Possible.
And I highly recommend it.
It's published in an article form that I'll link to.
His argument from the post-communist left is not that it's impossible or is not that revolution is impossible because it's not necessary or it's, it's, it's immoral or something.
Not that it's impossible because it can lead to disastrous effects or moral quandaries.
His view is that neoliberalism makes people incapable of organizing resistance or revolt at scale.
And it does this by preventing the formation of a collective subject, the person who feels connected.
Now, what does that look like in the media flurry that happens after the Manjoni affair?
At first, it looks like a populist search, and instantly it devolves into online gamification.
It happens on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, political commentators, memes, and folk songs.
There's a shared feeling and conviction that is fragmented and dissipated into countless atomized hot takes, all in competition with each other for attention.
And social platforms are making money on the dissipation of revolutionary sentiment.
And that's one reason, I think, beyond the difficult moral questions, that I think Han would say that Mangione's violence doesn't make sense and it cannot possibly work in current conditions.
Hahn explains revolution may have been possible in a disciplinary society that characterized industrial capitalism in which workers clearly are aware that they're being exploited by factory owners.
And that made it possible for a we to emerge and to resist exploitation.
But in our society, we've replaced external exploitation with self-exploitation.
Like under neoliberalism, we are the entrepreneurs of ourselves, master and slave combined.
We're taught to experience our exploitation and that of others as a form of freedom.
You buy the phone made of metals mined by children and you become a creator with no or insufficient health insurance.
And this happens in this space that is dominated by liquid feedback or an emphasis on speed and immediacy that undermines the necessary time for reflection and meaningful action.
And right-wingers and neo-fascists have to deal with the same problem, the same dissociative issues, but...
it doesn't obstruct their objectives in the same way.
Because what they need to do is to disrupt whatever is left of the administrative state, as you guys have been covering, so that capitalism can operate in its purest and most uninhibited form.
Like, that's what your focus on Project 2025 is about.
So I'm preparing to interview Josie Reisman on pro wrestling in American politics, and I'm watching Mr. McMahon on Netflix, which I highly recommend.
So I'll go into detail on that later.
But the 30,000-foot takeaway is that we live in an entertainment spectacle of ceaseless catharsis and distraction in which real experiences, like the injuries of wrestlers, the exploitation of women, it's all instantly transformed into storylines for consumption rather than action. it's all instantly transformed into storylines for consumption rather than So Luigi Mangione, Brian Thompson, they're real men with materially different positions and interests in a consequential conflict.
And Mangione really did shoot him in the back.
And Thompson really died leaving two kids fatherless and exposing the human frailty that's usually covered up by lots of, you know, C-suite amenities, right?
But that surveillance video of it happening, it turns into a wrestling ring or a video game in which it's both a real and not real storyline for a fragmented and self-isolating populace where the ability to think collectively has been systematically degraded.
