Brian Thompson, the CEO of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed in Midtown Manhattan on December 4th. Five days later, police arrested Luigi Mangione as a suspect in the killing at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
Liv, Julian, and Travis discuss the ideological waters that Magione swam in and how this incident proves that everyone is an online investigator. Plus we explore the reaction to the killing, which includes a surprising amount of AO3 fan fiction. Finally, we break down the popular claim that there’s a special connection between the killing and the number 286, which isn’t as impressive when closely examined.
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Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
REFERENCES
Discover, Defend, Desire
https://archiveofourown.org/works/61349623/chapters/156809128
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, Premium Episode 271, Luigi Mangione.
As always, we are your hosts, Julian Fielde, Liv Agar, and Travis View.
Something's fishy.
You're telling me those eyebrows killed a man?
You're telling me that face is the face that finally did something?
Anything?
A whop from a rich family sped away on a bicycle, took a bus and got caught where all contemporary American moments converge?
A McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania?
Surely nothing can be what it is or what it seems.
Surely it's a secret third thing.
You're telling me back pain took justice into its own hands?
That the pills ran out and all that was left at the bottom of the bottle was three bullets?
Here are some messages of support from the people we serve.
Thank you so much, and rest in heaven, I don't know why somebody did that, but prayer's going up, and y'all just keep going, because you guys got good customer service, and I like your healthcare, so I'm not going to switch.
The last two sentences were taken verbatim from an email sent to employees by management at UnitedHealthcare.
The testimonials were uncredited.
If you want a picture of the present, imagine a patent leather shoe stamping on a human face.
Forever.
Luigi Mangione signed each of his bullet casings.
Deny, delay, depose.
Words carved into the flesh of one man.
But in the mass grave, not a single corpse has an entry or exit wound.
The emails they received before they died were unsigned.
If not automated, then functionally indistinguishable.
Soon, deep learning algorithms will clean up the remnants of any crimes having been committed by human hands.
The evidence will not just be absent, it won't have existed in the first place.
And so we circle back into the QAA boardroom for another media cycle, shifting our perspectives to satisfy shareholder curiosity with a singular goal, to maximize your enjoyment of the information we dispense you.
After all, you aren't just a listener.
You're also a customer, a friend, a member of the family, a rat nibbling on your weekly pellet of virtue.
To us, there are no psyops, just psy-opportunities to better serve you.
We promise you all of this and much, much more.
Because we're there for what matters.
And we're loving it.
And nothing, nothing is as important to us as your health and satisfaction.
We are pleased to bring you a series of products this week.
First, we'll be examining the background of one Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old who assassinated the CEO of medical insurance company United Healthcare.
Then we'll be exploring how people have reacted to this bloody cultural moment with a mix of jubilance, paranoia, and, for the more sheltered among us, haughty reproach.
I mean, speaking of haughty.
What, you're talking about me?
Luigi Mangione.
Oh.
Yeah, of course, him too.
Another Italian man who looks as good as me.
And who is as celebrated in the culture for his good looks.
As universally recognized for being ripped.
I'm forgetting.
Listen, I feel like not a day goes by where people are not hashtagging me with cum gutters and other such statements.
Quote tweeting, till the room stinks.
My back also hurts.
So, you know, I'm exactly like him, folks.
Do you think there's a bunch of Italian guys on Hinge right now who are like, this is my moment?
Oh, 100%.
I'm sure if you just track the amount of uses of the flag, it has gone up considerably.
That's right, folks.
We're not just pedophiles and sexual...
Predators.
We're also people who will kill the people you don't like.
Much like the Italian anarchists of yesteryear, we are also making white people like Travis, who have blonde hair and blue eyes, if you know what I'm saying, stare at the ceiling in dismay, rolling their eyes at the idea that we would have a moment of pleasure in this sordid landscape, this awful reality, that we would have one little orgasm, just a little death.
That's all we ask for.
It's a tiny squirt.
A tiny squirt, yeah.
It's a dribble.
It's not even...
It's not even...
It's not even got distance on it.
This is still just dribbling down the shaft.
And yet some would say, no, no, no.
They would come and ruin our orgasm.
So without further ado, I give you...
Travis already has his head in his hands.
It's going to be a long episode, and for once, I'm not the one being tortured.
So Liv, take it away.
Also, I do want to say he is ethnically Albanian, so he is Balkan excellence.
Of course.
This is the very first time a Serbian is positive about an Albanian, and it is incredibly opportunistic.
Please, just go back to your ancient racism.
Show us your true colors.
On December 9th, the feds listed Luigi Mangione as a person of interest related to the killing of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
And as a result, many internet sleuths looked online to see what part of Luigi's digital footprint they could dredge up to better understand his motivations.
It was interesting.
It was a lot different than I feel like a lot of earlier.
Like, what does this digital footprint look like?
You know, we did it, read it, sort of situations.
This one was much more normie, I guess I'll say.
Like, everyone was very invested in this.
It wasn't like the Boston bomber or something.
Yeah, this is a really interesting development in which everyone's kind of like a baker and investigator now.
Yeah, like everyone wants to know.
Yeah, the point has been made before by the greats over at the Radio War Nerd podcast, but I will say that it is interesting how much we want to find out about this guy, whereas the incredibly nerdy, not very good-looking guy who got shot in the face trying to off the guy that supposedly...
We all hate even more, potentially, than UnitedHealthcare guy.
He got zero.
Because, you know what?
We live in the land of Riz.
If you don't got Riz, don't even try to murder someone.
Because we will forget you.
Yeah, I saw that photo of the Trump shooter.
Like, when he was dead and he was all bloody and it gave me the ick.
So I didn't care.
Gross.
This Luigi guy.
Yeah, this...
The one thing about Luigi I will say is that he is alive, and that makes me way hornier.
Now, not to say that the dead don't, um, okay, we can move on.
Now, people dredging up his digital footprint was a very strange experience for me personally, as the more we found out, the more I realized how intimately I understood the cultural context that he came out of.
Yeah, he's your age, right?
He's, yeah, yeah, and like, oddly similar subculture stuff.
You know, he worked on Civilization VI in his undergrad, like, he's like an RTS guy.
Oh my god.
Bless him.
He had a donkey quote in his yearbook, which I don't know if that means anything to you guys.
Dude, that's a crazy sacrifice.
That means he's going to be in jail when Civ 7 releases.
No.
Can you imagine what he gave for us?
People also dug up, you know, his social studies essay in grade 11 about Nietzsche Roman Christianity and the information about the niche difficult to describe online political circles he frequented.
And I had a grave realization that people who had their minds formed by the same strange online political context as me are now having an effect on history.
It's like if a Russian anarchist who helped kill the Tsar was part of the full communism discord in 2015 or something.
Yeah, I mean, this is mind-blowing, and I think what it boils down to is, I can't believe someone did something.
That's it.
It feels like there's a kind of defrosting of history, almost, where it's like, oh, no, no, no, things are actually going to happen, you know?
I mean, between this, you know, the fall of Assad, it feels like certain stalemates are, at the very least, sweating the first drops off the ice block.
Yeah, one of the things about propaganda of the deed, which this is, like, vaguely related to, I mean, it's obviously not an explicitly, like, anarchist ideology, but I guess the point of propaganda of the deed is that the deed is the propaganda, is that, like, the rich are and historically have been very afraid of it.
Like, in the Russian, like, czar, Russian imperial period, they killed a bunch of them.
It was very scary to be for the Russian upper class, for the aristocracy.
And you get a little bit of that for healthcare CEOs, and they have clearly reacted to it in a strong way.
Yeah, people forget that revolution isn't just a leftist thing.
History yields revolutions and that even what the Americans often do abroad, you know, running some of these regime toppling operations, that they yield a type of revolution, you know?
It's not always for the benefit of mankind.
It's certainly not for, you know, kind of lofty ideals often, but, you know, it's like, hey, if you're going to ruin the orgasm, the orgasm will still happen, but it'll be ruined.
So...
This is what we get.
This is the revolution that we deserve.
Travis not enjoying any of my...
Any of anything that I'm saying.
You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast.
For access to the full episode as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA. Travis, why is that such a good deal?
Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month.
For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes, plus all of our miniseries.
That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Annie, 10 episodes of Perverts with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View.
It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting.
Travis, for once, I agree with you.
And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion.
