All Episodes
April 23, 2025 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
33:06
Luigi Mangione and the Revolutionary Normie

Alexandria is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Richard delves into the much-anticipated Luigi trial, which has captured significant media attention. He critiques the prominent support from Taylor Lorenz, highlighting the contradiction in the media's portrayal of criminal glorification in the United States. The discussion broadens to analyze the disconnect between mainstream media narratives and public sentiment, the fascination with 'revolutionary' figures, and the rise of 'normie' radicalism in contemporary American society. Comparisons are drawn between the motivations behind Luigi's actions and the January 6th insurrection, emphasizing the influence of social media and the middle-class discontent. The episode explores themes of radicalism, media influence, the American Dream, and societal values, questioning the authenticity and impact of so-called revolutions driven by middle-class frustrations.AI-generated summary00:00 Introduction to the Luigi Trial01:10 Media Narratives vs. Public Sentiment01:35 The Disconnect: Women and Revolutionary Figures03:01 Contradictions in American Identity05:37 Luigi's Ideology and Normie Revolutionaries22:42 Capitalism and Commodifying Dissent24:44 Social Media's Radicalizing Effect27:10 J6ers and Luigi Stans: A Normie Revolt This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Well, the Luigi trial is upon us, and it is set to be the trial of the century internet style.
And Luigi has one notable supporter, and she is the...
Bette Noir of the incels, and that is Taylor Lorenz.
Hilarious to see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone standing a murderer when this is the United States of America.
As if we don't lionize criminals.
As if we don't have, you know, we don't stan murderers of all sorts.
Do you know what I hate is using internet language in real life?
I was in a conversation once with someone who used unalive to refer to killing someone.
As if our phone call was going to be demonetized or something if we use the word kill.
I really hate that.
Just stop using standing.
That's just stupid.
There's a huge disconnect between the narratives and angles that sort of mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels.
And you see that in moments like this.
And I can tell you, I saw the biggest audience growth that I've ever seen.
Because people were like, oh, somebody, some journalist, is actually speaking to the anger that we feel.
The women who got her outside course in New York.
So you're gonna see women, especially, that feel like, oh my god, right?
Like, here's this man who's revolutionary, who's famous, who's handsome, who's young, who's smart.
He's a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.
Yeah, I just realized women will literally date an assassin before they swipe right on me.
That's where we are.
Alright, I kind of like that guy, actually.
He's being self-deprecating.
Some of how people cannot understand why people have sympathies for Mangione strikes me as the same as a lot of media not understanding why people support Trump.
I totally agree.
It's because a lot of people are just really, really desperate.
They want somebody to take on the system.
They want somebody to tear down these barbaric,
What I find fascinating here is that it is a sort of revolutionary normie.
It's a normie revolution, maybe even a bourgeois revolution, but not in the way that Marx meant it.
So let me pick some low-hanging fruit on this first.
It is fascinating that there is just this obvious contradiction in what Taylor Lorenz is saying.
So she makes a very similar argument as Alex Jones made when he was being interviewed by Piers Morgan 10, 15 years ago, and they were talking about gun control.
Piers Morgan, who's more or less conservative, was basically saying, like, Come on, man.
No other country has the gun issues that the United States has.
And many of those other countries have hunting, hunting culture.
In fact, maybe even a little bit of gun culture, but it's so much worse in the United States.
Can't you just be reasonable?
And he's like, listen, Pierce, you English want to come on here and we're going to go 1776 on your ass.
This country was founded on guns and whiskey.
You know, this kind of attitude.
We're a country of outlaws.
Which is wrong.
I mean, it's getting at a kernel of truth.
I guess I'll give you that.
But it is wrong.
This country is not Wyatt Earp.
This country was settled by Puritans.
The revolution...
Maybe it wasn't begun by aristocratic liberal plantation owners, but was certainly completed by them, and the country was defined by them, by Jefferson, Washington, et alia.
So this notion that it's a country of outlaws is sort of ridiculous.
Now, I actually do get it.
The frontier in the West is an extremely important component of American identity.
And yeah, you could sort of say that the country was founded on guns and whiskey like in the gold rush.
Go West, young man.
And the entire economy was based on pulling things out of the earth.
Getting wildly drunk, gambling, shooting the dealer when he cheats you, and then screwing prostitutes, taking one as your wife.
Tombstone, basically.
I get it, but yeah, you're certainly leaving out quite a bit of American identity.
So she says that, and then 30 seconds later, she says, he's such a moral man.
And he's like the perfect...
I mean, what we learned about Luigi was that he was worried about doom-scrolling reducing autonomy or something like this,
or the fact that health insurance providers might be rejecting a significant portion of their clients, and so we're all not Fully integrated into the healthcare system.
This is what he was fighting for.
Now, I get, in a way, many criticisms of the healthcare system, but this is a sort of unreflective, completely non-Marxian, middle-class conception of the world.
You're a wagee and you want better benefits is, in effect, what you are fighting for.
So he basically appeals to the normie, millennial, not-too-bright leftist.
Taylor Lorenz has been concerned with anti-trans bigotry on social media, etc.
She has deeply normie values.
The fact that as a revolutionary or something, you would even think about that just expresses the middle-class basis of her ideology.
And so you have this guy who's not the Unabomber.
I mean, I reject the Unabomber.
And the Unabomber has a fascinating history as an MKUltra victim, after all.
But I won't go into that.
But I mean, I reject this extreme...
I guess you could call it Ludditism, anti-technology, anti-industry.
I mean, I ultimately reject it.
But there is something sort of wild and cool about the Unabomber.
He obviously is highly intelligent and obviously thought through his ideology.
And it's an ideology that has been expressed by other radical traditionalist thinkers.
His terrorism, I found a bit lame and random.
Mail bombing.
The living in the woods alone, going off-grid.
Not something I would do, but rather cool, if I'm honest.
Badass. Sort of better than getting arrested in a McDonald's while eating hash browns.
All those photos we see of Luigi where he's really liking McDonald's is like, oh my god, a Lion King Happy Meal.
He's a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.
I genuinely wonder if Brian Thompson would be alive today if UnitedHealthcare had branded their insurance using a Disney film.
You know, Aladdin.
Perhaps, or maybe a Peter Pan throwback.
It's something to think about.
So you're going to see women especially that feel like, oh my god, right?
Luigi's horrible.
He's a midwit.
He is sadly exactly the type of person that Ivy League colleges are promoting.
It's a kind of Matthew Iglesias-like intellectual.
The midwit who's ultimately not reflective and thoughtful, certainly not revolutionary.
So he's basically going to be a good cog in the system.
That's Luigi.
But Luigi and revolutionaries around him felt like the system wasn't working well enough.
So Marx, to his credit, or Lenin, Chase, They wanted a radically different social order.
And they, in fact, predicted and longed for some sort of great crisis in the current order so that they could implement a new way of being.
They were genuinely revolutionary.
The French revolutionaries...
Unquestionably, not at the beginning at the very least, but unquestionably at some point were committing a sort of genocide, a kind of classicide against the landed aristocracy and even the church.
They were trying to implement a new age of reason.
Now, I don't necessarily agree with any of these people, but I guess I can respect game when I see it.
It is badass.
It is cool.
The normie revolutionary represented by Taylor Lorenz is in effect this notion that middle class America isn't working in the way that they hoped.
And they feel that there's some sort of demon on the other end who isn't allowing them to experience the American dream.
There must be malice involved with Brian Thompson, this sort of douchey, multi-millionaire dude who is running UnitedHealthcare.
He's letting people die, and everyone has a right to health insurance, and so he needs to help out all of these people.
This is not...
At all how an actual revolutionary would act and think.
It's a sort of angry, violent, normie reactionary.
They are worried that the middle class existence that they were promised and that they are in effect living is going to be taken away from them or won't be...
Implemented to them in the way that they desire.
And you see a lot of this with, like, red note people.
I mean, I don't know if the red note trend is popular anymore.
But when it looked like TikTok...
Was about to be banned right before Donald Trump was sworn in.
There was this move to Red Note, and they were seeing all of these fake LED-laden Chinese cities.
And they were also seeing the impact of, first off, all the stuff we talked about last Tuesday, free-floating currencies.
They were seeing the impact of currency manipulation by the Chinese.
They're not strengthening the yuan.
They're constantly weakening the yuan.
And so you'll get into a situation where they can buy a bag of groceries for the equivalent of $20 US.
Well, of course they can because it's the fucking exchange rate.
And the fact that you are falling into the same trap as Tucker Carlson going to Russia?
Russia is kind of incredible.
Russia has a different currency situation with the U.S. due to different causes.
But yes, you can go to Russia and feel like a millionaire, and that's the life of the expat, the tourist.
But if you're living in Russia and groceries cost 40% of your monthly wage, you're going to have a very different attitude towards
And I saw someone doing this exactly.
She was looking at...
They don't tell us what it's like over there.
You can have an apartment, and you can afford groceries, and they just get healthcare.
Maybe there's even a stronger millennial quality to this than I even imagined, because it's not even the American dream that was constructed by the government through things like the GI Bill.
After the Second World War, or the promotion of home ownership, the creation of the suburbs, which was a sort of government-finance collaboration.
The suburbs can't exist without the federal highway system.
There's no question about it.
They wouldn't exist without zoning.
They obviously wouldn't exist without big finance making massive bets on suburbs.
Et cetera, et cetera.
So the American government created this American dream, which, if we're really being honest, I mean, a lot of us could maybe be tagged as anti-American in this group, but if we're really being honest, was a sort of healthy,
if I guess a bit white bread and boring ideal of you can go to the Burbs, have two kids.
Own a car and two television sets and TV dinners are cheap.
And you can watch game shows every night.
And mom, while she's running the dishwasher and washing machine, can watch her stories, her soap operas.
And dad's hard at work nine to six and he'll commute back to the burbs and you go to church on Sunday and, you know, teach your son baseball on Saturday.
I mean...
We can criticize from some Nietzschean standpoint the last man nihilism at the heart of situations like this.
But it was sort of good.
And it could be eugenic in many cases.
It was at the very least a sort of fertile model.
The burbs wasn't really promoting culture and intellectual activity.
It was promoting...
Strip malls and chain stores in the end.
But, you know, nothing's perfect, I guess.
To this millennial model of, I want to live with a roommate or even live alone in my apartment.
And the fact that groceries are less expensive and that the government pays for my anxiety meds.
And my birth control.
Like, this is just so much better.
It's this millennial revolutionary standpoint where their pathetic lifestyle, it's become too expensive and it looks like it might even become impossible at some point in the near future.
And so they're looking to a state capitalist or...
It's affordable.
It is the most contemptible ideology I could perhaps imagine.
Last man idealism.
It really is.
And I think Nietzsche would have probably thought mom and dad living in the suburbs in the 60s is the last man.
But this is somehow worse.
Look, a lot of red pill or manosphere people have pointed this out.
This has even entered mainstream academic discourse as well.
What is it with the love of criminals?
Why is it that...
Women are sending letters to these just horrible people.
I'm fascinated by Hannibal Lecter.
If he existed, I would be writing him letters.
But, like, someone as just totally despicable as Chris Watts gets love letters from women.
What has gone wrong?
Like, why?
And it is basically a quest for an alpha.
So, being an alpha, what does that mean?
That means that you are above it all.
So you're richer than everyone.
You have higher social status politically than everyone.
It might also mean that you're just sort of a badass.
You know, the loner biker who comes into the bar, he doesn't have a boss.
He doesn't answer to anyone.
He does what he pleases.
That is maybe not quite the alpha of thinking, but it is an alpha.
He stepped outside of social norms.
And many women will naturally see that and love it and want to birth his child.
So that's a sort of baseline quality of why anyone would be attracted to someone like Luigi, who I just think is pathetic and should be bullied.
He's a midwit.
Like, we should bully Luigi.
I think he should just be sent to the electric chair just because his manifesto was so lame.
Like, dude, you brutally murdered someone on the streets of New York.
The possibility of getting away with that is really close to nil.
So, you're done.
You're done.
Why haven't you written a manifesto or expressed an idea that is bold or just simply wacky?
Why not go full Unabomber or just write Nietzschean aphorisms or declare yourself a Maoist?
That's at least cool, bro.
But when you declare yourself a follower of Matthew Iglesias, in effect, by your lame...
You're contemptible.
We should crush you for being boring, which is a much greater sin than being violent or revolutionary.
I think the world needs that.
The world needs outsiders or alt-alphas, if we want to call them that.
The world needs people questioning everything and pushing the limit.
But at this point, You're basically Taylor Lorenz who went on a murder spree.
I have no words.
I do think that normie millennial radicalism is actually going to be a thing.
Now, I don't know how far this is going to go, but it was interesting in the weeks following Luigi...
That I see these TikTok edits where they would do that song from Chicago.
He had it coming.
He had it coming.
He had it coming all along.
This is like the perfect millennial thing.
Broadway musical, plus murder, plus normie politics.
They were just showing fan edits of Brian Thompson lying in the sidewalk.
And then fan edits of Luigi and his six-pack or whatever.
Maybe it will come back in Trump's second term.
An interesting trend to keep your eye on.
I've noted recently that the most radical people I know are sort of middle-class people who have not been politically engaged throughout their lives and for whom the American dream has largely worked.
They have wealth.
They have two cars in the driveway, a big house, all the baubles that they could ever want in the world.
And they are deeply discontented and radical.
But in a strange way, like my parents even, have been radicalized.
And I laid at the feet of social media.
people that are especially new to the internet,
They got heavily online during COVID, probably.
Yeah, it's an interesting point.
Like, when I was a lot younger, say 20 years ago, I read Thomas Frank's work, and I don't know what he's up to now.
I think he's still writing, but he doesn't get the credit he deserves, and I don't think is as relevant as he should be, in my opinion.
He sort of predicted Trumpism with his book, What's the Matter with Kansas?
And he founded the Baffler, might have been the late 90s, I can't remember, or early 2000s.
He was looking at like Vans sneakers.
So Vans are still around, but maybe not quite as relevant.
I don't know.
I'm not connected to Zoomer culture.
But basically, if you hate your parents and they don't let you take the car out or, you know, the man's got you down or your social study teacher sucks or the girl doesn't want to go to prom with you, you buy Vans.
And your commodifying revolution, where you can be anti-social and anti-patriarchy, you could say, while purchasing something from a major corporation.
And so it's the amazing gelatin-like quality of capitalism.
I think the left wants to believe that capitalism is cruel and gray on gray.
And brutal.
And is run by boring white men in horn-rimmed glasses.
But the reality is that capitalism is going to sell you the Che Guevara t-shirt.
Or it's cool.
It's gay.
It's trans.
Trans in multiple ways.
It can kind of transition to other things.
So it's going to allow you to engage in radical dissent through purchasing products.
And I think this is totally correct.
Now, maybe this situation has progressed or it's been amplified in a way.
Maybe with social media, which is capitalism, but different.
It's almost, you know, like in a new stage.
When I was younger, you could commodify your descent by being a skateboarder and buying a Santa Cruz skateboard or listening to Nirvana.
Buying an album, which I believe was produced by Warner Brothers.
So capitalism will allow you to dissent against the system, and it will profit off that.
But maybe something more extreme is happening with social media.
Teenage girls looking at Instagram feeds of these women.
Who, in many cases, have a sugar daddy of some sort.
Who are Botoxed out, have fake breasts, are on a yacht, are just living their best life.
They're traveling to Greece and having the greatest meal ever.
It's casual and relatable, yet totally beyond your spending capacity.
Like, maybe there's something new that's happening with social media that is generating actual alienation and suicidal alienation, in fact, in young people.
And it really is different because, remember, if you buy the Nirvana album or wear the Vans, you're commodifying your dissent and you're sort of neutralizing it.
You know, you can...
Function normally and go to school and even study, take the SAT and get into college while being a Kurt Cobain fan.
But in some ways with social media, it's radicalizing people to go kinetic offline.
And that could be, I suck because I'm not attractive.
I'll never be her, my favorite Instagram model, and I'm just going to kill myself.
Or social media is getting people to engage in J6 and effectively try to overthrow the government.
It's making them kinetic offline in a way that was unappreciated and unintended.
Whereas the previous variations of capitalism were able to neutralize people and make their real world activity not damaging to society.
I would just comment that as someone who owned Nirvana Records and Vans shoes, you weren't looking at them 24-7.
You ignore your shoes when you're walking around with these phones and the engagement level of social media with it.
This is the other comparison I wanted to make as well between J6ers and Luigi Stans.
They are very similar people.
And they also have a sort of similar message in a way.
Jay Sixers eventually attempted to overthrow the government.
Now, they did it in a buffoonish manner that was never going to work.
And it involved them stealing lecterns and taking a poop in the hallway of Congress or putting their feet up on Nancy Pelosi's desk or whatever.
It was totally ridiculous, no doubt.
But at the end of the day, it was a direct threat to government.
That was the biggest coup attempt I've seen in America, certainly in my lifetime, and well beyond that as well.
And by coup, I don't mean a sort of soft change in power.
I mean, you could argue that FDR was a kind of coup or regime change or the Civil Rights Administration or what we're seeing now.
I mean, they're soft and invisible and largely consensual as well in many cases.
But this was just a direct attempt at seizing power.
None of them thought of it in that way.
They thought of it as I'm here protesting or finally we're taking our government back or this is the people's house.
They were like a deer in headlights in all of those photos and videos of J6ers.
And if you look at them...
It's interesting to compare them to Charlottesville.
So Charlottesville was largely young, and I think it was, if we're being a little bit unfair here, it was kind of like a bunch of cringe people from the internet who had seen memes and read Andrew Anglin or something.
To a large extent, it was that.
It's being a bit unfair, but you get my point.
And it was people who just wanted to...
Go out and shine.
We won with Trump.
We've created these online communities.
And let's strike up the band on behalf of the Robert E. Lee statue.
There was that quality to it.
There are other qualities as well.
Bad people on both sides, I would say.
But you get my point.
There is some crossover between J6 and Charlottesville, but the crossover is small.
You see people like Fuentes, you see people like Bakes, Alaska, and I'm sure there's some others.
But there wasn't a lot of crossover.
And J6 dwarfed Charlottesville by many levels of magnitude.
So you had this sort of normie type.
So there was a study done by the University of Chicago on who was at J6.
And the average age was more or less my age.
It was like 44 or something like that.
And there were people who were often red state voters in blue states.
That was a trend that was picked up on.
So they sort of felt surrounded, perhaps.
But they were largely a normie type.
There was higher levels of divorce.
Interesting. Is that causal or correlation?
It's interesting to think about that.
Someone like Ashley Babbitt, who was shot while raiding the Capitol, was divorced.
She was a former Obama voter, and she was in financial distress.
There's a certain type of person who was activated by QAnon and all of these memes.
Now, QAnon is, of course, wild and crazy, and I don't think you can underestimate its impact on J6.
But that being said, they were disappointed normies who genuinely believed that democracy had been taken away, and we're just bringing it back.
Don't you understand?
Everyone voted for Trump, so we've got to go to the Capitol.
Come on, Trump's our guy.
Put him back in.
We believe in democracy, guys.
I can't believe the elites took it away from us.
That was the attitude.
But I think even among the sort of crazy radical elements, I think they still fought in those ways.
It was a normie revolt.
And I think it has the same dynamics of thought as a lot of the Luigi stuff.
I might have had some respect for J6ers if they were just like, fuck it, America's over, we're taking over the government.
I mean, that at least would have been honest.
And if you're going to go kinetic and you're going to just raid the Capitol, you're going to actually do it, then just go for it.
You're doing an open coup.
Just declare what you were doing, boldly.
Get people on your side.
They didn't do any of that, and I think precisely because they sort of believed in these things.
They believe in the institution of voting, even as they were disrupting democracy.
They believe that if every American were just allowed to speak his or her voice, that this economy would work for your average citizen.
They believe in it so hard.
They're so angry.
It's so disappointed that this dream has been taken away from them.
So it, too, was a sort of normie revolution.
Export Selection