Assassins
And all you have to do
Is squeeze your little finger
Ease your little finger back—
You can change the world.
America did not invent assassination, but we do lend it an unseemly glamour. A society that makes such a fetish of individual success gets cluttered with castoffs who refuse to be ignored. Luigi Mangione is the latest in a long line of assassins, who arrive with manifestos and linger as folk heroes. Wherever he is locked up, mountains of fan mail await him.
The Ballad of Luigi Mangione hits all the familiar notes. In the first wave of coverage, we learned he was an All-American kid from a good family. That family’s mundane prosperity is shorthanded as privilege, and the Baltimore boys’ school Mangione graduated from as valedictorian is promoted as elite. Because he attended the University of Pennsylvania, he will forever be Ivy League-educated, as if the Ivy League has not produced generations of damaged people. We are meant to be shocked that such a pretty, credentialed young man could be deranged in this way. John Wilkes Booth, another advantaged Marylander, took a wrong turn, too.
Everything published in a flurry about this troubled individual will be revised. A dominant narrative—that the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson symbolizes national fury at a callous private insurance system—casts Mangione as our avenger. He takes a hot mugshot, which inspires TikTok ballads, online mash notes, and SNL skits. That’s been countered, mainly from the right, with righteous scolding. From that corner, lionizing Mangione, the alleged killer of a father of two, is another sign society and its Ivy Leaguers have gone mad.
Reality is not going to live up to these projections. There is no evidence that Mangione was some left-wing radical; his Twitter postings reveal the interests of a libertarian-adjacent, podcast-hooked dude. It’s all there: looming AI, imperiled masculinity, smothering wokeness, the Roman Empire, falling birth rates, and toxic smartphones. These are the preoccupations of a Joe Rogan fan, not a Marxist revolutionary.
If the work of countless internet sleuths is our guide, Mangione’s rage at America’s healthcare morass is rooted in a personal ordeal. We know from Reddit that he suffered from spondylolisthesis, a painful spinal condition. We know that in college he experienced what he described as a “brain fog.” We know from Goodreads he thought Ted Kaczynski had a point, but he also threw in a good word for Dr. Seuss. From digital fragments, a Frankenstein legend is cobbled together. This invention takes on a life of its own while the genuine article is extradited to New York.
After graduating with bachelor’s and master’s engineering degrees from Penn, Mangione worked in Santa Monica for TrueCar, the car-buying site, and drifted to Hawaii, where he spent time in a co-living space called Surfbreak, where the back pain reportedly worsened. He underwent surgery for the condition, which was covered by his insurer (not United Healthcare), and posted that it was successful. Off he went on a Western seeker’s ramble across Asia. Somewhere in there, he cut off contact with loved ones. Then he resurfaced with a homemade ghost gun.
