No, Robber Barons, An Assassin Probably Isn't Coming for You
But you should still be afraid, and it is never too late to change your exploitative ways, alleviating the danger and acting to morally redress your past at the same time.
“These parasites had it coming” - Luigi Mangione
The AP writes:
About the same time the #FreeLuigi memes featuring the mustachioed plumber from “Super Mario Brothers” mushroomed online this week, commenters shared memes showing Tony Soprano pronouncing Luigi Mangione, the man charged with murdering the UnitedHealthcare CEO in Manhattan, a hero. There were the posts lionizing Mangione’s physique and appearance, the ones speculating about who could play him on “Saturday Night Live,” and the ones denouncing and even threatening people at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s for spotting him and calling police.
It was all too much for Pennsylvania’s governor, a rising Democrat who was nearly the vice presidential nominee this year. Josh Shapiro — who was dealing with a case somewhere else that happened to land in his lap — decried what he saw as growing support for “vigilante justice.”
…
“We do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint,” the governor said. “In a civil society, we are all less safe when ideologues engage in vigilante justice.”
Shapiro, the well-known perpetrator of a murder coverup and summarily dropped candidate for Vice President, summarizes the establishment viewpoint: that Mangione’s assassination of Thompson was to “resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint,” or, in philosophical terms, a killing not necessitated by an immediate need for protection of himself or others. However, it could be plausibly argued that his killing was motivated by self-defense and depending on the reaction, may well save many lives. The onus to react appropriately in any situation is on the power-holder, in this case the state—will it double down on the oppression and profit-seeking, in fact rendering Mangione’s actions unnecessary and therefore unjust? Or will it concede his point and perhaps even reform the system meaningfully? If the latter, Mangione will have been a hero unlike any we’ve seen in many decades. If anything less happens as a result, the usual suspects in the political and mainstream media sphere will continue their pusillanimous tirade, decrying such brazen violence while simultaneously facilitating a system with a list of victims which would make Eichmann blush. In the moment, Brian Thompson was actively involved in a conspiracy to commit murder, which was only legal because of government capture by the insurance industry; it was no less a deadly conspiracy, and Mangione believed he was interceding on behalf of its myriad victims to stop it. Whether he was “correct” or not is largely a legal question and one already decided, almost certainly not in his favor. But there is also the equally important court of public opinion, which is also likely to be wrong in many circumstances, but importantly is discursively accessible to all and might inspire future direct action. Therefore an ethical discussion of his assassination and what precisely constitutes self-defense in a capitalist system is important (I’ve written extensively about this here and here).
The reaction to Luigi Mangione’s act of killing UnitedHealth CEO has been incredible to witness, especially given the common rejection of even mildly disruptive protests, which range from annoyance at the inconveniencing of say, blocking a road, to calls for violence against the protesters even by high ranking politicians. I’ve written about this numerous times:
Most importantly, Mangione’s action laid bare the widespread and furiously bubbling class anger which has until now only ever manifested as mostly-ignored cries of “how do they keep getting away with it,” ineffective protests which were always brutally suppressed and then slandered in the media (see: Aaron Bushnell) and only occasionally erupted into violence, which was always deftly redirected inward by police and the media: rich murderers like Brian Thompson whose actions were always the real cause of mass suffering and death and who in any just system would have been held accountable for them have always been portrayed by the media as effectively unreachable by word or bullet, so the left had to express their anger through infighting and petty organizational squabbles. Though it was never truly the case that anyone was beyond real reproach, the portrayal was sufficient and the effects of crackdown sufficiently chilling that even championing such revolutionary violence was a risk few were willing to take. All of this changed on December 4 when Mangione shot and killed UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson in New York City in broad daylight, and nearly evaded police until his capture days later (there are still questions about his post-shooting behavior which credibly cast a shadow of doubt on police narratives about his actions). But for the tip of one “good Samaritan” (widely reviled among anyone but the usual suspects mentioned above), he might have committed the perfect crime: victimless (no collateral damage) self-defense practiced on the behalf of the insurance giant’s millions of victims, from which he escaped justice, living in hiding as an ever-present danger to similar rich murderers who were only able to commit their lethal acts because they were legal, or lucrative enough to shareholders.
That Mangione’s actions have been widely and unanimously celebrated among what we might call “the true left” (anti-capitalists who understand that merely following orders or acting at the behest of an incorporated entity does not absolve one of their participation in deadly crimes) has unsurprisingly struck fear into the hearts of others who get away with similar crimes and are handsomely rewarded for doing so. The first obvious analogue would be fossil fuel CEOs and other big polluters, whose victim list vastly outmatch Brian Thompson’s, though they are already likely well aware of their unpopularity and live secretive lives accordingly. There are then the participants of—we’ll charitably call them questionably legal—wars of conquest and resources which have taken place in the last 50 years. If Thompson can be attacked for his part, and his underlings who administer the claims denials, and so on down the line, then certainly the same justification covers a military leader who orders his warfighters to open fire on civilians (many examples collected here). Therefore every US veteran, rich or poor, alongside every bloodstained CEO and politician in their pocket, should be afraid of facing consequences for their actions—extrajudicial consequences, as it is clear that the US justice system exists to protect them as it does rich CEOs. Mangione’s actions may clue them in that the system will no longer save them rhetorically or physically, and legal protection is worth relatively little if one’s life has ended.
This legalist facilitation of capitalism and its myriad crimes has protected murderers and polluters alike for well over a century. This in a nutshell has caused the earth environmental system to break down: temperatures are breaking records years in a row, food is prohibitively expensive and only getting worse, natural disasters are so frequent and severe that insurers are refusing to cover them, and rich countries will not even deign to voluntarily cover these costs to poorer nations, who suffer first and worst from climate related disasters. Its breakdown and subversion is an important first step on the road to an egalitarian, even just survivable, future.
There will be protestations and crackdowns from the murderous fascists, of course, as one Florida woman recently found out (her bail was an exorbitant $100,000):
A Florida woman was arrested and charged this week after police say she ended a phone call with her health insurance provider with threats that mimicked wording associated with the suspected UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter.
The incident occurred Tuesday when Briana Boston, a 42-year-old woman from Lakeland, was speaking with a representative from Blue Cross Blue Shield after she had been told that her medical claim was denied.
In an arrest affidavit obtained by ABC News, police said that near the end of the recorded conversation with the insurance provider, Boston can be heard saying, "Delay, deny, depose. You people are next."
Less dramatically, several healthcare companies have forced employees to sign loyalty oaths and removed information about corporate leadership from the internet, and, more productively and laudably by Blue Cross, backed off of a proposal which would limit the amount of time patients could be placed under anesthesia. But we must be fearful of overreactions by fascists when we accuse them of murder, especially now, and especially given the fascist tendency to play victim in order to histrionically oppress others:
A tweet that encapsulates the growing paranoia among state-sanctioned murderers. Tracy Walder took this tweet as an explicit threat and later explained that it would make her a target, though Mahima’s post contained no threats or even implications of violence. Walder, who killed via drone strikes for the Central Intelligence Agency, seems to have erased this tweet overnight. The reply is an interesting interpretation of “extrajudicial murder of a civilian” given who she was replying to, and this interpretation is likely to be the one pushed by the compliant corporate media in the coming months.
What precisely motived Mangione? His politics are slightly muddled, but one thing was clear: his act was targeted at a system he viewed as corrupt and insufficiently removed from its victims to absolve them of direct culpability for their deaths and dismemberment. Whether he himself was a victim of a claim denial over back injuries is now being called into question by a few commentators such as Aaron Rupar, but if Mangione himself wasn’t a victim, countless others were (UnitedHealth used an AI to incorrectly deny millions of claims, among myriad other crimes) and it is possible to carry out self-defense on behalf of others. If Mangione wasn’t the victim, perhaps a family member or friend was. Or perhaps he read a story such as this one and decided to take action:
That the American healthcare industry is predatory and well-bloodied should not be a controversial statement, as noted in my review of Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal’s excellent An American Sickness (Mangione cited her as well in his manifesto):
The complete and total inability of the system’s victims to seek redress through lawsuits or other less violent means proves exhaustion: the system, in effect, is killing us, and we have no other options than to fight against it. But as we have seen countless time, less than violent protest is grossly insufficient when so many lives are on the line. Is it not offensive to the millions of ongoing victims of the healthcare holocaust that we would only be bothered to hold a sign, or picket for a few hours? Are their lives worth so little to us?
It didn’t have to be this way. Neither the millions of victims of capitalist healthcare nor the occasional rage murder or assassination that takes place as a result were ever truly necessary. Despite how it reads, none of this is an endorsement of violence; quite the contrary: Brian Thompson should have never put himself in his position, and Luigi Mangione should never have been forced into his. There are always alternatives to violence on the part of the perpetrator, in this case the health insurance industry and its representatives (not, importantly, Mangione, who was either a victim himself or practicing self-defense on behalf of other victims).
Australia recently put forth an alternative to retributive violence which could be pursued in the meantime (BDS is another readily apparent example, similarly derided as disruptive, unfair, and anti-Semitic by the usual suspects), a method of holding perpetrators accountable in some fashion without necessarily harming them:
We could of course reform the for-profit healthcare system to avoid future assassinations…or we could continue with the current victim-creating death machine, knowing a few CEOs will get fed into it alongside their own victims. We could stop Israel’s butchery with a phone call, saving perhaps another few hundred thousand lives along with a few dozen Israeli victims of blowback. The only reason we do not take the least violent course is that murderers such as Thompson was useful to the empire, and worked to maintain capitalism rather than undermine it. The same is true for US Soldiers who took part in unnecessary violence: we hold them up as heroes while they kill women and children because of well-funded propaganda efforts by empire-aligned forces. They are useful, like Israel and Brian Thompson, and expendable, like Israel and Brian Thompson.
Notably, most of the wistful eulogies for Thompson are sure to include the phrase “think of his family,” an irony certainly lost on those lionizing the man, because the phrase implies that his assassination would be less distasteful if he was a loner or sick, or otherwise less useful to the world, just like his millions of victims of denied claims are assumed to be (the sick and uncared for are considered drains on the community, or more accurately, on capital). Either we are all worth something, no matter who we are or how much money we have, or none of us matter. Basic human rights do not exist if we see Thompson as anything other than a murderer who experienced an all-things-considered quite mild bit of blowback, and his status as a family man or rags-to-riches success story do nothing to alter that calculus. Think of Brian Thompson’s family? What if they are happy he died? What if he was abusive or neglectful? Who cares about Brian Thompson’s family?! Similarly, who cares about a US Soldier, another well-compensated cog in the bloody machine, who suffers from PTSD and dies alone from suicide or drug addiction, having become a drain on the very machine he violently reinforced? What if Brian Thompson was 89 years old, long estranged from his family, and hated by everyone around him? Would he be less of a person? According to his company, he would.
Any potential for the meaningful, lasting cessation of violence demands that those committing the initial act cease their attack, not that their victims give up their right to self-defense and suffer in silence. This is as true for Israelis as it is for rich CEOs, yet Israel has only ramped up the bloodshed of invasive war and genocide and worked harder to cover up the true number of their victims, which now undoubtedly number somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million, mostly women and children. The outcome of their unchecked aggression and facilitation of violence by the US puts Brian Thompson’s actions as a CEO to shame:
The obvious ramification of Israel’s refusal to allow the vast majority of food and aid trucks to enter Gaza coupled with their ceaseless bombardments targeting civilian infrastructure.
This is why the elites are so fearful of the widespread adulation Mangione is receiving. They know that any real movement would not stop at health insurance CEOs; none of the real exploiters and butchers would be safe, and despite their best efforts, they know what they are: monsters who would never exist in any kind of just world. Better for them, and us, that they cease their attacks. As I wrote in “How to Gently Criticize a Pipeline,”
The conclusion is relatively simple: to get their attention, the self-interested nihilists which make up our ruling class must be made to feel pain (the form and severity of this pain is up to them to decide), and any honest appraisal of those who made them feel it would consider them as fully justified martyrs for the most important cause in human history. Those who fall short of forceful, even violent acts, will be seen as wasted opportunities by the millions soon to be impoverished, displaced, and bereaved by the changing climate and resultant upheaval and scarcity. For example, the Colorado man who set himself on fire on the steps of the Supreme Court last April in an environmentalist protest would have made much better use of the materials had he employed them in other ways we cannot discuss, from any conceivable perspective (from ethical concerns to the appraisal of its outcome) given that his sacrificial act was virtually ignored.
Was Luigi Mangione justified? If Brian Thompson was justified in his actions as CEO, then yes. If he wasn’t, neither of them were and we have some work to do toward building a livable (communist) future. The unprecedented outpouring of support for his assassination indicates that there is an increasingly forceful appetite for change among the hundreds of millions of victims of capitalism in this country. What will we do with this upswell?
Note: I have no plans to do anything similar to Luigi Mangione—this is a dissection of the ethics and discourse surrounding his actions. I have issued no threats, real or implied.