Luigi Mangione: American Revenge Fantasy

When a hooded gunman shot dead the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in Manhattan last week, the story already had the makings of folklore to many disenfranchised Americans raised on revenge narratives. The unsympathetic target. The everyman cause. The cool demeanor. The clean getaway. The messages on the cartridge cases found at the scene made clear that this was not a hitman hired by a rival firm or a spurned lover, leaving the nation free to speculate: this was Jesse James bushwhacking, Neo leaving the Matrix, or the Weather Underground; this was the people’s justice administered against the common class enemy. And as long as the shooter remained hidden behind his mask, cloaked in anonymity, America and all its warring cliques were free to project their own fantasies and anxieties onto this viral, homicidal blank slate, and to try to decipher what being a ‘hero’ in the modern world really means.

Then the police start posting pictures, and the suspect’s handsome to boot; the first image— the one of the alleged shooter hooded, mask up, in a Starbucks—revealing beautiful, thick eyebrows and a penetrating gaze. Then in the next one—hooded but with the mask pulled down in a moment of vulnerability, disarmed by a flirty hostel worker—you get his smile and jawline. And then another, in a taxi, hooded and masked again, once more the unmistakable eyebrows, the penetrating gaze—yes, this is a man of conviction, many in America said. This had to have been a man driven to kill not from a deficiency of eroticism, but a surplus. 

Some vocal internet leftists got their hopes up for a moment. Maybe we’ve found our sexy rockstar Andreas Baader to usher in a joyous new era of political violence, they thought. The fascists of this city already have their own killer hero of the hour, Daniel Penny, the strawberry blond vigilante who strangles the life out of black people on public transport—he’s their dashing man, all-American in that familiar style, he kills and talks casually with the cops at the crime scene and gets acquitted: he simply did what any true gentleman would do, they think.

In the hooded ‘CEO shooter,’ many on the left thought maybe they’d found their own guy, the outlaw who dispatches the ‘correct’ people for the ‘correct’ reasons. And what might be even better for them is if they never even know—if he slips off into the mountains, to rendezvous with his comrades and lovers, and live on forever in incandescent dreams of struggle…

Yet from the moment the mask first slips, it’s only a matter of time before the dream dissipates. When the guy gets caught the next Monday, tipped off by a class traitor in McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, our fantasies must face the man. Luigi Mangione. Suddenly we have a name, and full, instant access to the life this person led online. And though the name is giving ‘Years of Lead’… and I suppose we do see images of him hiking mountains with his six pack… the rest isn’t exactly Che reading Goethe in the Sierra Maestra. 

Turns out the dude basically just has Ivy League tech-worker himbo midwit tastes. He reads, and he recorded his reading on Goodreads and Twitter. It’s all TedTalk pop-psychology, self-help-guru airport-book slop: biographies of Elon Musk, treatises on optimizing our brains with psilocybin, total normie banality… Even when he dips his toes into the surface-level, clearnet online right—following Paul ‘LindyMan’ Skallas on Twitter, retweeting Peter Thiel, maybe even going to Sovereign House once—his engagement with it seems to suggest a sort of anodyne yuppie centrism. Some of the more curmudgeonly communists I follow on social media even start saying that he’s a fascist, that he’s the same as Daniel Penny, that he’s just another white dude who needs to kill people to get his dick hard, that he’s probably an abuser, nothing like Andreas Baader… It’s easy to see why those types feel a bit miffed, since they seem to read a lot of big books on the histories of mass killings, analyses of what went wrong, how they’d do better, how they’d stay in power, how they’d get a higher score.

In retrospect, it perhaps should’ve been clear that the UnitedHealthcare CEO assassin wasn’t a communist when he killed an insurance executive and not some other leftist sect rival. And maybe there is something for today’s would-be revolutionaries to learn from his reading list. After all, you fight a guerrilla war not with the army you want, but the army you have. So put down your Little Red Book and pick up Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind…

Other news outlets latch on to the fact that he read Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future, blessing it with a four-star review on Goodreads (and no doubt a hefty uptick in Amazon sales). That’s the scary one, the press would have us believe, the forbidden incel PDF screed. Then when you look, the review reads like it was written by a golden retriever; it’s not quite ChatGPT, a bit more organic than that, but similar: “This says a lot about society.”

I don’t think anyone has ever truly been radicalized by Kaczynski, it’s all just a ruse, a token for pseuds to signify how sick and twisted they want you to think they are, to make them feel badass when they hike—the true psychopaths actually just get turned into STEM Raskolnikovs by the Andrew Huberman podcast and whatever; it’s in the normie slop that you’ll find the real manic ideological power fantasy of the ruling class. Like Kiefer Sutherland’s character in Melancholia, the bourgeois positivist who entertains the children with his device tracking the motion of the ‘rogue planet’ and then, when it becomes clear that the rogue planet is on a collision course with Earth—that his science has failed, that his optimism was nothing but delusion—he kills himself rather than join his family in facing the end of the world.

Fortunately, for the rest of us spectacle-enjoyers, most audiences across the political spectrum seem more or less indifferent to Mangione’s intellectual banality. If anything, it’s ‘relatable.’ It appears that normal people just want blood in the streets, preferably from socially acceptable targets, and they want it to be spilled by hunks. Ideally, the hunks would be wearing masks, and I don’t mean the sort of Covid mask you can just take off, but rather the sort that conceals the essence of things, the sort that can maintain the illusion of virility and romance, the sort that sustains collective fantasy. It ultimately doesn’t matter how it relates to ‘reality.’

Every assassin—whether you have them pegged as hero, villain, or something in between—needs an origin story. Whether he’s found guilty or not, internet sleuths quickly deduced that Mangione was radicalized against the health insurance industry, and wider US society, by years of botched and bogus treatment for chronic back pain. Yet when PopCrave and the Daily Mail report that Mangione’s spinal surgeries made “dating and being physically intimate” impossible, the tortured hunk’s mooted impotence merely cues a chorus of “I can fix him” replies. So what’s more important to America—the revenge or the fantasy? 

Whatever happens next, a suspicious and conspiracy-hungry American public already has its work cut out. The chapter of Mangione’s mask may have ended, but the fantasy has merely transferred itself to the Monopoly money backpack, the monobrow, the cash the suspect claims was planted by police, the ‘286 riddle.’ No doubt all our little Walt Whitmans will unearth a rich network of esoteric Americana significance as the trial plays out across the coming years.

Follow Michael Crumplar @mcrumps

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