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It was a few days before Christmas when I saw it: The words \u201cDeny, Defend, Depose\u201d had been spray-painted on some sort of brick electrical power box on Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans. Shortly thereafter, Instagram began showing me advertisements for a T-shirt with a pink heart and the words \u201cDaddy, I love him.\u201d The photo in the heart was Luigi Mangione.<\/p>\n
Mangione is the twenty-six-year-old man\u00a0arrested<\/a>\u00a0for allegedly shooting to death UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in early December in New York City, but you probably already know that. You also likely know that \u201cDeny, Defend, Depose\u201d were the words scratched into shell casings found at the scene. Perhaps you also know that a backpack linked to the shooting\u00a0was found in Central Park<\/a>\u00a0stuffed with Monopoly money. By the time we knew those two details, well before Mangione was arrested and charged with terrorism, among other things, the shooter was already well on his way to folk-hero status. Graffiti with those three words has been spotted in\u00a0Germany<\/a>, France<\/a>, Brazil<\/a>, and Chile<\/a>; graffiti in South London<\/a> demands \u201cFree Luigi Mangione.\u201d<\/p>\n Mangione has\u00a0pleaded<\/a>\u00a0not guilty to terror and murder charges, and out of respect for that plea and for the pretense that the U.S. justice system clings to \u201cinnocent until proven guilty,\u201d I want to spend very little time talking about the person and instead think about the public response to the shooting. (Mangione\u2019s attorney archly noted that New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who personally perp-walked Mangione, \u201cshould know more than anyone the presumption of innocence.\u201d) The Internet has made much of Mangione\u2019s looks, but I\u2019ll venture that his \u201chotness\u201d\u2014that Instagram T-shirt notwithstanding\u2014is something of a red herring here. By the time that backpack of fake bills was found, people were already\u00a0cheering him on<\/a>.<\/p>\n Why? The utter failure of the U.S. health care system is the most obvious answer. Signs outside of Mangione\u2019s arraignment\u00a0declared<\/a>, \u201cMurder for profit is terrorism,\u201d and the Internet\u00a0overflowed<\/a> with videos<\/a>\u00a0and text posts sharing stories about UnitedHealthcare and other insurance companies, stories of treatment denials and refused payments, illness and pain, and premature death. A Facebook post by UnitedHealth Group, UnitedHealthcare\u2019s parent company, mourning the loss of Thompson had received more than 19,000 \u201claugh\u201d reactions by the time a screenshot crossed my desktop on December 5\u2014again, before even the first surveillance photo of the shooter had been released. (At the time of writing, it had increased to\u00a0131,000<\/a>\u00a0in spite of UnitedHealth Group limiting who could react to it.) The health insurance company is the perfect example of\u00a0my argument<\/a>\u00a0that capitalism cannot abide grief or care about death, and the public response to the shooting indicates that most people know it. When pundits like Bret Stephens of\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0desperately\u00a0attempted to shame people<\/a>\u00a0into mourning Thompson, proclaiming him the real hero, readers pushed back<\/a>. Yet the refusal to grieve a man who profited from this death-making system is a reflection of the industry\u2019s own refusal to grieve the thousands sickened and killed by denials of insurance claims<\/a>.<\/p>\n Life is cheap in America today. The insurance industry is nothing more than a vector for what Friedrich Engels called \u201csocial murder<\/a>.\u201d One might also adapt historian Peter Linebaugh\u2019s term \u201cthanatocracy<\/a>\u201d for our society, where health care is expensive but guns are plentiful, and justice depends on who is on their receiving end. (As CBS News\u00a0noted<\/a>, the charge of first-degree murder that Mangione received is \u201cusually reserved for the killing of law enforcement officers.\u201d) The day police arrested Mangione, Daniel Penny\u2014who killed an unhoused subway dancer named Jordan Neely\u2014was set free to celebrate with President-to-be\u00a0Donald Trump<\/a>.<\/p>\n Killing is not rare in this country or elsewhere, but the political killing of a member of the ownership class certainly is. Hence the celebrations around the world, in countries that have much better health care systems than the United States, the\u00a0dance songs<\/a> and the corridos<\/em><\/a>, and the social media posts comparing photos of Mangione\u2019s perp walk to\u00a0paintings of Jesus<\/a> and film stills of Superman<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re talking about hundreds of thousands of people who are not political, embracing openly a very radical, very transgressive act,\u201d political theorist Geo Maher, author of\u00a0A World Without Police<\/em><\/a>, tells me. While many of those people say they don\u2019t approve of killing, they are nevertheless moved by the incident. A woman named April, who spoke to\u00a0outside of Mangione\u2019s first court hearing in Pennsylvania, said that she\u2019d driven six hours to attend. She\u00a0described<\/a>\u00a0her struggles to obtain care for her cystic fibrosis, noting that \u201cI don\u2019t agree with what happened, you know, violence, vigilantism . . . but violence has made changes in our country.\u201d<\/p>\n The history of political violence in the United States is, of course, older than the country itself. It\u2019s just that, as historian Mark Bray, author of\u00a0Antifa<\/em><\/a>, explains, lately we\u2019ve been accustomed to that violence coming from the right. We don\u2019t really know the politics of the shooter, but his choice for a target\u2014a prominent executive entering an investor meeting\u2014first called to my mind anarchist Alexander Berkman\u2019s failed 1892 attempt to kill Homestead Steel head Henry Clay Frick in an act of\u00a0attentat<\/em>, or \u201cpropaganda of the deed.\u201d<\/p>\n Berkman, a comrade of the better-known Emma Goldman, chose Frick during the violent lockout at Homestead, in Pennsylvania, when workers had already engaged in a gun battle with Pinkerton guards. The year was 1892, and the class war was much more of an open war then; the Haymarket affair in Chicago, which led to the execution of four anarchists on the flimsiest of evidence, had happened only a few years prior. Berkman hoped to prompt the people to rise up, sparking a broader rebellion, but he succeeded neither in killing Frick nor even receiving the kind of adulation that Mangione already has. In his prison memoirs, Berkman expressed his frustration with the lack of support from the workers at Homestead, and even from other anarchists, who disavowed him. He did describe one piece of mail that had enclosed a single dollar bill, but even that supporter chastised him for taking up the gun.<\/p>\n Berkman called his attempt \u201cthe first terrorist act in America,\u201d at a time when that word had a rather different valence than it does now, almost twenty-four years after 9\/11. But, in charging Mangione with terrorism, prosecutors unwittingly recall Berkman\u2019s act. There is something in the symmetry that doesn\u2019t require studying anarchist history, Bray notes. The logic of the act makes sense, whether one decries it or celebrates it. This is perhaps the biggest difference from Berkman.<\/p>\n People have grown up with the quotidian violence of the health care system, of policing, of shrinking opportunities and spiking prices, Maher notes, and thus it was ultimately not surprising that someone would eventually seek revenge against a CEO. \u201cIt\u2019s so absolutely commonplace, and the commonplace is the grounds of politics,\u201d Maher says. \u201cEveryday people already think that people shouldn\u2019t profit off death. And that\u2019s literally what UnitedHealthcare does . . . . That\u2019s just the way that capitalism works. It always creates death, whether it\u2019s in the quality of our food [or] whether it\u2019s in oversight of pharmaceuticals [by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration]. But it just happens to be the clarity in this situation about how direct the link to death is kind of unprecedented.\u201d<\/p>\n Bray adds that, for a lot of people, the shooter is \u201cprobably closer to a Robin Hood.\u201d Some version of the social bandit, as historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote in his classic book\u00a0Bandits<\/em>, is known around the world, real or imagined, from Robin Hood to Pancho Villa to the peasant bandits of Chinese classics. Banditry is a product of economic crisis and transition; the social bandit is embraced by the people because he embodies a form of justice and the dream of freedom. He uses violence, but strategically, he becomes a popular symbol that transcends his age.<\/p>\n In the United States, we had Jesse James (portrayed most recently on film by Brad Pitt in\u00a0The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford<\/em>), and a generation later, during the Great Depression, John Dillinger, \u201cPretty Boy\u201d Floyd, and most famously, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow (immortalized on film in 1967 by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty). In the latter film, the photogenic criminals proudly declare to a family that has been foreclosed upon, \u201cWe rob banks.\u201d While they don\u2019t do much redistribution, the bank robbers nevertheless target the villains of the day, the ones who had caused the crisis. This, Hobsbawm suggested, was \u201cperhaps one powerful reason why these rather minor and marginal figures on the scene of American crime were singled out as \u2018public enemies.\u2019 Unlike \u2018the mob,\u2019 they represented a challenge to the all-American values of free enterprise, though they believed in it.\u201d<\/p>\n The United States \u201cloves its outlaw stories because they can also function as a catharsis, as a pressure escape valve where people fantasize about killing a CEO, but they\u2019re never going to do it,\u201d Maher observes. But, he points out, \u201cthis is tapping into something deeper, which is that your everyday frustrations, you can\u2019t always get your hands on the person who\u2019s causing them.\u201d<\/p>\n Much has been made of\u00a0UnitedHealthcare\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0use<\/a>\u00a0of artificial intelligence (AI) to deny claims, despite allegations that the software has a 90 percent error rate. A lawsuit had been\u00a0filed<\/a>\u00a0a year before Thompson\u2019s death to that effect, and the story resurfaced after the shooting. Maher points to a broader phenomenon: Well before the AI hype bubbled over recently, it became nearly impossible to speak to a human when searching for help\u2014whether it\u2019s your insurance company or your phone company, you\u2019re probably talking to a recording.<\/p>\n The usual response, American style, might have been to shoot up a call center. But the successful precision targeting of a CEO seems to have struck a chord because, well, it worked. When, over and over again, protesters have taken to the streets, signed petitions, blocked traffic, demanded change, and been told that the only option is to vote\u2014only to be given the slimmest of options at the ballot box\u2014it is no wonder that people despair. As scholar Dan Berger\u00a0joked<\/a>\u00a0on X (which is owned by Trump\u2019s billionaire buddy Elon Musk), paraphrasing John F. Kennedy, \u201cThose who make Bernie Sanders impossible will make Luigi Mangione inevitable.\u201d<\/p>\n Or, as Maher says, \u201cThey tell us political violence is unacceptable, but it\u2019s all the state does all day long.\u201d<\/p>\n We\u2019ve been shown, if not told, over and over again that the way to access power in the United States is to get yourself a gun. \u201cA guy took a gun and shot a health insurance CEO\u201d is the most American sentence I\u2019ve ever written. And yet, as noted above, the graffiti and videos and celebrations come from around the world. There is something about the reversal of power in that particular moment that has resonated, which is why, following Hobsbawm, Mayor Adams showed up for the perp walk with a ludicrously overwhelming show of force.<\/p>\n The 1890s saw\u00a0anarchist assassinations<\/a>\u00a0in many countries, Bray notes, and in Spain and France, some of those assassins were wildly popular. In Barcelona, he says, \u201cvendors started selling lithograph portraits of the anarchist martyrs.\u201d Police were stationed by their graves after their executions, because there was concern people would try to dig up bones for relics. Berkman didn\u2019t succeed, but\u00a0Leon Czolgosz<\/a>, who was less of a committed radical, managed to assassinate President William McKinley, after having heard Emma Goldman speak, and probably more importantly, having been blacklisted for taking part in a strike.<\/p>\n So what happens next? Will we see more attempts on the lives of CEOs? School shootings, after all, didn\u2019t immediately proliferate but have increased steadily in the years after Columbine until 2024, when there were\u00a0971<\/a>\u00a0of them, including 112 that resulted in injury or death. The attempted shooting of Donald Trump has all but disappeared from the news, and the man arrested outside of one of Trump\u2019s golf courses and\u00a0charged with attempted assassination<\/a>\u00a0in a second incident has gotten only a fraction of the coverage lavished on Mangione. Political assassinations don\u2019t happen in a vacuum; whether they capture the public\u2019s imagination or ire depends upon conditions already in place, Maher notes. Trump is loved and hated in near equal measure; there is no such love for insurance company CEOs.<\/p>\n What should be impossible to deny now, though I have no doubt that mainstream politicians and pundits will continue to deny it, is that there is a deep well of anger and pain in the United States, and across the world, and a\u00a0good number<\/a>\u00a0of those angry and hurting people know quite well who is causing their pain. They know who has the money and the power, and each overdramatic perp walk and overblown set of charges for Mangione\u2014again, who is innocent until proven guilty according to the stated logic of the U.S. criminal legal system\u2014reminds us of that fact.<\/p>\n Yet, as Maher notes, political change begins with \u201csparks, glints of light in everyday common sense, that spread unpredictably, in this case transnationally, incredibly quickly. And that\u2019s when things begin to change.\u201d The challenge is to turn those sparks into something that overturns a death-making system.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n