"I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done."
Susan Zakin
It was just an ordinary Monday. The New York Times tried to explain why some young men who voted for Bernie Sanders had switched their allegiance to Trump. "For certain voters, political preferences are defined not by party, but by their attitudes about the ruling class — whether they trust people in power, or think they’ve rigged the system against ordinary people,” the Times reporter wrote in the paper’s usual clinical tone.
In an Altoona, Pennsylvania McDonald’s, police arrested Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old prep school valedictorian and University of Pennsylvania graduate, in connection with the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street last Wednesday.
The handwritten manifesto found on Mangione contained the passages “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”
The obvious comparison was to the Unabomber. Theodore Kaczynski, a Harvard-educated recluse. was convicted of a series of mail bombings between 1978 and 1995 that killed 3 and injured 23. The parallel did not escape USA Today. The newspaper reported that someone who appeared to be Mangione had given a 4-star rating to Kaczynski’s manifesto in January 2024.
Written by a user with the profile name "Luigi (lnmangione)" accompanied by the same photo that Mangione used in other social media profiles, the review said Kaczynski’s manifesto examined "the question of 21st century quality of life.”
“It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it's simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out," the reviewer says.
“He was a violent individual − rightfully imprisoned − who maimed innocent people," Mangione wrote. "While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.”
Like Mangione, the Unabomber was highly educated. He’d been, famously, a math prodigy at Harvard. If you read his manifesto (I have) Kaczynski makes a reasoned argument and he was, as Mangione pointed out, right about a lot of things. I knew the terrain, having written a book, Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement, that traced the history of the U.S. environmental movement, both the Washington, D.C. players and their rowdy radical counterparts. Radicals are distinguished by a sense of crisis. In his introduction to Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman’s handbook for ecosaboteurs, Ecodefense, the legendary Southwestern author Ed Abbey had written:
“If a stranger batters your door down with an axe, threatens your family and yourself with deadly weapons, and proceeds to loot your home of whatever he wants, he is committing what is universally recognized—by law and morality—as a crime. In such a situation the householder has both the right and the obligation to defend himself, his family, and his property by whatever means are necessary. . . . The American wilderness, what little remains, is now undergoing such an assault.”
What’s different is not only that Kacyznski was a loon and Mangione, if he turns out to be the killer, probably isn’t. There is a difference in the subjects of their rage and the respective historical moments. Kacyznski carried out a 17-year bombing campaign in the 1980s and 1990s and his cause was the environment. Poll after poll has shown that while Americans profess to care about the environment, very few people decide whether or not to vote for a candidate based on their environmental record. (That should be obvious with Trump’s election. Did anyone hear Harris talk much about the environment?)
The other difference is timing. The Unabomber was arrested in 1999. He committed suicide in his prison cell in 2023.
Now it’s 2024. A convicted felon, sex offender, grifter and con man has just been elected president. He controls all three branches of government. If his rhetoric and the promises of his appointees can be taken even half-seriously, it will take a herculean effort to keep even a facsimile of the rule of law intact. Three of America’s richest businessmen already are toadying. While the Affordable Care Act will likely survive, the possibility that a Trump administration will rein in corporate greed is nonexistent.
Any sane person understands that American health care is a disaster, and the numbers bear this out. Ad infinitum, ad nauseam, we hear that health care costs in the U.S. are the highest in the world while outcomes are among the worst. Our life expectancy is dropping.
UnitedHealthcare is the worst of the worst. During the three years that Thompson headed UHC, the company’s claim denial rate skyrocketed from just under nine percent to more than 30 percent in 2023, twice the average denial rate for health insurers.
Unlike the environment, a slow-moving train wreck that can be imperceptible in one’s daily life, the health care industry’s profit motive kills people. Even before Mangione was arrested, the reaction to Thompson’s murder was unprecedented. In my unscientific survey, perfectly nice, respectable, educated people, many of them women, hoped that Thompson’s killer would escape.
When Mangione was caught, they talked about “outlaws” (as Tom Rush sang, ladies love them) and commiserated. Hashtags FREE HIM and #PATRIOT were trending on X. It didn’t hurt that Mangione looks like the cute friend your son would bring home for Thanksgiving. One waggish writer wrote this on X:
Meech
@MediumSizeMeech
Miranda: “They found the UHC shooter, his name is Luigi Mangione, and he’s HOT!”
Charlotte: “I don’t think we should be calling murderers hot”
Samantha: “Honey, I need that man in MY gione!”
Carrie: “Big is moving to Paris”
For their parts, most of the men I was reading pontificated, expressing horror at this “senseless” murder. This is the same behind-the-curve mindset that caused otherwise intelligent commentators like The Atlantic's Tom Nichols to criticize Joe Biden for pardoning his son. The rest of us understood that Hunter Biden did not have to become a human sacrifice to an era of history that is already half-gone.
In fact, the murder wasn’t “senseless” and the apparent need to have an opinion rather than simply pay attention to the historical moment obscured the most significant part of the story.
America is in freefall. There is less accountability all the time, and corruption is destroying America. It’s not just that we’re becoming an authoritarian state - we don’t know yet how far Trump’s predilections will carry him - but we are well on our way to becoming a failed state. That is a place where ordinary people are powerless. It is gangster capitalism. There is no recourse, no fairness. Nobody helps you. You are either predator or prey.
If the alternative is the French Revolution, well, that could be better. Not great, necessarily. But better. Here’s a meme that hit social media within hours of Mangione’s arrest.
More than a decade ago, I interviewed Kenyan conservationist and anti-corruption crusader Richard Leakey. I asked him about America’s penchant for attempting to institute our brand of democracy in countries without the history or tradition that allowed the democratic system to flourish in Western societies.
“Accountability is the desired condition of civil society,” Leakey told me, choosing his words carefully. “If you have accountability, you move toward a greater democratic space. But if you have greater democratic space, you will not necessarily move to greater accountability."
Donald Trump was democratically elected, and that election’s message was dire: there is no accountability. Without accountability, America could explode.
The Democrats should listen to Richard Leakey. The question is not democracy; democracy elected Trump. The real issue is accountability.
Corruption must be the message for Democrats in 2026. Kamala Harris ran a good campaign but she was the wrong candidate. She continued to take advice from her brother-in-law, Tony West, senior vice president at Uber, a company that consistently and vociferously defends its policies of exploiting workers. She told us she was “a capitalist,” trying to out-Trump Trump. What does a capitalist mean now? Ask Luigi Mangione, or any woman of a certain age, no longer employable and barely hanging on to her home and health care. Ask the Walmart workers who can’t pay their rent in an inflated housing market driven by Obama’s Wall Street bailout in 2008.
It’s not just young men and middle-aged women who are angry at the dehumanization that has become the norm in American society. America was always low on human feeling and high on efficiency; now it is little more than a machine for extracting money from its citizens. It started in the 80s, when “it’s business” became the catchall phrase excusing any behavior, as if the word itself (“business”) had a kind of magic. The irony, of course, is that the angriest victims of income inequality became Trump’s latest marks. Now, it seems, pace #patriot, more of us are angry.
For a moment there, before I saw the details that were reported today, I fantasized that the shooter was part of an underground movement, like the terrorist cells dedicated to fighting climate change in Steven Markley’s novel The Deluge. Thompson’s shooter would disappear and others would act. Finally, someone would listen. Do something. Because we are tired, those of us who are rational arguers, and we are losing. But I reminded myself that in the novel, the climate change radicals lost in the end. The waters rose. The storms whipped through the world.
Mangione, it’s worth noting, comes from a prominent Republican family in Baltimore. His grandfather, Nick Mangione Sr., who died in 2008, was a self-made real estate developer. His cousin Nino Mangione, is a Republican Maryland state delegate and a Trump supporter. The family owns country clubs, a right-wing radio station and - wait for it - nursing homes.
Bubbe Wokestein
@veggieto
While I absolutely agree that murder is never the answer. The "hero worship" we saw really emphasizes the current climate of how us regular folk feel about greedy corporations. And it crosses party lines. So maybe we're not as divided as it seems?
Susan Zakin is the Journal's editor.