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It’s been six days since UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered outside the New York Hilton Midtown just before 7am.
The assassin, 26 year-old Luigi Mangione, was apprehended yesterday at a McDonald’s in Altoona, PA after an employee there recognized him from publicly released images and called the police.
He was carrying a 3D printed gun, a 3D printed silencer, several fake IDs, and a three-page manifesto in defense of the murder. Was he hoping to get caught? It sure seems like it.
As with so many other issues in our increasingly divided country, the incident has become far less about discussing the particulars in good faith and more about aggressively rationalizing our biases and shutting down anyone who challenges them.
America’s health care system is severely broken, held in place by insurance companies who routinely engage in unethical practices for which the primary goal is prioritizing corporate profits over sick people, enabled by enough lawmakers who directly benefit from preserving that status quo.
Meanwhile, the country is quite clearly veering into an era in which political violence is increasingly seen by many as not only acceptable but necessary.
In his manifesto, Mangione wrote: “I do apologize for any strife or traumas, but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites had it coming.”
Bizarrely, in his Goodreads four-star review of “Industrial Society and Its Future” by Ted Kaczynski—better known to us plebs as “The Unabomber Manifesto”—he wrote that Kaczynski was “rightfully imprisoned” but also:
“When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution… […] Peaceful protest is outright ignored, economic protest isn’t possible in the current system, so how long until we recognize that violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self-defense.”
Yeah, that’s certainly one way to sum it up.
Here’s another way: Ted Kaczynski was a vile, self-absorbed piece-of-shit who intentionally murdered and maimed innocent people from the comfort of his remote cabin and justified it with a narcissistic pseudo-intellectualism instead of, you know, having the guts to engage in the hard work of advocacy.
He was not a revolutionary. He was a terrorist and a coward whose actions only served to inspire a generation of more self-absorbed extremists, and I’m really glad he’s no longer walking the earth.
Of course, some will whine this is unfair framing because Mangione targeted a horrible enabler of this unfair system rather than innocent people, he’s merely agreeing with Kaczynski on the principle of violence as necessary, and our disgust should be with corporations who have willingly bankrupted and/or enabled the deaths of millions.
Of course we should be disgusted with these corporations. They’re cruel and predatory and inhumane. They knowingly exploit the suffering of innocent and sick people to maximize profit.
But just for the sake of argument, let’s briefly allow these other things to be true: Mangione was right to murder Thompson, health care executives deserve any violence coming to them, etc.
Okay, so, what now? Tell me what happens next. Because in the past week, I have read zero commentary that answers this with any degree of sufficient reason.
The hopeful wish—and I think even that’s generous—is that health care executives will somehow be intimidated into curbing their unethical practices out of fear being targeted next.
Are you kidding me? Health care executives aren’t going to let a little homicide get in the way of their profits. They’ll beef up security, hire the best PR professionals money can buy, increase lobbying to complicit lawmakers, and leverage this murder for sympathy.
And it will work. You know how I know that?
Because we just had an election in which an openly corrupt champion of corporate greed who still hasn’t released his supposed health care plan since he first ran for president eight years ago was picked over a policy expert who had a defined health care plan and was nominated by a political party that achieved the greatest health care reform in modern history.
How many millions of people openly cheering on Mangione stayed home or even voted for Trump?
How many of them had time to share memes online but not organize family and friends and neighbors to get out the vote because of purity politics or VP Harris just isn’t likable or Democrats aren’t good enough or both parties are the same (they are clearly not) or, hell, someone else will do that work, so why bother?
Mangione is one of them. Here’s this Ivy League educated young man from a privileged family and an impressive social network who could have tried to use those resources to change the system.
But he didn’t even try. He didn’t venture into health care advocacy or do any political organizing on this. He read a manifesto written by a violent clown and decided it better served either his ego or convenience to murder a health care executive on the street than undertake the difficult work of reform.
My issue is not with the millions of people in this country who have said over the past week that they’re not mourning the murder of Thompson because Thompson sure as hell didn’t mourn their loved ones who have been cruelly victimized by corporations like UnitedHealthcare.
They’re well within their right to feel that way. I come from a family background in which it was obvious growing up that insurance companies would sooner allow us to die or be financially ruined than grant us the care we need. I get it.
My problem isn’t with the millions people who are rightly pointing out all the ways in which UnitedHealthcare is evil and openly asking: where is the sympathy for the most vulnerable in this country when they perish because executives have decided their lives and livelihoods aren’t profitable?
That is absolutely necessary to ask and demand an answer to it.
My problem is with Mangione and people like him who don’t do the work that needs to be done and encourage political violence as a supposed last straw—not having really tried other approaches in good faith—which, in the end, will only further normalize a growing culture of political violence that overwhelmingly harms the innocent and most vulnerable.
Murdering people in the street is ultimately wrong not because it’s a question of whether or not the person murdered deserves it but because it further erodes the social guardrail, which is thinning at an alarming rate, that it’s immoral to inflict violence on others out of political and policy disagreements.
Political violence solves nothing. It never has.
All it does is offer a brief sense of smug satisfaction for some, fuel for the worst people to continue doing what they do, and more than enough room for dead innocents after that.
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