A human ping-pong ball
On the lemmas of Luigi Mangione
Luigi Mangione was discovered eating hash browns in a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania on December 9, 2024. There has been, from the outset, almost too much information on the man himself to take in. An incoherent squall of Goodreads reviews, international travel, sexual escapades, and possible manifestos. He’d been on the run for a good while beforehand, eluding police with wild virality. The masked CEO shooter, the young hunk with a smile, the Italian vigilante.
Out of this nightmare, hope springs from the breasts of a privileged young man with a back injury sustained from surfing in Hawaii in mid-2022. His world travels only add to the mystery, the air of worldliness, like a double agent out of an old spy novel.
The difference between Mangione—colloquially just Luigi—and his “true crime” predecessors is a difference of meaning. He had an enormous social media footprint. Articles are being written about his Goodreads, his shirtless pics in Honolulu, his posts on X about being hung or praising RFK Jr. Unlike the killers of In Cold Blood, Mangione has etched his reasons for shooting healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on bullets: Delay, deny, depose. The same words of a book condemning the healthcare industry for its failure to actually serve the people. In a 20/20 Special, cultural critic Jia Tolentino says Mangione is exemplary of a society that simply has given up on voting as the solution to national woes. Yet, even if all of this is true, it ignores the fact that there is so much context to Mangione and his alleged killing that paradoxically there is practically none. We could (and will) be sorting through his digital footprint for decades. It will never unlock the entire puzzle. Was he crazy? Was he a class hero? Was he a terrorist? Why target UHC if he was never insured there? Was he someone who could or could not fuck due to back-issues? (Now alleged sex tapes are starting to circulate.) Was he a person or a symbol—for the right or for the Left? Meaning is emptied out.
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The case has entered the national zeitgeist at the same time that President Trump has made claims about annexing Canada. Far Right X posters are drawing new maps. Of course, many of these true believers also participated in, or believed in, the horrific events of Charlottesville and January 6th. Violence is only ever condoned when it is the righteous upon the unrighteous. The people must always act predictably. Luigi Mangione did not. He did what many wanted in their wildest dreams: take down the voice on the other side of the telephone, the one saying you do not deserve healthcare.
His story is a labyrinth for all the ills of society in this crumbling empire: prison conditions, sexualization without consent, true crime debasement, conspiracy theories of fascist secret societies, individualism versus collectivism, racial purity, the definition of good and evil. Luigi Mangione is a portal, one open to telling us all we can ever know about the desire for order and health, for security and destruction.
Here are the facts: On December 4th, 2024, Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare was shot in cold blood while walking to a conference. The killer used a 3D-printed gun with a makeshift silencer. A manhunt began. Five days later, Luigi Mangione was arrested one state over in Pennsylvania. His case began on December 19th. Mangione was charged with, among other things, first degree murder, his online presence cited as damning evidence. He pleaded not guilty on the 23rd.
Here are the complications: the Judge has ties to the healthcare industry. So do many politicians commenting on his case. There are unfounded rumors that Brian Thompson was going to blow the whistle on healthcare corruption. Take it or leave it, but it’s floating around among a grab bag of conspiracies. Some argue Mangione does not look like the pictures previously released of the suspect. That’s harder to prove or disprove as a claim since the cameras were low-grade cab photos. Yet, Mangione’s lawyer is right when she says the political machine has already arrived at a verdict. This cannot happen again, therefore he must be guilty. The Daily Mail is already reporting they may have a hard time finding a jury willing to convict Mangione on terrorism charges. Perhaps they should read the Oresteia. “The butcher comes. Wipe out death with death.” Just as the Furies pursued Orestes for killing his mother who in turn was a murderer, so the police come for Luigi after he slew a man he believed to be a criminal. Now, the state has announced it will seek the death penalty for Mangione. Delay. Deny. Depose.
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Trump 2.0 has made cynics and isolationists of us all. The political violence that does occur is often random (besides Aaron Bushnell, who took a strong stance for Palestinian liberation by taking his own life). We want there to be a coherent logic to such acts, but often these breaking points have no singular author or political affiliation. Mangione is not, for what it’s worth, a Lefty. Dubbed "a human ping pong ball" by his own lawyer, Mangione instead seemed to vacillate between gonzo capitalism and the so-called tech bro “gray tribe,” an ideology linked to Silicon Valley and a rejection of political partisanship. Instead of the blue or red tribes (Democrats and Republicans), gray tribe members seek to suture together a variety of viewpoints–often as a way of showing off their more evolved intellectual palette. They take from as many sources as they can, trying to optimize the best parts of each. On X, Mangione followed Sam Altman, Ezra Klein, Edward Snowden, RFK, and AOC. He also retweeted anti-woke diatribes. This does not necessarily unmake his folk hero status, but it does complicate the idea of an anarchist vigilante.
He may be a knight in shining armor, but he may not be ours to claim. The death of the author doesn’t just apply to literary works, but also political actions. Even if Luigi acted as an individual, he is now certainly supported by a mass movement who hang on his every word. I recently posted a letter Luigi supposedly sent a fan about The Lorax and got a crescendo of messages asking if he had written to me. No, I said. It was just something I found online. I suppose I wanted his words to echo, to parse any new proclamation. His words haunt us; they speak to us like a Greek chorus denouncing the woes of our contemporary world—not merely as the prophecies of an individual who got fed up. If the actions were materially radical ,regardless of his own specific political affiliation, does it matter whether or not he was a “good” Leftist? If he hangs for our sins, can he redeem our political plight?
His Goodreads holds many apocryphal clues into such a mindset. “Clearly written by a mathematics prodigy. Reads like a series of lemmas on the question of 21st century quality of life,” Mangione wrote of the Unabomber’s manifesto on Goodreads. In high school, a class on forensics asked each of us to do a presentation on a serial killer. I chose the Unabomber, thinking, not unlike Mangione, that his hands were the most clean. I was seventeen and utterly deluded. Unlike Ted Kaczynski, Luigi did not want to use a bomb to make his point, as that would almost undoubtedly kill or maim innocents.
When reporting on such a case, it seems important to pre-emptively denounce politically-motivated murder. The TrueAnon podcasters made sure to include a disclaimer over and over as they discussed the murder of Bryan Thompson. “We disavow.” The comments section heeds to no such decorum: “We’re sorry your claim has been denied. Being shot is not a pre-existing condition.”
In The Nation, Maya Vinokour points out the tension of Mangione’s drive for optimization and ideas about social control. While reviewing the self-help manual Grit, a young Mangione writes “It isn’t suffering that leads to helplessness; it is suffering you don’t think you can control.” Clearly, Vinokour notes, we are becoming fed up with the individualistic limitations of moguls, mantras, and self-improvement. Recently on Instagram someone shared a post that joked: “I can’t take another four years of infographics, some of you have to start ——— people.”
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This too is a lemma, an attempt to understand a nation in need of a story. A nation looking for a cult, a nation bent on its own destruction even if it cannot see a metaphor beyond the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. How can Jordan Neely’s killer be set free and praised while the healthcare industry is able to go on, unfazed? Recently Anthem BCBS even tried to set time caps on how much anesthesia they would cover. While they reversed the policy, it’s not as if they won’t find other ways to exponentially increase profit.
The problem with capital is that it is never satisfied, can never be satisfied. It must expand even when there is nowhere left to expand to, creating a surplus population and orchestrating organized abandonment in order to further extract value. No surprises then when Donald Trump “jokes” about annexing countries like Greenland. Westward Expansion can learn new polarities. Easy.
This is not a biography. If it is, it is a history of a system rather than an individual. No magic trap doors will be swung open, only illuminations of MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN on the walls. Apocalypse and war are not discrete events anymore. They are slow, wild things; hydras with tendrils in many honeypots. Healthcare, climate change, endless profit, unemployment, homelessness, corporate greed, civilian surveillance. The time to jump ship may have passed. What can we do? Gaze towards the heavens and moan and then carry on anyway. For Mangione there was but one imperative. “Frankly these parasites simply had it coming.”
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At first, Mangione’s manifesto was only published by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein on his Substack. He’s been notable for covering the case without having to fold to outside pressures. He’s even broken open some bombshell conflicts of interest that we’re in for during the upcoming trial. These will no doubt fuel further deep state conspiracy theories. It’s not hard to see why the state is coming down so hard on Mangione, nor why many feel he’s being made an example of with the terrorist charges levied against him. Healthcare executives with close ties to the government want the almighty hammer of justice. The people, however, don’t. Newscasters were quick to note that fellow inmates were yelling out of prison windows about Mangione’s mistreatment behind bars. Mangione himself has had to issue a statement due to the sheer amount of letters and monetary support he’s gotten since his arrest. News organizations were cynical of such a move, decrying the idea of giving a murderer money. Most mainstream publications seem utterly bewildered that the people love and admire Mangione.
His manifesto reflects this populism. It is short and to the point. “I do respect what you do,” he tells the Feds. “This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience.” He apologizes for causing anyone trauma and then rails against the healthcare system. “It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
Mangione is not the first hot Italian political killer—Sacco and Vanzetti have him beat. Still, penny dreadfuls tell us just as much about the political needle as any good analyst. The gallows and the phoenix both await us in the afterglow of the revolution. Whether or not a revolution requires skirmishes as we’ve seen the past few years in Virginia and at the Capitol or continually white knuckling of electoral politics remains to be seen. The Empire continues to lose its ability to keep its politicians and citizens calm. Mangione’s desperate act points this out. The emperor has no clothes. Neither he nor we are safe. Yet we all march on, aware of being led to the slaughter. As the new Trump administration seeks to strip away healthcare for many Americans, Mangione continues to be a symbolic reminder of our nation’s moral bankruptcy. Even if murder is a grim way to try and raise the alarm, the shot’s been heard. The world’s on fire and we need water. Some goddamn medicine to alleviate the suffering, the endless toil towards more productivity even as benefits are slashed in favor of higher profits. We are aware. Yet too often, we do nothing. We wait. We ride it out.
On paper, we don’t know exactly how Mangione came to be radicalized. Yet, psychically, we do know. Our healthcare system refuses to serve us, asking instead that we serve them. With endless piles of cash and mind-numbing amounts of debt. Mangione wrote online about suffering from spondylolisthesis, often colloquially known as “spondy.” It seems he may have written online to seek support for such a diagnosis alongside other health issues, trying to weed out fact from fiction across online forums after he had surgery in 2023. A neurosurgeon named Tyler Cole told Newsweek that Mangione’s procedure seemed “suboptimal.” Anyone who has been to a hospital for an extended period of time knows how bleak even a tiny procedure can be. The long wait for the faint whiff of hope. It can be so easily snatched away and replaced with something else. With fuel, with ignition, with a halo of fire.
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Grace Byron is a writer from the Midwest based in Queens. Her writing has appeared in New York Magazine, The Nation, Bookforum, Vogue, and elsewhere. Her debut novel Herculine is forthcoming from Saga Press in October.
