Heather Mac Donald Luigi Mangione and the American Abyss The assassination of Brian Thompson does not call for a “conversation” about health care—it calls for a reckoning with Americans’ moral breakdown.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/luigi-mangione-unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian-thompson
On the morning of December 4, 2024, in midtown Manhattan, a masked male snuck up behind the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a health insurance company, and pumped three bullets into the executive’s back and leg. Brian Thompson, a 50-year-old father of two, was pronounced dead a few minutes later.
Celebrations of the murder broke out on social media almost as soon as the killing was reported. The unknown assailant had provided a public service by taking out a leader in a predatory and heartless industry, the killer’s fans asserted. The jubilation grew in fervor as each newly released surveillance video confirmed the original impression that the killer, still at large, was young and handsome.
Once an arrest was made, the lionization of the suspect, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, reached a frenzy. “Luigi”—always “Luigi”—was the “hot assassin.” Merchandise featuring his image and phrases from a handwritten manifesto he had carried with him sprung up on Amazon. A video projection of Mangione’s face was cheered at a rock concert in Boston. A crowdsourced defense fund quickly swelled with donations. Wanted posters appeared in Manhattan with pictures of other corporate CEOs. The names and salaries of health-care executives were posted on line. Private citizens who had helped with the manhunt were vilified as snitches; police officers involved in arresting Mangione received threats.
To the mainstream media, the question posed by this episode was obvious: Why are Americans so angry at health-insurance companies? And so reporters and opinion columnists got to work limning a portrait of the health-care industry—its profits, the salaries of its executives—and fleshing out the animus against it.
The only relevant question in the wake of the Thompson murder, however, is: What has gone wrong with Americans’ moral compass that so many could cheer the extrajudicial killing of an innocent man? That question has not been deemed worthy of exploring.
When the high fives for the assassin started appearing on the web, some observers dismissed that support as a minor emanation from the fever swamps of social media, where anonymity and the desire for a following push users to rhetorical extremes.
But a poll of registered voters released on December 17 undercuts that diagnosis. Over 41 percent of respondents supported the Thompson assassination, or were at best ambivalent about it. Nearly 16 percent of respondents were “unsure” or “neutral” about whether the killer’s actions were “acceptable or unacceptable.” A little over 8 percent of respondents found Mangione’s actions “completely acceptable.” Another 8.4 percent found those actions “somewhat acceptable,” and 9 percent found them “somewhat unacceptable.” (It is not clear how “somewhat acceptable” differs from “somewhat unacceptable.”) Four of every ten Americans, in other words, will not unequivocally condemn the killing.
The younger the voter, the greater the level of support for political killings. Sixty-seven percent of voters aged 18 to 29 were ambivalent about or supportive of Mangione’s actions, with only 33 percent finding those actions completely unacceptable. Fifty-seven percent of voters aged 30 to 39 were unwilling to condemn the killing unequivocally, with only 43 percent finding it “completely unacceptable.” Democrats were nearly twice as likely as Republicans to find it either somewhat or completely acceptable.
It’s no surprise that age is inversely correlated with support for left-wing assassination, since the younger the voter, the more recent his exposure to the American education system. The pro-Mangione reaction epitomizes the dominant traits of contemporary academia: narcissism, a juvenile view of economics, the inability to think in terms of principle and precedent, and ignorance about the civilizational triumph that is Western due process. Campus reaction to the October 7, 2023, terror attacks in Israel put another item on that list: support for barbarism when the victims of that barbarism belong to a group disfavored by the academic Left. We can now add corporate executives to the list of acceptable targets.
Mangione’s manifesto reflects his Ivy League education (he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania): it is poorly written (“I do apologize for any strife of traumas”), riddled with cliché (“clearly power games [are] at play”), and self-important (“Evidently I am the first to face it with such brute honesty”). “It had to be done,” Mangione asserts, fashioning himself as the instrument of cosmic justice: “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”
But for the purest distillation of how the academic establishment analyses issues of right and wrong, one turns to Mangione’s faculty fans. Their self-blindness was as striking as their capacity to justify murder.
A Columbia University professor of social work and director of education for the “Safe Center,” a victims services agency, could not bring himself to feel sympathy for Brian Thompson. “I will mourn the death of one man after I finish morning [sic] the deaths of the nearly 700,000 other people who have died in the past 10 years alone because of private health insurance. It may take a while,” wrote Professor Anthony Zenkus on X. Only certain favored victim categories may make a claim to “safety.”
Zenkus describes himself as an “activist on issues of racial justice, income inequality, and climate justice.” Plain old justice, the kind that comes from obedience to the rule of law, lies outside his concern. Zenkus is an “ally in the Movement for Black Lives.” Too bad Thompson was not black.
A St. Louis University professor of “bioethics,” race, and gender announced on social media that she was “not sad” about the “UHC CEO being shot dead in the street.” Yolanda Wilson felt no sorrow because Thompson’s company was “evil,” she wrote. If you run a company which someone deems “evil,” according to this bioethicist, you can’t complain if you are murdered. “Chickens come home to roost,” Wilson explained, echoing Malcom X’s judgment after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
A bioethicist is supposed to think dispassionately about tradeoffs, including between medical access and finite resources. Wilson’s analysis of health care, however, starts from herself and never progresses further. She had scheduled a discretionary surgery (she never discloses its nature), but two days before the procedure, UnitedHealthcare revoked its approval and asked for more paperwork. Frustrating, no doubt, and perhaps the result of negligence or error. But Wilson sees herself as the victim of a malign force directed specifically against her: UnitedHealthcare “wanted to inflict maximum torment,” she said. An adolescent trying to make sense of a world that does not conform to his will could not have been more maudlin.
Wilson did eventually have her surgery, but the trauma remained. “I was unnecessarily stressed. My surgeon was unnecessarily stressed. My loved ones were unnecessarily stressed.” In the safetyist university, the creation of “stress” is also a mark of “evil.”
Wilson has served as a visiting scholar in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. Judging by her reasoning here, the only thing that could have recommended her for that position was her intersectional identity. One can hope that such appointments disappear under the Trump administration.
Another scholar specializing in class, race, and gender sneered that the Thompson killing would spur an increase in security for the “very wealthy who fear the consequences that come with their wealth.” Tressie McMillan Cottom, who teaches at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science, was catapulted into the progressive empyrean when she received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2020—not coincidentally, the year of the George Floyd antiracism psychosis.
Showing an affinity with nineteenth-century anarchists, Cottom believes that being assassinated is a “consequence” of wealth. Trying to protect yourself against assassination is more proof of your class-based turpitude. The Thomspon killing “will also be used to justify more abuse of poor people,” Cottom told the New York Times, without explaining wherein such abuse would consist.
A professor of English, cinema, and media studies at the University of Pennsylvania posted a video on TikTok with the caption: “have never been prouder to be a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.” On Instagram, Professor Julia Alekseyeva announced that Mangione was the “icon we all need and deserve.”
Alekseyeva is the paradigmatic contemporary English professor, a species that studies anything but literature. Alekseyeva focuses on film, comics, television, and digital media, with an emphasis on “radical leftist politics” and “antifascism.” It was Mangione, however, who set himself up as a fascist, believing himself entitled to act with lawless power against a “parasite.”
With such teachers, it’s no surprise that a segment of the public shows stunted moral development.
The Washington Post was unique among large newspapers in unequivocally condemning the assassination and repudiating efforts to leverage the killing into a discussion of health care. An editorial called the celebrations of Thompson’s death a “sickness.” Those who excuse or applaud Thompson’s killing reveal an ends-justify-the-means sentiment inconsistent with stable democracy, wrote the editorial board.
Nearly 12,000 of the Post’s subscribers rose up in revolt, protesting the paper’s effrontery. They showed a prickly sensitivity to being judged, a facile embrace of Marxist apologetics, and a childish belief in their moral superiority. “This is a deeply and shockingly out of touch scolding of ordinary people’s extremely understandable reaction to a shocking event—but also to our decades long battle with being murdered by callous health execs,” wrote a reader in one of those online comments. “It is laced with disingenuous apologetics for the health insurance industry—an evil industry that should not exist. Of course, it is written by a self-righteous and wealthy class of people who are largely insulated from the worst consequences of our for-profit health insurance system. The lack of understanding on display here can only mean than none of you did the work of talking to very many ordinary people. You did not do your jobs. This piece speaks only for the wealthiest class.”
Morality is only for the “wealthiest class,” apparently. As Bertolt Brecht announced: Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral (loosely translated: unless you have a full belly, you’re not going to worry about ethics).
Other subscribers showed the same wounded fragility, an import from academic safetyism. “I think the Post missed the point [about the health-care system] in favor of shallowly and unhelpfully trying to occupy the moral high ground—is that really the job of the editorial board?” asked another reader. “To admonish people for being insensitive about the assassination of a man who is responsible for the unseen pain and hardship of many people?”
And again: “The WaPo editorial board had an opportunity to point out the gross inequity in [the US health-care model]. Instead they took this opportunity to chastise the populace who feel rightly frustrated and angry at legalized murder through a profitable business model.”
In October, the Washington Post lost a quarter million subscribers when owner Jeff Bezos announced that the paper would not officially back a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. Readers were outraged that the paper was not fulfilling its duty to instruct the public about the awfulness of Donald Trump, even though the Post’s previous news and editorial coverage had made its position on such awfulness crystal clear. It is a good bet that the delicate souls who now cannot stand to be reminded by a newspaper of basic moral truths were among those demanding a Kamala Harris endorsement because “occupy[ing] the moral high ground is . . . the job” of an editorial board.
New York Times subscribers were just as incensed at that paper’s coverage of the murder, though the Times took no formal position on the killing and immediately turned its attention to the alleged flaws in the health-care system. But simply running a story on how insurance-industry employees were responding to the assassination turned the Times into an accomplice to homicide, according to readers—not to the homicide of Thompson, but to the alleged homicide of health-insurance policy holders.
“Why does the NY Times keep reporting from the insurance industry’s viewpoint” whined a commenter. “These ‘workers’ know what they do to people. Perhaps their fear is exactly that knowledge: they know that they have wounded and killed so many innocents that they have earned this potentially fatal hatred. The FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) industries have taken capitalism fairly close to its logical conclusion—to slurp up money by killing people.”
Causality, ethics, and laws of supply and demand: all lie beyond the ken of these readers. Their most shocking ignorance concerns the civilizational breakthrough that is due process. The cornerstone of Western constitutionalism is the idea that the government cannot deprive someone of life, liberty, or property without transparent procedures designed to ferret out truth. Citizens must have notice of a law before they can be punished for violating it. They must have the opportunity to contest their guilt through cross examination, with the assistance of counsel, and through the presentation of exculpatory evidence. If they are found guilty, they have the right of appeal. And, as part of the social compact, citizens cede to the government the right to use coercive force. These procedures, developed over centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence, represent the West’s greatest triumph over irrationality. They hold in check the tribal abuse of power based on instincts of revenge and hatred.
Mangione’s celebrants missed all of this. In their view, private citizens are entitled to carry out the death penalty—as long as the executioner’s political outlook meshes with one’s own. “Had this man not been slain, I sincerely doubt he would have ever been held accountable for the damage he has caused,” wrote a Washington Post subscriber. Another Washington Post reader used the same accountability language: “What is important about this murder is that it holds an individual to account for his company’s crimes. It is not entirely fair to the dead executive to have to pay for the sins of an entire industry, but it is time that the individuals who profit from sickness and death are held to account.” (That “not entirely fair” concession must have struck the commenter as magnanimous.)
But Thompson broke no law in his management of UnitedHealthcare. (The allegation that he was involved in insider trading has no bearing on the alleged justification for his assassination.) Even if UnitedHealthcare were violating the regulatory superstructure governing insurance, Mangione had no authority to “hold [Thompson] accountable” for that violation. License private citizens to roam the streets slaying alleged enemies of the people and you guarantee anarchy.
These observations should be obvious. And yet Mangione’s fans are unencumbered by even a passing acquaintance of due process. This ignorance represents a disastrous educational failure. After Daniel Penny was acquitted of homicide charges for subduing a raving, drug-addicted vagrant in a Manhattan subway car, Black Lives Matter activists claimed that a white power structure had legitimated vigilantism against helpless black civilians. Penny, however, had no intent to kill Jordan Neely; he was not a vigilante but a protector. Mangione was a vigilante par excellence—his intent was murder and he arrogated to himself the authority to act as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner.
Even if one is indifferent to the rule of law, self-interest argues for a stance against extrajudicial killings. While Mangione’s supporters applaud his choice of target now, the principle that disgruntled actors get to kill individuals they don’t like cannot be confined to one’s favorite enemies. But leftists find it difficult to think in terms of neutral rules. It never occurs to the campus censors who now punish speech they deem racist, say, that one day the power to censor may change hands.
Mangione has lawyered up to fight his prosecution. His supporters have launched a defense fund for him, which reached nearly $200,000 within days of his arrest. Mangione’s defense team will exploit every lever available to contest the government’s case. Mangione did not grant Thompson such legal protections before summarily executing him.
The mainstream media called on a phalanx of experts to explain the public’s glee. Those experts did so only with reference to customers’ allegedly abusive interactions with health-insurance companies. No one noticed that public celebration of Mangione’s deed represented a moral nadir. News articles and op-eds outlined how unfair a for-profit health-care system is. Those explanations shaded imperceptibly into justification. “Just about everybody has had negative experiences with health insurance companies that don’t pay the claims or pay very low amounts,” a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law told the New York Times, so the public’s reaction is “not surprising at all.” The founder of a company that helps patients appeal coverage denials said to the Times: “What we’ve ended up with is a deeply frustrated population with few channels for equitable relief. No one is condoning violence against executives, but there are private tragedies happening every single day. For the most part, they go totally unheard and unknown.”
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts) gave the most sweeping exculpation. “People can only be pushed so far,” she said. “If you push people hard enough they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.” “Ultimately?” The threat of further vigilantism is not in the future, it is now. “This could be another groundbreaking moment in American culture,” said a Washington Post reader.
Health-care enrollees have not been denied justice. They may have a sense of entitlement to all the care they want, but being denied a claim according to preexisting standards and procedures, however infuriating, is not a miscarriage of justice. Appeals procedures are available to insurance customers, however cumbersome.
The Mangione fan club’s understanding of causality was just as primitive as its knowledge of due process. It was a given that health-care companies had “killed” people by the thousands. The numbers of such purported homicide victims were alarming. Democratic political commentator Briahna Joy Gray told television anchor Piers Morgan that while she “personally” had no empathy for Thompson, she did have “empathy for the 68 million Americans and their families who are killed every single year.” An aggrieved Washington Post subscriber wrote in response to the paper’s editorial against murder: “Thousands die as a result of denied claims. Every one of those deaths resulted in an increase in profits. It’s about the only way insurers can increase profits in a system where corporations are expected to increase profits. And denying claims is just so easy to do.” Another Washington Post subscriber wrote: “Really DGAF about what happened to that CEO. He’s complicit in the murder of countless people by denying them care. That goes for every last segment of the medical-industrial complex.”
But patients die because of their underlying conditions, not because of the limitations of health insurance. Health plans are generally required by statute or contract to pay for medically necessary care. Most coverage denials concern diagnostic testing that insurers deem superfluous—an MRI after someone has already had a CAT scan, say—or experimental treatments with insufficient evidence of efficacy. At the edges, the definition of “necessary” can be subject to dispute. But American insurance draws the line of “necessity” much more expansively than health-care systems in other countries, a large factor in high U.S. health-care costs.
Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian tried to show how for-profit insurers “too often make money for stockholders by withholding care from sick people.” The only example she could come up with was UnitedHealthcare’s use of an algorithm to identify people guilty of mental therapy overuse. Using algorithms to evaluate medical need and care is not nefarious; it is evidence-based. And the results in this case do not suggest hard-hearted abuse. From 2013 to 2020, UnitedHealthcare denied claims for more than 34,000 therapy sessions in New York State, for an alleged saving, Abcarian reports, of about $8 million. Given the therapy addiction among New York City’s intelligentsia, that was probably an undercount of excessive claims.
The most damning charge brought against health-insurance companies is that they seek to make a profit. The understanding of markets on display in this argument makes a 15-year-old’s railing against “capitalism” look sophisticated. All economic transactions were assumed to be zero sum: “You can’t become a billionaire without exploiting people or resources or both. The same holds true for corporations,” wrote a Washington Post subscriber. Everything frustrating with the health-care system was attributed to the evil profit motive. The New York Times noted that “health insurance companies are profiting. The division overseen by Mr. Thompson reported $281 billion in revenue last year,” as if that were relevant to Thompson’s assassination. A former spokesman for Cigna published an op-ed in the Times explaining why he quit his job: The health-insurance industry “puts profits above patients.” A Times subscriber railed against “greed”: “Everything is about greed, money . . . money . . . money! Hedge funds buy stuff up left and right suck them dry and sell to the next fund who repeats the same greed ride. This is what is happening to the medical/health industry. And health care dose [sic] not matter only money.”
By contrast, someone who expects his every health demand to be covered, regardless of cost or efficacy, is not greedy.
This is not the place for a discussion of American health care, since engaging in such a discussion gives Mangione what he wanted and would encourage future executions. Suffice it to say that attributing the frustrations of American health care to the profit motive is laughably simplistic. There will always be tension between maximal coverage and costs, including (especially) in a public system. The industry’s current structure is the product of decades of circuitous regulation that overrode traditional market incentives and made employers, government, and insurance companies, not individual users, the buyers of care.
As for Americans’ oft-mentioned lower life expectancy compared with other modern countries: Americans’ rates of obesity, sedentariness, drug abuse, and gun violence put us in a class by ourselves.
The reaction to the Mangione killing should set off alarms regarding Americans’ growing moral decadence. Yet national leaders have largely been silent. In a December 11, 2024, press briefing, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked: “Given the killing of the UnitedHealthcare executive, what would you say to Americans who might sympathize with Luigi Mangione’s purported manifesto indicating that insurance companies ultimately care more about their profits than the health of their customers?” The question was emblematic of the press’s own moral blindness. She should have been asked: “What would you say to Americans who are lauding the assassination of a business leader?” But Jean-Pierre took the bait. “Obviously, this is horrific. Violence to combat any sort of com—corporate greed is unacceptable,” she responded. The reference to “corporate greed” was gratuitous. The reporter pressed on: “This administration has made price gouging a priority. . . . Are Americans treated fairly by their insurance companies?” Jean-Pierre demurred from answering, on the ground of not wanting to interfere with an ongoing investigation. She should have said: “The president refuses to change the topic from a brutal assassination to the alleged sins of an American industry.”
President Joe Biden has not weighed in, and President-elect Trump did so only after being asked for a response. U.S. senator John Fetterman (Pennsylvania) has been the most forceful in his denunciations of the Mangione cult; Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro made an unfortunate concession to “real frustration with our health care system” before lambasting Mangione’s narcissism in murdering someone he disagrees with.
The pro-Hamas demonstrations in and around college campuses were shocking enough. Perhaps they were enabled, though by no means excused, by the distant theater of battle, Americans’ near-total ignorance of history and geography (including but not limited to the Middle East), and the ease of adopting politically correct positions when nothing seems immediately at stake in one’s personal life. But the Mangione killing is in everyone’s backyard and has no overlay of crabbed geopolitics. Perhaps Americans are too stupefied by social media to embark on a twenty-first century version of the “propaganda of the deed.” But we’ve already experienced two other political assassination attempts this year. Unless our leaders and teachers fight the ignorance on evidence this month, we could be heading toward the abyss.
Comments are closed.
