It was a few days before Christmas when I saw it: The words “Deny, Defend, Depose” 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 “Daddy, I love him.” The photo in the heart was Luigi Mangione.
Mangione is the twenty-six-year-old man arrested for 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 “Deny, Defend, Depose” were the words scratched into shell casings found at the scene. Perhaps you also know that a backpack linked to the shooting was found in Central Park stuffed 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 Germany, France, Brazil, and Chile; graffiti in South London demands “Free Luigi Mangione.”
Mangione has pleaded not 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 “innocent until proven guilty,” I want to spend very little time talking about the person and instead think about the public response to the shooting. (Mangione’s attorney archly noted that New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who personally perp-walked Mangione, “should know more than anyone the presumption of innocence.”) The Internet has made much of Mangione’s looks, but I’ll venture that his “hotness”—that Instagram T-shirt notwithstanding—is something of a red herring here. By the time that backpack of fake bills was found, people were already cheering him on.
Why? The utter failure of the U.S. health care system is the most obvious answer. Signs outside of Mangione’s arraignment declared, “Murder for profit is terrorism,” and the Internet overflowed with videos and 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’s parent company, mourning the loss of Thompson had received more than 19,000 “laugh” reactions by the time a screenshot crossed my desktop on December 5—again, before even the first surveillance photo of the shooter had been released. (At the time of writing, it had increased to 131,000 in spite of UnitedHealth Group limiting who could react to it.) The health insurance company is the perfect example of my argument that 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 The New York Times desperately attempted to shame people into mourning Thompson, proclaiming him the real hero, readers pushed back. Yet the refusal to grieve a man who profited from this death-making system is a reflection of the industry’s own refusal to grieve the thousands sickened and killed by denials of insurance claims.
Life is cheap in America today. The insurance industry is nothing more than a vector for what Friedrich Engels called “social murder.” One might also adapt historian Peter Linebaugh’s term “thanatocracy” 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 noted, the charge of first-degree murder that Mangione received is “usually reserved for the killing of law enforcement officers.”) The day police arrested Mangione, Daniel Penny—who killed an unhoused subway dancer named Jordan Neely—was set free to celebrate with President-to-be Donald Trump.
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 dance songs and the corridos, and the social media posts comparing photos of Mangione’s perp walk to paintings of Jesus and film stills of Superman.
“We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people who are not political, embracing openly a very radical, very transgressive act,” political theorist Geo Maher, author of A World Without Police, tells me. While many of those people say they don’t approve of killing, they are nevertheless moved by the incident. A woman named April, who spoke to outside of Mangione’s first court hearing in Pennsylvania, said that she’d driven six hours to attend. She described her struggles to obtain care for her cystic fibrosis, noting that “I don’t agree with what happened, you know, violence, vigilantism . . . but violence has made changes in our country.”
The history of political violence in the United States is, of course, older than the country itself. It’s just that, as historian Mark Bray, author of Antifa, explains, lately we’ve been accustomed to that violence coming from the right. We don’t really know the politics of the shooter, but his choice for a target—a prominent executive entering an investor meeting—first called to my mind anarchist Alexander Berkman’s failed 1892 attempt to kill Homestead Steel head Henry Clay Frick in an act of attentat, or “propaganda of the deed.”
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.
Berkman called his attempt “the first terrorist act in America,” 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’s act. There is something in the symmetry that doesn’t 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.
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. “It’s so absolutely commonplace, and the commonplace is the grounds of politics,” Maher says. “Everyday people already think that people shouldn’t profit off death. And that’s literally what UnitedHealthcare does . . . . That’s just the way that capitalism works. It always creates death, whether it’s in the quality of our food [or] whether it’s 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.”
Bray adds that, for a lot of people, the shooter is “probably closer to a Robin Hood.” Some version of the social bandit, as historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote in his classic book Bandits, 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.
In the United States, we had Jesse James (portrayed most recently on film by Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), and a generation later, during the Great Depression, John Dillinger, “Pretty Boy” 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, “We rob banks.” While they don’t do much redistribution, the bank robbers nevertheless target the villains of the day, the ones who had caused the crisis. This, Hobsbawm suggested, was “perhaps one powerful reason why these rather minor and marginal figures on the scene of American crime were singled out as ‘public enemies.’ Unlike ‘the mob,’ they represented a challenge to the all-American values of free enterprise, though they believed in it.”
The United States “loves 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’re never going to do it,” Maher observes. But, he points out, “this is tapping into something deeper, which is that your everyday frustrations, you can’t always get your hands on the person who’s causing them.”
Much has been made of UnitedHealthcare’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) to deny claims, despite allegations that the software has a 90 percent error rate. A lawsuit had been filed a year before Thompson’s 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—whether it’s your insurance company or your phone company, you’re probably talking to a recording.
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—only to be given the slimmest of options at the ballot box—it is no wonder that people despair. As scholar Dan Berger joked on X (which is owned by Trump’s billionaire buddy Elon Musk), paraphrasing John F. Kennedy, “Those who make Bernie Sanders impossible will make Luigi Mangione inevitable.”
Or, as Maher says, “They tell us political violence is unacceptable, but it’s all the state does all day long.”
We’ve 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. “A guy took a gun and shot a health insurance CEO” is the most American sentence I’ve 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.
The 1890s saw anarchist assassinations in many countries, Bray notes, and in Spain and France, some of those assassins were wildly popular. In Barcelona, he says, “vendors started selling lithograph portraits of the anarchist martyrs.” Police were stationed by their graves after their executions, because there was concern people would try to dig up bones for relics. Berkman didn’t succeed, but Leon Czolgosz, 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.
So what happens next? Will we see more attempts on the lives of CEOs? School shootings, after all, didn’t immediately proliferate but have increased steadily in the years after Columbine until 2024, when there were 971 of 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’s golf courses and charged with attempted assassination in a second incident has gotten only a fraction of the coverage lavished on Mangione. Political assassinations don’t happen in a vacuum; whether they capture the public’s 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.
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 good number of 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—again, who is innocent until proven guilty according to the stated logic of the U.S. criminal legal system—reminds us of that fact.
Yet, as Maher notes, political change begins with “sparks, glints of light in everyday common sense, that spread unpredictably, in this case transnationally, incredibly quickly. And that’s when things begin to change.” The challenge is to turn those sparks into something that overturns a death-making system.
