How Rageful Rhetoric Enabled the UnitedHealthcare CEO Murder

Luigi Mangione, a Maryland native and University of Pennsylvania graduate, has been charged with murder and multiple weapons-related offenses for the targeted killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Mangione penned a brief manifesto in which he apologized “for any strife of traumas” but claimed his murder “had to be done.” He called healthcare execs like Thompson “parasites” and remarked that there are “clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

After suffering a debilitating back injury, Mangione underwent a spinal fusion surgery that left him in chronic pain. According to his friends, he began experimenting with psychedelics, like mushrooms, to manage the pain and ended up going down a dark path of radicalization against the healthcare industry.

Mangione was also apparently emboldened by seeing the pain his mother went through in battling neuropathy. He allegedly reached the point where his own debilitating pain, compounded by his mother’s, drove him to lash out at the person he saw as the embodiment of their suffering: the CEO of his mother’s healthcare provider, UnitedHealthcare.

At the beginning of the year, Mangione’s radicalism became apparent when he left a review of Ted Kaczynski’s — the Unabomber's — book, writing, “These [healthcare] companies don’t care about you … why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive?” While, in hindsight, such a statement sets off alarm bells, this kind of language is common from the revolutionary Left.

Many left-wingers — and even some on the Right — agree with Mangione’s disdain for the healthcare industry and tacitly approve of his violence. Journalist Taylor Lorenz — who was recently fired from the left-wing outlet Vox — lionized the shooter, saying she felt “joy” when Brian Thompson, a husband and father, was gunned down outside his Manhattan apartment.

Others online took to ruthlessly mocking Thompson’s death, cracking jokes about him being denied life-saving coverage and celebrating his murder. The shooter’s political views that he expressed online have been difficult to label as either right-wing or left-wing — but the Left is the loudest in praising his actions.

Murderous hatred towards the healthcare industry is nothing new — back in 2015, a Bernie Sanders supporter shot up a GOP congressional baseball practice while yelling, “For healthcare!”

Violence is often rationalized by intellectuals or politicians on the Left when systems, or even individuals, are considered to be politically and economically corrupt. Look no further than the George Floyd rioters, who were permitted to burn down entire city blocks, and the many pro-Palestine rioters charged with vandalism and assault.