Before he allegedly killed United healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Luigi Mangione was considered intelligent, thoughtful, kind, funny, and well-adjusted in every way. Now, because he killed someone, probably for political reasons, he’s considered insane. But what does that say about all the other people who kill for political reasons, like the President? Or Thompson himself?
As is typically the case after a high-profile murder, people are speculating about suspect Luigi Mangione’s state of mind when he allegedly killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Hilton hotel in Manhattan.
We have a likely (political) motive in the form of a handwritten statement Pennsylvania police say they found on Mangione when they arrested him. “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming,” it reads. “A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the fourth largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No, the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it…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.”
Thompson’s death immediately prompted the widespread assumption that his killer had to have been motivated by something personal. The CEO must have been the victim of a vengeful patient, or someone who loved and lost a person to an insurance denial. There are, after all, numerous Americans whom United Healthcare refuses to cover for medical treatment. Some die. But the man they arrested doesn’t fit the bill. Though Mangione’s social media feeds indicate that he had major back surgery following an injury, the operation appears to have been successful. There is no evidence that an insurance company denied his claim. United Healthcare says Mangione has never been their customer.
This looks like a case of self-radicalization.
Mangione was privileged and high-functioning. If he can become a one-man terrorist group, anyone can.
The establishment press can’t wrap its collective head around it.
Writing in The New York Times, David Wallace-Wells is among the many journalists who wondered aloud: “We’ve seen the video of him shouting at the press as he’s pulled into the courthouse, which suggests perhaps some disquiet. But we also haven’t heard from anybody who interacted with him at any point in his life who found him anything but levelheaded, cleareyed, calm and even kind.” Why might someone with Mangione’s background (white, well-off, Ivy-educated), looks (women have been swooning over him online) and social currency (he was friendly and popular) stalk a business executive he’d never met and gun him down?
Perhaps, some reports suggested, back pain from spondylolisthesis drove him insane. Or that pain made it impossible for him to have sex and that made him nuts. Or his turn to violence was inspired by Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber manifesto. He was 26, the average age when schizophrenia first manifests—maybe a mental time bomb was behind his psychotic break. One of these explanations may prove true. Or none. Luigi Mangione may be sane. He may simply be a class traitor.
Wallace-Wells continued: “In many ways, the obvious explanation is that the attack was the result of some kind of breakdown. But aside from the shooting itself, we haven’t seen any real signs of a breakdown.” (Except for shouting at the press. Wallace-Wells thinks that makes you unwell.)
Interesting questions arise from the assumption that mental illness is “the obvious explanation” for why people kill. We are going to have to radically rethink our society if that’s true.
Are prison employees who administer capital punishment insane? What about combat troops who kill enemy soldiers whom they have nothing against personally, simply because they’re given an order? Are members of the military lunatics? Must one be crazy to serve as President, a job that involves ordering men and women to shoot and bomb other people—sometimes en masse—and signing off on extrajudicial assassinations, as with drones? Harry Truman dropped The Bomb. Was he psycho? What of a police officer who shoots a suspect? If a health insurance company unfairly denies life-saving medical care to a patient and the patient dies, which one can argue is tantamount to murder, does that make a CEO like Thompson a murderer too—and therefore insane?
If everyone who kills a human being is psychotic, shouldn’t every killer be granted an insanity defense and automatically be sent to a psychiatric facility rather than prison?
What about farmers who kill animals? Vets who euthanize them?
When Marianne Bachmeier entered a German courtroom in 1996 and shot to death the man who raped and murdered her seven-year-old daughter, there was no confusion. Everyone understood her motivation. It was personal, relatable and therefore there was no talk that she might be bonkers.
Should it turn out that Mangione’s motive was personal, and that he or someone he cared about suffered pain at the hands of the health insurance industry, the discomfort of the chattering classes would be mitigated. Oh. That makes sense.
It is possible, though—likelier, really—that Mangione engaged with the question of America’s for-profit healthcare system impersonally and intellectually, yet passionately. Like those who marched against the Vietnam and Gaza wars despite having no personal stake in the conflict, it is hard not to feel disgust and outrage when one hears horrific accounts of insurance companies denying and delaying valid claims as they rake in billions. Mangione had to have known, as everyone does, that there is no prospect of healthcare reform coming out of a Washington in which neither political party wants to fix the system.
People kill other people in service to far more abstract concepts than affordable healthcare. Political leaders kill over such dubious controversies as arbitrary borders and the Domino Theory and NATO Expansion and the Shia-Sunni Schism, yet nobody thinks they’re insane.
Murder, all societies agree, is wrong—unless it’s committed by someone officially authorized to take life. Vigilantism is problematic because, taken to its logical extreme, the rule of law would collapse.
Dismissing a vigilante’s actions as the product of an unsound mind, however, thoughtlessly brushes off the question of why he feels compelled to resort to an act so drastic that it will probably end his own life as well. When one is confronted with massive suffering and heinous injustice, when society doesn’t offer a legal mechanism to stop these horrors, is it inherently insane to say to yourself: someone should do something? Or to conclude: if the answer is yes, why not me?
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
Donald Trump committed countless crimes without being held accountable. So it’s a weird reflection of our societal priorities that the one offense for which he is being held accountable is a relatively trivial paperwork charge.
Editorial Cartoonists Ted Rall (from the political Left) and Scott Stantis (from the political Right) discuss breaking news and politics.
This week, Democrats are finally focusing on and starting to become alarmed by President Biden’s stubbornly-low poll numbers. 67% of Democrats say they don’t want him to be their candidate next year. Democratic senators say that even voters who think he has done a good job think he is simply too old to run again. Now mainstream media outlets are starting to float the possibility that he may decide to step aside, and either open up the Democratic primary process or anoint a successor. Scott and Ted handicap the various scenarios for Bidexit.
Four days away from their strike deadline against the big three Detroit auto makers, the United Auto Workers union is still far away from the latest offers on the table. In agreement that a strike currently looks likely, Scott and Ted discuss the state of negotiations, the future of the auto industry and the economic impact of a walkout.
Reuters has published a shocking expose of the advanced state of autonomous AI weapons currently in development and available for sale on the international arms marketplace. From drones to trucks to submarines to fighter jets, the dark vision of the Terminator movies is upon us. Will the world act to ban these dystopian killer robots?
Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast:
DMZ America Podcast Ep 116 Sec 1: Bidexit
DMZ America Podcast Ep 116 Sec 2: UAW Strike Deadline
DMZ America Podcast Ep 116 Sec 3: Autonomous Assassination Drones
A 23-year-old man was the latest mass shooter to make the headlines, this time at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was an employee. As usual, Democrats called for increased gun control. Republicans blamed the mental health crisis. Both parties have a point. But we also shouldn’t ignore something unique to America, a brutal culture of violence that permeates our politics, pop culture and our everyday lives.
No country in the world invades the sovereign airspace of other nations as brazenly or extremely as the United States with spy drones, assassination drones, spy satellites and outright invasions. So it’s beyond rich to see U.S. officials whine so much about China’s survelliance balloon.
“Be realistic. Demand the impossible.” —Situationist slogan, 1968.
Demand #1: The $30-per-hour Minimum Wage.
Not phased in over so many years that today’s $30 is worth $20 by the time it takes effect. $30 an hour for all workers, no exceptions, now. This is an eminently reasonable demand. If anything, it’s too little to ask. $7.25 is a sick joke. Congress’ abdication of its moral duty to reward American workers for their extraordinary productivity by increasing the minimum wage at or faster than inflation has eroded the base salary since the Vietnam era. Corporate profits have soared as workers’ wages have stagnated.
The federal minimum wage was $1.60 in 1968. Adjusting for the official inflation rate, that’s $30.00 today. Let’s party like it’s 1968.
Demand #2: Free national healthcare.
Not market-based, not a hybrid—we need real, actual, universal healthcare. Every nurse and every doctor becomes a federal employee. Health insurance vanishes as a business sector. Every check-up, every test, every doctor’s visit, every medication, every surgical procedure is fully covered, no questions asked, as long as it’s approved by a physician.
This is not too much to ask. Germany, where only 0.5% of the population is uninsured, pays only 10.7% of GDP for healthcare, compared to 16% here in the U.S. Norway, where hospitals are operated by the government, has a $210 per citizen per year deductible after which the government picks up the tab for everything; like Germany, overall healthcare costs in Norway are about 60% of ours.
Throw in dental, vision and mental health.
Demand #3: Slash military spending by 80%.
We’re not the world’s policeman. We’re its deranged serial killer. The U.S. squanders $800 billion a year to invade, occupy, assassinate, intimidate and bomb people who mean us no harm and destroy their infrastructure. That’s more than the next nine biggest-spending militarist nations combined. And those countries total 10 times our population.
Slashing the Pentagon budget would make the world safer. Fewer U.S. wars and proxy wars would reduce anti-Americanism and thus reduce the chance of another terrorist attack, save thousands of American lives and millions of people overseas, not to mention massively helping out the environment.
Those savings would easily cover…
Demand #4: Free four-year college.
Young Americans have long been coerced into a devil’s bargain: without a college degree, they’ve been told, you won’t land a decent-paying job. College is insanely expensive so you’ll have to accept the burden of student loan debt. If you don’t make enough money after graduation due to bad luck or a bad economy or a changing workplace, too bad, you still have to pay. You can’t even discharge the loans in bankruptcy.
If the corporations who own our politicians require job applicants to have a college degree, a college degree should be free. 39 countries have free college. We deserve, and can afford, the same as Kenya, Iceland and Panama.
Demand #5: Leadership to ban the most frightening weapons.
As the world’s most aggressive militaristic nation and its biggest international arms dealer, only the U.S. has the standing and power to stop the arms races we’re starting. The U.S. should forswear its currently-stated, insane option of launching a nuclear first strike and invite all other nuclear powers to make the same commitment. It should join the 80% of the world’s nations that have pledged not to use landmines. It should ban drone-based weapons in its military, police and civilian sectors and demand that other nations do the same. The world must come together to ban lethal autonomous weapons; the U.S.’ early lead in this technology gives it leverage to lead the way.
More to come.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
President Biden has been running around saying that, if Democrats make sizable gains in the midterm elections, they would codify abortion rights at the federal level. Of course, this is a promise that he will never have to keep because the precondition is not going to happen.
After months of denial and censorship, main stream media is finally admitting that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a real thing. But will it really matter?
President Biden delivered a primetime speech that was marketed as an appeal to protect American democracy but directly targeted President Trump and his Republican supporters as the main threat to that noble institution. Gravely undermining his antiauthoritarian message was the stagecraft of the event in Philadelphia, which featured dystopian lighting and the ominous sight of two US Marines standing at attention.
