Luigi Mangione And The Renaissance Of Class Warfare

January 21st, 1793. After years of soaring living costs, failed harvests, and ongoing political turmoil, millions of members of France's working class, also known as the sans-culottes, faced homelessness, bankruptcy and starvation.

Worst of all, they had no way to do anything about it.

Marie “let them eat cake” Antoinette didn't care if they lived or died, the Estates-General kept power in the hands of the nobles and clergy (also known as the richest 5% of the population), and the concept of citizen's rights was still only four years old.

So the sans-culottes did what any self-respecting group of 18th-century peasants tired of the social order would do and chopped off King Louis XVI's head.

And while this didn't go down too well with Louis' fellow aristocrats, as Maximilien Robespierre pointed out, it was inevitable. After all, the interests of the aristocracy could never align with the interests of the sans-culottes.

Louis represented a world where the poor had to stay poor, where they were only useful as a resource for the rich to use and discard. And this, as Robespierre also pointed out, meant they needed to reconsider the rules:

If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror.

Virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice.

On December 4th, 2024, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione meted out speedy, severe and inflexible justice to United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

After writing a brief manifesto, scribbling the words “Deny,” “Delay” and “Depose” on his shell casings, and packing a bag filled with Monopoly money and fake IDs, Mangione did what many Americans who are tired of the healthcare system have probably at least considered doing, and shot Thompson in the back at close range.

And while this didn't go down too well with Thompson's fellow CEOs, several culture warriors (who also happen to be multi-millionares) took it even worse.

Some, like Matt Walsh, tried to frame Thompson's killing as an assault on white maleness. A take so terrible that even his most devoted followers weren't buying it.

Others, like Ben Shapiro, tried (and failed) to pivot to politics, claiming that the reaction to Thompson's killing was a hallmark of the “evil reactionary Left” (an especially interesting take considering that CNN's Michael Smerconish was busy comparing Thompson’s murder to that of Heather Heyer and John Lennon).

But most interesting, at least to me, was district attorney Alvin Bragg, who added terrorism charges to Mangione’s murder charges, arguing that killing Thompson was intended to “sow fear.”

Because sure, it was obviously designed to sow fear. But whose heart was it supposed to sow fear into? Mine? Yours? The ~26,000 people who die every year due to a lack of healthcare coverage? Did Mangione make a single person with a clear conscience about how they earn a living sleep less soundly in their bed?

This crime had nothing to do with “race,” it wasn’t motivated by politics, Mangione isn’t a mugger or a crackhead or a religious fundamentalist.

This was the 21st-century version of a class-motivated murder. And the reason there’s been such an outpouring of horror and indignation from assorted multi-millionaires is that, at least in this case, none of the distractions pundits and politicians use to shift attention from America’s gaping class disparities are working.