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?

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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.

The culture wars have duped millions of people into believing that those who have less than they do are the source of their financial problems. That immigrants or the homeless or people with the wrong skin tone are their enemy. We’re endlessly encouraged to believe that when we’re trying to figure out why we’re struggling, we should look down instead of up.

But finally, for this brief, shining moment, everybody’s looking in the same direction. For the billionaires, that’s even scarier than Mangione.

I can't pinpoint where exactly, but there’s a line where you can kill people and the police won't do anything.

You can't shoot a CEO in the back with a 3-D printed "ghost gun," for example, or stab your company president during a staff meeting, but it's no problem if you cut off a severely diabetic patient's access to insulin until they die a painful death. You're welcome to delay a liver cancer patient's access to treatment until the tumours spread to their chest, lungs and stomach. You’re free to force board-certified oncologists to endlessly defend their medical recommendations until their patients...well, you get the idea.

To be clear, I’m not saying that Thompson deserved to die because of this. His murder (probably) isn't going to lower anybody's insurance premiums or convince companies to stop denying claims. He didn't build the system, nor was he single-handedly holding it together.

But there's no escaping the fact that he earned a very comfortable living by taking money from people for medical insurance and then making it as hard as possible for them to get it back when they desperately needed it. His company, United Healthcare, denied around 33% of claims. More than any other major insurance company.

Thompson and his peers represent a world where corporations rake in profits by systematically and maliciously denying healthcare. A world where the interests of health insurance companies can never align with those of their customers. A world where poor, sick people are only useful as a resource to use and discard.

So all I’m saying is, if you force people to choose between buying food and paying their medical bills, if their legal paths to justice are either non-existent or impossibly expensive, if they’re forced to suffer in a system so utterly devoid of virtue, well, don’t be surprised if some small number of them resort to terror.

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