When Luigi Mangione was arrested within the killing of the chief govt of UnitedHealthcare, he was hailed in some corners of the web as an anti-capitalist folks hero.
In a doc mentioned to be a “manifesto” discovered with Mangione, printed on-line by journalist Ken Klippenstein, the 26-year-old former knowledge engineer condemned UnitedHealthcare for abusing “our nation for immense revenue.”
“Frankly, these parasites merely had it coming,” Mangione wrote. “A reminder: the US has the #1 most costly healthcare system on this planet, but we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy.”
However Mangione was not an easy, left-leaning Robin Hood determine avenging what he sees because the brutality of the U.S. healthcare system or, as one right-wing critic alleged, “simply one other leftist nut job.” The political ideology he articulated on-line — on social media platforms from X and Reddit to Goodreads — defied neat left-right binaries and confirmed a younger man steeped in a hodgepodge of on-line Silicon Valley philosophy and heterodox concepts.
Mangione’s web postings, together with accounts from individuals he knew and talked to on-line, provide a fancy view. Mangione’s final publish on X was in June, practically six months earlier than he allegedly traveled to Manhattan to kill, and he appeared to disconnect from his household and buddies across the similar time. However his digital footprint presents a glimpse into his ideological journey, documenting a few of his deepest hopes and anxieties about the way forward for know-how and humanity.
Mangione, proven in a picture offered by the Hawaii Division of Land and Pure Assets, lived on the Surfbreak co-working neighborhood close to Honolulu in 2022.
(Hawaii Division of Land and Pure Assets / AP)
The previous valedictorian of an elite Baltimore prep faculty and Ivy League graduate shared posts on social media from an eclectic stream of populists, entrepreneurs, neuroscientists, centrists and disruptors. On X, he adopted comic and podcaster Joe Rogan; President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for well being secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; liberal columnist Ezra Klein; and democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
On a now-private Goodreads account that authorities reportedly recognized as belonging to Mangione, he included a biography of tech billionaire and GOP megadonor Elon Musk — now a detailed Trump advisor — in his favorites record and rated Republican Vice President-elect J.D. Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” three out of 5 stars.
A pc science main with an curiosity in rationalism, self-improvement and efficient altruism — a philosophical motion that makes use of proof and motive to assist others — Mangione enthused about technological innovation. However he additionally apprehensive about how firms and bizarre individuals used tech, sharing a stream of posts on smartphones’ impact on psychological well being, the draw back of Netflix and Doordash, and an AI chatbot’s threats to hold out revenge.
Mangione appeared skeptical of a few of the core tenets of left-leaning “identification politics.”
Two years in the past, he shared a publish from British Indian author Gurwinder Bhogal difficult the concept that asking “The place are you from?” is rude: “If wokeism teaches minorities to be traumatized even by pleasant gestures, it can’t declare to bridge divides.” In April, Mangione retweeted a blogger who complained that modern-day atheists “disprove[d] God” solely to finish up “worshipping on the DEI shrine” and “utilizing made-up pronouns like non secular mantras.”
Some on the left are actually dubbing Mangione right-wing, however they don’t appear to agree on whether or not he’s a “center-right biohacking Thiel-loving tech bro” or “one other far proper MAGA Trumper Terrorist.”
Bhogal, who chatted and emailed with Mangione on-line after the American turned a founding member of his Substack, mentioned Mangione was neither.
“He was left-wing on some issues and right-wing on others,” Bhogal wrote in an electronic mail. “He was pro-equality of alternative, however … he opposed wokeism as a result of he didn’t imagine it was an efficient manner to assist minorities.”
Bhogal mentioned Mangione first reached out to him in April whereas on a visit in Asia. Mangione requested him a couple of 2023 article Bhogal wrote exploring the rise of the NPC, or Non-Participant Character, a time period referring to online game characters that some on-line subcultures now use to explain people who behave in predictable, scripted methods.
The article resonated with Mangione, Bhogal mentioned, in all probability as a result of he felt he didn’t match right into a political tribe. Bhogal described Mangione as curious and well-read, with “principally fairly tame” mental pursuits in “mind rot, indoctrination, declining birth-rates, gamification and company greed.”
On X, Mangione praised conservative commentator Tucker Carlson as “spot on” in recognizing that “trendy structure kills the spirit” and shared a video of a chat by enterprise capitalist and GOP megadonor Peter Thiel on why individuals with Asperger’s syndrome excel in tech.
On Goodreads, he gave “Industrial Society and Its Future” by the late Theodore Kaczynski, often known as the Unabomber, a four-star evaluation. Kaczynski was “rightfully imprisoned,” he wrote, however he additionally famous: “it’s merely unimaginable to disregard how prescient a lot of his predictions about trendy society turned out.”
On the finish of his evaluation, Mangione quoted a random Reddit person, Bosspotatoness: “These corporations don’t care about you, or your children, or your grandkids. They’ve zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck, so why ought to we’ve any qualms about burning them right down to survive?”
In response to Bhogal, Mangione appeared disillusioned with established order politics, however he appeared to dislike Trump.
“He believed company greed for short-term income was inflicting tech corporations to saturate society with mind-rotting leisure,” Bhogal wrote. “He requested me the best way to maximize company in a world continuously making an attempt to deprive us of it.”
Those that acquired to know Mangione in 2022 when he lived on the Surfbreak co-working neighborhood close to Honolulu described him as a standard, affable man.
“He didn’t appear hardcore in any route,” mentioned Josiah Ryan, a spokesperson for Surfbreak proprietor and founder R.J. Martin. “Nobody actually is aware of what his political beliefs have been. He appeared balanced, younger and curious, and not using a noticeable ideology.”
Although Mangione got here off as anti-capitalist and anti-corporate in his manifesto, Brian Levin, founding father of the Middle for the Examine of Hate and Extremism and professor emeritus of legal injustice at California State San Bernardino, mentioned that didn’t essentially make him hard-left. More and more, Levin famous, anti-corporate and anti-institutional subcultures function throughout the ideological spectrum.
“We’re seeing a diversification of most of these extremism, in addition to an a la carte building of idiosyncratic beliefs which might be typically hooked into an ideology,” Levin mentioned, noting that two years in the past, a mass shooter who killed eight individuals at a mall in Allen, Texas, was a Latino with a Nazi tattoo. “Let’s see the place the defendant falls.”
Mary Beth Altier, a medical professor at New York College’s Middle for International Affairs who research political violence and habits, mentioned it was changing into extra frequent for political violence to be largely motivated by a single problem, on this case the healthcare business.
“They’re not essentially becoming into a bigger group or ideology,” she mentioned, “however relatively have a private grievance with a specific problem.”
On-line, some pundits and extremism consultants have prompt that Mangione expressed views related to “the grey tribe”, a time period coined a decade in the past by Bay Space psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander, to consult with an internet collective of rationalists, on-line tech fanatics, atheists and free thinkers who fall outdoors standard left- or right-wing tribal pondering.
“More and more seems like we’ve acquired our first gray tribe shooter,” journalist and extremism professional Robert Evans posted on X the day Mangione was charged. “Boy howdy is the media not prepared for that.”
As Alexander described it, the grey tribe espouses “libertarian political opinions, Dawkins-style atheism, obscure annoyance that the query of homosexual rights even comes up, consuming paleo, ingesting Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, studying a number of blogs, calling American soccer ‘sportsball,’ getting conspicuously upset concerning the Warfare on Medicine and the NSA…”
As obscure as Mangione’s views may appear to People who don’t dwell in the identical on-line areas, Evans wrote on his Substack that “his curiosity in Grey Tribe-adjacent thinkers and self-help books written by productiveness hackers … is extremely frequent amongst younger males.”
Different observers of web subcultures prompt Mangione was a “new tech centrist” or “TPOT adjoining,” an acronym for This A part of Twitter, one other unfastened offshoot of Silicon Valley “post-rationalism” that developed on-line throughout the COVID-19 lockdown and focuses on concepts, know-how, spirituality and conspiracy theories.
Some joked concerning the issue of attributing motivation to Mangione in an period of more and more in-the-weeds on-line subcultures.
“Tried explaining that the shooter wasn’t a far left radical however truly a proper wing tpot adjoining ted okay studying lindyman following, rfk pilled upenn grad,” one poster wrote on X. “Bought kicked out of the household group chat.”
Sometimes, Levin mentioned, those that interact in public acts of symbolic violence are motivated by one, or a mix of, three elements: ideology, which could possibly be non secular or political; a psychological situation or psychological instability; a way of non-public profit or revenge.
“The underside line right here is that is somebody who skilled a grievance, and that grievance resonated,” Levin mentioned of Mangione. “The mix of grievance, idiosyncrasies, private psychological misery, withdrawal from assist programs and the glorification of violence that exists typically in our society may have a particular impact on people who really feel an unjust grievance or who really feel the system doesn’t work.”
Mangione’s final publish on X seems to be June 10. By November, his mom filed a missing-person report for her son in San Francisco.
A health buff, he had suffered well being setbacks. The highest banner of his X profile, subsequent to a photograph of him posing shirtless and smiling atop a mountain, was a picture of an X-ray exhibiting 4 screws in a backbone, an indication that he had gone by means of lumbar spinal fusion surgical procedure.
Posts from a since-deleted Reddit account, with particulars matching Mangione’s biographical particulars, confirmed that Mangione suffered from persistent again ache ensuing from spondylolisthesis — a situation during which a vertebra within the backbone, often within the decrease again, slips misplaced. Mangione wrote that his situation was exacerbated by a browsing accident.
“My again and hips locked up after the accident,” he wrote in July 2023. “I’m afraid of the implications.”
Mangione is pictured in a holding cell after being taken into custody Monday in Altoona, Pa.
(Altoona Police Division / Getty Pictures)
Mangione wrote that he underwent spinal surgical procedure weeks later, which appeared to have improved his signs.
When Bhogal chatted with Mangione by way of video for 2 hours in Could, he didn’t get the impression that he was in ache or on painkillers. “He appeared lucid, relaxed, and cheerful,” Bhogal wrote.
However Bhogal mentioned Mangione might have felt remoted. He complained the individuals round him have been on a “totally different wavelength” and appeared keen to affix a neighborhood of like-minded individuals. He urged Bhogal to schedule group video calls to debate rationalism, Stoicism and efficient altruism.
That by no means occurred.
The final time Bhogal heard from Mangione was June 10, when he obtained a message during which Mangione requested him the best way to curate his social media feeds. Bhogal forgot to get again to him.
Part of him wonders, now, if he may have averted the obvious end result if he had replied.