Whether you consider Luigi Mangione a hero to the working masses, a misguided young man, or a straight-up murdering villain, one thing is clear: He has given us much to think about as a country as we stand on the brink of Donald Trump and Elon Musk turning this country into their personal payday and into the United States of America Inc.
Prior to his capture and arrest, speculation ran rampant about the identity of the brazen killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Was he a fed-up member of the proletariat? Was he avenging the death of someone who died at the hands of UnitedHealthcare’s cruel policies and standard-issue denials?
It’s safe to say that no one was prepared for a very attractive, well-heeled young man who happens to be an Ivy League graduate—and from a family whose wealth reportedly came from the healthcare industry.
If reports are to be believed—and in today’s world, the truth is harder to source—it seems an injury that led to back surgery and his own challenges with pain and issues with UnitedHealthcare were part of what led to his actions.
Though apparently, he did leave behind a handwritten manifesto that, as of this writing, only journalist Ken Klippenstein dared to publish, here’s an excerpt.
Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. 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 [indecipherable] 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. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. 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.
Friends, I am not going to lie: His words about the healthcare insurance industry and corporate America aren’t wrong. From 1978 to 2020, CEO pay grew by 1,322%; in contrast, workers’ wages grew by a paltry 18% during that same time. If that wasn’t bad enough, in the post-pandemic market, salaries for CEOs who run companies in the S&P 500 jumped nearly 13% at a time when inflation was kicking the average American’s ass.
Remember that old movie from the 1980s, Wall Street, and Michael Douglas’s speech on how greed is good? Well, we are living in a time when greed has become so good that the corporate overlords don’t even have enough sense to throw some bones at the working stiffs who help them be the greedy bastards that they are. I mean, charging you good money to have health insurance in the event you need it one day, only to maximize their profits by using policies and programs that actively seek to deny you what you have paid into, is some greedy and egregious shit.
During the presidential election season, there was much talk made about the cost of goods—and while the eggs being costly are not strictly about greed, hello: avian flu—who hasn’t noticed that the prices have gone up, while the sizes have gone down and at the same time, the companies aren’t taking any losses.
It has become increasingly hard for people to make ends meet; it is a regular monthly occurrence that I have Patreon patrons who must cancel their support because they can no longer afford it. We are rapidly becoming a nation where we are barely surviving and no one in power seems to care enough to stand up to the people who are getting fat off our labor and making our lives not simply less-than-comfortable but downright painful.
My lane of expertise is anti-racism work. But in recent years, I’ve noticed that many in the field of fighting racism and white supremacy culture decoupled the class analysis piece from anti-racism work by watering it down to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work, which was more palatable to the masses. Or more palatable for a brief time, until it wasn’t tolerable either—hello, “anti-woke” agenda complaints and the rolling back of racial equity gains. The thing is, by moving away from a class analysis, it becomes harder to see oppression outside of a racialized lens. Instead, we get lulled into a white supremacy framework of seeing class violence perpetrated by individuals as inherently bad without examining how the very systems we swoon over are violent and designed to exploit all of us.
That’s the sneaky, seductive nature of white supremacy culture and whiteness in general. It decides who and what is bad without deeper examination. It says violence is bad no matter what, without examining the direct violence the systems do to lots of people and the way that systemic violence can lead to seemingly random acts of violence. It doesn’t care to go deeper into why almost all our politicians require the deep pockets of big business to run. Even the so-called good politicians take that money, and big business expects a return for its investment.
Of course, we are all getting a front-row seat to how money drives our politicians and what the big-money boys are thinking, as we see Elon Musk pivot from techbro weirdo to Elon Musk rainmaker in the halls of Congress.
There is still a certain naiveté for the average Americans who consider themselves to be good people. The assumption that the people in charge care about us. But, as I stated in a recent post, the hard-won gains of marginalized people starting with the Civil Rights movement were not because a majority of Americans wanted to do the right thing. It was because people were willing to fight, push back, and break the rules. White people as a collective didn’t just decide to see the humanity of Black people; it required Black people willing to go to jail, get their heads bashed in and, yes, be willing to die. History shows that far too many of our great changemakers were cut down in the prime of their lives. Some took a more radical approach but even the ones that most white people claim to revere for their lack of violence still were met with violence despite their own commitment to nonviolence. And even the nonviolent people in the movement were constantly breaking laws; however unjust those laws were, they were still laws that were broken.
Whether we see Luigi as a delusional young man in need of help or the portal to deeper conversations on how unrestrained capitalism is working to destroy us all, I think that as Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently said, you can only push people so far. If Elon Musk and his DOGE scheme get real traction once Trump is reinstalled, there will be real pain heading for people who assumed their VA healthcare, Social Security, and other benefits were untouchable. If their scheme to create short-term pain (and long-term, too) for the average American is enacted, the robber barons will continue getting richer while we may end up creating more Luigis. One thing is certain: You really can only push people so far, and now is the time to figure out how to create a world where someone with a young, promising future doesn’t feel the need to give up or to kill. In order to do that we need to develop a class analysis that is accessible to the masses and allow ourselves to engage in the real and honest conversations that the culture of whiteness frowns upon.
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