The first week of the Christmas seasons brought tidings of retributive joy. (Unless you’re an impatient psycho who stands your Christmas tree up the day after Halloween. In that case, please consult your primary head doc or self-intake at your local bughouse.)
Luigi Mangione—not to be confused with his homonym digital doppelganger Luigi Mario—catalyzed the class consciousness of shitlibs by plugging UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Within hours of the murder, which happened on the open Manhattan streets, the online left was in happy delirium. A few choice examples of the lustful sentiment, complete with requisite irony: “[U]nited [CEO] should have had his primary care physician recommend bullet removal surgery months ago so he would know if he was treatable today”; “UnitedHealthcare CEO denied access to this life”; “[H]e was already CEO when he was shot, pre existing condition. [C]laim denied”.
Thompson had it coming, in other words, for being a penny-pinching Scrooge profiting off the rotting corpses of many who couldn’t afford their deductibles. This was a comeuppance killing. His executioner—who reportedly suffered from a debilitating back injury—was an Italian Tiny Tim, exacting vengeance, branding a 3D-printed 9mm instead of a cane.
Now, lest you think I exaggerate the giddiness of viral progressives, who treat every instance of quotidian life as a cosmic slave revolt in morality, don’t think the glee is confined to rando M.A. pursuers spouting off with their thumbs and Michael Moore. “We all live on campus now,” as Andrew Sullivan put it. The credentialed angst extends beyond the quad all the way to Congress.
Multiple elected officials rationalized Mangione’s murder by drawing attention to the coverage gaps in the U.S. health care system. Senator Elizabeth Warren, perhaps channeling her ancestors’ resentment over pilfered land plots, used angry empathy as a heuristic: “The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the health care system.” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-USSR) told “Meet the Press” that “shooting somebody in the back is totally unacceptable” before backtracking by citing “people’s anger” at an industry that “denies people the health care they desperately need.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez copied the call, aktuallying the real villain: “This is not to say that an act of violence is justified, but I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence.”
An erstwhile theater kid, Ocasio-Cortez probably struggled to not burst into “Do You Hear the People Sing?” in response. She just can’t quit the high-dudgeon Marxism that vaulted her into a congressional career. Denying an insurance claim is violence? For piqued progressives, any thing, any action, any spoken word, any instance of stubborn reality, that doesn’t conform to the leftist cosmovision is “violence.”
Naturally, such “violence” necessitates a resistant response, which, as gruesomely evidenced in left-wing revolutions through the centuries, manifests in loads of lopped off heads, piled in tribute to universal justice.
So are three elected officials justifying Mangione’s slaying because of the venal profiteering on the part of not just UnitedHealthcare, but American’s stingy insurance conglomerates?
Yes, obviously. No amount of “but”s, qualifications, and reiterating that “violence is never the answer” excuses the plain fact that Sens. Warren and Sanders, along with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and a slew of their congressional comrades, are holding up the hit job as an excuse to consolidate government control of the rapacious health care sector, which cavalierly allows thousands of infirm Americans to go to the coffin every year. Mangione supposedly suffered from a debilitating condition that rendered him unable to enjoy, let’s say, the priapic pleasures in life. Furthermore, UnitedHealthcare, it was floated, denied his claim for necessary nostrums. “A man afraid is a dangerous animal,” said Steinbeck. Mangione did the only thing a man of little means can do when beaten so harshly—rage against the system.
There’s just one discrepancy in the left’s karmic folktale. Ok, there are several plot holes. First, Mangione wasn’t insured by UnitedHealthcare. Second, he underwent successful back surgery, and weaned off the prescribed opioids a week later. Third, the Mangione family are no paupers; Luigi was to be beneficiary of his grandmother’s $30 million bequest (mamma mia!), but relinquished his right to the money by committing a felony.
So the left’s latest prole–pushed-too-far is anything but. Another case of printing an insurgent legend.
If Mangione wasn’t a victim of some cubicled insurance broker’s cold-hearted cost-calculation, why’d he play target practice with Thompson? Working-poor chronicler Chris Arnade has an idea: “the theory I find most convincing is that Mangione could be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.” The psychic break suggestion is apposite with Mangione’s recent history. He was apparently missing for months before his murderous deed, a public nobody, camouflaged in the crowd, his family hunting for his whereabouts.
We’ll never know what devious thoughts, perceived unfairness, and wrongful machinations fluttered in Mangione’s immiserated mind during his dropout. He limned his crackered construals into a manifesto, that was more of a minifesto, clocking in at just above 250 words, a pittance of postulation. But I suppose Luigi, in the end, preferred his pistol to do the philosophizing. He certainly can’t be accused of violating St. Francis’s lament that “the spirit of the world tends to be all talk and no action.”
Mangione’s tale is less kitchen-sink drama than a disturbed cosplay of righting an injustice, less pathos than bathos. In a rush to construct a new idol, lefties elevated a brainsick nepote, imputing a redemption arc onto someone who might have just needed a clutch full of clozapine.
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