Why the online left is simping for Luigi Mangione

Not for the first time, Taylor Lorenz has gone viral for saying something ridiculous. A development that I’m sure will appal Taylor Lorenz, attention-seeker that she is.

This time, the former New York Times and Washington Post tech writer, turned podcaster and Substacker, has said she felt ‘joy’ after the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan last week, allegedly by 26-year-old gunman Luigi Mangione.

On Piers Morgan’s YouTube show – shortly after Mangione was caught in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s – Lorenz let slip that she was cock-a-hoop after hearing Thompson had succumbed to three bullets. She then backtracked when challenged, saying she was only joyful that the US is now debating healthcare injustice.

No one’s really buying this. Not least because, a few days earlier, Lorenz had posted, on Bluesky naturally, ‘And people wonder why we want these executives dead’, responding to the news that another big health-insurance firm would no longer cover anesthesia for the full length of some surgeries.

But while Lorenz saying something dumb is not really a news story, she was only saying explicitly what others have been getting at more gingerly. Indeed, the titillation that much of the faux-left chattersphere seems to have experienced from this apparent assassination is pretty widespread, and creepy.

While the organised American left has more sense than to openly luxuriate in a murder, the leftish influencers, streamers and YouTubers have had no such hesitation, variously describing the alleged killer as ‘so sick’ (in a good way) and snarking at conservative pundits for their out-of-touch, pearl-clutching takes. (The tone across social media more broadly has, indeed, been one of ‘karma is a bitch’, with ordinary posters at the very least struggling to get too upset about Thompson’s grisly end.) The more considered, respectable left-wing take, meanwhile, seems to be: murder is bad, yes, but what do we expect in such a broken system?

Thompson’s killing is being painted as somewhere between an understandable, and perhaps even supportable, response to America’s deeply dysfunctional, inhumane healthcare system, under which hundreds of thousands of people are driven into bankruptcy every year and thousands die because insurance companies refuse to pay out. UnitedHealthcare has a bigger market capitalisation than ExxonMobil, but denies about one-third of claims.

The details emerging about Mangione would suggest he was no raging leftist. He seems to have been a follower of the centrist podcast bros – those who dispense a mix of self-help, gym tips, nerdy AI chat and anti-wokeness. Perhaps more telling is his glowing review on the Goodreads website of the manifesto of Ted ‘Unabomber’ Kaczynski, who mounted a 17-year domestic-terror campaign, raging against industrial society. ‘You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution’, posted an account bearing Mangione’s name and likeness.

Some speculate that Mangione’s chronic back pain might have radicalised him, even though his incredibly wealthy background would mean it is unlikely he’d been left destitute and untreated. Shell casings found at the scene were marked with the words ‘deny’, ‘defend’ and ‘depose’ – words typically used in health-insurance policy documents, which inspired the title of a 2010 book, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It. The police say that, when Mangione was arrested, he was in possession of a short ‘manifesto’, declaring that ‘These parasites had it coming’. ‘I do apologise for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done’, it reportedly says.

In their ‘joy’ and rationalisations, Team Luigi is being accused of mainstreaming revolutionary violence. The truth, I think, is much more pathetic. The frisson some leftists have felt from this killing – not the ordinary folks scarred by a woeful healthcare system, but the well-heeled commentators who no doubt have immaculate coverage – speaks more to a kind of morbid pessimism than to any genuine radicalism.

Those swooning over Mangione are not egging on some grand revolution, they are extracting a vicarious thrill from watching someone lash out, murderously, at ‘the system’. The claim that Thompson’s cold-blooded killing has, at least, generated ‘a conversation’ about healthcare is pretty weak, too. Not least because the main conversations it has generated thus far, across cable news and the internet, are whether or not Taylor Lorenz is a twat, or whether it’s acceptable to celebrate a killing, or whether it’s okay to find the killer sexy (Mangione clearly took on board all that podcast-bro workout advice).

This speaks to what American Marxist Fredrik deBoer, in another context, has described as the ‘​​fantasy of deliverance through political violence’ on today’s political left, bred of a ‘feeling of grasping at straws’. Having failed to transform the system, leftists fantasise about going to war with it, despite this being obviously doomed to fail in an era when the state is overwhelmingly better armed than the populace and the populace is generally disapproving of political violence.

I’d go further. The simping for Mangione has a creepily therapeutic feel to it. This killing might change nothing, but at least it has landed some abstract blow for ‘justice’, and allowed some effete podcasters to get off on posing as dangerous radicals. It’s political violence as emotional catharthis.

They should be careful what they wish for. You’d hope, after two foiled presidential assassination attempts, that activists would be more wary of looking approvingly upon lone-wolf assassins. The next time some religious extremist guns down an abortion doctor I’d be keen to hear their takes.

Of course, in a country so big and so heavily armed, there will always be those whose political grievances turn murderous. America is not in the grip of late-Sixties-esque ferment; this is not a new Weather Underground. Still, the commentariat would do well not to encourage would-be gunmen, lest things spin any further out of control.

There is an air not of revolution, but of violent cynicism – a sense that society is rotten, unchangeable, so you might as well go out in a blaze of righteousness, whether that’s by burning down a city in the name of George Floyd or gunning down a CEO in pursuit of phoney ‘justice’.

We shouldn’t try to intuit too much about a society from one murder. Nor should we take shooters’ manifestos at face value. Their motivations are often more – ahem – personal than political. But we certainly shouldn’t be lionising them, either. That way, darkness lies.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater