Luigi has been busted. Is he a hero or a villain? Or simply a mentally ill man?

Morgthorak the Undead

Dec 09, 2024

I’ve mostly been silent regarding the murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson. When the murder first happened, it quickly generated a firestorm on social media about the medical care system of the United States and the role played by insurance companies and their executives. Many people on social media considered the murderer to be a hero of sorts, who stuck it to one of the executives that were screwing over ordinary people.

Now that Luigi Mangione has been arrested, I have a few thoughts to share. First, he is *allegedly* the murderer and is innocent until convicted of the crime. We should always proceed from that assumption since it is how our legal system works, and Mangione is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

With that said, the case against him looks good for the prosecution since he was busted with what looks to be the murder weapon, along with a manifesto, fake IDs, etc. All of that will certainly be used against him after he is formally charged with the murder of Brian Thompson.

However, it also begs this simple question: Why didn’t he get rid of the gun and the fake IDs? He’s had about a week to dump them somewhere where they would never be found, but instead he carried them around with him until he was arrested. That makes no sense if he had been intent on getting away with the crime, so maybe he wanted to get caught? I do not know, but holding on to such evidence seems extremely odd to me.

Also, keeping a manifesto on his person is also noteworthy. The manifesto appears to be a written confession of guilt. Does it indicate that he wanted to become a martyr of sorts by getting caught? His Goodreads review of Ted Kaczynski’s book indicates that he viewed it positively. So perhaps Kaczynski was a role model for him? Maybe he wanted to be placed in the same category as Kaczynski in terms of taking a stand against modern technology and its effects on human life?

One of the more notable parts of this story is how Luigi, a young man of 26, took his mask off to flirt with a female employee at a café. That act resulted in a clear picture of his face being disseminated across the Internet, which might have been the reason an employee at McDonald’s was able to ID him and tip off the cops. As I said on Notes, it wouldn’t be the first time a young man let his balls override his brain. Or perhaps it fits in with a desire – conscious or unconscious – to ultimately get caught and charged by the cops?

Viva Frei on X speculated that perhaps Mangione had experimented with psychotropics or was on an SSRI drug:

As I write this post, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of him being on an SSRI or him having taken some psychotropic. However, it is still possible he had some sort of psychotic break. We will have to wait until much more detail is released about him. Frei’s speculation is interesting, however, and it bears watching as we get more information about Mangione.

Another bit of speculation that I came across on X indicates that he had some kind of back surgery that resulted in significant changes to his behavior that were noticed by his friends:

And an interesting comment suggesting that severe pain from back problems could result in the manifestation of schizophrenia:

Please take all the speculation I’ve included here from X with a huge grain of salt. There is currently no way for us to know how much of it is true or, if it is, how all the pieces fit together to explain what Luigi Mangione allegedly did.

Another interesting question about Mangione’s alleged murder of Brian Thompson is: why did he choose Thompson as his victim? If botched back surgery or the complications from it caused Mangione deep pain or helped push him into a psychotic episode, why didn’t he go after the back surgeon(s) who did his surgery? Why kill Thompson?

The only answer I can come up with to that question is that Thompson had been picked as a target of the DOJ for insider trading:

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was one of several senior executives at the company under investigation by the Department of Justice when he was gunned down outside a Manhattan hotel on Wednesday.

Thompson — who was killed in what police called a targeted shooting outside the Hilton hotel in Midtown — exercised stock options and sold shares worth $15.1 million on Feb. 16, less than two weeks before news of the federal antitrust probe went public, according to a Crain’s New York Business report from April.

The stock price dropped sharply after the revelation that the DOJ was investigating whether the company had made acquisitions that consolidated its market position in violation of antitrust laws, a source familiar with the probe told the outlet.

So did Mangione catch a news article or social media post that mentioned Thompson, and then decided to murder him? Unless the cops find some direct evidence on Mangione’s phone or computer, we can’t know for sure. But something must have caught Mangione’s attention, or perhaps Thompson’s company might have played a role in Mangione’s back surgery?

In the title of this article, I asked this question: Is Luigi Mangione a hero or a villain? Or is he a mentally ill man?

I will now put that question to you, my readers:

My personal feeling about all of this is that Mangione is neither a hero nor a villain. From the information that seems to be emerging about him – that we should all still take with a grain of salt until it is fully verified – he strikes me as a young man that became mentally ill. Something happened to him that set him off on a course of murder (allegedly), and nobody around him seemed to understand what was happening or how to stop it.

This conclusion does not fit into the hero or villain narratives that are raging right now on social media, but, as with many things in life, sometimes things are not as black or white as they seem initially. I know that people don’t like hearing that because social media has made everybody very quick to jump to conclusions and cast judgment and blame without pausing to fully understand the details of complicated situations.

Note that I am not excusing him for the alleged murder of Brian Thompson here, but if he suffered a psychotic breakdown, then it is impossible for me to simply write him off as a one-dimensional villain who killed Thompson on a lark or simply because of a political desire to facilitate change in the country’s medical care system. Many people agree that the country’s medical system is a mess, but very few people will cross the line into murderous violence in an attempt to change it.

I think we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg here regarding the story of Luigi Mangione. There is much more to come, and, when all is said and done, there will be many people left with egg on their faces for jumping to certain conclusions without waiting for enough information to emerge to properly understand this complicated and tragic situation.

UPDATE: It looks like his back pain was so bad he could not even have sex:

Brian Thompson shooting suspect Luigi Mangione suffered a back injury so severe he was unable to have sex, a former roommate said.

RJ Martin lived with the murder defendant for six months at a Hawaii co-living space and told The New York Times about 26 year-old Mangione’s secret agony.

‘He knew that dating and being physically intimate with his back condition wasn’t possible,’ Mr Martin told The Times.

‘I remember him telling me that, and my heart just breaks.’

Explaining the injury that Mangione had suffered after a back condition called spondylolisthesis was worsened by a surfing accident Martin said: ‘His spine was kind of misaligned.

‘He said his lower vertebrae were almost like a half-inch off, and I think it pinched a nerve.’

Martin told CNN that Mangione, who he described as a bright engineer, suffered from debilitating pain throughout his six month stay at SurfBreak during 2022.

He said a single surf lesson left Mangione ‘in bed for a week’ afterwards, adding: ‘It was really traumatic and difficult, you know, when you’re in your early twenties and you can’t, you know, do some basic things.’

UPDATE 2: Ken Klippenstein published Mangione’s manifesto.

I’ve pasted the entire thing below, and added paragraph breaks because it was one big blob on Ken’s site. The breaks make it easier to read.

“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone.

This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there.

I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. 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 allwed 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.”

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