THIS WAS NEVER ABOUT ONE CEO

Penn grad Luigi Mangione's arrest for killing UnitedHealthcare's CEO forces a truth upon us: This isn't about violence. It's about the state-sanctioned corporate machine strangling us all.

YESTERDAY EVENING, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione was charged with murder for the shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Brian Thompson, in Midtown Manhattan. Along with three gun charges and forgery, he faces decades behind bars for what prosecutors are calling a cold-blooded killing.

Now for the last week, mainstream media have been wringing their perfectly manicured hands about the attack, while politicians have rushed to their podiums to call Luigi a “coward” for using violence to “try and prove some ideological point”.

Yet across social media, a very different — and far more complicated — narrative is unfolding. One which is repulsed with politicians calling the systematic, capitalistic degradation of human life as “ideological” . . .

When a manifesto talking against corporate parasites overwhelmingly resonates with the masses, maybe it’s time for our ‘leaders’ to recognize what that says about our society. Perhaps it’s time for them to realize it’s less about Luigi Mangione himself and more about what he represents . . .

Someone who finally struck back at the state-sanctioned corporate overlords who’ve been bleeding us dry for decades.

I’m not out here championing violence. I’m not waxing lyrical about the second amendment. I’m not ‘celebrating death’ (I’ll leave that up to corporate and white America at large). But I am acknowledging literal decades of pent-up rage at a system that’s been commodifying human suffering on an industrial scale.

The United States is a nation screaming into the void . . .

• 62% of Americans say it’s the federal government’s responsibility to ensure healthcare coverage, yet our politicians keep telling us it’s “unrealistic”.

• 78% of young adults think harm to people in the U.S. caused by climate change will get a little or a lot worse in their lifetime, but here we are watching corporations dump metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere while buying off legislators.

• 67% of Americans support higher taxes on billionaires, yet somehow we keep getting trickle-down economics shoved down our throats.

Here we are just asking for basic fucking fairness, and yet we keep getting clubbed for our trouble.

We’re living in an era where corporate CEOs are our de facto kings, with their corner-office thrones wielding more power over our lives than any medieval monarch ever dreamed of. Public financial records show that in 2022, UnitedHealth Group (the overall parent company) gorged itself on $324 billion in revenue, while Brian Thompson himself took home $10 million as his company’s algorithms were busy denying life-saving treatments to kids with cancer.

Hey mainstream media and elected officials: Tell me again why people aren’t supposed to be angry? Why we’re supposed to — what exactly — shrug that off?

More than 100 million Americans carry medical debt.
Two-thirds of all bankruptcies are tied to medical bills.
One in four Americans have rationed their insulin because they can’t afford it.

And what do we get when we protest? When millions march in the streets for healthcare reform? When we flood town halls demanding change? When we beg our representatives to stop funding genocide in Gaza or endless slaughter in Sudan?

We get tear gas.
We get empty promises.
We get form-letter responses from congressional interns.

So when someone comes along and disrupts this system people are going to react. They’re going to project their Robin Hood fantasies onto him. They’re going to Maid-Marion-thirst-trap about his photos and make him into some kind of avenging angel, because we’re all so goddamn desperate for someone — anyone — to actually land a punch against these corporate dragons.

Luigi Mangione, with his Ivy League degree and prep school background, is an unlikely folk hero. In many ways, he’s actually part of the same privileged system people are raging against. But that doesn’t matter as people aren’t necessarily singularly swooning over him — they’re swooning over the idea of him, over the fantasy that someone finally said enough to a system that’s been fucking all of us over for years.

This isn’t just about healthcare — it’s about an entire system of corporate and government fuckery that’s destroying lives globally. While Americans are dying from treatable diseases, our tax dollars are funding military operations that devastate places like Gaza, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, and Congo. We’re bankrolling the destruction of entire nations while our own people are setting up GoFundMe pages for basic medical care.

The desperate search for heroes isn’t new — but the intensity of it is. We’re watching record numbers of Americans support labor strikes (71% backed the UAW), seeing unprecedented support for wealth redistribution, and have witnessed the highest approval for unions since 1965.

People aren’t just angry — they’ve been organizing, mobilizing, protesting. But still they’re getting nowhere against a system that’s rigged to ignore them.

When you’ve got millions of Americans one medical emergency away from bankruptcy, watching insurance companies post record profits and clink crystal champagne glasses as they deny basic care, something’s got to give.

Instead of mainstream media and Aunt Maud being shocked by the public response, shouldn’t they ask themselves what it says about our society that people are so desperate for a hero that they’ll project that role onto anyone who challenges the status quo?

The real question isn’t why people are romanticizing Luigi Mangione, but why we’ve let things get so bad that this kind of response feels inevitable.

This first step toward addressing the real capitalistic disease in this nation, is acknowledging the truth of our sick systems.

ALL OF THEM.

And maybe if our *leaders* were actually interested in fixing that systemic violence of corporate greed, white supremacy, and capitalism, we wouldn’t need to swoon after young vigilantes in the first place.

Every time millions march for climate action and get ignored, every time we watch Congress approve billions more in military spending, every time another GoFundMe has to be posted for someone’s chemo treatment — we’re creating the conditions for people to celebrate anyone who fights back.

That’s not me justifying or not justifying murder. It’s just fact. It’s foretelling.

Because when peaceful protests are ignored, when democratic processes fail, when voting feels meaningless, people start looking for heroes.

And more than that, people start looking to be them.