We Don't Have to Ponder the Killer's Motives

We're still trying to "figure out" the United Healthcare CEO assassin, even though it all seems pretty clear.

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since I started FilmDrunk in 2007. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.

—

Ever since the alleged United Healthcare CEO assassin Luigi Mangione was arrested at an Altoona McDonald’s on Monday (Mangione was supposedly reported by a McDonald’s employee for “acting suspiciously,” whatever that looks like at an Altoona McDonald’s) commentators have been asking, as Max Read put it, “what type of guy” Mangione is.

It’s a natural impulse to wonder, ingrained in us since the first highly publicized, high-profile acts of public violence in the 90s (I know there were a few before, but you know what I mean). It’s partly a ritual we perform in the absence of doing anything to prevent more violence, and partly just a habitualized national pastime. What was the killer reading? How was he raised? Whose team was he on?

You can tell that the act has become rote and unthinking, because the supposed point of the whole deal is to try to guess at a killer’s motives. And we’re still doing it now, combing through Mangione’s Twitter timeline and podcast listening history, trying to assign him a previously established ideology like beavers who see trees and think only of their potential as dam material. This even when this particular crime appears, by all information available, to have had possibly the most straightforwardly obvious motive in all of murderdom.

For once an act of “senseless violence” seems to make a sick sort of sense. It all reminds me of a kinda cheesy pre-financial crisis movie about a math genius who designed a thingamajig to defraud the stock market (The Bank, 2001 — probably the first and only reference to this movie you will ever read). In the third act, when pressed to reveal his motive, the anti-hero, played by David Wenham, explains “I dunno. I guess I just hate banks.”

What type of politics or childhood must someone have had to hate private health insurance companies and their profiteers? Well, any kind, really. That’s why we’re all captivated. This killer, as we all eagerly learned well before Mangione’s capture, had written “Deny, Defend, and Depose” on the three shell casings found at the murder scene — presumably a slightly misquoted reference to Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It, a 2010 book by Jay Feinman.

We’ve since learned that Mangione had back pain, has a name that’s fun to say, looks good in a mugshot, and was found with a “manifesto,” published by Ken Klippenstein. Which read in part:

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 [actually 60th, as of 2021, according to US News]. 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.”

At 262 words, people online were arguing over whether Mangione’s statement even qualifies as a “manifesto.” But even 262 words was probably too many. Redundant, almost. What else needed to be said? “I dunno. I guess I just hate banks.”

It feels like we’re all acting out a self-flagellating, beating around the edges, concern-trolling cycle of discourse where one isn’t necessary (again, we know why this killer killed, he couldn’t have laid his motives out more plainly). And the general public seems way ahead of both politicians (duh) and our elite journalistic institutions on this one (the latter hollowed out by the same forces that ruined healthcare though they may be).

While the Daily Beast was writing about how “Luigi Mangione Destroyed His Grandfather’s Rags-to-Riches Legacy” and The Atlantic was clutching pearls about “Decivilization May Already Be Under Way” (how badly do you want to wedgy a nerd right now? just me?) — the latter after a year of genocide apologia — the general public was largely parroting Chris Rock’s old devil’s advocating bit about OJ Simpson: “I’m not saying he should’ve killed her… but I understand.”

Which is to say that people, ah… understood.

And so we don’t have to grasp at assigning Mangione a complex nomenclature. Just look at what happens when you even try (and this isn’t a knock on Max Read, God bless him for even attempting it):

What does this add up to? I’ve seen some people suggest that Mangione’s politics must be “insane” or “incoherent” or “irrational,” and that may be true in some abstract sense, but I think the cultural and ideological portrait painted by his Twitter account is actually a fairly common and intelligible one, and would be pretty familiar not just to anyone who spends a lot of time on Twitter but to anyone who works in tech or frequents a gym weight room. It’s a loudly non-partisan, self-consciously “rational” mish-mash of declinist conservativism, bro-science and bro-history, simultaneous techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, and self-improvement stoicism--not left-wing, but not (yet) reactionary, either. The basic line is something like: The world is getting worse and phones are killing us; politics won’t save us but technology might; in the meantime, lift weights, take supplements, listen to podcasts.

I can understand the attempt, and the inertia that causes it, but we don’t need a perfect vigilante any more than we need a perfect victim. Would it help more if Mangione was more obviously on your team, or on someone else’s? It’s irrelevant, because he made his motivations as plain as he could.

The “(Rosenthal, Moore)” citation in his manifesto, by the way, seems to refer to to Elisabeth Rosenthal, who wrote An American Sickness: How US Healthcare Became Big Business (2017), and Michael Moore, famous director of Sicko (2007) and others. Those are two works that came out a decade apart, the last one seven years ago, both describing a paradigm that seems essentially unchanged since then (probably even worse). Not only has nothing changed, there doesn’t seem to even be anyone promising to change it. What is to be done?

Organize. Protest. VOTE.

Those are the usual lines, and yet where has that gotten us? We just had a presidential election, yet another campaign season that seemed to drag on for 18 months, this one including a last-minute candidate swap and multiple assassination attempts. Even in the midst of all that pandering and demonizing, I don’t remember hearing a single candidate suggest universal healthcare, or ending private insurance profiteering, or in any way making our system look even a little more like the 41 countries (or 59!) that have better life expectancy than we do. What does it say that they think we’re not even owed lip service?

We don’t have to wonder what drove this killer crazy. It’s a better question to ask how anyone is still sane. Just like the Democrats seem to have forgotten that the money you raise during a campaign (and they raised ONE BILLION DOLLARS during this one) is supposed to help you spread your message (which is to say: having a message should come before having the money to spread it), people in power seem to have forgotten that reform isn’t just something you do out of pity to make you feel like a nice person. It’s also something you do to prevent violent upheaval. At the very least, Mangione’s (alleged) act gives us reason to say “don’t do it for us, do it for you.”

Maybe now at least some people leading the country will be smart enough to read the writing on the wall?

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro commended the worker [who reported Mangione] while chastising those who have celebrated Thompson’s killing because of frustration with health care insurance companies.

"In some dark corners, this killer is being hailed as a hero," Shapiro said. "Hear me on this: He is no hero. The real hero in this story is the person who called 911 at McDonald’s this morning." [USA Today]

I’m not saying Josh Shapiro has to bring Luigi Mangione a pizza pie in prison (especially not Altoona-style, dear God) but praising the McDonald’s tipster as the real hero while chastising (chastising!) everyone else is missing the goal posts to an almost inconceivable degree. Talk about wasting the moment. Those of us keeping tabs on what people write online haven’t seen an outpouring of mass emotion this non-partisan since 9/11. It’s somewhat heartening that for once, we all seem to want kind of the same thing. Shapiro is emblematic of most politicians, who seem to see themselves as still living in a world where they can control the discourse on vibes alone. That they can simply scold us back into quiet complacency once again.

Here’s a thought, and it’s not a complicated one: maybe it’s time to stop treating anger itself as the enemy. Maybe it’s time to fix what’s actually making people so angry. (Or even give it lip service!) It’s hard to think of a lower bar for basic political competence than being able to make us feel like we’re not going insane.

The truth is, we’re not going to cold plunge our way out of this one, or cure it with the right podcasts (except maybe Mad Yourself A Man, the world’s only Mad Men podcast, subscribe now). And we’re definitely not going to fix it with scolding Obama impressions (“uh… let me be clear: good things aren’t possible.”).

This time around, the question isn’t so much “why did he do it?” so much as “why hadn’t it happened before?”

Maybe it’s time to learn that part of living in a society is being accountable to each other, and not always just in the nice way.