LUIGI MANGIONE TO FACE FEDERAL CHARGES OVER KILLING OF UNITEDHEALTH BOSS:
Luigi Mangione, the suspect indicted on murder charges in the shooting of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson, will now face federal charges that could attract the death penalty, the New York Times reported late on Wednesday.
It was not immediately clear what charges the suspect would face in the federal case but they will be in addition to the New York state murder indictment, the report added, citing people familiar with the matter.
Federal charges would potentially allow prosecutors to pursue the death penalty, which has been outlawed in New York for decades, it said.
Related: Christopher Rufo: Luigi Mangione and Left-Wing Nihilism.
What’s interesting about this manifesto is two things. One is that for a very smart person, he’s reduced it to very simplistic, left-wing narratives, and it was only a few hundred words. He didn’t even actually think through why he was committing the crime in detail. In fact, he says at one point, “I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument about the corruption of America’s healthcare system”—and yet he felt he was educated enough to plot and execute a plan to murder this company’s CEO.
Beneath this admittedly surface-level, left-wing rhetoric, what is really happening here? It’s something that I have witnessed over the last few years and documented in various capacities, but it really comes into sharp focus here. It’s a form of left-wing nihilism.
Typically, the left likes to present itself as left-wing progressivism. “We’re going to make the world better. We’re going to provide more healthcare. We’re going to get a public option. We’re going to have the Affordable Care Act. We’re going to have a single-payer system that will provide care and value each human being.” That’s the narrative in a traditional left-wing progressivism. But once that wears off—certainly the failure of Obamacare contributes to this, certainly the failures of the Sanders-Warren wing of the party have contributed to this—as those narratives have been sloughed off and abandoned as impractical (more accurately, as counterproductive), you see a new form of left-wing nihilism, which is the other side of the coin of left-wing progressivism. “If we can’t build a healthcare system, let’s destroy the existing healthcare system”—and perhaps out of this catastrophic destruction, something better will emerge.
The reason for this is quite simple if you look at it from the outside honestly. Building a society and building a national healthcare system for 340 million people is hard. Assassinating an unsuspecting individual on the streets of Manhattan is relatively easy. So the energy gets directed into that direction because the energy seeks opportunity, and then whatever psychopathology that is living inside these individuals—and certainly, Luigi Mangione had some psychopathology living inside of him—can then use those narratives as an intellectual rationalization. He’s a smart person. He was seeking some rationale for what is likely a complex mix of ideological and personal reasons why he wanted to commit this crime.
What’s the big problem with this is obviously the murder. You should not murder people for no reason on the streets of Manhattan. This is obvious, although not as obvious as it should be. Some people are really struggling with that. But the second problem, and the deeper problem, is that it reveals the extent to which madness and nihilism have been baked into our culture. Someone who is an Ivy League graduate, someone who has a strong family network, someone who has wealth and health and opportunity ahead of him decides to go down this dark path. That’s why there’s a fascination about this case. If it was an unknown, anonymous vagrant who stabbed someone in the street, it’s a blip. But we’ve raised the stakes, because what this shows—and for those of us in the media who share the same kind of educational background as this individual, as both of these individuals—it creates this window that America’s elite is simultaneously failing to restrain the psychopathologies of too many young people, and that the elite ideologies—both the elite ideologies that are more conventional and the elite ideologies that are even more radical—offer no path of constructive action. In fact, they are preying on people who, for their own reasons, are feeling a sense of rage, a sense of destructiveness, a sense of passion. It gives them the keys and the language to act on that in highly symbolic ways, but nonetheless extremely destructive ways.
And how: Shock poll: 41 percent of young voters find killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO acceptable.