Exiting Luigi’s Mansion

Edited and with a coda by Spencer Ackerman

I'M WRITING IRON MAN FOR MARVEL COMICS! IF YOU PUT IT ON YOUR PULL LIST AT A COMIC STORE (AN ONGOING SUBSCRIPTION WHERE THE STORE RESERVES EACH ISSUE FOR YOU), I'LL SEND YOU FREE STUFF! EMAIL SOME KIND OF RECEIPT TO FOREVERWARS.BULLPEN@GMAIL.COM AND THE SWAG WILL BE YOURS! 

ON THE MORNING of December 4, outside an investor conference at the Hilton Hotel on W. 54th Street in Manhattan, a 26-year-old software developer named Luigi Mangione shot and killed the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson. (For purposes of this piece, every time you see a verb in this paragraph relating to Mangione, insert in your mind the word "allegedly.") Video of the killing and a pre-killing picture of Mangione’s face circulated widely on the internet; over the next five days, every detail about the killing became a miniature sensation. Mangione had written “DENY,” “DEFEND,” and “DEPOSE” on the bullet casings, apparently a reference to  “Delay, Deny, Defend,” the tactical mantra for health insurers seeking to avoid paying out claims to their customers. UnitedHealthcare denies claims at twice the industry average, or about ⅓ of its claimants. 

On Monday afternoon, December 9, Daniel Penny, also 26, was acquitted of the death of Jordan Neely, a schizophrenic man whom Penny choked to death on the subway last May. Neely’s father is suing Penny for Jordan’s death. 

That same morning, police in Altoona, PA arrested Mangione. He had a 3D-printed "ghost gun" assembled from a kit on the internet in his backpack, which police say is the murder weapon. (I don’t equivocate here because Mangione himself didn’t object to the presence of the gun in court, though he did claim police had planted some money on him.)

I VISITED THE SCENE OF THOMPSON'S DEATH a few hours after the murder, just before the annual Christmas Tree-lighting ceremony a block away at Rockefeller Center. 

There was no sign of damage to the wall where security camera footage showed Thompson slumping down after getting shot in the back, not even a stain. In the early winter darkness, there were no uniformed cops, just competing film crews vying for space. Reporters tried not to get in each other’s live segments. One of Midtown’s ubiquitous cop-show film-shoots adjusted its lights across the street. I’m sure we’ll see something produced by Dick Wolf featuring characters legally distinct from Brian Thompson and Luigi Mangione, but with much-needed verisimilitude added by the on-location filming and the musical theater veterans who will play the killer and the victim. It wasn’t so much that everyone had moved on. It was just that the murder had been seamlessly integrated into New York City’s nested stories about itself: At the center there was the dead body; and beyond that, headlines about the dead body; and at the next layer, the crime drama about the dead body ripped from those headlines.

UnitedHealthcare is in the midst of an antitrust investigation related to its planned acquisition of a rival hospice conglomerate. Less than a week before the investigation was announced, Thompson dumped $15 million in stock so that he wouldn’t take the gigantic hit from the investigation’s announcement five days later. The move was so brazen that other investors were in the process of suing Thompson for insider trading when he died. Since 2011, UnitedHealthcare has been the defendant in a different lawsuit brought by the Justice Department over a subsidiary that overbilled Medicare to the tune of "likely billions" of dollars.

Thompson was a prominent figure in Minnesota. Minnesota Democratic politicians Tim Walz and Amy Klobuchar were first out of the gate with condolences. Someone in Minnesota with the name "Brian Thompson" and who listed UnitedHealthcare as his employer donated twenty thousand dollars to various winning political campaigns in 2020, including Mitch McConnell’s and Joe Biden’s. Thompson was promoted to CEO of the company the following year.

As everyone knows by now, Mangione became a folk hero because of who he killed. Popular accounts on Tiktok swooned semi-ironically over the Crimestoppers picture of Mangione’s smiling face; somebody draped a professionally printed banner reading DENY DEFEND DEPOSE from an overpass on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago; somebody else started calling him The Claims Adjuster, which stuck until his real name became too irresistible for meme purposes. Yesterday someone hacked road signs in Seattle to read “ONE LESS CEO/ MANY MORE TO GO,” which KUTV reported under the frankly hilarious headline “Seattle road sign's message raises questions after CEO's shooting,” and in a clip that circulated today on social media, Mangione's fellow jailbirds can be heard over a NewsNation reporter's shoulder yelling "Free Luigi!” 

The contrast between Mangione and conservative-celebrity murderers like Penny is striking. For one thing, this time the national media is merely looking on in horror, rather than actively promoting the killer. Donald Trump gave clemency to figures like photogenic killer Eddie Gallagher—like Penny, Gallagher was acquitted of murder by a jury , albeit a military one—who immediately ran to the conservative talk show circuit and participated in an Apple TV documentary about his case. Kyle Rittenhouse, the boy whose mother took him across state lines to kill an antiracist protester in August 2020, helped right-wingers promote their gun ranges and campaigned for Republican politicians after his own expensive acquittal. The former editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal railed against “the left’s terrifying assault on due process.”

There’s something horribly wrong in this country. Most people can feel it. They can feel that we seem to be on the cusp of widespread violence. Conservatives are desperate to brand their own enemies as agents of a corrupt system and manufacture support for violence against them. But the system is hard to disguise. W. E. B. du Bois had it pegged a hundred and forty years ago in Black Reconstruction: “[T]he prevalent American idea [is that] labor could be emancipated from the necessity of continuous toil and that an increasing proportion could join the class of exploiters, that is of those who make their income chiefly by profit derived through the hiring of labor.” Health insurance is a remarkably efficient engine of that exploitation.

Thompson’s murder has been celebrated across a political divide most of us were lamenting as impassible last month. Conservatives are yelling the same things at Ben Shapiro that liberals are yelling at Adrienne LaFrance: that their loved ones are dead because UnitedHealthcare didn’t give them the treatment they needed or the dignity they deserved. It’s particularly clarifying in light of the way some of Donald Trump’s supporters adopted his mug shot as a badge of honor. Of the Trump supporters I talk to, every one is convinced that his various indictments are proof that he opposes a system we all know to be corrupt.

AMERICANS INCREASINGLY despair of any nonviolent solution to our problems because they seem designed to fail. To provide a public alternative to employer-provided health insurance would be to radically change this country’s economy. That is something people with wealth are simply not going to permit. And so we have to be able to do something about it without their permission. 

A lot of people seem to think the solution to society’s ills, in the absence of literally any other workable, immediate alternative, is to just straightforwardly murder people. When a man with an office job is gunned down in the street while minding his own business and an entire nation cheers, this suggests that there are some things fundamentally wrong with that nation, not least with its office jobs. I’m going to call this phenomenon Luigi’s Mansion, after the video game that takes place in a lavishly appointed old house populated by an apparently infinite number of hostile ghosts, in which no room is safe, even though evidence of money is everywhere. Yes, it’s a little labored, but I’m going to do it anyway. [Go off, king. -Spencer]

In general, our leaders and their mouthpieces seem to have three main misapprehensions, all of which seem to be driving us toward violent confrontation. 

The first is that when the very wealthy loot the government of billions of dollars, when they rob their peers in the stock market, when they cheat sick people out of lifesaving medicine and therapy, all they have done is follow the romantic Code of the Tough Businessman. They have cast down the gauntlet before their smelly victims and challenged them to a gentlemanly duel in the courts, which is the only venue available to anyone who wants to answer that challenge. That’s why there’s so much time and energy and, of course, money spent on the composition of the judiciary in this country. It’s where rich people want to fight you. And sometimes it seems like those rich people would be a little less smug and obnoxious if the consequence for all that disrespect was a punch in the mouth instead of a few billable hours for their lawyer.

The second is that the only true enemies of “successful” people are the poor and that every part of society should be configured to defer maximally to the rich and minimally to the poor. But if the justice system is completely suborned so that it can only be used by the wealthy against their inferiors, if every policeman is the devoted creature of the moneyed class, then when there are disputes within that class, they will risk dividing the corrupted judicial and law enforcement systems into competing factions. We’re not there yet and I hope we don’t get there, but if we do, it will not be the rich people fighting each other.

Our elected officials and the people who fund their campaigns don’t seem to believe that the sudden preponderance of dirty and deranged people on the streets and public transit and in tents under overpasses is anything but a plague of irresponsibility. This is the last misapprehension. It is hard for elected officials to talk about such people without insinuating that it is a public service to restrain them, even if they die in the process.

And now suddenly it seems that there are, in fact, venues of dispute outside the courts. One of them turned out to be the sidewalk outside the Hilton Hotel on 54th Street in Manhattan. It is as safe for me as the courthouse was for Brian Thompson, which I think is probably why so many people were so gleeful about the killing. They know they have nothing to fear from Luigi Mangione – something that doesn’t seem to be true of Daniel Penny.

It’s outrageous that the class of people who see themselves as uniquely intelligent, informed, and analytical are just now discovering this. What they seem never to have considered is that a robust regulatory state that enforces laws passed by a representative body is the compromise position. The alternative is that those responsible for such a flagrantly unfair society, whose brutality is as real for us as it is invisible to them, no longer get to move about freely and peacefully for fear of everyday people.

I want to be careful how I say this, because that’s not a society anyone actually wants to live in. Moreover, it's not an escape—it's just another level in the Mansion, another boss fight, when what we want to do is leave. Most of the fighting for resources already goes on between people who already have too little. People who control access to food and medicine and guns will always be able to kill poor people in greater numbers than poor people will be able to kill them. All the poor have going for them is overwhelming strength in numbers, and all that keeps them from exercising it is the belief that they still have something to lose.

SPENCER HERE. I'll just add a few thoughts to Sam's essay. 

First, the deliberate obfuscation by politicians and journalists of Luigi Mangione's motives for killing Brian Thompson—allegedly—puts me in mind of the deliberate obfuscation by politicians and journalists of al-Qaeda's motives for 9/11. I am not comparing the two events, nor am I saying Luigi is Osama. I'm saying instead that in both cases, portraying the killings as unknowable and irrational serves a familiar purpose: to stop people from thinking about why someone would have reason to do such a horrific thing. There is no reason to think structurally about the extreme acts of a crazy person. There is every reason to think structurally about the extreme acts of a rational person. 

Luigi may have (allegedly) committed an extreme act, but as best I can tell, he isn't crazy. Crazy people write sprawling and difficult-to-follow manifestos. The one attributed to Luigi and published by Ken Klippenstein is a tight 262 words. This is the gist:

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 [has] 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 allowed them to get away with it. 

Agree or disagree with this—accept or reject it as a justification for murder—but it's a coherent statement. The economics-speak makes it what you might call hyper-rational: he's employing a certain actuarial voice to turn the tables on those who use such language to keep people sick, suffering and broke. As I was typing this, I got an update from a GoFundMe I contributed to on behalf of someone with cancer. 

Second, when I hear and read accounts describing the Thompson murder as indicative of a civilizational breakdown, all I hear is the hectoring of people who do not consider the health care system in this country to be a civilizational breakdown. UnitedHealthcare and its peers make their money not by providing access to healthcare, but by rationing a resource without which none of us can stay alive. They are a middleman layer that is at best confiscatory, and very often predatory. They take the money they make from that confiscation and invest it in politicians—Walz, Klobuchar, so many others—who ensure that the healthcare system in this country stays as it is and benefits who it does. Luigi Mangione does not threaten you, your aging parents, or your neighbor. Your health insurance provider does—if you're lucky enough to have one. Luigi Mangione does not threaten what passes for democracy in this country. Your health insurance provider does—by bankrolling politicians on a scale that renders your vote a formality. And it isn't only your health insurance provider that does that. 

You can kill people in this country, and in others, with a pen or a keystroke or an AI, and do it at scale. That isn't considered a civilizational breakdown. To borrow a phrase, this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. 

Finally, to elaborate a bit on a point of Sam's, the Thompson killing feels like a moment in which people see each other clearly across culture-war divides and manufactured political tribalism. I suspect Luigi's trial is going to be an event—especially if the prosecutors limit the jury pool to those who haven't been fucked over by the healthcare system, which will mean Luigi will be judged by the wealthiest people in Manhattan who still answer a jury summons. In that case, observers will see the trial, and the justice system, the way Sam describes above, the way that UnitedHealthcare treats health access. Not as a way to mete justice out, but to ration access to it.

Putting Mangione in a little red or blue box based on aspects of his social-media history is just an attempt to stop people from seeing how much they actually have in common. I will judge this man by his trigger fingers and not by his Twitter fingers. I don't know whether and how the class consciousness emerging in the wake of Mangione's (alleged) act of murder will survive, nor what direction it will take. But we well and truly need to stoke and build upon that class consciousness if we're going to be free, safe and, indeed, healthy. 

LAST THING: al-Monitor is reporting that the U.S. has given its Syrian Democratic Forces clients an ultimatum to abandon Manbij. The SDF have reportedly done so. On Monday, they also shot down a U.S. Reaper drone, allegedly because they confused it with a Turkish one. I have my suspicions, if only because a Reaper's wingspan is some 25 feet longer than that of a Bayraktar-2; it's 15 feet longer; and the Kurds are awfully familiar with Turkish drones by now.