December 11, 2024 • 20 mins
Robert traces the online history of alleged CEO shooter Luigi Mangione and arrives at a simple conclusion for why he did what he did.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. Hi everyone, It's me James, and I'm coming
at you today with one of these little requests that
I make sometimes when there's something that we would like
you to do, when it's very important to do. So
today I want to talk to you about Syria, and
specifically North East Syria. So with the world's eyes fixed
on Syria, many are rightly celebrating as a brutal dictatorship
(00:22):
of Basha a Lasad comes to an end. But for
Kurdish and other minority communities, recent days have bought violent attacks,
ethnic cleansing and occupation by Turkis back to Jahadis groups
in an attempt to take advantage of the chaos by
crushing the Rajava Revolution. Turkey and its mercenaries are openly
committing war crimes against the region's autonomous communities. Many thousands
(00:42):
have already been forced to be displaced and thousands more
are in danger. To make matters worth this remains largely
absent from the mainstream media reporting on Syria. If you'd
like to share your solidarity with the people of northern
and Eastern Syria, please call on Congress to take urgent
action by passing the Emergency Legislation to stop the final
hold Turkey accountable and commit US support to the Syrian
(01:04):
democratic forces and the diverse communities under their protection. If
you want to take action today, you can go to
Defendrojaba dot org. That's d E F E N d
R oja VA dot org. If you are able to
the most effective action we can take right now is
to call a couple of representatives. One representative and one senator.
(01:24):
Representative would be Gregory Meeks. He's from New York. He's
a Democrat. He is a ranking member of the House
Foreign Affairs Committee. His phone number is two zero two
two two five three four six one. The other one
will be Senator James Rish He's an Idaho Republican. He
is a ranking member's Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His phone
number would be two zero two two two four two
(01:46):
seven five two. If you'd like to have some talking points,
you can find those on Defendrojaba dot org. If you'd
like to donate financially instead, especially to this humanitarian aid
effort for the tens of thousands of people who have
been displaced by the SNA's advances, you can donate to
two organizations that I would suggest to. First, we be
(02:07):
Heavier store the Kurtis Red Crescent. That's h E Yva
s O r dot com and you want to go
slash e n If you want to see their website
in English, you can donate there. The other one will
be the free Burmer Rangers who are currently working in Raka.
I was talking to my friend Abat who works with them.
You can donate to them at www dot free fr
(02:30):
e E Burma b U r m A rangers dot com.
We will put all of this in the show notes
al the URL so if you're driving you don't have
to write them down. Those are the concrete ways that
we can help right now and what is unfolding as
a very terrible situation in nor Syria. Thanks, I hope
you enjoyed the episode.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Hey everyone, Robert Evans here and this is it could
happen here obviously. One of the things that's been happening here,
probably the biggest story of the last week or so
at least, is the shooting of United health Care CEO
Brian Thompson by an alleged shooter named Luigi Mangione. Meggione
is an interesting character. People have had a lot to
(03:10):
say about him and so I went through his online footprint,
everything I can find on his social media, and I
wrote an article for my substack Shatter Zone, and I'm
going to be reading that in a slightly amended form
for you now as today's episode. I've spent much of
the last ten years reading manifestos and being a fly
on the wall in different little online bolt holes where
(03:32):
extremists plan and seek to incite mass shootings. When Luigi Mangione,
the suspected shooter of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was
arrested at a McDonald's, it didn't take long for digital
sleuths to put together a comprehensive record of his online activity.
I will tell you now that nothing he read or
posted explains why he gunned down an insurance executive better
(03:52):
than this single image in the background of his Twitter
profile and the images, of course, of an X ray
showing four screws in someone's lower base spine, apparently due
to a lumbar spinal fusion surgery. The day after I
wrote this article, The New York Times published a piece
after finding Luigi's read it. The piece by Mike Baker,
Mike Isaac, and my old boss at bellancat Eric Tohler
(04:16):
confirms that he had a spinal fusion surgery that he
had dealt with back pain for years, which had been
minor and then gotten much worse after a surfing injury,
and had grown even worse after slipping on a piece
of paper caused persistent problems, including pain when he sat down,
twitching leg muscles, and numbness in his growing in bladder.
According to The New York Times, he had that spinal
(04:37):
fusion surgery, which he had been deeply frightened of ahead
of time, but which resolved those symptoms, and then he
continued to have other symptoms, probably unrelated to the back pain.
It's unclear if the back pain came back, but what
is clear is that he wrote constantly online about pain
and about his struggles with various other health issues, including
a persistent brain fog that he seemed unable to get
(05:00):
care for. His friend r J, who lived with him
at an intentional community for digital workers in Honolulu starting
in twenty twenty two, confirms that Luigi suffered an injury
shortly after taking a basic surfing class after moving there.
This laid him up in bed for about a week,
unable to move his friends had to seek the special
bed to help him with the pain. In general, we
(05:21):
have ample confirmation that he was someone who dealt with
a series of escalating health issues that changed him from
an extremely active, physically fit young man into somebody who
felt like they were no longer able to do or
enjoy the things they had previously been able to do
and enjoy. Now this is most of what we know
about the health history of Luigi Maggione as of December tenth.
(05:43):
Now when I record this twenty twenty four. As I
write this, a purported manifesto is making the rounds online
which discusses health issues his mother faced. It's still unclear
if that manifesto is real. kN Klippenstein has finally gotten
access to what he claims is the draft of the
manifesto that the shooter had on him when he was
(06:04):
arrested by the police. I don't know if that's a
manifesto or something he wrote while nervous, because he largely
addresses the cops in it and tells them you know
what to expect when searching him. But again, at the moment,
this purported manifesto that was also posted on substack very unclear.
As to whether or not that's real. So for this today,
we're going to stick with what we can verify, and
(06:26):
what we can verify is that Luigi Mangione suffered from
chronic back pain. He had five different books in his
Goodreads that he read about dealing with back pain and
healing from back pain, as well as other chronic health issues.
If he is the shooter, then we can confirm he
also chose to act out by targeting an insurance ceo.
The New York Times has stated that he was arrested
(06:48):
with a two hundred and sixty two word manifesto which
has since been leaked, and in that manifesto, he describes
the executives who run insurance companies as parasites who quote
continue to abuse our country for a mince profit because
the American public has allowed them to get away with it.
In addition to all this, we know that Luigi came
from a wealthy family. His grandfather made millions running a
(07:09):
series of country clubs, nursing homes and office buildings and hospitals.
One of his cousins is a Republican state legislator. It
is unclear if Luigi had any access to the family
money but he was clearly financially comfortable enough to move
to Hawaii and pay to join an intentional community. He
had engineering degrees and a promising early employment history. This
is a man who had options. He could have been
(07:30):
almost anything he wanted to be, and the thing that
he ultimately chose to do with his life, after suffering
a debilitating series of health issues, was to shoot the
CEO of United Healthcare. Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain.
(07:56):
It's a well known fact that most terrorists tend to
be radicalized in communities. Much of my career was spent
watching eight chan turn from an imageboard dedicated into gamer
gate into a machine for generating white nationalists mass shooters.
These people often appeared as lone wolves to the untrained eye,
but they were radicalized intentionally, in and by a community.
(08:17):
Much will be made in the coming days and months
about Luigi's online footprints. I will go into some detail
about where he spent his time and how we should
characterize it, but I want to be clear at the
outset that his intellectual diet does not seem to be
what made him choose to take action, although it may
have influenced the specific kind of.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Action he took. Luigi followed a lot of accounts on
Twitter that are wildly popular with young men, like Joe Rogan.
He listened to Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson and agreed
with them on certain things, but he also had cogent
criticisms of their arguments and presentation. Here's what he said
about Jordan Peterson on May fourteenth. This is why Jordan
Peterson always bothers me. Overcomplicates everything he says aloud, wasting
(08:57):
everyone's mental bandwidth and having to decipher its. Teachers are
the best communicators, clear, succinct, simple language, which does kind
of gel with the fact that he wrote three words
on the bullets he used to shoot that CEO. Luigi
also expressed frustration with wokeness and expressed opinions common on
the libertarian tech influenced right, like a belief in the
(09:19):
social benefits of Christianity, without expressing popular religious beliefs himself.
I've found one post where he talks about how nature
of wares a vacuum and shares an article about how
Christianity's decline has unleashed terrible new gods. Some of his
posts took the form of memes typical to online discourse
of this type. But I've also read an essay that
(09:39):
he wrote when he was fifteen years old discussing how
Christianity persevered over Paganism in ancient Rome, and that essay
exhibits a long standing interest in this topic and a
capacity to treat it with nuance. His paper is very
well written, particularly for a fifteen year old, and while
his conclusions are highly arguable, it's not the work of
someone hopelessly brings washed by culture war bullshit. Luigi liked
(10:03):
to think and read and come to his own conclusions.
He was interested in AI, in cryptocurrency, in life extension,
and in a constellation of tech bro adjacent attitudes and
philosophies often described as the Gray Tribe. I found one
post where he talks about a senior speech he gave
on the Future quote topics ranging from conscious artificial intelligence
(10:24):
to human immortality. The term gray tribe was coined by
an influential rationalist blogger and psychiatrist named Scott Alexander Siskin.
He used it to refer to an intersection of nerd
culture with Silicon Valley influenced ideology descending from the online
rationalist movement. This community existed outside of traditional right left ideology.
(10:45):
Now I've not found any evidence that Luigi was a
specific fan of Scott, but he expressed appreciation for several
figures associated with this big Tent movement, including Peter Teel.
If we described Scott as representing the more liberal flank
of the Gray Tribe, Luigi seemed to be drawn to
folks closer to the right wing side of things. The
worst person to use this terminology would probably be Teel
(11:06):
associate Bilaji Shrinivasan, who has used Gray Tribe framework to
describe his ideal big tech takeover of San Francisco and
purging of progressives. However, I must stress that Luigi Mangione
never expressed any support for this end of the ideology
that I can find. He was a young man of
libertarian inclinations who worked in big tech and had ties
(11:27):
to San Francisco, but he was also clearly someone still
making his mind up about the world. As information about
him has come out, I have seen people on the
left who initially saw his axis heroic lament that he
was a bigoted tech bro. Scott Alexander has been credibly
described as a eugenic supporter, as have many other people
adjacent to the strains of rationalism and big tech ideology
(11:48):
in which Mangione dabbled. Luigi's Twitter account does indeed include
weird posts from his time in Japan, where he theorizes
on how to solve falling birth rates by panning pocket
pussies and video game cafe. At other points, he complains
about Japanese citizens acting like quote unquote NPC's but race
science and eugenics don't seem to have been a focus
(12:09):
for him, and I would caution anyone against being overly
reductive about a twenty six year old beliefs based purely
on a handful of posts that bear no relation to
his actions in the world. The evidence that we have
of his online footprints suggests someone who was not unmoved
by certain arguments rooted in social justice. He expressed admiration
for a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's slaughter House five about
(12:30):
criminalization of poverty in the United States. Quote America is
the wealthiest nation in the world, but its people are
mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.
To quote the American humorist Ken Hubbard, it ain't no
disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.
It is, in fact a crime for an American to
be poor. Even though America is a nation of the poor,
(12:50):
every other nation has folk traditions of men who were
poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more esteemable
than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are
told by the American poor. Meluigi is certainly not the
idealized leftist icons some had hoped, but he doesn't easily
fit into any other box We've got. His interest in
gray tribe adjacent thinkers and self help books written by
(13:12):
productivity hackers like Tim Ferriss is incredibly common among young men.
Much has been made of the four st hour review.
He gave industrial Society and its Future the manifesto of
Ted Kazinski, But as with the rest of his media diet,
he did not view Ted through the simple lens of
hero worship. Here's what he wrote quote he was a
violent individual, rightfully imprisoned, who maimed innocent people. While these
(13:36):
actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luttite, however,
they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme
political revolutionary. Now we know those words. His condemnation of
Kazinsky maiming innocent people are not just words, because we
have seen the attack he allegedly chose to carry out.
Not a series of bombings that killed and maimed innocent
people with no real power in our society, but a
(13:58):
surgical strike against a man that the very top of
the system he hated, and one that caused no collateral damage.
He was capable of appreciating some of Kazinsky's conclusions, but
ultimately the quote he chose to highlight in his review
came not from the manifesto, but from a Reddit post
made by a guy with the user name boss Potatoess,
who otherwise mostly commented on the grateful dead. This post
(14:20):
praises Kazinski for having the balls to realize that peaceful
protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere, and complains economic protest
isn't possible in the current system. As a result, violence
against those who lead us to such destruction is justified
as self defense. Quote. These companies don't care about you,
or your kids or your grandkids. They have zero qualms
(14:40):
about burning down the planet for a buck, so why
should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive.
This is not the kind of radicalization pathway our media
is good at discussing or analyzing. The things Luigi read
and the people he interacted with online absolutely influenced what
he did and how. But Boss Potatoess is not some
nazi on aib Chan trying to provoke a shooting spree
(15:01):
for the lulls. He's a random dude angry about the
things seventy percent or more of the country is angry about,
and he's expressing a lack of faith in a peaceful
way forward. If you read this post in its entirety
as Luigi did, you can't miss the pain there, anxiety
and horror at the inevitability of climate change and the
looming knowledge that everything good and green on this earth
is being fed into the bloody maw of an industry
(15:24):
concerned only with maximizing profit. In more ways than one,
Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. I know many people
who suffer with chronic pain and ongoing medical issues. I
(15:46):
will tell you that it is not uncommon in dark moments,
after fruitless, hours long calls about dropped medications or receiving
surprise bills for them to joke about what they'd like
to do to the executives who run these companies. These
are jokes made in moments of despair and pain. No
one I know would ever act on them, because they
all have lives people to care for into whom they
(16:07):
are responsible. They would never really do anything because the
consequences to their own loved ones would be so severe.
In the months before the shooting, Luigi had cut off
all contact with his family. He admitted this in court.
His parents eventually filed a missing's persons report in November
of this year, and we have evidence that friends tried
to contact him on his family's behalf via social media.
(16:30):
As was first noted by a Twitter account, Luigi Mangione
expressed interest in the works of Paul Scalis, a tech lawyer, writer,
and prominent poster who writes about the Lindie effect, a
concept that boils down to this the only effective judge
of things is time. Scalus is popular among the set
of people Mangione found himself drawn towards, and writes about
(16:50):
the wisdom of ideas from antiquity. It's not hard to
grasp what a man with an academic interest in ancient
Rome might see in him. On December fourth, twenty twenty four,
Paul made this post. Look, if you don't have any
kids and you one of these guys just floating around
the big cities. You got your education, but you never
really used it to make money. You got a dead
end back office job and a future of just working
(17:12):
somewhere until you're seventy five and then dying. Go ahead
and do something. It's been suggested that this may have
influenced Luigi, and I think the timeline makes it clear
that cannot be the case. Luigia cut off contact with
his family in most of his friends months before this.
The evidence suggests that he had planned this attack for
quite some time. He arrived in New York City on
(17:32):
November twenty fourth, on a bus bound from Atlanta, where
he did not reside. So I don't think this post
represents a piece of his radicalization journey. Nor was Scallus
advocating for people to kill CEOs. But the situation in
mindset Scallus described does speak to a lot of young
men like Luigi, young and educated, but without intense responsibilities
or much hope for the future. This subset of society
(17:55):
has always overproduced terrorists, revolutionaries, and of course mass shooters.
The United States has a mass shooter culture over the
last several decades since Columbine, we have grown used to
the idea that people who are angry and no longer
care if they live or die will sometimes choose to
go down killing strangers. In most cases, these shootings are
(18:16):
totally random, the victims chosen with no concern beyond maximum
body count and maximum attention. More recently, especially since twenty nineteen,
mass shootings have become increasingly politicized. Different extremists, mostly right wing,
have used them to put theory into praxis and earned
free pr for their causes. Most people abhor these actions,
(18:37):
but we have grown used to the idea that other
people will use such acts as a way to spread
messages that might otherwise get ignored. It is not coincidental
that the white genocide conspiracy theories from Brenton Terence christ
Church Manifesto are now mainstream talking points and conservative politics.
Luigim Mangione grew up with all of this. He would
have come to the same conclusions about the roles shootings
(18:59):
play in our society as any other reasonably aware person.
What he did, was, of course, not a mass shooting,
but the assassination, his actions afterwards, and his possession of
a manifesto were all clearly plotted out by someone who
knew the social script for how this kind of thing
goes in the USA. In the wake of this shooting,
every media organization commenting on it has had to grapple
(19:21):
with the waves of public enthusiasm for Luigi's actions. Right
wing media figures condemning the left for celebrating this assassination
have been criticized by their own readers and listeners. Insurance
companies have pulled down lists of their executives from the Internet.
This is because they too, understand the shooter culture of
the United States. Like everyone else, they know that any
mass shooting that meets with massive media coverage and interest
(19:44):
will spawn copycats. The assassination Luigi is believed to have
carried out was new and exciting. It demanded the public's
attention in a way that most mass shootings don't. At
almost the same time, the United Healthcare CEO was gunned down,
a gunman walked into a Relie school near Oraville, California,
and shot two young children before killing himself. This shooting
(20:05):
drew almost no national attention. It was entirely drowned out
by the execution of an insurance industry CEO. The armed
and disaffected young men who are most drawn to this
sort of thing will not miss this fact. I believe
Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. The shooters who follow
him will all have their own reasons for what they do,
for their own journeys to that violent end, but ultimately
(20:28):
they'll do what they do because Luigi proved. It's what
gets attention.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
For now, It Could Happen Here is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website poolzonmedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could
Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Thanks for listening.
Also media. Hi everyone, It's me James, and I'm coming
at you today with one of these little requests that
I make sometimes when there's something that we would like
you to do, when it's very important to do. So
today I want to talk to you about Syria, and
specifically North East Syria. So with the world's eyes fixed
on Syria, many are rightly celebrating as a brutal dictatorship
(00:22):
of Basha a Lasad comes to an end. But for
Kurdish and other minority communities, recent days have bought violent attacks,
ethnic cleansing and occupation by Turkis back to Jahadis groups
in an attempt to take advantage of the chaos by
crushing the Rajava Revolution. Turkey and its mercenaries are openly
committing war crimes against the region's autonomous communities. Many thousands
(00:42):
have already been forced to be displaced and thousands more
are in danger. To make matters worth this remains largely
absent from the mainstream media reporting on Syria. If you'd
like to share your solidarity with the people of northern
and Eastern Syria, please call on Congress to take urgent
action by passing the Emergency Legislation to stop the final
hold Turkey accountable and commit US support to the Syrian
(01:04):
democratic forces and the diverse communities under their protection. If
you want to take action today, you can go to
Defendrojaba dot org. That's d E F E N d
R oja VA dot org. If you are able to
the most effective action we can take right now is
to call a couple of representatives. One representative and one senator.
(01:24):
Representative would be Gregory Meeks. He's from New York. He's
a Democrat. He is a ranking member of the House
Foreign Affairs Committee. His phone number is two zero two
two two five three four six one. The other one
will be Senator James Rish He's an Idaho Republican. He
is a ranking member's Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His phone
number would be two zero two two two four two
(01:46):
seven five two. If you'd like to have some talking points,
you can find those on Defendrojaba dot org. If you'd
like to donate financially instead, especially to this humanitarian aid
effort for the tens of thousands of people who have
been displaced by the SNA's advances, you can donate to
two organizations that I would suggest to. First, we be
(02:07):
Heavier store the Kurtis Red Crescent. That's h E Yva
s O r dot com and you want to go
slash e n If you want to see their website
in English, you can donate there. The other one will
be the free Burmer Rangers who are currently working in Raka.
I was talking to my friend Abat who works with them.
You can donate to them at www dot free fr
(02:30):
e E Burma b U r m A rangers dot com.
We will put all of this in the show notes
al the URL so if you're driving you don't have
to write them down. Those are the concrete ways that
we can help right now and what is unfolding as
a very terrible situation in nor Syria. Thanks, I hope
you enjoyed the episode.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Hey everyone, Robert Evans here and this is it could
happen here obviously. One of the things that's been happening here,
probably the biggest story of the last week or so
at least, is the shooting of United health Care CEO
Brian Thompson by an alleged shooter named Luigi Mangione. Meggione
is an interesting character. People have had a lot to
(03:10):
say about him and so I went through his online footprint,
everything I can find on his social media, and I
wrote an article for my substack Shatter Zone, and I'm
going to be reading that in a slightly amended form
for you now as today's episode. I've spent much of
the last ten years reading manifestos and being a fly
on the wall in different little online bolt holes where
(03:32):
extremists plan and seek to incite mass shootings. When Luigi Mangione,
the suspected shooter of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was
arrested at a McDonald's, it didn't take long for digital
sleuths to put together a comprehensive record of his online activity.
I will tell you now that nothing he read or
posted explains why he gunned down an insurance executive better
(03:52):
than this single image in the background of his Twitter
profile and the images, of course, of an X ray
showing four screws in someone's lower base spine, apparently due
to a lumbar spinal fusion surgery. The day after I
wrote this article, The New York Times published a piece
after finding Luigi's read it. The piece by Mike Baker,
Mike Isaac, and my old boss at bellancat Eric Tohler
(04:16):
confirms that he had a spinal fusion surgery that he
had dealt with back pain for years, which had been
minor and then gotten much worse after a surfing injury,
and had grown even worse after slipping on a piece
of paper caused persistent problems, including pain when he sat down,
twitching leg muscles, and numbness in his growing in bladder.
According to The New York Times, he had that spinal
(04:37):
fusion surgery, which he had been deeply frightened of ahead
of time, but which resolved those symptoms, and then he
continued to have other symptoms, probably unrelated to the back pain.
It's unclear if the back pain came back, but what
is clear is that he wrote constantly online about pain
and about his struggles with various other health issues, including
a persistent brain fog that he seemed unable to get
(05:00):
care for. His friend r J, who lived with him
at an intentional community for digital workers in Honolulu starting
in twenty twenty two, confirms that Luigi suffered an injury
shortly after taking a basic surfing class after moving there.
This laid him up in bed for about a week,
unable to move his friends had to seek the special
bed to help him with the pain. In general, we
(05:21):
have ample confirmation that he was someone who dealt with
a series of escalating health issues that changed him from
an extremely active, physically fit young man into somebody who
felt like they were no longer able to do or
enjoy the things they had previously been able to do
and enjoy. Now this is most of what we know
about the health history of Luigi Maggione as of December tenth.
(05:43):
Now when I record this twenty twenty four. As I
write this, a purported manifesto is making the rounds online
which discusses health issues his mother faced. It's still unclear
if that manifesto is real. kN Klippenstein has finally gotten
access to what he claims is the draft of the
manifesto that the shooter had on him when he was
(06:04):
arrested by the police. I don't know if that's a
manifesto or something he wrote while nervous, because he largely
addresses the cops in it and tells them you know
what to expect when searching him. But again, at the moment,
this purported manifesto that was also posted on substack very unclear.
As to whether or not that's real. So for this today,
we're going to stick with what we can verify, and
(06:26):
what we can verify is that Luigi Mangione suffered from
chronic back pain. He had five different books in his
Goodreads that he read about dealing with back pain and
healing from back pain, as well as other chronic health issues.
If he is the shooter, then we can confirm he
also chose to act out by targeting an insurance ceo.
The New York Times has stated that he was arrested
(06:48):
with a two hundred and sixty two word manifesto which
has since been leaked, and in that manifesto, he describes
the executives who run insurance companies as parasites who quote
continue to abuse our country for a mince profit because
the American public has allowed them to get away with it.
In addition to all this, we know that Luigi came
from a wealthy family. His grandfather made millions running a
(07:09):
series of country clubs, nursing homes and office buildings and hospitals.
One of his cousins is a Republican state legislator. It
is unclear if Luigi had any access to the family
money but he was clearly financially comfortable enough to move
to Hawaii and pay to join an intentional community. He
had engineering degrees and a promising early employment history. This
is a man who had options. He could have been
(07:30):
almost anything he wanted to be, and the thing that
he ultimately chose to do with his life, after suffering
a debilitating series of health issues, was to shoot the
CEO of United Healthcare. Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain.
(07:56):
It's a well known fact that most terrorists tend to
be radicalized in communities. Much of my career was spent
watching eight chan turn from an imageboard dedicated into gamer
gate into a machine for generating white nationalists mass shooters.
These people often appeared as lone wolves to the untrained eye,
but they were radicalized intentionally, in and by a community.
(08:17):
Much will be made in the coming days and months
about Luigi's online footprints. I will go into some detail
about where he spent his time and how we should
characterize it, but I want to be clear at the
outset that his intellectual diet does not seem to be
what made him choose to take action, although it may
have influenced the specific kind of.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Action he took. Luigi followed a lot of accounts on
Twitter that are wildly popular with young men, like Joe Rogan.
He listened to Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson and agreed
with them on certain things, but he also had cogent
criticisms of their arguments and presentation. Here's what he said
about Jordan Peterson on May fourteenth. This is why Jordan
Peterson always bothers me. Overcomplicates everything he says aloud, wasting
(08:57):
everyone's mental bandwidth and having to decipher its. Teachers are
the best communicators, clear, succinct, simple language, which does kind
of gel with the fact that he wrote three words
on the bullets he used to shoot that CEO. Luigi
also expressed frustration with wokeness and expressed opinions common on
the libertarian tech influenced right, like a belief in the
(09:19):
social benefits of Christianity, without expressing popular religious beliefs himself.
I've found one post where he talks about how nature
of wares a vacuum and shares an article about how
Christianity's decline has unleashed terrible new gods. Some of his
posts took the form of memes typical to online discourse
of this type. But I've also read an essay that
(09:39):
he wrote when he was fifteen years old discussing how
Christianity persevered over Paganism in ancient Rome, and that essay
exhibits a long standing interest in this topic and a
capacity to treat it with nuance. His paper is very
well written, particularly for a fifteen year old, and while
his conclusions are highly arguable, it's not the work of
someone hopelessly brings washed by culture war bullshit. Luigi liked
(10:03):
to think and read and come to his own conclusions.
He was interested in AI, in cryptocurrency, in life extension,
and in a constellation of tech bro adjacent attitudes and
philosophies often described as the Gray Tribe. I found one
post where he talks about a senior speech he gave
on the Future quote topics ranging from conscious artificial intelligence
(10:24):
to human immortality. The term gray tribe was coined by
an influential rationalist blogger and psychiatrist named Scott Alexander Siskin.
He used it to refer to an intersection of nerd
culture with Silicon Valley influenced ideology descending from the online
rationalist movement. This community existed outside of traditional right left ideology.
(10:45):
Now I've not found any evidence that Luigi was a
specific fan of Scott, but he expressed appreciation for several
figures associated with this big Tent movement, including Peter Teel.
If we described Scott as representing the more liberal flank
of the Gray Tribe, Luigi seemed to be drawn to
folks closer to the right wing side of things. The
worst person to use this terminology would probably be Teel
(11:06):
associate Bilaji Shrinivasan, who has used Gray Tribe framework to
describe his ideal big tech takeover of San Francisco and
purging of progressives. However, I must stress that Luigi Mangione
never expressed any support for this end of the ideology
that I can find. He was a young man of
libertarian inclinations who worked in big tech and had ties
(11:27):
to San Francisco, but he was also clearly someone still
making his mind up about the world. As information about
him has come out, I have seen people on the
left who initially saw his axis heroic lament that he
was a bigoted tech bro. Scott Alexander has been credibly
described as a eugenic supporter, as have many other people
adjacent to the strains of rationalism and big tech ideology
(11:48):
in which Mangione dabbled. Luigi's Twitter account does indeed include
weird posts from his time in Japan, where he theorizes
on how to solve falling birth rates by panning pocket
pussies and video game cafe. At other points, he complains
about Japanese citizens acting like quote unquote NPC's but race
science and eugenics don't seem to have been a focus
(12:09):
for him, and I would caution anyone against being overly
reductive about a twenty six year old beliefs based purely
on a handful of posts that bear no relation to
his actions in the world. The evidence that we have
of his online footprints suggests someone who was not unmoved
by certain arguments rooted in social justice. He expressed admiration
for a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's slaughter House five about
(12:30):
criminalization of poverty in the United States. Quote America is
the wealthiest nation in the world, but its people are
mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.
To quote the American humorist Ken Hubbard, it ain't no
disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.
It is, in fact a crime for an American to
be poor. Even though America is a nation of the poor,
(12:50):
every other nation has folk traditions of men who were
poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more esteemable
than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are
told by the American poor. Meluigi is certainly not the
idealized leftist icons some had hoped, but he doesn't easily
fit into any other box We've got. His interest in
gray tribe adjacent thinkers and self help books written by
(13:12):
productivity hackers like Tim Ferriss is incredibly common among young men.
Much has been made of the four st hour review.
He gave industrial Society and its Future the manifesto of
Ted Kazinski, But as with the rest of his media diet,
he did not view Ted through the simple lens of
hero worship. Here's what he wrote quote he was a
violent individual, rightfully imprisoned, who maimed innocent people. While these
(13:36):
actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luttite, however,
they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme
political revolutionary. Now we know those words. His condemnation of
Kazinsky maiming innocent people are not just words, because we
have seen the attack he allegedly chose to carry out.
Not a series of bombings that killed and maimed innocent
people with no real power in our society, but a
(13:58):
surgical strike against a man that the very top of
the system he hated, and one that caused no collateral damage.
He was capable of appreciating some of Kazinsky's conclusions, but
ultimately the quote he chose to highlight in his review
came not from the manifesto, but from a Reddit post
made by a guy with the user name boss Potatoess,
who otherwise mostly commented on the grateful dead. This post
(14:20):
praises Kazinski for having the balls to realize that peaceful
protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere, and complains economic protest
isn't possible in the current system. As a result, violence
against those who lead us to such destruction is justified
as self defense. Quote. These companies don't care about you,
or your kids or your grandkids. They have zero qualms
(14:40):
about burning down the planet for a buck, so why
should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive.
This is not the kind of radicalization pathway our media
is good at discussing or analyzing. The things Luigi read
and the people he interacted with online absolutely influenced what
he did and how. But Boss Potatoess is not some
nazi on aib Chan trying to provoke a shooting spree
(15:01):
for the lulls. He's a random dude angry about the
things seventy percent or more of the country is angry about,
and he's expressing a lack of faith in a peaceful
way forward. If you read this post in its entirety
as Luigi did, you can't miss the pain there, anxiety
and horror at the inevitability of climate change and the
looming knowledge that everything good and green on this earth
is being fed into the bloody maw of an industry
(15:24):
concerned only with maximizing profit. In more ways than one,
Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. I know many people
who suffer with chronic pain and ongoing medical issues. I
(15:46):
will tell you that it is not uncommon in dark moments,
after fruitless, hours long calls about dropped medications or receiving
surprise bills for them to joke about what they'd like
to do to the executives who run these companies. These
are jokes made in moments of despair and pain. No
one I know would ever act on them, because they
all have lives people to care for into whom they
(16:07):
are responsible. They would never really do anything because the
consequences to their own loved ones would be so severe.
In the months before the shooting, Luigi had cut off
all contact with his family. He admitted this in court.
His parents eventually filed a missing's persons report in November
of this year, and we have evidence that friends tried
to contact him on his family's behalf via social media.
(16:30):
As was first noted by a Twitter account, Luigi Mangione
expressed interest in the works of Paul Scalis, a tech lawyer, writer,
and prominent poster who writes about the Lindie effect, a
concept that boils down to this the only effective judge
of things is time. Scalus is popular among the set
of people Mangione found himself drawn towards, and writes about
(16:50):
the wisdom of ideas from antiquity. It's not hard to
grasp what a man with an academic interest in ancient
Rome might see in him. On December fourth, twenty twenty four,
Paul made this post. Look, if you don't have any
kids and you one of these guys just floating around
the big cities. You got your education, but you never
really used it to make money. You got a dead
end back office job and a future of just working
(17:12):
somewhere until you're seventy five and then dying. Go ahead
and do something. It's been suggested that this may have
influenced Luigi, and I think the timeline makes it clear
that cannot be the case. Luigia cut off contact with
his family in most of his friends months before this.
The evidence suggests that he had planned this attack for
quite some time. He arrived in New York City on
(17:32):
November twenty fourth, on a bus bound from Atlanta, where
he did not reside. So I don't think this post
represents a piece of his radicalization journey. Nor was Scallus
advocating for people to kill CEOs. But the situation in
mindset Scallus described does speak to a lot of young
men like Luigi, young and educated, but without intense responsibilities
or much hope for the future. This subset of society
(17:55):
has always overproduced terrorists, revolutionaries, and of course mass shooters.
The United States has a mass shooter culture over the
last several decades since Columbine, we have grown used to
the idea that people who are angry and no longer
care if they live or die will sometimes choose to
go down killing strangers. In most cases, these shootings are
(18:16):
totally random, the victims chosen with no concern beyond maximum
body count and maximum attention. More recently, especially since twenty nineteen,
mass shootings have become increasingly politicized. Different extremists, mostly right wing,
have used them to put theory into praxis and earned
free pr for their causes. Most people abhor these actions,
(18:37):
but we have grown used to the idea that other
people will use such acts as a way to spread
messages that might otherwise get ignored. It is not coincidental
that the white genocide conspiracy theories from Brenton Terence christ
Church Manifesto are now mainstream talking points and conservative politics.
Luigim Mangione grew up with all of this. He would
have come to the same conclusions about the roles shootings
(18:59):
play in our society as any other reasonably aware person.
What he did, was, of course, not a mass shooting,
but the assassination, his actions afterwards, and his possession of
a manifesto were all clearly plotted out by someone who
knew the social script for how this kind of thing
goes in the USA. In the wake of this shooting,
every media organization commenting on it has had to grapple
(19:21):
with the waves of public enthusiasm for Luigi's actions. Right
wing media figures condemning the left for celebrating this assassination
have been criticized by their own readers and listeners. Insurance
companies have pulled down lists of their executives from the Internet.
This is because they too, understand the shooter culture of
the United States. Like everyone else, they know that any
mass shooting that meets with massive media coverage and interest
(19:44):
will spawn copycats. The assassination Luigi is believed to have
carried out was new and exciting. It demanded the public's
attention in a way that most mass shootings don't. At
almost the same time, the United Healthcare CEO was gunned down,
a gunman walked into a Relie school near Oraville, California,
and shot two young children before killing himself. This shooting
(20:05):
drew almost no national attention. It was entirely drowned out
by the execution of an insurance industry CEO. The armed
and disaffected young men who are most drawn to this
sort of thing will not miss this fact. I believe
Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. The shooters who follow
him will all have their own reasons for what they do,
for their own journeys to that violent end, but ultimately
(20:28):
they'll do what they do because Luigi proved. It's what
gets attention.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
For now, It Could Happen Here is a production of
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Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
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Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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