Luigi Mangione

After an extremely annoying weekend that involved seeing a stand-up comedy set where this Gen-Z kid performed a whole routine around “screw that guy, he deserved to die,” narrowly beating a team called “More CEO Murders Please” at bar trivia, and witnessing an Instagram yoga chick account called “thisbadasslife” offer safe harbor to the shooter (before we knew his identity) while spreading her legs wide on a terrace, I decided I had to say something. Our compass was broken. It was up to me to correct it. So I took to Facebook and posted, “Anyone making excuses for the UnitedHealthcare CEO assassination in any way is a moral idiot. This is not the way to effect social change. You are a fool and your jokes are not funny. I will cede the rest of my time.

The news that UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Brian Thompson, had been killed sent an immediate shockwave across America, prompting quick assumptions about the assassin’s motive. Early chatter on platforms such as BlueSky speculated that the shooter, who is now suspected to be “tech whiz” and UPenn graduate Luigi Mangione, might be some kind of anti-capitalist folk hero. As details emerged, these hypotheses began to fall apart. Mangione, who was taken into custody Monday, was skeptical of “woke” culture, followed several right-libertarian figures online — and curated a GoodReads list heavy on Silicon Valley self-help, futurism, psychedelics and advice on treating chronic back pain.  The tidy ideological script many anticipated did not materialize.