Luigi Mangione 🪶 Understanding His Popularity

Gearóid Ó Loingsigh ☭ writing in Substack on 10-December-2024.

Luigi Mangione’s killing of Brian Thompson has resulted in a plethora of memes on Facebook celebrating to some degree the demise of the unlamented CEO. Some of them are very funny, full of wit, others express outrage at the nature of the US health system and others openly call for more such killings and Facebook has not suppressed them, which says a lot. Facebook is run and owned by a right-wing extremist, Mark Zuckerberg. But he is no idiot and probably hopes to ride out this particular storm, rather than suppress it. But he is mistaken as Mangione has struck a nerve. This is not going away.

Some so-called progressives have also sought to soften the impact of Mangione’s actions. There are of course criticisms from the Left about how such actions don’t solve problems: the CEO is replaced and the machinery rolls on, and these are valid, but there are others who seek to wrest any agency or legitimacy from him. Munya Chawawa the British comedian and rapper released a musical video questioning how he was treated by the Police and saying he would have got different treatment if he were black.[1] Yes, generally the cops are quick to kill blacks, especially those they think have actually killed someone, though they did in fact arrest the black DC Snipers (also known as the Beltway Snipers) who had murdered ten innocent civilians.[2] In fact, it is not that US cops don’t kill whites, they do, it is just that not at the same rate as blacks. Half of those killed by US cops are white, but blacks are killed at more than double the rate of whites despite making up only 14% of the population.[3] And yes, he is handsome and it helps, and again the memes have gone into overdrive. His arrest and mugshots have been compared to even scenes from one of the innumerable Superman films. Though I prefer the Che Guevara comparison. He is no Che, as Che set out to overthrow a state and had a programme for change and is the main person behind the remarkable success story that still is, despite everything, the Cuban health system, but the striking mugshot images do help.

Mugshot of Luigi Mangion

Che Guevara mugshot in Mexican jail

However, Chawawa missed the point altogether and questioning police violence is not something you would automatically associate him with. But the idea that the cops act with benevolence towards those who shoot CEOs if they are white is nothing short of identitarian rubbish. He is not the only one though. There are many others from all sorts of liberal backgrounds who recoil in horror that someone might lash out, but shrug their shoulders every day when people die having been refused medical care. Most people in the US have understood and identify with Mangione’s actions, not out of some idea that he might change the system, but out of their own frustration at how the system works. The plethora of memes on Facebook bears testament to this fact. The killing of the CEO is extremely popular regardless of how effective a strategy it is.

Another comedian, this time from the US Josh Johnson, understood something that many liberals and chic rappers like Chawawa could not is that Mangione struck a chord. Though Johnson unlike Chawawa is from the US and understands the US healthcare system. He mentioned the fact that many CEOs are eliminating their Linkedin accounts and that the media went into overdrive on how devastating it all was.

I’m not gonna lie, this is how you can tell the news is owned by billionaires because the news was like, uh, ‘this devastating, terrifying, harrowing attack in New York’, and I’m not saying… look a murder did take place… I’m not saying it couldn’t have been listed as those things, I’m just saying ‘you’re the news!’ You play horrific stuff all the time. You’re the same news that when those pagers were going off in the Middle East, exploding, you were like ‘check this out!’[4]

The same media pundits who were horrified, express no such horror as Israel carries out its genocide, they don’t even question it and yet we are expected to take their statements on Thompson and the sanctity of life at face value. Johnson then made a point about the system and how it didn’t care about anything other than money, not even about Brian Thompson. The meeting Brian Thompson was going to when he was shot went ahead as planned, and on time. Capitalism doesn’t miss a heartbeat when there is money at stake. All the fake outpouring of grief from the corporate world and the media is to be measured against that fact. Nothing stopped their ruthless pursuit of profit, not even the killing of one of their own.

It has brought to mind the film John Q starring Denzel Washington. It is a bit late to review a film some 22 years after its release, but it is more relevant now than when it was released. The film deals with the father of a child who is taken to hospital only to find that the surgeons can’t operate on him as his insurance doesn’t cover what is needed. It also turns out that the child’s condition could have been detected earlier, but the US health system missed it. Never was the film John Q so relevant. In his manifesto, he could just have said, Do you want to know why? Watch John Q. That would have been enough.

Films don’t exist in a void. When you see lots of films where the government is corrupt, or the CIA and FBI is in cahoots with big business, it indicates that a lot of people accept the basic premise of the film. The same goes for dramas like John Q which was the highest grossing film for the President’s Day weekend release and took a total of US $71 million in the US and US $ 102.2 million world-wide. Though it was not based on the real incident, in Canada, (not the US) where Henry Masuka took the ER staff hostage in 1999 demanding immediate treatment for his son and was later killed by the cops when he exited from the hospital, carrying an unloaded pellet gun.

In the film most of the public are sympathetic to John Q as are most sympathetic to Luigi Mangione in real life. The difference of course is that John Q managed to force them to operate on his son, making one small change at an individual level. Mangione has made no changes at all, but he has reignited a debate on the issue and once again put not only the nature of the health system in the spotlight, but also the police and judicial system with various social media posts pointing out the huge effort put into finding him as opposed to arresting the billionaires who raped underage girls on Epstein’s island.

One of capitalism’s greatest successes in the late 20th and early 21st century is not how high the Dow Jones Index is at, or any of the other roulette tables known as stock exchanges, but rather that it has destroyed many collective organisations, coopted others or through social partnership brought on board to one degree or another all the potential opposition movements and organisations. Trade unions frequently fall into all three categories, social and environmental movements also and of course the huge deluge of NGOs that abound in all areas of social and economic life. The organisations Luigi Mangione type figure would have turned to decades ago are now part of the problem, implementing government policy, refusing to challenge the state as their salaries depend on government largesse and patronage and making sure their “clients” i.e. the poor, don’t step outside of the structures.

So, it is no surprise that Mangione would lash out the way he did, nor is it a surprise that he is so popular. The success of capitalism in convincing people there is no possibility of organised opposition is such that individual acts go viral. Those liberals who wail against his actions are the same ones who make sure there is no collective response. What is needed is not so much more killings but more people with Mangione’s resolve organising to brush not only the Thompsons of the world aside but also the coopted organisations paid to keep them in check. It is as Leon Trotsky once said:

Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely. But one must know the limitations of force; one must know when to blend force with a manoeuvre, a blow with an agreement.[5]

More relevant to Mangione is the killing of a Nazi diplomat in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan,[6] whose actions were used by the Nazis as a pretext for Kristallnacht Trotsky commented:

A single isolated hero cannot replace the masses. But we understand only too clearly the inevitability of such convulsive acts of despair and vengeance. All our emotions, all our sympathies are with the self-sacrificing avengers…[7]

So let us wish Mangione well in his trial.

References

[1] See.

[2] Washington Post (01/10/2022) D.C. sniper attacks: A timeline of the violence and victims

[3] Washington Post (18/12/2024) Police shootings database 2015-2024

[4] See

[5] Leon Trotsky (1932) What Next? Part III.

[6] Jacobin (09/11/2021) The Boy Who Shot a Nazi: An Interview with Joseph Matthews.

[7] Leon Trotsky (1939) For Grynszpan.

⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.