The end of the Luigi cult
Americans love their killers. Still, Luigi Mangione, who shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson dead in December 2024, may be the most beloved of them all. It took a special sort of fetishist to see something in maniacs like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed for no reason other than their sadistic compulsions. Mangione, though? Nearly every American has been ground down by our country’s healthcare system.
Police had prepared for a mob last Friday, as Mangione appeared in a Manhattan courthouse to plead guilty to federal stalking charges. But by midmorning, the officers outnumbered everyone they’d been sent to contain. The cult of Luigi had not come. Still, the press had, in force: those of us outside were, by my count, about 98 per cent press and 2 per cent Luigi’s admirers. The photographers, finding nothing to shoot, shot one another. A BBC reporter, also at a loss, attempted to interview me.
So who, 19-some months after Thompson’s killing, still keeps the faith? Well, there was Fione, 42, a coordinator in a home care agency. She’d moved to the United States from China, she told me, and had discovered that ‘insurance is, you know, just like a scam.’ Companies like UnitedHealthcare, she told me, ‘charge people for their human right’ – and Thompson, as CEO, had ‘murdered thousands of people using his laptop.’
I asked Fione why she’d come to the courthouse. She hoped Mangione would see that she ‘didn’t forget what you did for the patients.’ She’d cancelled a medical appointment to be there.
By the courthouse steps sat Kristopher Aadahl, 39, a homeless man with a pentagram tattooed on one hand and an ‘A’, for anarchy, on the other. He admired Mangione, he told me, as a man ‘willing to sacrifice his own life to benefit others.’ Today he wore a MAGA hat, but he’d first become politically involved on the other side of the spectrum: with Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign, in 2016. That ‘whole thing was completely railroaded’ by the Democratic National Committee, he said. The powers that be ‘did not allow what the people wanted.’
‘We’ve been emotionally manipulated and mentally manipulated in all sorts of ways,’ he told me. ‘I don’t know, is murder justified?’ America, he said, ‘is supposed to be the land of the free.’ So ‘how are we supposed to break free?’
Then there was Dodge Landesman, a YouTuber. He wore a matching belt, tie and derbies – all bright blue – and had come to determine whether support for Mangione had ‘waned.’ It had, he concluded. ‘There used to be tons of people, people dressed up in inflatable outfits, people dressed up in Luigi costumes.’ But today, ‘that same support is not here.’
Of the murder itself, Landesman said that ‘it’s never OK to take a father away from his children.’ But Thompson had also been ‘an evil figure,’ one ‘responsible for the death of at least hundreds of thousands of people.’ Mangione ‘was avenging lives and trying to save them.’
Moments later, suited men emerged from the courthouse, carrying a lectern. Shortly afterwards, Mangione’s guilty plea of stalking resulting in death was announced. But we knew that, didn’t we? Mangione’s defenders rarely dispute that he gunned down Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, on that Midtown Manhattan sidewalk. Only one person visibly reacted, a shirtless, tattooed man. He threw his hands in the air, grasping at the sun. He moaned in agony: ‘HHRRAAHH! HHRRAAHH!’ Then he approached the press pen, mouthed a few profanities, and stumbled off.
Still, for some members of the crowd, Mangione’s plea stung. One young woman, Mahnoor, felt betrayed by her idol’s decision to plead guilty. ‘I think he should have fought a little more, have, like, a little more trust in the justice system.’
Others believed there had been chicanery in the outcome. ‘Jury nullification was definitely a possibility,’ Ariel Roman, a 26-year-old law student, told me. The justice system, she said, had ‘treated him unfairly.’ Prosecutors ‘withhold exculpatory evidence’ and had ‘been leaking a lot of stuff to the press before they even told his defence counsel.’ He should have gone to trial anyway. ‘It’s worth rolling the dice,’ she said, ‘especially when public opinion is as positive.’ (Some 30 per cent of Americans profess to ‘understand’ Mangione’s motives; consistent majorities, however, neither approve of the killing nor view him favourably.)
As she left the courthouse, I caught Abril Rios, a pro-Mangione influencer and an ex-organiser with ‘Hot Girls for Zohran,’ who had been inside for the proceedings. Rios is one of the three ‘Mangionistas’ – the name of their shared Instagram account – who caused a stir in May when, wearing city-issued press passes, they condoned Thompson’s killing on the steps of another courthouse. The mayor’s office promised afterward that it would review its press-credentialing process. Still, Rios told me that she’d heard nothing more from the Mamdani administration. Her credentials still stand.
‘I don’t think this is a concession or an admission of guilt,’ Rios told me. Mangione’s lawyers, she thought, had simply advised their client to plead guilty so that they could ‘advocate for the double jeopardy clause in the state case.’ (The Fifth Amendment’s double jeopardy clause bars trying a person twice for the same offence; Mangione currently stands accused of murder by the state of New York.)
She defended the killing itself, though – an act her idol had, she said, not truly conceded to committing. ‘Everyone has a family,’ she told me, but ‘it doesn’t mean you should get into an industry where you’re putting profit before people.’ And: ‘when you are getting into those sorts of lines of work, you should consider that some people may be very unhappy about that.’
Such was the scene: the still-faithful celebrating a man for a crime they believe he may not have committed, or else wishing he’d kept up the fight in court. It seemed, that day, that the cult of Luigi had run its course.
It was probably always going to end like this. Yes, Mangione’s admirers shared his loathing of the insurance industry, which Americans hated before Thompson’s killing and hate still. But Mangione was a creature of a political moment.
December 2024, after all, was the season of the ‘vibe shift.’ Donald Trump had become the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004, and, for the first time since he descended the escalator in 2015, had the approval of a majority of Americans. Corporate America, so ostentatious in its commitments to the cause of ‘racial justice’ four years earlier, was now reconciling itself with the right. For much of the political left, Mangione had, if nothing else, identified a solution to that condition: you could just kill the bastards.
But as the New York Times’s Ezra Klein declared last December, ‘the Trump vibe shift is dead.’ Trump’s approval rating has tumbled to the mid-thirties. This November, the Democratic party appears likely to win the House, if not the Senate. Rios, for her part, told me that the ‘Mangionista’ movement had been set in motion by the sense that ‘protesting and voting isn’t working.’ But democratic socialists have romped through Democratic primaries, and are angling to seize the party itself. Elections don’t seem so ineffective after all.
For many on the left, killing the bastards no longer seems necessary. The returns, in any case, are poor. Roman told me she’d bought a UnitedHealthcare plan after Mangione put two bullets in Thompson. ‘It’s still shitty,’ she said. ‘So it didn’t really accomplish what he wanted it to.’
What’s next for the Mangionista movement? ‘I want us to continue to have these conversations to question why oligarchs are stealing away our futures,’ Rios told me. And ‘this wave of DSA has kind of started forming.’ I asked whether she would back AOC for president. ‘We’ll have to see,’ she told me. ‘I think she’s fantastic.’
https://spectator.com/article/the-end-of-the-luigi-mangione-cult/
