Something is brewing!!!!!!!!!!!!!
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69908890/143/united-states-
Joel is big mad and tells the judge to put all his media-access regulations on the record so the defense won't weaponize this issue on appeal. He is terrified that the Luigi fans will secretly sneak in electronic devices and record the trial and harass witnesses. He wants only audio recordings. I think he is paranoid, but I can see some of the crazies doing it (looking at you, Jules!). How will the judge rule, guys? You know who will be furious about this letter? Inner City Press. I hope he fights with Joel tomorrow. A girl can dream.
After Luigi Mangione was arrested in December 2024 in connection with the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the internet did what it often does: It turned something serious into a joke.
Although Mangione has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder in New York and to federal stalking charges, viral memes at the time romanticized him as a popular – and incredibly attractive – man of the people who made corporate elites within the American health insurance industry afraid.
Some of these memes adhered to conventional forms of political satire. One, for example, quoted a speech from the movie “A Bug’s Life,” in which a villainous grasshopper argues for the need to punish the movie’s ant protagonist to keep the other ants in line. In this meme, the political point was clear: Elites preserve power by making examples of insignificant ants who dare to challenge them.
The point was less clear with other memes, including celebrations of Mangione’s fashion-forward shackled ankles in court and mock Burger King advertisements referencing the fact that a McDonald’s employee had been the one to call law enforcement on him: “Burger King: We won’t turn you in to the Feds.” Rather than being ironic, they are unserious.
Nonetheless, memes like those received serious reactions from social commentators and political pundits who interpreted them as evidence that America’s young adults are nihilistic and morally indifferent.
As an experimental psychologist who studies moral judgments about real-world controversies, I have examined these attitudes toward Mangione and the humor surrounding him online.
I believe these reactions are better understood not as a rejection of value but as a refusal to participate in conversations that feel selective and disconnected from young people’s broader economic and political frustrations. In my assessment, Gen Z’s dark and nonsensical humor does not show a lack of moral values, but it’s instead the product of its desire to engage in more authentic conversations about what they believe.
Alienation, not indifference
Research shows deep levels of alienation among Gen Z, or young people born between 1997 and 2012. Having grown up with smartphones and social media, this generation has come of age in an increasingly online world. Despite the internet’s capacity for instantaneous interaction, followers have proved a poor replacement for friends.
Gen Z is among the most socially isolated and psychologically distressed generations on record. Compared with prior generations, fewer friendships and romantic relationships have left many young adults craving connection and solidarity. This alienation is also evident in their skepticism toward institutions and traditional narratives about values.
Many are pessimistic about achieving the American Dream and question the value of higher education. What was once considered the optimal vehicle for living a better life is instead viewed as a barrier.
If the American Dream feels out of reach, and college seems like an expensive obstacle, calls to take them seriously may feel inauthentic, alienating and absurd.
Demonstrators stand outside the Manhattan federal courthouse in New York shortly after Luigi Mangione, the suspected killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, arrived for a hearing in December 2024. AP Photo/Seth Wenig
When seriousness gets suspended
Discussions about values require some seriousness if they are to resonate with their audience.
If, for example, a commencement speaker praising the value of artificial intelligence is met with jeers from graduates – as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was in May 2026 – the speaker’s message is immediately rendered inert.
These students’ jeers fell short of offering an argument against the speaker’s claims; instead, they created an atmosphere that prevented those claims from receiving consideration. For graduates pessimistic about AI’s implications for the labor market, claims professing its value feel inauthentic.
Together, their jeers not only provided an escape from what felt like an alienating and inauthentic message about the value of AI, but they also created a sense of solidarity through a shared suspension of seriousness.
A supporter of Luigi Mangione wears the Nintendo character Luigi’s green hat outside a New York courthouse in February 2025. AP Photo/Stefan Jeremiah
Humor offers an escape
Far from being unique to Mangione, this suspension of seriousness recurs throughout online meme culture.
The OceanGate implosion prompted similar memes, including one depicting a pod of orcas with the caption “The water is safe, send more billionaires.”
Even Charlie Kirk’s assassination became material. In a trend known as “Kirkification,” users superimposed his face onto images ranging from the Mona Lisa to women in bikinis, transforming a grim event into a shared absurdity.
In my assessment, Gen Z’s creation and circulation of memes offers an escape from otherwise serious conversations – for example, conversations about the value of the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s life. This may be especially true when demands to condemn Mangione appear to ignore inequities within an American health insurance system perceived as corrupt and unjust.
Although commentators often dismiss Gen Z’s humor as nonsensical or nihilistic meme slop, scholarship suggests that it acts as a collaborative coping mechanism, driven by a desire for authenticity.
Memes about Mangione, or even campus lookalike contests centered on him, fall short of offering a precise moral argument in favor of largely suspending seriousness.
This style of humor can be seen in Mangione’s alleged decision to leave a backpack containing Monopoly money in Central Park. It was seen, too, on shell casings recovered after Kirk’s killing, which included video game commands, a sexually suggestive internet saying and “if you read this you are gay lmao.”
Miscast explanations of nihilism
With the help of approximately a dozen undergraduate students, I examined the psychological and situational factors associated with Gen Z’s reactions to Mangione and other events – like Kirk’s assassination and the Kamala Harris is “Brat” phenomenon during the 2024 presidential election – in two studies currently under review.
Our findings indicate that favorable attitudes toward Mangione were associated not only with superficial factors, such as his perceived attractiveness, but also with higher levels of political cynicism.
Perceived systemic bias in the American justice system, for example, was addressed in a meme depicting Mangione walking into court with the text “You can kill dozens of kids and get a lesser sentence because their lives don’t matter as much as a CEO’s.” Federal prosecutors were seeking the death penalty against Mangione for a charge a judge dismissed in January 2026.
Casting Gen Z’s reactions as nihilistic obscures the values and institutional distrust connected to them and fails to appreciate their egalitarian and pragmatic ideals. Dismissing them may deepen the alienation that allowed the death of a father of two to become a joke.
Supporters of Luigi Mangione raise signs outside the Manhattan federal courthouse in New York in January 2026. AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura
Why simple moral messages alienate
Although political commentators disagree about how to interpret the response to Mangione, many accept a seemingly basic principle: Killing should never be justified.
Yet decades of research on moral judgment shows that people do not apply that principle consistently. Instead, in certain situations, like in the famous “trolley problem,” people frequently judge killing to be morally permissible – especially when that killing is expected to promote the well-being of others.
Simplistic and sweeping moral injunctions not only fail to appreciate people’s actual moral attitudes, but they also eliminate the possibility of having authentic and nuanced conversations.
Those conversations need not end by endorsing Mangione as a sympathetic figure. However, an open and authentic conversation about Mangione cannot be realized in spaces that require all discussion of the event to be reduced to affirmations that, as has been advocated by some, “Murder is bad. Period.”
Such requirements can make conversations about significant moral issues – even controversial ones, like the morality of Mangione’s alleged actions – little more than demands for conformity. In this case, those boundaries risk ignoring and, thus, further alienating Gen Z.
Gen Z’s humor shows that almost anything can become a joke. I believe the danger of that is not that young people reject values, but that continued alienation may leave them laughing when seriousness is most required.
Activists are promoting a rarely used quirk in America’s legal system that could allow jurors to acquit Luigi Mangione even if they believe he is guilty of murdering the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, The Times can reveal.
Mangione, 28, is accused of shooting Brian Thompson, 50, outside a Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan in December 2024, allegedly as an act of protest against America’s health insurance system. The killing has spawned a pro-Mangione movement that has been harshly criticised by experts.
Now an organisation called the December 4 Legal Committee is at the forefront of a campaign to raise awareness about jury nullification — a pre-Civil War power that means a jury can find a defendant not guilty even if they believe the person broke the law, or if there is evidence against them.
Nullifications are rare but are thought to have been historically used by jurors who believed the law was unjust or the punishment too harsh. It is thought to have occurred during the trials of Vietnam War protesters accused of burning draft cards and in pre-Civil War prosecutions against people who were charged with aiding escaped slaves.
Judges will not explicitly inform jurors of nullification, but they also don’t forbid it. Instead, during the jury selection process, judges ask potential jurors whether they’ll be willing to follow the law, and try to weed out those who might refuse. Unless jurors come forward after the trial, the public may never know if they acquitted a defendant despite being convinced of their guilt.
Speaking to The Times, Jamie Peck, one of two spokespeople for the committee, described jury nullification as “a beautiful feature of our justice system and really one of the only safeguards against tyranny that we have”.
The organisation, whose name is a reference to the day that Mangione allegedly shot Thompson, is run by a group of campaigners who have so far raised more than $1.5 million to fund the suspected killer’s defence.
In the last few months, dozens of donors have written messages on the organisation’s website advocating for jury nullification, which will also feature in a book being released by the committee. The book, Depose: Luigi Mangione, the Right to Health, and the Unfinished American Revolution, is due to be published on September 1, one week before Mangione’s trial begins. He has pleaded not guilty to state and federal charges of murder.
The campaign is not without risk: in the past, activists have been arrested for handing out pamphlets about jury nullification outside courthouses.
The prospect of Mangione being freed by jury nullification has been criticised by legal experts. Kenneth Belkin, a criminal defence attorney in New York, said: “You don’t want prosecutions based on politics. You don’t want juries acting based on politics. You want them pursuing the truth.”
He predicted that it would be difficult to find jurors who don’t have an opinion on the case. “You have a juror pool in New York City that is particularly politically inflamed. It’s a very partisan city, and I think Luigi Mangione has a lot of support in New York City, despite the fact that he’s accused of an egregious murder.
“I think that’s concerning because if you have a large amount of people that are supporting a [suspected] murderer’s political stance in committing a murder, that raises a real possibility that you could get some jurors on that jury that may not convict, no matter what the evidence says.”
Sonali Chakravarti, a professor of government at Wesleyan University, added: “There needs to be a way for a jury to have true freedom to render the outcome that they think is the most just under the circumstances … but taken to an extreme, nullification would completely cause a breakdown of the legal system.”
The December 4 Legal Committee is a disparate group of medical professionals, historians and high school dropouts who have described Mangione as a “hero” in the eyes of many Americans and Thompson’s death as “the most celebrated since Osama bin Laden”.
This case reflects deep divisions over America’s healthcare system. According to a survey weeks after the shooting, 78 per cent of Americans said the individual who committed the killing had “a great deal” of responsibility for Thompson’s death. But 69 per cent believed healthcare coverage denials by insurance companies also carried a “great deal” of responsibility.
In its upcoming book, the committee argues a swell of support for Mangione reflects a hatred of America’s health system. In an excerpt they write: “We don’t know if he [Mangione] did what they say he did, and we’re not here to speculate about how his personal biography may or may not make sense of it all. For us, what matters is millions of people around the world believe he did it — and they love him for it.”
Sam Beard, another spokesperson for the December 4 committee, described the group as “working class folks from around the continental US who have met each other either through social causes that we care about”. Most of its members are anonymous. Beard is a 32-year-old “community organiser” who hosts a “Party Girls podcast” with Peck, where the two discuss “communism and gossip”.
More than 41,000 people from the US and dozens of other countries have donated to a defence fund established by the group. Some donors have contributed as much as $50,000.
Mangione’s trial is due to open on September 8.
Reporter Matthew Lee put in a request to Judge Carro for an overflow room for the state trial on July 18, and he just said that he has still not heard back & confirms there won't be an overflow room for the August 11 hearing either. But he plans to pursue it and says there will be more to say. Does anyone have any ideas what he could mean by that?
ICYMI, that is the same reporter who filed a request during the state suppression hearings last December to have much of the evidence unsealed, and he succeeded.
https://x.com/innercitypress/status/2081783255980707951
edit: The letter link in the header got a bit buried, so reposting: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28496543-for-luigi-mangione-nys-trial-no-overflow-courtroom-so-inner-city-press-letter-to-justice-carro-here/
Sourced from: https://www.nycourts.gov/public-information
