Luigi Mangione and the spectre of populist, non-partisan political violence

A shifting paradigm

This is a post about how technological advancement has made it almost impossible to avoid detection and punishment if our elite’s willpower to catch a perpetrator exists, the climate which is going to make higher-level assassinations more common regardless, and how upper elites will respond to that threat.

This is actually a topic I’ve thought about covering for awhile, but it was a lower priority compared to others. I’ve increased it to high priority due to current events.

In the days after the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO I saw a large number of poor takes around the internet, arguing that the UHC CEO assassin would get away with murder. I wrote a Note arguing that he would definitely be caught and caught quickly, which I was sure of even before the image of him de-masked at the hostel he was staying at was released. The poor take argument went more-or-less as follows: the perpetrator covered his face with a mask almost the whole time he was in New York City, he rode a bike (not a public e-bike), he disappeared into central park which lacked cameras, he used a silencer, he wasn’t caught in or around the scene of the crime, most crimes are solved because they had a personal relationship to the victim and here there likely was none, etc. Furthermore, the U.S. has a historically low below 50% homicide clearance rate (i.e.conviction rate), which is pretty crazy all things considered. See here:

Therefore, because of the U.S.’s low clearance rate, the many precautions the attacker had taken and his lack of personal connection with the victim, it was only reasonable, these people argued, to assume he would get away with murder.

Let’s highlight the problems with this argument. Yes, the homicide conviction rate is very low, but that is because most murders are of people that the system doesn’t care about. A large percent of those murders are low income black-on-black violence, and relatively few of those murders result in a conviction:

Here, the victim was a globohomo cog in the machine who made $10 mil+ a year — he was important. Because of that, our elites were certain to spend resources as a high priority to find and track down the killer, especially to disincentivize something like this from happening again. Criminal violence in our system can be applied against the powerless, but never the powerful (unless it’s an intra-elite spat, which this did not seem to be). Additionally, the murder happened in NYC which is one of the most surveilled cities in the world, and all it would take is one wrong move in order to be discovered. Our elites could find him if he had his cell phone on him, they could find him if he left a fingerprint somewhere, they could find him if his silencer was registered (as there would only be a small pool of buyers), they could find him if he de-masked at some point (which he did) or if he used his credit card somewhere. Facial recognition software is quite advanced at this point and they could narrow the list of suspects even if he was wearing a mask by looking at facial characteristics such as facial shape, eyebrow shape, and the distance between the suspect’s eyes. Facial recognition technology isn’t quite there yet to identify people just by the eyes, but it’s not far off either: see this journal submission which states “Multimodality (voice, iris, fingerprint...), soft facial biometrics, infrared imaging, sketches, and deep learning without neglecting conventional machine learning methods are tracks to be considered in the near future” (with that said, Mayor Eric Adams is asking NYC businesses moving forward to ask people to remove face masks (what happened to fraudvirus, libs?) so the masks may still be proving to be a bit difficult for identification, although that technology is also progressing). There are so many ways with modern technology they could track this guy down if the political will is there, which in this case there was. One wrong move and the perp was done for.

This isn’t the past; we live in the era of the omnipresent security state. Perhaps if he had done this ten or twenty years ago he would have gotten away with it. Still, the perpetrator’s tiny odds of escaping these days would have been higher if the crime happened in a remote area and not the most surveilled place on the planet, but still low odds if the political will was there to track him down. Soon with the implementation of Real ID and everyone needing to submit your biometrics to access public events, combined with the digital panopticon previously discussed where Sundance argues that Peter Thiel, his Palantir partner Alex Karp and Musk are galloping the country toward as quickly as they can, such identification will happen almost instantaneously. The noose is tightening and the public is asleep.

With the attacker caught (although it’s strange he apparently didn’t ditch the murder weapon), one is going to see the book thrown at him and he is going to be made to suffer - solitary confinement, or genpop with contracted sexual assaults against him - to try to prevent copycats from happening in the future. The official story of how Mangione was caught - that of a McDonalds worker recognizing him and reporting him to the police - is possible, as there are always plenty of people in the public ready to report on a fugitive (reminiscent of the great book The Running Man, not to be confused with the terrible movie, which I will cover in the future) but it’s also possible - if not probable - that he was caught via abuse of the technological security state and then parallel construction was used as an excuse for how he was actually tracked down.

Release of this non-mugshot photo by authorities is highly unusual and just the start of the humiliation ritual. This photo is on the Daily Mail and is not a fake

The media is also running with the very worst photo of him they could take.

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The public is broadly supportive of the attacker

The public response to this assassination is interesting to watch on social media: it is broadly supportive of it, believing that UnitedHealthcare is highly predatory and that the CEO’s actions resulted in the deaths of many people. See this Rolling Stone article about it. Mangione’s possible manifesto can be seen here, or a different one here. This assassination transcended traditional left/right dynamics and represents more of a populist vs. elitist dynamics given that the attacker is hard to pigeonhole: he was a good looking guy (Twitter profile here), apparently an Ivy League graduate¹, the valedictorian of his high school class, who was worried about global warming and praised Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and it’s Future even as he seemed proficient with guns:

To Mangione’s point, UHC has the highest coverage denial rate in the insurance industry, double the national average, leading to record profits for the company (which the CEO was on his way to announcing when he was killed):

UHC took down the biographies of it’s executives from its website and is fearfully putting up a fence around it’s headquarters. Comments to it’s posts on social media are turned off and they sent out an internal memo for employees not to comment publicly. It’s stock went up the day after the attack, but then fell a lot the day after that, almost 10% between 12/5 and 12/6. The other top executive called the public’s response deplorable.

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Widening wealth disparities increase social instability

There is no middle class in America anymore; people have talked for a long time about how the middle class is dying, but it isn’t dying anymore - it is dead. Dead, dead, dead. There is simply the ultra rich and everyone else. A shitbox in a major metropolitan area costs well over $1 million if not double that with interest rates on mortgages at 7% - no one can afford to buy a home anymore. The traditional middle class lifestyle - home ownership, two cars, put kids through college, retirement, perhaps only one parent working - is now reserved for the top 1% if not higher.

This is why the public is generally approving of the attacker’s actions - the general population is angry and upset as it’s quality of life continues to erode, which is only going to get worse (much worse) given the extreme amount of federal debt, which at 125% debt to GDP ratio is higher than it was at the peak of World War 2. We see 20%+ inflation on foodstuff, health care, housing costs, even as the Fed claims that real inflation is 2%. It’s a joke. You can see all the charts here how the wealth disparity really skyrocketed after getting off the gold standard in 1971, and it accelerated further after the decline of the Soviet Union - without fear of communism holding financial predators in check they were free to dramatically jack up executive compensation while ruthlessly decreasing worker pay.

If people feel like they don’t have a stake in society, if they can’t afford to have a family and if they think the future is going to be worse than it is now, then you are going to see a much greater rise in attacks like this moving forward. I’m kind of surprised that it hasn’t happened more, to be honest; this is the first big one I can think of in recent memory where a higher up executive was targeted instead of terror attacks instigated by our elites against the public.

As these attacks grow over time, there will be a response from the elites: both in terms of limiting free speech online, to increasing propaganda by labeling such attacks as terrorism, and also result in a vast proliferation of private security forces and walled ultra-rich enclaves, much like one sees in South Africa and Brazil. It will become dangerous for the ultra rich to go out in public without armed security. This is coming and it is neo-feudalism in action. But it will also be interesting to see if UHC quietly lowers their claim rejection rates moving forward - will a CEO want to bear the risk of assassination even if he has a giant private security force (or is the CEO just an expendable cog and shareholders will force him to bear that risk regardless)? What about top bankers or the central bank owners if they become subject to the public’s wrath such as the 1920 Wall Street bombing? The upper elites have never been targeted historically: not a single Rothschild was killed in World War 2 despite many of them living in Europe before and during the war because they controlled Germany’s finances (via the Bank for International Settlements, the Dawes loans, financing and supply of IG Farben, and via Germany’s central bank). Yet the structure of the modern world is slowly, ever-so-slowly leaking out to people (also see here and here). Will the rising risk of assassination in turn serve as a limiting factor for upper elites who may have to ultimately take personal risk into their calculations?

Bill Gates was photographed by his PR team in 2019 getting a burger to try to appeal to the common man; there are probably two dozen security officers just out of camera sight.

Mangione’s attack was qualitatively different than other shootings, such as the Las Vegas shooting (buried by the FBI and media), the Trump assassination attempts (buried by the FBI and media; we already know much more about Mangione than about Matthew Crooks), or terrorist attacks (most of them sponsored by the FBI), because this is a populist response to the elites and not the regular elite crushing of the masses with associated mind-games.

Psychopolitics

touched on this concept a bit in this post. There are very few assassinations in the modern era and most of them are against dissidents or populists both on the right and left, or of strongmen who globohomo used to support but they became tired of (Qaddafi, Saddam). Historically one may think of Huey Long and the Kennedys as victims of this too. Future attacks under this shifting paradigm may be done by lone wolfs without official government sanction or support, and how would elites protect oneself from such nebulous threats? What kind of general anxiety would that endanger? It is interesting that the media is hyping up this attack; perhaps they don’t quite understand what to make of the paradigm shift he represents, or alternatively the media’s owners may want to highlight him in order to further their goals of pushing ubiquitous internet censorship in the future (“We need to clamp down on free speech for public safety!”).

I hope you found this exploration helpful. Perhaps it’s not a bad thing if our upper elites, utterly materialistic and atheistic², would have to factor public blowback to them personally as a check on their unlimited rapaciousness and greed.

Thanks for reading.

1. This raises an interesting point about the personality and background profile of this shooter: a likely upper middle class resentment brought about by access to the upper class but an inability to convert that access to money or power; entitlement without payoff. Indeed, the upper middle class has always been biggest threat to the elites, not the middle or lower lumpenproletariat who would not likely feel the toxic resentment/entitlement combination to target higher elites.

2. According to Eustace Mullins, the central bank owners “adopted the Hegelian dialectic, the dialectic of materialism, which regards the World as Power, and the World as Reality. It denies all other powers and all other realities. It functions on the principle of thesis, antithesis and a synthesis…Thus the World Order organizes and finances Jewish groups; it then organizes and finances anti-Jewish groups; it organizes Communist groups; it then organizes and finances anti-Communist groups. It is not necessary for the Order to throw these groups against each other; they seek each other out like heat-seeking missiles and try to destroy each other. By controlling the size and resources of each group, the World Order can always predetermine the outcome. In this technique, members of the World Order are often identified with one side or the other. John Foster Dulles arranged financing for Hitler, but he was never a Nazi. David Rockefeller may be cheered in Moscow, but he is not a Communist…a distinguishing trait of a member of the World Order, although it may not be admitted, is that he does not believe in anything but the World Order. Another distinguishing trait is his absolute contempt for anyone who actually believes in the tenets of Communism, Zionism, Christianity, or any national, religious or fraternal group…If you are a sincere Christian, Zionist or Moslem, the World Order regards you as a moron unworthy of respect. You can and will be used, but you will never be respected.”