3 reasons behind the unsettling glorification of Luigi Mangione
In the days since Luigi Mangione was charged with killing the top executive at one of the largest health insurers in America, an untold number of people online have declared him a modern-day hero.
A fundraiser for his legal defence raised thousands of dollars before being removed. Online stores are selling T-shirts bearing his face and messages like, “In This House, Luigi Mangione Is A Hero, End of Story.” On TikTok, users posted videos with phrases like “free my man” and “my empathy is reserved for people who deserve it.”
Mangione, 26, is accused of shooting Brian Thompson, 50, from behind as he walked into a midtown Manhattan hotel to prepare for his company’s annual investors’ conference on Dec. 4. His lawyer said he plans to plead not guilty.
It usually goes without saying that murder is one of the most reprehensible crimes. And Thompson’s killing has certainly sparked plenty of shock and outrage. But experts in online communication, clinical psychology and health-care reform believe there are three key reasons so many other members of the public seem to be celebrating an accused killer instead — and they say some of those factors have been festering in plain sight.
“I think it’s straightforward what’s happening, almost to the point of being obvious,” said George Bonanno, a clinical psychology professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York City.
First: A disdain for health insurers
The first reason, Bonanno said, is that some level of anger and frustration with the U.S. health-care system “has been boiling for some time.”
Americans pay more for their health care than residents of any other high-income country. But data also shows spending on insurance premiums, out-of-pocket costs, pharmaceuticals and hospital services has all risen over the last five years, according to The Associated Press.
The suspected killer of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Luigi Mangione has been receiving a startling amount of online praise recently. David Gilbert, a reporter at Wired, discusses what he’s seen online and why some might be glorifying Mangione.
Health insurance companies can encapsulate so much of what feels, to many, heartless and broken about the system — they can be cold, remote and impossible to navigate in a way that can seem as though it’s on purpose.
The disdain isn’t unanimous — public-opinion polling data shows most Americans are pleased with their insurance plans — but when the bitterness is there, it’s visceral.
“If you’re treated unjustly by the health-care system, you have no recourse at all.… That feeling makes people feel helpless and angry and have desires of doing something,” said Bonanno, author of The End of Trauma.
Then, “this guy comes along and does it.”
Second: A CEO makes an easy villain
With their seething contempt for insurance companies in mind, Bonanno said, many online saw Thompson as an easy villain and Mangione as an easy hero.
“[They] were absolutely ripe to be complete stereotypes,” the psychologist said.
Thompson led UnitedHealthcare, which brought in $281 billion US in revenue in 2023. His own compensation package, worth $10.2 million US, made him one of the company’s highest-paid executives.
“Here’s the CEO of one of these companies, who makes $10 million [US] a year. And then he’s shot by a young person that isn’t really identifiable. [The gunman] looks kind of handsome. He’s mysterious. He gets away on a bicycle,” Bonanno said.
“It seemed very Robin Hood-y.”
It soon came out that the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” were carved into shell casings found at the murder scene, mimicking the title of a 2010 book: Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.
The killing was also widely condemned and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said the glory directed at the shooter was “deeply disturbing.”
Thompson, who lived in Minnesota, left behind a wife and two high school-aged children. Andrew Witty, CEO of parent firm UnitedHealth Group, called him a humble man with working-class Midwest roots.
“B.T., as we knew him … never forgot where he came from, because it was the needs of people who live in places like Jewell, Iowa, that he considered first in finding ways to improve care,” he wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times. He also clarified Mangione wasn’t one of the company’s customers.
UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty mourned the killing of executive Brian Thompson and said he understood public frustrations with the ‘flawed’ U.S. health-care system on Friday, in a New York Times opinion piece. It was his first public comment since Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth’s health insurance unit, was shot dead last week.
Former NYPD detective sergeant Felipe Rodriguez also condemned the online reaction supporting an accused killer.
“They’ve made him a martyr for all the troubles people have had with their own insurance companies,” he told Reuters.
Third: Who Mangione is
The online conversation around Thompson’s death took another turn on Monday when the public found out the accused killer’s identity.
Mangione can be described with a host of adjectives, among them young, fit, wealthy and male. The valedictorian of an elite private high school with two Ivy League degrees, he comes from a prominent upper-class family in Maryland and maintained an active presence online.
On top of that, he also suffered from chronic back pain that impacted his daily life, according to friends and online posts, though his specific treatment and coverage history is unclear.
“This, of course, is framed as, ‘He’s one of us,'” said Ioana Literat, a communications professor at the same college as Bonanno.
“‘One of us’ as in a social media user, ‘one of us’ as a young person and, very importantly, ‘one of us’ as someone that is dealing with this system that doesn’t work for regular people.”
And the crime mirrored the Hollywood method of solving problems: A rogue vigilante — usually a young, muscular, white man — swoops in to break the rules and save the day, often with drama and violence laid on thick.
Literat said Mangione could be considered particularly appealing to Gen Z. Another Canadian professor who studies health-care reform said many teenagers and 20-somethings have lost faith in the societal institutions that are supposed to help them and could relate to finding justice through their own activism.
“Youth and young adults are, I think, justifiably resentful of people in positions of power, political power, commercial power,” said Julian Somers, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C.
Several experts said the reaction would likely have been different if Mangione didn’t look the way he does.
“In the comments, there was a deep conversation about ‘Well, what if he was Black? What if he was poor? What if he didn’t look like that?'” Literat said.
Dark humour helps people cope, psychologist says
In his opinion piece, Witty said he understood public frustrations with the “flawed” U.S. health-care system, but mourned Thompson’s death and condemned the “vitriol that has been directed at our colleagues who have been barraged by threats.”
In addition to ill wishes for insurers, dark humour has been common online. Literat said that tone is part of “the language of TikTok,” but Bonanno believed it goes deeper.
He said those jokes are a way to cope with the grave reality of what’s suspected to have unfolded in America: Someone in their mid-20s felt the only solution to a common American pain point was to shoot another human being — a married father of two — in cold blood on a public sidewalk.
“The idea that if we’re not happy, we’re gonna go out and kill someone, it’s not a good thought. It’s not a good precedent to be endorsing,” said Bonanno.
“Pushing it away with humour makes it easier to live with that.”
Published at Sun, 15 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000
As the riot police form a line, shields raised, protesters across the street shout curses and chants at them before deploying fireworks.
As the pyrotechnics rain down, some of the police charge forward, dragging protesters away for arrest, beating them all the while. A crowd dispersal vehicle with water cannons douses the still-defiant group as the police line advances. When that fails, the tear gas comes next, wreathing Rustaveli Avenue in acrid smoke.
Eventually, the protesters are slowly cleared.
This is the scene that has played out nightly for nearly two weeks in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital.
Protests have rocked the South Caucasus republic since Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced on Nov. 28 that the government was suspending talks on joining the European Union, long an official and popular goal in Georgia.
Thousands have spent days protesting outside Georgia’s parliament to urge the country to reconsider holding off on its bid to join the EU. Many say this would allow Russia to increase its influence over the former Soviet country.
A month earlier, Kobakhidze’s Georgian Dream party won a disputed national election, the results of which the European Parliament refused to recognize, citing “significant irregularities.”
The foreign policy reversal is part of a shocking change for Georgia over the past several years. Once seen as a pro-Western bastion in the region, the Georgian Dream administration has instead been charting a course increasingly aligned with Moscow since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
That has intensified in recent months, with the European Union announcing in July that it was freezing Georgia’s recently opened EU accession process, while the United States suspended Washington’s “strategic partnership” program with Tbilisi on Nov. 30.
The shift away from Georgia’s longtime Western orientation in favour of Russia — which invaded Georgia in 2008 — is partially inspired by genuine security concerns, experts say.
Kornely Kakachia, a professor of political science at Tbilisi State University, says that while Georgia was seen as the darling of the West in the South Caucasus, geopolitical realities contributed to limiting those ties.
“Even though Georgia had closer contacts with the EU and U.S., they didn’t solve the country’s main problem, which was security — the permanent threat of Russia,” Kakachia said.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine drastically changed the calculus, too, because everyone knows that if Russia invades Georgia next, we will be on our own,” he said, adding that this messaging resonates among Georgians.
Consolidation of power
The primary motivation for the shift, however, was domestic, Kakachia said: a simple desire to consolidate power by elite members of the Georgian Dream. Chief among these is Bidzina Ivanishvili, the party’s billionaire founder who de facto runs the country from the shadows.
In this context, the EU’s demand for “deoligarchization” — differentiating between the interests of Georgia’s public and its wealthiest members — was understood by Ivanishvili to refer to him personally, Kakachia said.
“He doesn’t want to lose power, and so he wanted to make sure nobody challenged him,” he said, adding that Ivanishvili “has now basically captured all state institutions — he can dismiss the prime minister tomorrow, announce any policy, without any checks.”
While Georgia’s opposition and protesters are keen to label every action of the government as either inspired or commanded by Russia, Kakachia says the current government was fully capable of assuming its present course with minimal input from Moscow.
“Ivanishvili thinks that the West is weak and that Russia is winning its war in Ukraine,” he explained. “And since there is this pressure to maintain democracy from the West, it’s much easier to align with Russia and other illiberal powers like China, Turkey, Azerbaijan and others. As Georgia becomes more isolated internationally, Russia’s influence will increase.”
Russia unlikely to openly intervene
Other observers agree that while Moscow is surely pleased with Georgia’s present course, the country ranks much lower on the Kremlin’s list of priorities than many in Georgia assume.
“I’d be very hesitant about regarding Russia as the key driver of events in Ukraine,” said Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert and senior associate fellow at London’s Royal United Institute of Services (RUSI).
He says that unlike Ukraine and Belarus, Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn’t see Georgia as part of Russia’s historical core, and there’s nothing specific — like territory, basing rights or mineral concessions — that he wants from the country.
“Above all, the Kremlin just wants a neighbour that isn’t openly defying it,” Galeotti said, adding that’s a condition Georgian Dream is fulfilling.
There are few indications that Russia would consider intervening openly in Georgia — and fewer effective tools for it to do so, he says.
“Given the war in Ukraine and, indeed, the sudden reversals in Syria, it would be hard [for Moscow] to find regular military forces for an intervention.”
Parallels to Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution
In the absence of any significant foreign intervention — whether against the Georgian government by the West, or in support of it by Russia — Georgia’s protesters are largely left to bring down the increasingly repressive authorities on their own.
Many have already drawn parallels between Georgia’s current demonstrations and the 2013-14 Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine, where pro-European protesters managed to topple Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who sparked outrage by rejecting closer EU relations in favour of joining the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union.
And while the comparison isn’t exact, that successful civic uprising offers useful lessons for the present movement in Georgia.
“A lot of countries with authoritarian regimes have discontent, corruption, even [armed] insurgencies,” said Alexander Clarkson, a lecturer in German and European Studies at King’s College London. “But this kind of Maidan-level success in toppling a government needs a convergence of multiple factors that is rare.”
The three key factors, according to Clarkson, are a powerful and regionally diverse protest movement, a substantial opposition presence within state institutions, and enough government figures willing to defect.
The first is certainly present in Georgia. More than 30 cities and towns across the country have seen protests, including both major cities such as Batumi and Kutaisi as well as smaller provincial towns.
The Georgian opposition’s influence over state institutions, however, is marginal. While Georgia is not nearly as authoritarian as Russia or Belarus, it’s far less factionalized than 2013 Ukraine.
Meanwhile, a steady drip of government defections have continued. Figures such as mid-level interior security chiefs and political appointees continue to leave their posts on a daily basis, while at least five Georgian ambassadors have also resigned.
There are also rumours of discontent within the rank and file of Georgia’s police force, perhaps explaining Georgian Dream’s increasing reliance on informal enforcers, known as titushki, to violently suppress protests.
Protesters adapting
And protesters are adapting, too. Recent days have seen a growth in “anti-titushki squads” at demonstrations. Their aim is to beat back riot police as they attempt to seize and detain participants.
A cheer went up through the crowd on Rustaveli Avenue around midnight on Saturday as a group of 50 such young men — all rugby players, as one Georgian journalist told CBC News — strode proudly onto the street, heading to the scene of a recent scuffle with police.
Both the ongoing Georgian protests and the government’s violent response are unprecedented in the country’s 33 years of independence.
As tens of thousands of Georgians continue to take to the streets nightly, it’s still unclear if they will succeed, but the stakes could not be higher.
With Georgian authorities set to ban all major opposition parties in the near future, it might be the last chance for the protesters to stop their country’s authoritarian — and Russia-friendly — slide.
Published at Sun, 15 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000
