The School Shooter Generation Gets a Hero
I'd love Luigi to [redacted] on my [redacted]
Hello sweet subs, happy Friday the 13th. Here are things to read around the web:
The Invisible Man - on homelessness in America
Syria’s factions explain in a map - https://archive.ph/JPWjH
TIKTOK ISN’T ANTI-ISRAEL: IT’S HIRED UNIT 8200 AGENTS TO RUN ITS AFFAIRS
Download and read free: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1861-light-in-gaza
UnitedHealth Is Strategically Limiting Access to Critical Treatment for Kids With Autism
Listening to:
Luigi Online
An obsession of mine in the past week has been visiting Reddit, the Internet’s foremost hellhole since Elon submerged X THE EVERYTHING APP further into the abyss, and seeing what different forums have to say about Luigi Mangione:
Jokes, thirsting (at least one NSFW artwork rendering, featuring Monopoly money and giant, dripping cock) and support for and about Luigi have an uncanny sense of osmosis, spilling from one forum to the other, even among seemingly disparate topics: r/healthcare posters, with direct experience of patients being denied claims discussed their “thoughts and prayers being of out network,” a quippy rejoinder which then appeared on other forums like r/popculturechat, filled with people who post about family members struggling, children suffering, their own lives upended by medical debt, next to jokes about Ryan Murphy already filming the movie. Most forums featured dissections of Luigi’s Good Reads account (and a near-universal misquoting of a review about the necessity for violence as being written by him, though Luigi himself clearly writes he has pulled that chunk of text from…you guessed it…another poster online) and his Twitter. It is a unique moment, one where Luigi’s instantaneous ascension to folk hero is accompanied by the more traditional patterns of online sleuths, rubberneckers, supporters and Stans — people looking to complicate the narrative, or better understand his motives, based on what he has read, liked, and followed. As if there was some unifying algorithm, one piece of locatable media that radicalized him, one instance in which his seemingly comfortable life went in this direction.
Of course, this desire to look between the lines (or likes) is further emboldened by major news networks and social media websites scrubbing Luigi’s presence, refusing to publish his manifesto, and making certain topics about him viable for banning. Nothing fosters unity like a common enemy, and Luigi now has not only the entire healthcare industry as a very understandable target, but also reinforced by legacy media and paternilization attempting to quell the positive response to his actions.
I also think it cannot be underestimated that his popularity (for those perhaps confused about it) is also due to living in a country absolutely riddled with guns and, crucially, senseless gun violence. That a trigger is, for once, being pulled in a direction that at least makes sense is a large component of the positive reaction.
As Sam Adler-Bell writes in his piece “The Sense of a Killing,”
It is a rare thing for an American CEO or other public figure to be targeted in this manner. But the structure of feeling it unleashed did not seem novel to me. Americans have a great deal of recent experience assessing the worthiness of strangers for execution. It’s one of the things we do together online: when someone is killed by a cop or vigilante; when a protester is mowed down by a car; when a Palestinian child is killed by an Israeli sniper or an Israeli civilian by Hamas. Arguing about whose lives are expendable is one of America’s favorite pastimes.
He continues,
As the writer and gun-violence expert Patrick Blanchfield put it to me, “This event gives us something fairly rare: a situation where a person victimized by a distinctively American system of normalized human liquidation — i.e., gun homicide — is also representative of that other distinctively American institution for disposing of human life, our for-profit health-care system, a key function of which is determining how much individual human lives are worth, and enforcing those assessments with ruthlessly incentivized efficiency.”
Or, it’s this:
In a piece about what type of guy Luigi is, Max Read writes that his tastes and follows cannot be readily summed up:
“What does this add up to? I’ve seen some people suggest that Mangione’s politics must be “insane” or “incoherent” or “irrational,” and that may be true in some abstract sense, but I think the cultural and ideological portrait painted by his Twitter account is actually a fairly common and intelligible one, and would be pretty familiar not just to anyone who spends a lot of time on Twitter but to anyone who works in tech or frequents a gym weight room. It’s a loudly non-partisan, self-consciously “rational” mish-mash of declinist conservativism, bro-science and bro-history, simultaneous techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, and self-improvement stoicism--not left-wing, but not (yet) reactionary, either. The basic line is something like: The world is getting worse and phones are killing us; politics won’t save us but technology might; in the meantime, lift weights, take supplements, listen to podcasts.”
Or as John Ganz writes,
He seemed to believe in tech-futurist solutions, in applying rational, systemic methods to overcome social problems. His posts sound like thought experiments. Then he took the steps of an old-school anarchist: direct action, propaganda of the deed.
Despite the complexity of all of our interests and the inability of Twitter likes and reposts to accurately represent that (or anything), people will still very much be trying to “make sense” of this, to try to understand what led Luigi from a seemingly comfortable life into doing this. In the meantime, people online will try to map a trajectory that makes sense, using digital breadcrumbs to assemble a picture that suits their version. Back pain, mental break, latent schizophrenia—we’ll see it all.
But whatever his specific reasons, I don’t think it takes a huge leap in thinking to wonder why someone—even an unexpected someone—would target a CEO making upwards of 20 million dollars a year and routinely denying people life saving treatment. It is harder to see that as violence, though, it’s not as legible as a bullet to the chest. The insurance CEOs are (likely) not Dr. Evil type machinations, cackling and stroking a hairless cat, but simply exploitative and necessarily ruthless through the system of capitalism. It’s very “banality of evil” but, yeah, it really is. Yes shooting someone in broad daylight is, well, not ideal. But can we see reason to this when thinking of health insurance CEOs sitting in boardrooms, wearing $2,000 shoes, lining their pockets while they decide how much to market the drug that should be free for or debating how much anesthesia is too much anesthesia, actually? Which is all to say, killing is a grim business — and both sides here have killed.
I have seen much speculation about whether Luigi would get this much attention if he didn’t look the way he did. Obviously being hot helps. But I also think there is a facade of sanity about him—about his actions, the manifesto—that is appealing, especially to a generation of kids who grow up doing active school shooting drills as part of their normal. For kids to fear school, to expect and practice for the statistically highly likely scenario that they might die in school, why shouldn’t Luigi become a folk hero, for daring to use the violence endemic to this country in a way that might do something? It is no wonder we can get behind him: he’s not shooting our children or our most marginalized in spaces that are meant to be safe for them. He’s shooting someone who, whether you agree or not, was the figurehead of a company that represents an arm of industry that fucks everyone who lives in this country.
Food for thought!
Here are books I recommend about healthcare, feel free to comment / send me others you like.
Health Communism - love this book by friends of the newsletter Artie Vierkant and Beatrice Adler-Bolton
Health Justice Now: Single Payer and What Comes Next - Timothy Faust
Anne Boyer, The Undying (one of my favorite excerpts below)
And lastly, my beautiful greying beagle:
xx
shelby + clem
Ily as the kids say - or more likely, elder millennials such as myself - preshiate the sanity