Why Luigi Mangione is the beautiful face of American nihilism

Justice is supposed to be blind. But in the case of Luigi Mangione – the 26-year-old American who allegedly shot dead health insurance company chief executive Brian Thompson in New York last week – it had its eyes wide open.

Wide open and ogling: not long after Mangione’s arrest (in the appropriately American environs of a McDonald’s) the internet exploded with memes about how good-looking he is.

Pennsylvania State Police police shows Luigi Mangione (right) at a McDonald’s in Altoona on December 9. He was arrested and later charged with murder (left).Credit: AP

It really is the (alleged) murder for the moment – executed on a Midtown Manhattan street and instantly transformed into viral internet fodder, with the alleged perpetrator’s social media footprint mined to feed the relentless content beast.

Mangione is an all-American princeling: Ivy League-educated, brawny and brainy.

It was his distinctive full eyebrows that did him in – security camera footage of the suspect shows a pair of fine eyes and strong brows, framed by a COVID mask and a black hoodie.

Days later, as he ate his hash brown in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, his eyes helped a member of the public to identify him and phone police.

On social media, Jonathan Ness from the Queer Eye for a Straight Guy TV show joked that their next season could be devoted to Mangione for a straight-guy makeover. But, Ness said, don’t worry – “the brows, [I] would never touch”.

Memes proliferated about his hotness, with “If he’s fit, you must acquit” being just one example of the kind of thing being posted. There were shirtless photos, verbal accounts from his friends (who say he is lovely) and reports that he had suffered from terrible back pain, for which he had endured a spinal operation in June.

The bullets that killed Thompson on December 4 were inscribed with the words “Deny”, “Defend” and “Depose”. This seems to be a reference to the reported behind-doors strategy of US health insurers, who use these tactics to not pay out insurance claims to patients, thereby maximising their profits.

The “manifesto” reportedly found in Mangione’s backpack was a soup of anti-capitalist vigilantism and motherhood-statement morality about corporate America.

It is shocking that an alleged murderer should be celebrated in this way, but not at all surprising.

Gun violence in America is quotidian. It is a country with a long history of vigilantism. It also has a history of public fascination with killers possessing (alleged) sex appeal, from Charles Manson to the more recent case of the Menendez brothers.

The lawlessness and moral glibness of the internet is the flipside of the United States’ culture of individual freedom.

In a perfectly American twist, the anti-capitalist crusader has been exploited for merchandising opportunities. T-shirts, hoodies, tote bags and mugs bearing Mangione’s image are available online.

But we can’t blame the internet – we must look at why there is a market for Mangione merch and why ordinary people, including those who presumably don’t have homicidal tendencies themselves, would cheer on a murderer.

It doesn’t hurt that he’s beautiful. There is also the widespread rage many share over his cause. The US health insurance industry is a multibillion-dollar profit giant funded by the sickness of the American people. Stories of its institutional cruelty are legion.

Just this week, it was reported that a different health insurer, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, had quietly announced it would impose time limits on anaesthesia during certain surgeries in certain states. The company later backed down in the face of a public outcry.

A paper by the Commonwealth Fund (an American research body dedicated to promoting “a high-performing, equitable healthcare system”) states that healthcare spending in the US, both per person and as a share of GDP, is “far higher” than other high-income countries.

A poster depicting Mangione outside the Hilton Midtown Hotel in New York.Credit: AP

But Americans are getting sicker. According to the Commonwealth Fund, “People in the United States experience the worst health outcomes overall of any high-income nation”. They are more likely to die younger from avoidable causes than people in peer countries. They have higher maternal and infant mortality rates, the highest rate of people with multiple chronic conditions among peer countries, and an obesity rate nearly twice the OECD average.

Another Commonwealth Fund paper reported that “media investigations have found that insurers are becoming increasingly adept in using technology to deny payment of medical claims and pressure their company physicians to deny care during prior authorisation reviews”.

It has been reported that UnitedHealthcare has the highest claim-denial rate (32 per cent) of all the private insurance companies.

The Manhattan shooting can be read as a cautionary tale illustrating the far-reaching consequences of economic inequality (not to mention a moment to give quiet thanks for the taxpayer-funded universal healthcare we enjoy in Australia).

But the tasteless cheering over the assassination – a defenceless man shot in the back with no warning – is something more than that.

It is a nihilistic expression of the hopelessness of American politics as a remedy for anything, not even something so fundamental as access to healthcare.

President-elect Donald Trump has at least named the problem of America’s bad-health epidemic.

But his tonic is his nominee to head the federal Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr – an anti-vaxxer who advocates cooking in beef tallow (a heart disease-inducing saturated fat) because he says the seed-oil industry is poisoning us.

Trump told Time magazine this week that he and RFK Jr will discuss ending some child vaccination programs. Trump suggested vaccines might be responsible for autism, a dangerous myth that has been widely debunked.

In the embittered, conspiracy-laced realm of online radicalisation, there are no crucial distinctions between left and right.

Instead, there is bipartisan agreement that politicians won’t help and that democracy is an inefficient vehicle for generating social solutions.

In the face of such nihilism, it doesn’t matter that violence only breeds more violence and that Luigi Mangione will soon be last month’s meme, just another pretty person to scroll past.

Jacqueline Maley is a columnist.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.