CHRONICLES– [Alleged] Healthcare assassin Luigi Mangione, or simply “Luigi” as he is now known by his online fangirls and fanboys, has lifted the veil on a corrosive, youthful nihilism.
An Emerson College poll found that 40 percent of people aged 18-29 believe Mangione was justified in killing Brian Thompson, the corporate executive randomly selected to be the victim in his juvenile Breaking Bad cosplay.
Mangione’s desire to be mythologized has been satisfied by the hackneyed, made-for-Netflix narrative of his personal decline, which is now everywhere blasted before our eyes by sensationalist and sympathetic media. He has been depicted as a tortured genius of sorts, with tragically wasted potential.
Much has been made of his “Ivy League” education—he went to the University of Pennsylvania, the most spuriously designated, perhaps, of the Ivies—and his seemingly idiosyncratic political views.
He sympathized with the Unabomber’s luddite beliefs, and was disillusioned with the pervasiveness of porn, for example. But his grab-bag of cranky ideas should not be mistaken for profundity.
Mangione’s intellectual sources are dilettantish in the extreme: He cites progressive filmmaker Michael Moore in his magnum opus, an impressively stupid, self-important, and superficial rant against corporate greed.
Compared to, say, the Unabomber’s essay, Mangione makes little effort to justify his crime, and appears preoccupied with strutting for the public. With false modesty, he calls his murder “trivial” and offers help on solving the crime—a move typical of egomaniacs.
On the right, Mangione has been painted as a Marxist college brat who went off the deep end. While Mangione does not appear to be a doctrinaire leftist, he has the lazy and resentful temperament of one. His illiterate “manifesto” is the product of a diseased and unoriginal mind desperate for notoriety at any price.
The media, and members of the jaded public, obligingly place Mangione on a pedestal … READ MORE.
