Luigi Mangione, 28, who pleaded guilty Friday to federal U.S. charges of interstate stalking resulting in death, has been a public litmus test for the morality of the political left. Many have failed.
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down on a New York street in December 2024 — shot first in the back (how dastardly) by a masked Mangione, who only now admits to the heinous crime. “I shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan and he died… I knew what I was doing,” Mangione said in court Friday. The plea, and not Mangione’s guilt, was the only surprise.
Yet men and women fawn over Mangione, penning letters to him in prison and even fundraising for his legal fees, while leftist media asks whether his “motivations were noble or evil,” and the intellectual class debates if this cold-blooded assassin is “reminiscent of historical folk heroes.” The legal fundraiser, which has raised more than US$1.5 million, says that Mangione “is being treated in an unprecedented and unfair fashion by a state acting out of cowardice and fear to make a spectacle of his case in an attempt to intimidate us all into submission to state and corporate power.”
Here’s an idea: don’t assassinate others if you want to retain your freedom.
Outside of the New York court today, a Mangione fan— an attractive young woman with a California uptalk accent — spoke on video to announce her unconditional support for the now admitted killer: “I’ve always said I support Luigi whether or not he did it,” she said. “This is about a movement. It is about Luigi but it’s also about the conversation he started.” Later, she referred to the murder as neither “wrong or right” but instead as “more of a revolutionary act of protest… the likes of which we haven’t seen since the civil rights era.” Have these people lost their minds?
Civil rights hero Rosa Parks did not shoot her bus driver in the back. If she had, she likely would have become a footnote in history. The tragic assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., by contrast, was committed by a violent racist. The heroes of the U.S. civil rights era were not gun-wielding murderers. They were nothing like Luigi Mangione.
Mangione’s sentencing hearing is set for Dec. 18. He is still facing state-level charges in New York, including for second-degree murder. But after pleading guilty to federal charges today, it’s possible that his trial will no longer go ahead. This is because New York has a “double jeopardy” law to prevent accused persons from being tried twice for the same crime.
Mangione’s lawyer, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, told the public today that her client will seek to have the murder charge dismissed. Ultimately, he could spend less time in prison as a result. It’s a move as calculated, and cowardly, as the murder of Thompson.
Brian Thompson, a husband and father, is dead. He was assassinated for political reasons. And still, America’s health-care system remains unchanged in the wake of this cruel killing. Mangione wrote the words “delay,” “deny” and “depose” on the bullets he used to kill Thompson, in reference to health care insurers denying patient claims. He has forever tainted those words — and any power they could have wielded as protest — with his inexcusable violence.
There is certainly an argument to be made about the “corporate greed” of U.S. health care insurers, but a bullet into the back of a stranger is not one of them. If you believe that it is, you are inviting a violent society in which the cost of health care will drop precipitously on your list of priorities.
Luigi Mangione is no hero.
National Post
