There is a particular kind of cognitive dissonance that happens when the facts of a story refuse to cooperate with the story you have already decided to tell, and I think we are watching that dissonance play out in real time with Luigi Mangione, because the more that actually comes out about who this guy is and what he believes, the harder it becomes to square with the image a huge chunk of the online left has built around him. This is not a guy who was organizing tenant unions or reading Marx in his spare time. This is a guy who publicly mocked DEI and identity politics before any of this happened, who shared posts arguing that “wokeism” traumatizes people rather than helps them, who has been corresponding from prison with Patrick Bet-David, a conservative media figure whose entire platform is built around entrepreneurship, self-reliance, and a fairly standard right-coded worldview, and who spoke admiringly of Elon Musk and Joe Rogan and RFK Jr, three men who are not exactly staples of the modern American left’s reading list. Add to that a genuinely unsettling four-star Goodreads review of the Unabomber’s manifesto, in which he described Ted Kaczynski not as a lunatic but as an “extreme political revolutionary” whose predictions turned out to be prescient, and you start to get a picture of someone whose actual worldview is a strange, heterodox mix of tech-right individualism, anti-institutional suspicion, and a kind of great-man theory of violence, not the coherent anti-capitalist class consciousness people have projected onto him.
And look, if this is true, and a meaningful chunk of it clearly is, true enough to be documented in his own words rather than rumor, then holy hell, the online left cheering this guy on as one of their own is embarrassing in a way that goes beyond the class privilege stuff I have already written about. Because this is not just a rich kid getting a pass because of who he allegedly shot, this is a rich kid who does not even hold the politics being projected onto him, getting fully absorbed into a movement’s iconography anyway, purely because his one dramatic act pointed in a direction people wanted to cheer for. If all it takes to be welcomed into the left is doing one thing that hurts someone the left already hates, regardless of what you actually believe the rest of the time, then the word left has stopped meaning anything at all, it has become a label you slap on whoever’s most recent act you happen to be excited about, untethered from any actual coherent ideology, any actual shared values, any actual litmus test beyond did this person hurt somebody I don’t like.
This is where I think the hypocrisy becomes impossible to explain away with the usual deflections. If Luigi Mangione had shot Brian Thompson and then it came out, in his own reviews and posts and correspondence, that he was a committed democratic socialist, a labor organizer, someone who had spent years in mutual aid networks and had a documented history of solidarity with marginalized communities, I do not think anyone would be surprised that the left claimed him, agree or disagree with the violence, that would at least be internally consistent, a violent act growing out of a genuinely held, long-standing political commitment. That is not what we are looking at. We are looking at someone who mocked the exact language and framework a huge amount of the online left uses to talk about identity and marginalization, who found community and validation not among leftist organizers but among heterodox tech-adjacent commentators and a literal MAGA podcaster, and who has expressed more admiration for a mail bomber’s manifesto than for any actual left-wing political tradition or thinker that I have seen documented anywhere. And despite all of that being publicly available, despite all of it being sourced back to his own words rather than speculation, people are still out here treating him as a class warrior, a working class avenger, one of their own, because the actual content of his beliefs is apparently less important than the emotional satisfaction of the act itself.
I keep coming back to the counterfactual, because I think it is the cleanest way to see through the noise. If Mangione had shot someone who was a person of color, if the target of that violence had not been a wealthy white healthcare executive but someone whose death would have been read, immediately and correctly, as racially motivated or as an act of right-wing violence, does anyone seriously believe the same online left would be selling merchandise and laugh-reacting at anyone who brought up his privilege or his politics? Of course not. In that scenario, every single detail I just laid out, the DEI mockery, the Bet-David correspondence, the Rogan and Musk admiration, the sympathetic reading of a domestic terrorist’s manifesto, would be treated as exactly what it looks like on its face, evidence of a young man radicalized through right-coded online spaces into an act of ideologically motivated violence, and the same crowd currently defending him would be writing thinkpieces about the pipeline from tech-bro individualism to political violence. The only reason that treatment has not happened here is the identity of the victim, not the identity or politics of the shooter, and once you see that clearly, the entire “he’s one of us” framing collapses, because it was never actually about him, it was about who he hurt.
I do not think the healthcare industry’s brutality stops being real just because the person who allegedly struck a blow against it turns out to be politically incoherent or genuinely sympathetic to a domestic terrorist. That anger is still justified, that critique of the system is still valid, and none of what I have laid out here changes any of that. What it does change, or at least what it should change, is the specific decision to build a folk hero narrative around this particular man, to treat him as a symbol of left-wing resistance when the actual documented content of his worldview looks nothing like left-wing resistance, looks instead like a fairly online, fairly heterodox mix of grievance, individualism, and admiration for men who solved their political frustrations with violence rather than solidarity. Welcoming that into the fold, cheering it on, treating it as evidence of some righteous class awakening, is not just historically illiterate about who this specific man actually is, it is a symptom of a deeper problem, which is that a chunk of the online left has become so hungry for a symbol, any symbol, that it stopped checking whether the symbol actually believed in anything it claims to stand for, and started asking only whether the symbol’s last act felt good to watch.