This is the last post I am going to write on Luigi Mangione for a while, not because I have run out of things to say, honestly I could keep going, but because I think I have said what I actually came here to say, across all of these, and at some point repeating yourself past the point of necessity just becomes noise, and I would rather leave this where it is, clearly stated, than keep circling it. So let me close it out plainly.
I do not care how unpopular this position makes me. I do not care about the laugh reacts, the mockery, the account getting taken down, the accusations of being immature or petty or a concern troll or whatever the label of the week happens to be. None of that has ever been the metric I use to figure out whether I am right about something, and it is not going to start being the metric now. If it turns out that I am one of a small handful of progressive people willing to actually say, clearly and repeatedly, that a wealthy, privileged, ideologically incoherent young man does not become a working class leftist hero just because of who he allegedly shot, then I will gladly be one of that small handful. If it turns out I am the only one saying it in whatever specific corner of the internet I happen to occupy, fine, I will be the only one. Being surrounded by agreement was never something I needed to feel confident in a position, and being surrounded by disagreement has never been enough on its own to make me reconsider one, because neither agreement nor disagreement is actually evidence of anything, they are just headcounts, and headcounts have never been how you figure out what is true.
I want to say clearly, one more time, because I think it is worth saying plainly rather than letting it get lost in everything else I have written, what I have been trying to do across all of these posts is not attack the left, is not concern trolling, is not secretly rooting for the healthcare industry or for the people who actually deserve criticism in this story. I think the healthcare industry is genuinely predatory, I think the anger people feel toward it is completely justified, and I think that anger deserves real, sustained political attention, organizing, legislative pressure, all the unglamorous work that actually changes outcomes rather than just generating a satisfying viral moment. What I have been trying to do is hold my own side, the side I actually belong to, the side I actually want to see succeed, to the standard it claims to hold itself to, because a movement that abandons its own stated principles the second a satisfying symbol shows up is not a stronger movement, it is a weaker one, more brittle, more capturable, less trustworthy, and I would rather be the annoying voice pointing that out now, while it still costs me something socially to say it, than stay quiet and watch the standard quietly erode because nobody wanted to be the one to say the unpopular thing out loud.
I have laid out the case as thoroughly as I know how across all of this, the class background, the private school and the Ivy League degree and the family wealth built on nursing homes and land development, the media savvy and the way both this and the last decade of American populist politics have run on the same trick of letting a rich person cosplay as an outsider, the actual documented politics, the anti-DEI posts, the letters to a conservative podcaster, the sympathetic reading of a domestic terrorist’s manifesto, none of which lines up with the folk hero narrative that got built around him, and the pattern of people who claim to care about marginalized voices mocking and dismissing an accurate, fact-based argument the second it became inconvenient to their story. I have said all of it, I believe all of it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise just because saying it loudly enough for long enough got an account taken offline and got me called immature by people who never once actually engaged with a single fact I brought up. That refusal to engage was never a rebuttal, it was an admission that there was no rebuttal available, and I am comfortable letting that stand as the final word on it from my end.
So that is where I am leaving this. Not because I am backing down, not because the mockery worked, not because I have decided this does not matter anymore, but because I have said what I needed to say, clearly, consistently, across every angle of it I could think of, and I trust that to stand on its own regardless of how many people agree with it today. I would rather speak the truth as I see it and be alone in it than stay quiet and be comfortable in a crowd, and if that is the position this whole saga leaves me in, I will take it without complaint.