There is a detail sitting in plain sight in all of this that I have not seen enough people actually stop and sit with, and it is this, the political movement that would, on paper, have the most obvious claim to Luigi Mangione based on everything documented about his actual beliefs, has not claimed him at all, has in fact gone out of its way to push him in the opposite direction, while the political movement whose values he spent years publicly mocking has, in large part, scooped him up and started treating him like a mascot. That is backwards. That is the exact inverse of what you would expect if either side were operating from anything resembling consistent principle, and the fact that it is happening this way tells you something important about how little either side’s embrace of him actually has to do with what he believes.
Start with the MAGA side of this, because their behavior is the more genuinely strange half of the equation. Here is a young man who mocked DEI and identity politics in his own words before any of this happened, who admired Elon Musk and Joe Rogan and RFK Jr, who corresponded warmly from prison with Patrick Bet-David, a conservative media figure who described his letters as intelligent and witty and speculated that Mangione could have been a net positive for society under different circumstances, who reviewed the Unabomber’s manifesto approvingly and called Kaczynski a political revolutionary rather than a lunatic, a framing that lines up more comfortably with a certain strain of online right-wing anti-institutional thinking than with anything resembling organized leftist politics. If you handed me that biography with no name attached and asked me to guess which political tribe would end up embracing this person, I would have guessed the online right without much hesitation, the heterodox, tech-adjacent, anti-woke right that already has plenty of affection for men like Bet-David and Musk and a general fondness for lone-wolf disruptors who reject institutional consensus. Instead, the actual MAGA political apparatus, up to and including the Trump administration itself, has done the opposite, framing him explicitly as a left-wing figure, with Stephen Miller referring to him as a self-described anti-fascist and describing the killing as the work of communist revolutionaries, and the White House folding his case into a broader memorandum about domestic terrorism tied to left-wing political violence. That is not an accident and it is not really about ideological accuracy either, it is a political move, a useful one, because pinning a violent, high-profile killing on the left lets the right build a narrative about left-wing extremism that serves an obvious political purpose, regardless of whether it lines up with what the alleged killer himself actually posted online before any of this happened.
Here is what makes the other half of this so much stranger to me, though, because I can at least follow the cynical logic of why the right would want to paint him as a leftist even if the underlying biography does not fully support it, that is a fairly standard move in a hyper-polarized media environment, find a villain, attach him to the other team, generate outrage and turnout. What I cannot follow, what genuinely baffles me, is why the response from the left has so often been agreement rather than pushback. If the right is out here saying this guy is one of yours, and he is a supporter of anti-DEI content, penpals with a conservative podcaster, an admirer of Musk and RFK Jr, and a sympathetic reader of a domestic terrorist’s manifesto, the correct response from anyone actually paying attention to left-wing values and principles should be something close to no he absolutely is not, are you kidding, and instead what I have watched play out, over and over, is a huge chunk of the online left essentially nodding along, accepting the framing, and claiming him anyway, embracing the label the right handed them instead of rejecting it, because the emotional payoff of having a symbol who took down a healthcare executive was apparently worth more than the inconvenience of the actual facts. That is not principled disagreement with the right’s framing, that is capitulation to it, dressed up as ownership, and it is baffling to watch happen in real time.
I think what is actually going on here, once you strip away the performative parts of both sides, is that neither the right’s claim nor the left’s counter-claim is really about Mangione’s actual politics at all, both are about symbolic ownership of an extremely high-profile, extremely viral event, and the content of his actual beliefs is almost incidental to the fight over who gets to hold the symbol. The right wants him coded left because a left-wing assassin is a more useful villain for their narrative about left-wing political violence than a heterodox, hard-to-categorize young man who spent years mocking wokeness would be. The left, or at least the loudest and most online part of it, wants him coded as theirs because a young man who allegedly struck a blow against a hated healthcare executive is a more satisfying folk hero than the actual documented complexity of his worldview would allow for. Both sides are doing the same thing, reshaping a real person’s actual, messy, cross-ideological biography into whatever cleaner story serves their side’s immediate rhetorical needs, and the fact that those two convenient stories happen to be mirror images of each other, the right insisting he is theirs to blame and the left insisting he is theirs to celebrate, should be a signal that neither story is really about him at all, they are about the fight itself, with Mangione reduced to a prop being passed back and forth by two sides that both, in their own way, need him to be a cleaner symbol than the actual public record supports.
What gets lost in all of this, obviously, is the actual person, whatever complicated, contradictory mix of grievance and ideology and personal crisis actually produced the man who is now sitting in a cell awaiting two separate trials, one of which could end in a death sentence. Nobody particularly seems to want the complicated version. The right does not want a heterodox loner whose politics do not fit neatly into their villain, the left does not want a class-mocking Musk admirer as their hero. Both sides want the clean story, and both sides have been willing to bend the facts, quietly, selectively, to get one, and the fact that a large chunk of the left folded so easily into accepting the right’s framing rather than pushing back on it with the actual documented record tells me the online left cares a lot less about getting the ideology right than it does about getting to keep the symbol, and that, more than almost anything else in this entire saga, is the detail that should embarrass people the most.
I want to add one more piece to this because it has been sitting with me and I think it is actually the clearest evidence of what is really going on here, more than anything I have written so far. This is not the first time the right has tried to pin a shooter on the left. It happens constantly, it is practically a reflex at this point, some gunman commits an act of violence, and within hours there are accounts claiming he was a registered Democrat, or that he had a rainbow flag on his porch, or that he followed some vaguely left-coded account once in 2019, and every single time this has happened with a shooter who was actually right-coded, actually connected to right-wing forums, actually radicalized through right-wing spaces, the left has pushed back immediately and correctly, has done the research, has pulled the actual voter registration or the actual posting history or the actual manifesto, and has said no, stop lying, this guy was one of yours, own it. That pushback has been consistent, it has been fast, and it has generally been accurate, because a huge amount of political violence in this country really has come out of right-coded online radicalization, and correcting the record when the right tries to dodge that fact by relabeling their own shooters as leftists has been, for years, one of the more reliable and honestly admirable instincts on the online left.
So where is that instinct now? Because this is the exact same move, structurally, the right is looking at a shooter whose actual documented online history, the anti-DEI posts, the admiration for Musk and Rogan and RFK Jr, the warm correspondence with a conservative podcaster, the approving review of a domestic terrorist’s manifesto, lines up far more comfortably with right-coded, heterodox, anti-institutional online spaces than with any actual organized left-wing tradition, and instead of doing what the left has done every other time this exact trick got pulled, checking the record and pushing back, a huge chunk of the online left just said sure, fine, he’s ours, and ran with it. The only variable that changed is who he allegedly shot. Every other time, the test was who did this person actually appear to be, based on the evidence, and the left applied that test rigorously and correctly. This time, the test quietly became did this person do something we liked, and the actual evidence about who he appears to be got treated as an inconvenience to wave away instead of a question worth answering. That is not a small inconsistency. That is the entire methodology flipping the second it becomes inconvenient, and nobody seems willing to say it out loud.
And I know how I get treated when I point this out, I get told I am being immature, that I am being petty, that I am the one with the problem here, as if noticing an obvious double standard is somehow the childish move rather than the double standard itself. But here is the thing, I am not the one refusing to look closely at this guy. I am doing exactly what the left has always claimed to do when it comes to political violence, which is actually examine the record, actually read what he said before any of this happened, actually take seriously where someone’s worldview came from instead of just accepting whichever label is emotionally convenient in the moment. I have looked at the DEI mockery. I have looked at the Bet-David letters. I have looked at the Unabomber review. I have looked at the private school, the country clubs, the Ivy League degree, the family business built on nursing homes and assisted living facilities and decades of accumulated wealth. All of it points the same direction, over and over, toward a young man who came from serious privilege and whose actual documented politics do not remotely match the working class hero mythology that has been built around him. I am not the one refusing to look. The people laughing at me are the ones refusing to look, because looking closely would mean giving up a story they have gotten emotionally attached to, and it is a lot easier to call the person pointing at the evidence immature than it is to sit with what the evidence actually says.
I want to answer the question I keep getting, sometimes asked honestly, sometimes asked as a way of dismissing me, which is why do you even care this much, why does it matter, why not just let people have their symbol and move on. It matters because of exactly what principles are supposed to be for. A principle that only applies when it is easy, when it costs you nothing, when it never asks you to criticize someone you are emotionally invested in, is not actually a principle at all, it is a preference wearing a principle’s clothes, and the entire test of whether someone actually believes in something or just likes the way it sounds is whether they are willing to apply it to the people they like, not just the people they already dislike.
This is the part that I think gets lost in all the noise about tone and immaturity and whatever else people throw at me when I bring this up. Being progressive, being leftist, being left leaning, whatever word you want to use, is supposed to mean something more specific than just being angry at the right people or cheering for whoever hurt someone you already hated. It is supposed to mean a commitment to certain values, solidarity that is actually material rather than symbolic, skepticism of concentrated wealth and power regardless of who holds it, a willingness to interrogate privilege rather than excuse it, and if those values only ever get applied to people you already have reason to dislike, and quietly suspended the moment applying them would mean criticizing someone currently useful to your side, then you do not actually hold those values, you are just using them selectively as a weapon, which is precisely the behavior the left has spent years correctly criticizing the right for. The whole point of having a coherent political framework is that it produces the same answer regardless of whether the person in front of you is someone you find sympathetic or someone you find repulsive, and the second your framework starts bending based on how much you like the individual case in front of you, you do not have a framework anymore, you have a mood.
Here is the part that actually worries me, though, beyond just the hypocrisy of it, and it is the part in your message that I think is the real stakes here, the actual harm. Propping up Luigi Mangione without question does not just mean cheering for one specific act of violence against one specific person, it means, by extension, giving a pass to everything else that has come out about who he actually is and what he actually believes, because you cannot cleanly separate the parts of a person you want to celebrate from the parts you would rather ignore, not when you are holding him up as a symbol and an icon rather than engaging with him as an actual complicated human being. If a huge number of people are willing to look past his anti-DEI posts, his mockery of identity politics, his admiration for figures who are, by any normal left-wing standard, deeply suspect, his sympathetic reading of a domestic terrorist’s manifesto, purely because he is currently useful as a symbol, then what you are actually doing is normalizing all of that alongside the celebration, teaching your own community that those positions are forgivable, negotiable, not disqualifying, as long as the person holding them does something dramatic enough in a direction you approve of. That is a real cost. That is not an abstract purity test, that is the actual mechanism by which movements get hollowed out from the inside, where the stated values stop actually functioning as a filter for anything, because everybody has learned that the filter gets waived whenever the emotional stakes are high enough.
And I think this is why I keep pushing on this even though it would clearly be easier, socially, to just let it go, because I actually think the healthcare fight is important, I actually think the anger at the industry is justified, and I think that fight deserves better than being represented by a symbol whose actual biography and actual documented beliefs undercut the very class politics people are trying to attach to him. Every time someone points out an inconvenient fact about Mangione and gets laughed off instead of engaged with, the movement is choosing comfort over rigor, and movements that consistently choose comfort over rigor do not stay coherent for very long, they drift, they get captured by whoever has the most compelling story rather than the most defensible principles, and eventually the values that were supposed to define the movement stop meaning anything at all because nobody was willing to enforce them when enforcing them was inconvenient. I would rather be the annoying person saying the uncomfortable true thing now, while it still costs me something socially to say it, than be part of a movement that only discovers it had standards after the damage from ignoring them is already done.
There is a piece of logic in all of this that I think a lot of people are trying very hard to avoid, and it is a simple one, if you believe Luigi Mangione’s actions were meaningful, if you believe they were a righteous act rather than a senseless one, if you are willing to celebrate what he allegedly did, then you do not get to separate that act from the actual belief system that produced it, because the two are not separable, the manifesto and the Goodreads reviews and the DEI mockery and the admiration for Musk and Kaczynski are not some unrelated footnote sitting off to the side of the shooting, they are the actual documented raw material out of which the shooting emerged. You cannot logically hold up the act as meaningful and then wave away the mind that produced it as irrelevant, because if the mind is irrelevant then the act has no meaning either, it becomes just a random violent event, and the entire reason people are treating this as symbolic in the first place is that they believe it came from somewhere, that it meant something, that it was a response to something real. Fine. If it meant something, then the something has to include all of it, not just the parts that flatter the story.
This is where I think a lot of the online left is trying to have it both ways without admitting that is what they are doing. They want the symbolic weight of the act, the framing of it as a strike against a predatory industry, as a moment of catharsis for millions of people who have been mistreated by insurers, while simultaneously refusing to sit with the actual documented worldview of the person who did it, a worldview that includes contempt for identity politics, admiration for a domestic terrorist, and comfortable relationships with figures on the online right. You cannot cash the symbolic check without covering what is actually in the account, and what is actually in the account is a lot messier and a lot less flattering than the clean folk hero story people want to tell. If you are going to claim the act as meaningful, you have to also claim, and actually reckon with, the belief system that generated it, the back injury and the isolation and the online radicalization pipeline he seems to have gone through, reading a domestic terrorist’s manifesto approvingly, marinating in heterodox online spaces that treat lone-actor violence as a legitimate form of political revolution rather than something to be horrified by. That is not a side note to the story, that is the actual explanation for why this specific man did this specific thing, and pretending you can celebrate the outcome while declining to engage with the mechanism that produced it is not principled support, it is cherry picking dressed up as solidarity.
And this is exactly why the refusal to have the conversation is the tell, because if your support for what he did were actually grounded in something real, in an actual considered position about political violence and class warfare and when, if ever, it is justified, you would be able to sit with the uncomfortable parts of his biography and either explain why they do not undermine your position or revise your position accordingly. Instead what I keep running into is people shutting the conversation down entirely, mocking anyone who brings up the DEI posts or the Bet-David letters or the Kaczynski review, treating those facts as some kind of bad faith distraction rather than directly relevant information about the person they have chosen to celebrate. That refusal to engage is not confidence, it is avoidance, and it is the clearest possible sign that the support was never actually built on a considered position in the first place, it was built on vibes, on catharsis, on the satisfaction of watching someone take out a person they hated, and the moment you ask them to explain or defend the actual belief system underneath the act, the whole thing falls apart, so the easier move is just to laugh at the question and move on rather than answer it.
So here is what I keep coming back to, and it is the same thing I have been saying this whole time in slightly different forms, if you are going to support Luigi Mangione, actually support him, all of him, the privilege, the politics, the manifesto, the letters, the whole documented person, not just the fifteen seconds of catharsis you got from watching a healthcare executive get shot. Own it completely or do not claim it at all. Do not get to pick and choose which parts of a real, complicated human being you are willing to acknowledge based on which parts make your position easier to hold, because that is not political conviction, that is narrative management, and narrative management is exactly the kind of thing the left is supposed to see through when the right does it, which makes it that much more embarrassing to watch happen from the inside.
The Last Thing: When Your Own Side Starts Sounding Like the Other One
I want to end on this because it is the thing that has actually unsettled me the most through this whole process, more than any individual argument or any single laugh react, and it is this, the tone, the posture, the actual rhetorical moves I have watched some online leftists make in defense of Luigi Mangione are not new to me, I have seen them before, I spent years watching Republicans make the exact same moves in defense of Donald Trump, and hearing them now coming from people who would be furious at that comparison is genuinely one of the more disorienting experiences I have had in politics.
Think about the shape of it. Evidence comes out that complicates the hero narrative, and instead of engaging with the evidence, the response is to attack the credibility or the motives of whoever raised it, dismiss them as a shill, a concern troll, someone secretly working for the other side, rather than actually addressing what they said. That is not a leftist rhetorical move, that is the exact move Trump’s most devoted supporters have used for a decade against any journalist, any fact checker, any inconvenient story, the immediate pivot to attacking the messenger because attacking the message would require actually grappling with something uncomfortable. Think about the way facts about Mangione’s actual documented views, the DEI mockery, the Bet-David letters, the sympathetic Kaczynski review, just get waved off as irrelevant or fake or overblown, not through counter evidence but through sheer repetition and social pressure, laugh react after laugh react until the person raising the point gets tired and stops. That is not political analysis, that is the same “fake news” reflex, just running in a different ideological direction, the instinct to treat inconvenient information as something to be dismissed on vibes rather than something to be actually evaluated on its merits. Think about the willingness to excuse actual documented behavior and beliefs, privilege, contempt for people the movement claims to care about, admiration for figures the movement claims to oppose, purely because the person doing it is currently useful, currently on your side, currently the guy who did the thing you wanted done. That is the exact same permission structure Trump supporters built for him after the Access Hollywood tape, after the indictments, after every single moment that should have been disqualifying and instead just got absorbed and excused because he was already their guy and the loyalty came first.
I think what makes this so uncomfortable to say out loud is that it cuts against the story a lot of people on the left tell themselves about what separates them from the MAGA movement, which is the idea that the right is uniquely tribal, uniquely willing to abandon principle for loyalty, uniquely susceptible to cult of personality thinking, while the left is supposedly the side that holds its own accountable, that values evidence and nuance over blind allegiance. And maybe that story is still true in the aggregate, maybe this is a specific, contained phenomenon rather than evidence of some deeper rot, I genuinely hope that is the case. But watching this particular episode play out, watching people I would otherwise consider thoughtful, evidence driven, genuinely committed to left wing values, turn into exactly the kind of no-matter-what defenders they would mock instantly if they saw the same behavior aimed at Trump, has made it a lot harder for me to believe that immunity is as strong as people like to think it is. It turns out tribal loyalty is not actually a right wing personality trait, it is a human one, and it shows up whenever a group finds a symbol compelling enough, regardless of which side of the aisle that group sits on. The left is not special. It is not naturally immune to the exact dynamics it has spent a decade correctly diagnosing in the other side. It just has not, until recently, had as many opportunities to prove that, and watching this particular test get failed, quietly, by people who would never admit that is what happened, is the part of this whole saga that actually worries me the most, more than anything about Mangione himself.