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Radicalized: Ivy League Boy Reads ‘Unabomber’ Manifesto, Becomes Killer

Posted on | December 10, 2024 | Comments Off on Radicalized: Ivy League Boy Reads ‘Unabomber’ Manifesto, Becomes Killer

Luigi Mangione (left); Ted Kaczynski (right)

The headline is your “tl:dr” summary of what might otherwise seem mysterious: Why would the handsome young scion of a prominent Maryland family decide to murder the CEO of a health insurance company? Meanwhile, here’s the New York Times story:

Luigi Mangione, the online version of him, was an Ivy League tech enthusiast who flaunted his tanned, chiseled looks in beach photos and party pictures with blue-blazered frat buddies.
He was the valedictorian of a prestigious Baltimore prep school who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a head counselor at a pre-college program at Stanford University.
With his credentials and connections, he could have ended up one day as an entrepreneur or the chief executive of one of his family’s thriving businesses. Instead, investigators suspect, he took a different path.
The police now believe that Mr. Mangione, 26, is the masked gunman who calmly took out a pistol equipped with a suppressor on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and assassinated Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. He was arrested in Altoona, Pa., on Monday after an employee at a McDonald’s recognized him and called the police. Officers said they found him with fake identification, a weapon similar to the one seen in video of the killing and a manifesto decrying the health care industry.

Mangione’s grandfather was a successful real estate developer in the suburbs of Baltimore and, apparently, a devout Catholic who sired 10 children and had 37 grandchildren at the time of his death in 2008.

Luigi Mangione was the valedictorian of “the prestigious Gilman School in Baltimore,” an all-boys prep school where the annual tuition is nearly $40,000 and Luigi played several sports including (as the Free Beacon comically notes) soccer. Mangione then studied computer engineering at the University of Pennsylvania (Donald Trump’s alma mater, coincidentally) and after graduating in 2020, “worked as a software engineer at TrueCar,” but was apparently laid off last year when the company cut about 100 employees as part of “restructuring.”

After being laid off, Mangione seemed to start drifting into isolation. He was dealing with a persistent back injury that led to him undergo surgery. While recuperating from that ordeal, Mangione posted a review of Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future — the manifesto of the Unabomber. “It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless[ly] write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies,” wrote Mangione. “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.” Mangione said Kaczynski’s “actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.”

Well, to-may-to, to-mah-to, eh? Is it so difficult to conclude that the “extreme political revolutionary” was also a lunatic? And isn’t it true that most such would-be revolutionaries are lunatics? Not to wander too far afield here, but I am personally acquainted with Richard Spencer, the poster boy for every Antifa “punch-a-Nazi” meme, and it has long been my contention that what went wrong with Spencer basically is that he read Nietzsche at too young an age and took it too seriously. Young men should never read Nietzsche; they should know him only by reputation as a madman who died of brain syphilis. If it’s philosophy they crave, let young men read Aristotle or Marcus Aurelius or Edmund Burke, but never Nietzsche. Once the young man has gotten older, achieved some sort of stable adult life — wife, kids, mortgage, etc. — then it’s safe for him to skim through Nietzsche, so long as he keeps in mind that Nietzsche was crazy. Being quite the autodidact myself, I recognize the basic danger of do-it-yourself education, namely that the untutored student may go off on some bizarre tangent — young man reads Nietzsche, next thing you know, he’s leading a latter-day Nuremberg march — and it seems that some similar process is what happened with Luigi Mangione.

The headlines tell us that Mangione also wrote a “manifesto,” but that description is a bit grandiose:

Law enforcement officials that arrested Mangione also discovered a handwritten, three-page document that shed details on his mindset and motivations behind the fatal shooting.
“These parasites had it coming,” reportedly read the note, per CNN . “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”

Maybe I should write my own “manifesto.” I’ve already got the title: Crazy People Are Dangerous. Might be a bestseller.



 

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Category: Crime

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