by Alex Berenson, Unreported Truths:
(Second of two parts. First is here.)
Luigi Mangione was sicker than he looked.
In online pictures, Mangione, the 26-year-old Maryland man who (allegedly) gunned down UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street last week, seemed to be in great shape, a hot tech bro with ripped abs.
But in Reddit posts and to friends, Mangione painted a different picture, complaining of insomnia in 2018, irritable bowel syndrome in 2019, plus Lyme disease, even “brain fog.” He had a bad back too, bad enough to need surgery in 2023. Though it didn’t keep him from traveling, hiking, and carrying out a carefully planned murder.1
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Mangione’s medical problems have received attention. They deserve more.
For the release of Mangione’s short “manifesto” on Tuesday shows his complaints about the health insurance industry to be essentially generic. They were unrelated to any specific denial of care or coverage that he faced or even claimed had hurt someone else.
In other words, Mangione could have as easily shot an executive at an oil company and blamed climate change, or killed a hedge fund manager over income inequality. Those are more obvious targets for a would-be domestic terrorist concerned about corporate greed, as Mangione claimed to be.
Instead, he focused his anger on health insurance, (allegedly) murdering Thompson, the chief executive of the largest American insurer, in cold blood.
His anger appears to stem not from he was treated but how he felt.
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(But what about his back?)
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The maladies about which Mangione complained included a bacterial illness, spinal deformities, digestive problems, and issues sleeping.
But all of them, including his back problems, land in the swamp of so much modern medicine, the place where physical and psychiatric maladies are nearly impossible to disentangle.
Metaphor as illness.
Such diseases are difficult and frustrating. Patients insist their afflictions are physical, not psychosomatic, and demand treatments. Physicians may suspect otherwise; they have few solid cures either way. And patients frustrated with conventional treatments often wind up seeking costly, unproven remedies from doctors who range from hopeful to aggressive to outright grifters.
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Though they don’t usually wind up killing strangers in the street.
The media narrative about Mangione is facile and wrong (surprise, surprise): his illnesses explain his target, not his crime.2
And the crime was monstrous (even if woke journalists don’t think so).
The easy explanation is to call Mangione a psychopath who wanted attention and thought killing an executive would get it – that is, to write off the murder as overdetermined by Mangione’s inborn character defects.
But neither Mangione’s history nor the crime itself its suggests that view is right. Psychopathy is a fundamental character trait. True psychopaths almost always reveal their lack of empathy and cruelty by their early twenties. They rarely have real or close friends. People who knew them can easily point to signs of their degeneracy.
Mangione was the opposite, hard-working and apparently well-liked throughout high school, college, and in his first flush of post-collegiate life. People who knew him have expressed outright shock at his arrest.
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