How do murder suspects get their media nicknames? Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused of shooting and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has been called the “CEO killer” or some variation by ABC (12/24/24) and some of its affiliates (KABC, 12/20/24; KGO, 12/24/24). The name makes sense, as the victim’s stature and the place of his murder—a hotel where a company-related meeting was to take place—was the aspect of the crime that made it sensational news. This is similar to how Theodore Kaczynski became the “Unabomber,” because his targets were universities and airlines.
Yet right-wing media are using a seemingly mundane feature of Mangione’s life—his college degree from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania—to call him some variation of the “Ivy League killer.”
This label serves a few purposes for Republican-aligned media. Clearly, it is meant to deflate the sympathy for Mangione. Coding Mangione as an Ivy Leaguer also codes him as a leftist, occluding what appear to be his much more politically heterodox views; it paints him as an out-of-touch rich kid, rather than an anti-establishment renegade with whom Americans of all walks of economic life might relate.
It would appear that the right-wing press are taken aback by the growing sympathy the American public has with Mangione (Forbes, 12/12/24; Washington Post, 12/18/24; Newsweek, 12/21/24), a result of widespread anger against health insurance companies who inflate their profits through denial of care, high premiums and delaying medical services with cumbersome administrative bloat (AP, 9/12/22; KFF, 3/1/24; Gallup, 12/9/24; Marketplace, 12/13/24).
Focusing on Mangione’s education rather than the target of his attack, the “Ivy League” angle also seeks to turn the resulting policy discussion from one about the broken healthcare system to one about the education system. It promotes the right-wing narrative that academia is full of Marxist professors who indoctrinate vulnerable youngsters with revolutionary ideas, that Mangione is responding not to the objective reality about America’s healthcare crisis but to rhetoric that’s been wrongly instilled in him and many others—and that, therefore, the lesson of this shooting is that the US education system must be reformed by the incoming Trump administration.
‘Morally perverse positions’
New York Post columnist Charles Gasparino (12/14/24) argues for using the IRS to punish private schools that tolerate views he disapproves of.
Numerous articles in the New York Post (12/9/24, 12/10/24, 12/11/24, 12/12/24, 12/18/24, 12/23/24) make mention of Mangione’s “Ivy League” education. Columnist Charles Gasparino lamented in the Post (12/14/24) that a Penn professor posted on social media support of Mangione. Gasparino wrote that while students there pay “$85,000 a year to be brainwashed with leftism,” big school endowments are the primary “funding source of the progressive indoctrination we have in the college classroom.” The solution, then, is that Trump should go after university endowments’ tax breaks, so that they’re forced to lay off indoctrinating professors.
Princeton undergraduate and pro-Israel activist Maximillian Meyer (New York Post, 12/19/24), who wrote that Thompson’s killing was “rationalized as resistance by a privileged young person with two Ivy League degrees,” likened the attacks on the health insurance industry on his campus to student sympathy with Gazans: “To far-left young Americans, on any given issue, the world is divided into two buckets: oppressor and oppressed,” he wrote.
“The students who are celebrated as our nation’s most brilliant are often adopting the most morally perverse positions,” Meyer continued. He blamed the “moral equivocation” of educational institutions, and warned that “the reckoning, from elementary school on up, must begin now.”
‘Protect vulnerable young minds’
Scott Walker (Washington Times, 12/12/24): Mangione “sadly personifies the problems in our country’s education system these days…an ardent anticapitalist, a hate-filled opponent of corporations and private healthcare and a proponent of climate change alarmism.”
At the Washington Times (12/12/24), former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker made the same point under the headline “College Grad’s Arrest Shows Elite Education Breeds Hate, Not Tolerance”:
The situation on most college campuses since the Covid-19 pandemic has gone from liberal bias to outright indoctrination. Students are not taught how to think critically, but to hate America and abhor those with views that are not 100% aligned with their left-wing agenda… We must hold educators and institutions accountable for pushing these dangerous ideologies on our children and grandchildren. We must also protect vulnerable young minds from anti-American narratives and teach them to respect the values that have made our nation great.
UnHerd (12/10/24), a relative newcomer to Britain’s oversized world of pearl-clutching Tory media (Guardian, 10/28/23; Bloomberg, 9/10/24), attempted to situate Mangione in history, saying “members of the murderous Red Army Faction in Seventies Germany were almost all university graduates”; Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers “was the son of a CEO and graduate of the University of Michigan, a so-called ‘public Ivy.’”
Fox News similarly hyped up Mangione’s “Ivy League” pedigree, regularly applying the label to him in its headlines (e.g., 12/11/24, 12/12/24, 12/16/24, 12/23/24). “Ivy League Murder Suspect Acted Superior, Did Not Expect to Be Caught: Body Language Expert” read one Fox headline (12/13/24), desperately signaling to its audience that Mangione is not a real man of the masses.
‘Spoiled rich kid’
Former FBI agent Jennifer Coffindaffer told Newsweek (12/16/24) Mangione showed his “true colors” by hiring a lawyer. It’s not clear who Coffindaffer thinks Mangione should have used as a role model; Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Daniel Ellsberg all had private lawyers.
This theme occasionally bled outside right-wing media borders. Newsweek (12/16/24) made an entire article out of a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) by a former FBI agent, Jennifer Coffindaffer, who called Mangione a “spoiled rich kid” because he hired a high-priced defense attorney. “If Luigi truly believed his rhetoric, he would have gone with the public defender,” Coffindaffer avered, and therefore he’s “a hypocrite, not a hero.”
As FAIR (12/11/24, 12/17/24) has noted, centrist establishment papers like the Washington Post and New York Times, along with Murdoch outlets like the New York Post, Wall Street Journal and Fox News, have all used space to shame those with grievances against health insurance companies. They’ve told readers and viewers that, contrary to available evidence and a mountain of lived experience, the situation isn’t that bad, and we should simply accept the system for what it is.
But the right-wing media’s focus on Mangione’s education and family background is an irrelevant ad hominem attack that is meant not only to distract their audience from the well-founded reasons why so many sympathize with the shooter, but to redirect their anger toward the country’s education system, which has for so long been in the right’s crosshairs.
If our nation’s quaking corporate media gave equivalent coverage of ‘one’ for Mangionia and an unknown total of deaths due to the withholding of medical care by CEO Thompson’s insurance company, they would have run out of ink!
Sadly, media focus across the political spectrum should spotlight the lack of universal healthcare. Such a public policy reform (revolution?) would quell outrage that sparks murders of deadly, profiteering health insurer CEOs.
Popular meme: “Save a CEO – Support Medicare for All”.
Other nations don’t assassinate their health insurance CEOs. There’s a reason: it languishes on the desk of every Congress member: HR 3421, S.1655 — the Medicare for All Act of 2023.
It is entirely to be expected that a good-quality education would result in students becoming more socialist in their perspectives, as learning how to think and how the world really works are two of the functions of education. The hatred of education by the rich on the grounds that it turns the people against them – and rightly so – has distinct echoes in past eras when the church or the imams worked hard to ensure the ignorance, even illiteracy, of the people because they know that education is often accompanied by decline in belief in supernatural deities and in the power of organised faith. Capitalism likewise relies on faith in an ideology that benefits a few at the expense of the many.
Great writing. Gripping analysis.
Luigi’s visage in the photo in the linked Jacobin article speaks of the destiny whose absence Nietzsche often lamented of “The German.” Nietzsche also writes that the strongest timber resides with the cutthroats and murderers in the czarist gulags. He said Dostoyevsky’s semi-autobiographical book House of the Dead was filled with this insight.
I’d read that book long before I came upon Nietzsche’s cite. It didn’t impress me that way, but rather of inescapable heartache, gloom and tedium.
It’s lamentable a family man died, albeit of the ruling class. Where is the justice in a single person’s salary in the US being ten, twenty, thirty million a year and more, while the destitute live hungry in the street?
That the disparity in this particular instance can be attributed to health care for profit is too absurd to contemplate. Never mind the weapons dealers who make that kind of money. Why would anyone want that kind of money, anyway?
I think it’s a hackneyed expression by now, but the more you possess, the more you are possessed. Nietzsche had his Zarathustra elaborate this pang with the eulogy, “Therefore, praised be a moderate poverty.” I’ve found that to be a fairly successful approach to economics.
Mangione’s courage should be rewarded. As tragic as that would make still more a mess of this instance of class warfare. And it is class warfare. Mangione’s appearance is incidental. Class warfare is unceasing. The moneybags waging it have been, are, and increasingly, waging it constantly. And winning.
Just let someone call them on it. They’ll be ambushed with the accusation of engaging in class warfare as if it’s the most nefarious personal characteristic. It is more heartbreak, as if there weren’t already enough in these Warfare States of America to think of Mangione in prison at all. Crushing to think for decades.