“Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare since 2021, was shot and killed outside an entrance to the New York Hilton Midtown in Manhattan, New York City, on December 4, 2024. He was in the city to attend an annual investors meeting for UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare. Authorities believe the attack was not random. Thompson had been criticized for UnitedHealthcare’s rejection of insurance claims, and his family reported that he had received death threats in the past. The shooting occurred early in the morning, and the suspect, initially described as a white man wearing a mask, fled the scene.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Brian_Thompson
(edit) I would like to point out that Luigi Mangione is only a suspect and there are currently doubts about the integrity of the evidence.
Curiosity, resigned frustration.
Whether it was him or not, whether evidence was real or not. If the goal was to spark a revolution, if it was to wake people up to their collective power, if it was to scare the elites…
This person took action because they were desperate for change. But he didn’t reveal anything we didn’t already feel, and most people are continuing to do what they’ve already been doing: making memes about their malcontent in their comfortable communities.
I imagine it must feel so disempowering to sacrifice the only thing you think you have left - your free life - in order to spark change, only to watch all those who approve still continue to do nothing at all.
I like that the solidarity in conversation has drawn more attention to class rather than affiliation, that the profitable infighting between Team A and Team B (Left/Right, urban/rural, etc) has temporarily cooled while Americans look upwards.
But if there is change, it’s still a while away. The disenfranchised still have something to lose. They still think they can’t matter, and the lack of meaningful change will continue to prove that to them. Complacent malcontent.
It must be so miserable, being manhandled and denigrated by law enforcement, mistreated and neglected by imprisonment, dehumanized by the self-righteous; and see that the ‘movement’ your last hurrah inspired was the internet’s Meme Flavour of the Month. The sheer impotence of watching everybody laugh and keep waiting for somebody else to save them.
I can barely imagine how that must feel. To sacrifice everything and watch the world laugh.
If it was or wasn’t him (and was someone else), it doesn’t change that the action (or PotD) was the correct move imo. “Correct” forms of protests and legal actions only work so much in a system rigged against the working class. But the “peaceful” options never work against the rich/corporations. So I kind of hope more CEOs in all industries meet the same punishment for all lives that they have played with. Even if we are shown that dude hates leftists, doesn’t change my critical support of his (or whomever it was if not him) action. But it will be very important for leftist orgs/groups/collectives to start going hard for waking up the masses while there is such a good point of unity to work from.
I think he is being framed by the cops who are unable or unwilling to find the actual killer
A cold (maybe rational?) thought: some assassinations are milestones of time; this could be one.
From my point of view: we could feel bad thinking was a “good” assassination, but we’ve also to think about all the people murdered by UnitedHealth. For the average media is simple to manipulate narration, even without saying the false: he had children, he had a family; we could say the same about many officials of the German Army in WWII, they had families too.
Thompson’s sons are not assassin’s victims, they are victim of the system. Also Thompson himself could maybe seen as a collateral victim.
I’m waiting to have more information about the assassin to formulate a thought about him (could be a big misinformation about), my comment is about the fact in general.
he had children, he had a family; we could say the same about many officials of the German Army in WWII, they had families too.
He had been living separately from his family for some time. He had a DUI conviction. On the same day that the company suffered a ransomeware attack that wiped $46B from it’s market cap, he dumped $1.5M of his stock and along with others, was being investigated.
The media has obviously done a whitewash of the guy, as it’s in their class interests but to call him a piece of shit would be going lightly.
I’ll be honest, I’m ok with what happened. Someone at work gave me shit over “oh but he has 2 kids …”
Murder in the general sense is not ok. People shouldn’t be able to end the lives of other people just because without response. But this guy… How many lives did he decide to end so he can get a little bigger of a paycheck?
The kids? Yeah, as a parent, I have sympathy. But as a human, fuck that shit.
If a drug dealer who had 2 kids sold fentanyl laced drugs that killed several people just to make some money got murdered in the streets nobody would say “oh but he has 2 kids”.
They might say the drug dealer was doing something illegal. How this CEO was running things should be illegal. Countless (innocent) people died so he could get more money.
Oh also he was doing illegal things including insider trading and drinking and driving so there’s that.
Yeah.
Honestly I see Brian Thompson as way worse than this hypothetical drug dealer.
Obviously, the drug dealer is bad: he’s effectively killed people by selling fentanylaced drugs (presumably without telling his buyers what they were actually buying). But Brian has effectively killed thousands.
In both cases I have sympathy for the kids. In the drug dealers case, I might not be crying my eyes out about the death; but I still wish some form of non-lethal recourse had been taken. This person’s death doesn’t send a very effective message, as most other people in his position have already accepted the risk inherent to what they’re doing.
In Brian’s case, non-lethal recourse wouldn’t have been effective. If he was left alive he would’ve just kept killing people for his own profit, but his death sends a message to others in his position. People who usually wouldn’t see any sort of consequences for their actions.
I feel bad for the family. Losing a loved one sucks. I don’t know anything else about him, his family, or their life outside of this story to build an opinion on their suffering, but I’m sure it is immeasurable and only made worse by the media circus that has developed.
But one thing I do know is that this same terrible thing happens to so many families across the world every day. And the impacts can be harder than just dealing with the loss - what if the person murdered was the earner for the family? Or supported their disabled partner or child? What if a couple wasn’t married/legally bound, so the partner can’t get any of the deceased’s benefits? Imagine having to try to figure out childcare if you were a stay at home parent and had to go back to work. Imagine having to go back to work period after suffering a loss like that?
This is where my lack of sympathy for the current situation manifests - because Mr. Thompson’s family is ridiculously rich from his time as CEO of UHC, they will not have to worry about these scenarios. Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy safety and security and eliminate worry. They will be able to fully mourn their husband and father, knowing that their millions and millions of dollars are sitting there earning more money without them having to lift a finger. Their future is secure.
To become that rich you either profited off the efforts of others, or profited from the suffering of others. Or both.
I personally find it absurd that a murder involving a few people makes the world talk about these health problems much more effectively than street demonstrations of thousands of protesters. The real fact is that the protesters are us, here on the net, now much more impactful online than one on the street, and I don’t know if this is worrying or not but this is the reality (at least in many contexts).
People like Brian Thompson enjoy(ed) a life of care free luxury and comfort because people have been abiding by societal norms…the social contract. Eventually, those care free days are going to be a distant memory and “corpos” are going to need armed security 24/7 like every cyberpunk novel ever has predicted.
There is one truth about Americans. You do not want them to agree that you are the baddie they should focus on.
You reminded me of something by mentioning cyberpunk: if this case does not lead to an actual mass movement, it will probably accelerate in the opposite direction, of unlimited capitalist liberalism in which every CEO is a demigod with a private army for his personal defense. Which, as you well said, is narrated in every cyberpunk story but which is a symptom of its realization.
In case anyone is curious like I was, the original artist of this portrait of Mike Pondsmith - creator of the Cyberpunk TTRPG - is Lauren Tamaki, it was originally for The Atlantic article “The Role-Playing Game That Predicted The Future” written by Darryn King from December 2020, her other portraits are available here: http://laurentamaki.com/portrait-gallery
He’s the face of a shithead corpo and had responsibility to make shithead decisions for shareholders where he indirectly caused deaths of thousands.
It’s a vigilante move where Luigi is the hero. He should go through the justice system with a gofundme team of lawyers.
I’m surprised these replies in an anarchist comm haven’t brought up concepts like Propaganda of the Deed already. (that said, I know for a fact some people responding aren’t anarchists)
While I consider PotD of the 1890s-1900s to have failed in its intentions and is worth strongly critiquing, and while the crappy neo-Nazi imitation advocated by their popular text Siege has also been extremely ineffective, this assassination has provided an interesting case study - the killing of a healthcare CEO with no innocent bystanders is one of the least controversial extreme deeds yet. I’ve seen people even claiming this could become the new Columbine (we’ll have to wait to see if that prediction is worth anything, but it would be nice to see the ruling class be shot up for a change).
I think the biggest issues with the gilded age PotD was that a lot of them hurt innocent people, or had collateral damage which hurt everyone in the case of a lot of the bombings. Not all of them by any means, but when innocent bystanders got hurt or killed it made the deed a lot less supportable. Plus there’s just something about a health insurance CEO that makes literally nobody like them lol.
The innocent people, and also some who the anarchists wouldn’t consider innocent but a typical citizen might. Again, a parasitical CEO, no-one likes them but their squealing fellow upper-class. And this really had the effect of clarifying the economic classes - the booj and their megaphones yelled in unison that this was bad, while the worker class, regardless of any cultural “left”-“right” divide, overwhelmingly said “he got what he deserved”.
Yeah, seeing people from both sides trashing politicians or influencers who spoke positively about Thompson or negitively of the killer has been so cool to see. There are still the liberals opposed go any type of visible violence that didn’t like the murder, but even most of them didn’t support the statements in support of Thomas. The Facebook post with like 100,000 laugh reactions has to be such a sign that no one is mourning a ceo and no one will care if you get killed. Like it’s facebook, if you get that reaction on facebook you know it’s bad lol. I know it won’t lead to anything on its own, but I hope it makes them uncomfortable at the very least. It’s long since time that the owner class feel a modicum of the pain they cause millions daily.
I’m amazed they haven’t deleted it:
Honestly this is very clarifying and we should be jumping on this as a tool to further understanding of our cause. Not because the shooter was one of ours but because support for him is common ground we can use to talk to everyone who we want to talk to.
I think, taking the leaked manifesto as legit here, the guy was aware of this. One of the lines basically says “it seems obvious we need to take matters into our own hands and I guess I have to be the first to do it”.
That said, i think this works because it’s not just propaganda of the deed. These masters of the world are still only human. They have manipulated the world so they get to decide what happens to who, when, and accept no input from anyone else. Well, when they use that power to cause millions of excess deaths it’s no surprise their victims will (eventually, after much patience) simply step outside the social contract to deal with them.
He didn’t do it, but if he were Muad’dib, he’d be a hero and not guilty of any crime, because self defence is legal.
He’s probably just an attention-seeking weirdo who wants 15m of fame, there’s no shortage of them.
Some are elected President, some take down bad guys like Luigi seems to have.
If so he found the golden ticket. Insane amounts of attention and none of it negative.
It’s immoral to be more mad about Brian Thompson’s death than about the countless millions he killed and tortured and bankrupted with his pen.
The killer is a symptom, not of Brian Thompson but of the system he was a replaceable figurehead for. If we have less violent means of stopping insurance executives murdering millions, we should jump at them. Can’t let millions die like that though. Do anything else.
Even making the discussion about Luigi is a little misleading in the wider sense, although it’s not invalid by default to discuss it.
I do not condone murder. But this was not a murder, this was an assassination, and we need more of that.
More random assassinations by lone wolves will yield more state brutality, more cop cities and expanded security state powers.
(In case anyone thinks I’m speaking from a liberal position…)
More random assassinations by lone wolves will yield more state brutality, more cop cities and expanded security state powers.
It was not random, it was clearly targeted.
Cop cities, state brutality and expanding state powers are already the realitiy in the US.
By random I mean it is not organized. It is random people doing their own thing.
Sounds like anarchism to me
This. This may be a moment where American class consciousness has flickered to life, but without theory and organized movements nothing will come of it besides crackdowns.
At this stage though I can’t really condemn it, I’ve seen class consciousness only evaporate more and more over the course of my lifetime across the general populus, while concentrating in a few unions, which isn’t bad of course as it gets workers better material conditions, but it’s a far cry from a revolutionary movement. At this stage I feel all that’s left is individual actions, though perhaps I’m dooming.
I think prolewiki is a bit overly critical there, nobody thinks tagging a wall like some teenager is going to spread class consciousness enough to lead to anything, though a good art piece or slogan may make people stop and think, we’d be overwhelmingly closer to any kind of lefty utopia if the guy shooting trump didn’t miss.
we’d be overwhelmingly closer to any kind of lefty utopia if the guy shooting trump didn’t miss.
I don’t see how. He’d just be replaced by Vance or some other clown. Trump isn’t some unique villain, his rise is a product of late-stage neoliberalism. Fascism isn’t on the rise all over the Western world for no reason, it’s because of grinding neoliberalism throughout the imperial core.
Bruh I know what the imperial core is.
Yes trump would be replaced, that much is obvious as there is a league of even shadier mfers behind him, but whether his replacement would have the charisma to actually succeed in getting enough people energised to suceed is a different question entirely.
Yes there is a global rise in the far-right and yes it is in large part due to the decay of brief prosperity for the imperial core countries due to the failure of neoliberal policies, in many ways failure that is created by inherent contradictions within capitalism as described by Marx, but this rise is also tied together by strong charismatic leaders who are able to seize the moment in ways the left can’t counter because we cannot offer the simplicity of lies.
So to avoid the pendulum swinging to the right, keeping those individuals out of power is our only option and is a shared want between us and the establishment.
I see no reason not to seize the opportunity and utilize electoralism to our advantage, even in the absence of meaningful change, a rightoid passing legislation means a press environment even worse than typical neoliberal press, and that makes it that much harder to organise, to do mutual aid, talk about theory or spread solidarity.
Everything leads there anyway
Why are you asking about opinions of Luigi Mangione and not the assassin? Are you really taking the police’s word for it that they’re the same person?
Probably because even the media outlets are failing to use words like “suspected” or “allegedly”.
I think it sends an important signal that when people are pushed too far by the greedy capitalists, this may happen.
I read about him and I understand what he was feeling. He is not a evil person.
I feel SO BAD for that CEOS kids! And ZERO Sympathy for the Tens of Thousands of Parents and Kids who he Killed through his Denial of Healthcare Coverage!
Luigi did nothing wrong
Mario did it, it’s easy to confuse them
