Dem
47
GOP
53
Not surprisingly, there has been a lot of interest in the ideology of Luigi Mangione, the young man who has been charged with killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in a planned assassination. Right-wingers want to show that he was a pinko Commie who hates private enterprise. Many left-wingers see him as a folk hero who has brought the topic of health care to the front pages. There is much at stake, depending on who he really is.
As it turns out, Mangione has a long and detailed online history. However, his many postings don't leave a clear picture of him and what he wants. What is known about him is that he was a high school valedictorian, Ivy League-educated data engineer, avid gamer, fitness buff, backpacker, amateur philosopher and a victim of debilitating back pain.
There is something for everyone in his online footprints. Conservatives see an anti-capitalist San Francisco liberal. Progressives see an anti-woke rich kid who was bedazzled by right-wing futurists. His politics are complicated, though, so neither one is completely correct and he will not be a good poster boy for either one, except maybe as an example of why parts for ghost guns should be banned.
The most tantalizing bit of information about him is that he had chronic back pain and had spinal fusion surgery in July 2023, at a very early age, so it must have been severe. A key question is whether his health insurance company refused to pay for it. If so, we would have a motive for the killing, but so far we don't know who he was insured with and whether they paid for the operation. Either way, this may prove disappointing to the left unless more turns up. What they would like to discover is that a close friend or relative died because United Healthcare refused treatment for him or her and that resulted in the person's death, so Mangione was just following the Bible: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a corpse for a corpse. The one thing you can be sure of is that as more facts come out, people will try to twist them to serve their political ends.
Since Mangione is in custody and has been charged, there will certainly be a trial. His wealthy family can afford the best lawyers money can buy. It will be interesting to see what Mangione's strategy will be at the trial. Trying to deny that he pulled the trigger probably won't work. Instead, he could try for jury nullification by arguing that Thompson led to many people's deaths by denying healthcare they had paid for, so he deserved to die. Juries aren't supposed to do that and judges instruct them not to do that, but if one rogue juror simply votes not guilty over and over and over and over, eventually the judge will have to call a mistrial. The government could try again, but with the publicity of a mistrial out there, one or more rogue jurors who had never heard about jury nullification could do the same thing the next time. And the time after that. Eventually, the government might just decide prosecutors had better things to do and give up. Trying for mistrial after mistrial might well be Mangione's best strategy. (V)