Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old former valedictorian of Baltimore’s prestigious Gilman School, has been identified as a person of interest in the high-profile murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Mangione was detained based on a tip-off from a McDonald’s customer in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after recognizing a man in the restaurant from surveillance footage, according to ABC News.
He was carrying a gun, a silencer, and multiple forms of identification, including a fake New Jersey ID. The gun found with Mangione is similar to the one believed to have been used in Thompson’s murder.
At the time of his arrest, Luigi Mangione was found with a two-and-a-half-page handwritten manifesto reportedly filled with vitriol against the healthcare industry.
A law enforcement official described the document as filled with “rage and justifications,” including phrases such as, “These parasites had it coming.”
“These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done,” a police official who has seen the document told CNN.
According to the New York Post, citing sources familiar with the investigation, the manifesto consisted two and a half handwritten pages and echoed quotes previously shared by Mangione on his Goodreads account.
These quotes were drawn from the writings of the notorious Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” an anti-establishment extremist who terrorized the nation for nearly two decades.
Ted Kaczynski was an American domestic terrorist and mathematician, notorious for his nationwide mail bombing campaign aimed at individuals he believed were advancing modern technology and harming the natural environment.
Over a span of 17 years, from 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski’s bombings killed three people and injured 23 others. He sought to draw attention to his anti-technology manifesto titled “Industrial Society and Its Future,” which advocated a nature-centered form of anarchism.
In a glowing four-star review, Mangione lauded the document’s insights, referring to Kaczynski as a “political revolutionary” and even attempting to rationalize his violence.
Read his review below:
“Clearly written by a mathematics prodigy. Reads like a series of lemmas on the question of 21st century quality of life.
It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.
He was a violent individual – rightfully imprisoned – who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.
A take I found online that I think is interesting:
“Had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere and at the end of the day, he’s probably right. Oil barons haven’t listened to any environmentalists, but they feared him.
When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.
Fossil fuel companies actively suppress anything that stands in their way and within a generation or two, it will begin costing human lives by greater and greater magnitudes until the earth is just a flaming ball orbiting third from the sun.
Peaceful protest is outright ignored, economic protest isn’t possible in the current system, so how long until we recognize that violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self-defense.
These companies don’t care about you, or your kids, or your grandkids. They have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck, so why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive?
We’re animals just like everything else on this planet, except we’ve forgotten the law of the jungle and bend over for our overlords when any other animal would recognize the threat and fight to the death for their survival. “Violence never solved anything” is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.”
Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of the UHC CEO, left a 4-star review of the Unabomber’s manifesto, stating: “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism,… pic.twitter.com/LbP4xkmTYz
— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) December 9, 2024
