This Is How Political Violence Goes Mainstream

It is tempting to think of political extremists as those who have had their brain flambéed by a steady media diet of oddball podcasters, fringe YouTubers, and “do your own research” conspiracists. Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, was known to hang out in white-supremacist forums. Robert Bowers frequently posted racist content on the right-wing site Gab, where he wrote “Screw your optics, I’m going in” just before murdering 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto explaining why he murdered 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 was filled with 4chan jokes and memes, suggesting that he had spent ample time on the platform.

Yet at first glance, Luigi Mangione, the suspected killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, doesn’t seem to fit this mold. Mangione was active on social media—but in the most average of ways. He seemingly posted on Goodreads and X, had public photos of himself on Facebook, and reportedly spent time on Reddit discussing his back pain. Perhaps more details will emerge that complicate the picture, but however extreme his political views were—he is, after all, charged with murdering a man in Midtown Manhattan, and reportedly wrote a manifesto in which he called health insurers “parasites”—this does not appear to be a man who was radicalized in the fever swamps of some obscure corner of the dark web. On the surface, Mangione may have just been a fundamentally normal guy who snapped. Or maybe the killing demonstrates how mainstream political violence is becoming.

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A Goodreads profile that appears to have been Mangione’s showed that he had read books written by the popular science writer Michael Pollan and by Dr. Seuss (he gave The Lorax a five-star review). On what is believed to be his X account, he followed a mélange of very popular (and ideologically mixed) people, including Joe Rogan, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ezra Klein, and Edward Snowden. In at least one instance, he praised Tucker Carlson’s perspectives on postmodern architecture. His most extreme signal was a sympathetic review he gave to the manifesto written by Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. But as the writer Max Read points out, that’s not uncommon for a lot of younger politically active people who identify with Kaczynski’s environmentalist and anti-tech views, though it’s unlikely many of them are in lockstep with the Unabomber’s tactics.

Again, there are many unknowns about Mangione. Yet that has not stopped people from celebrating his purported cause; in fact, his bland social-media presence may only have made him easier to identify with. Jokes about Thompson’s death have gone viral on virtually every social-media platform, and they have not stopped in the week since the shooting. People filled comment sections for videos and posts about the shooting with unsympathetic replies, pointing out UnitedHealthcare’s reputation for denying claims, and ruminating on how much suffering Thompson was responsible for at the helm of the company. The Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonprofit that monitors and analyzes online extremism, found that six of the top 10 most engaged-with posts on X about Thompson or UnitedHealthcare in the shooting’s aftermath “expressed explicit or implicit support for the killing or denigrated the victim.” These responses weren’t politically divided either. When the conservatives Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro made videos complaining about people dancing on Thompson’s grave, people pushed back in the comments and called the commentators out of touch.

In this way, Mangione’s act and the response demarcate a new moment, one in which acts of political violence are no longer confined to extremists with fringe views, but widely accepted. This has been bubbling up for years: Jokes about “eat the rich,” guillotines, and class war have been memes for the young, online left since the late 2010s. Milder versions of this sentiment occasionally seeped out to wider audiences, such as last year, when people online applauded orca whales for attacking yachts in the Iberian Peninsula. Many young people are furious about the economic lot they have drawn by being born into an era of significant wealth inequality, and have made winking jokes about addressing it through violence. After Thompson’s murder, this sentiment broke out of its containment walls, flooding comment sections and social-media feeds.

This response probably isn’t an aberration, but instead is ascendant. America isn’t yet experiencing its own Years of Lead—a period in Italy from the 1960s to the 1980s in which political violence and general upheaval became the norm in response to economic instability and rising extremism—but political violence in the U.S. is slowly yet steadily becoming more common. In the past several years, it has surged to the highest levels since the 1970s, and the majority of ideologically motivated homicides since 1990 have been committed by far-right extremists.

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Experts have different theories as to what’s driving this, but many agree that we’re due for more acts of political violence before the trend dissipates. The response to Thompson’s death isn’t just people reveling in what they believe is vigilante justice—it may also be a sign of what’s coming. As my colleague Adrienne LaFrance has written, “Americans tend to underestimate political violence, as Italians at first did during the Years of Lead.” Mangione’s alleged act and the public response suggest that there’s appetite for political, cause-oriented violence; that these acts may not be committed or applauded just by terminally online weirdos. There are millions of guys who view the world the way Mangione does, and millions more willing to cheer them on.