Luigi Mangione and the Making of a Modern Antihero

The support for the alleged shooter is rooted in an American tradition of exalting the outlaw.

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Dec 13, 2024, The New Yorker

He is from a wealthy and prominent Maryland family, the valedictorian of a prestigious private school, an Ivy League graduate. His family and friends speak of him fondly, and they worried about him when he fell off the grid, some months ago. His reading and podcast habits, as gleaned from his Goodreads account and other traces of his online footprint, can be summed up as “declinist conservativism, bro-science and bro-history, simultaneous techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, and self-improvement stoicism,” according to Max Read, who writes on tech and Internet culture. In other words, a typical-enough diet for a contemporary twentysomething computer-science guy, and certainly not the stuff of alarm.

He is, by consensus, handsome, and jacked. “Holy happy trail, Batman!” Stephen Colbert enthused, over an en-plein-air portrait of a shirtless and beaming Luigi Mangione, who was briefly America’s most wanted man, and perhaps still is. “You know that guy’s Italian, because you could grate parmesan on those abs,” Colbert went on. (His fellow late-night host Taylor Tomlinson was more succinct: “Would.”) In his mug shot, Mangione, chiselled and defiant, appears ready for his closeup in a reboot of “Rocco and His Brothers.” He wears a hoodie well. On Monday night, a friend texted me a photograph of police escorting a dramatically backlit Mangione to his arraignment, and added, “Even the cops are trying to get him acquitted.”

Last week, Internet citizens were making dark, cathartic jokes about the fatal shooting, on December 4th, in Manhattan, of Brian Thompson, the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, which is the insurance arm of the world’s largest health-care company. Now that Mangione has been provisionally identified as Thompson’s assailant, and has been arrested and charged with Thompson’s murder, the terminally online are decorating Mangione’s picture with glittery graphics and heart emojis, sharing fancams of Mangione scored to Charli XCX’s “Spring Breakers,” and editing Mangione into time-stamped snapshots to try and provide him with an alibi.

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