On Monday afternoon, police announced that they had arrested a person of interest in the investigation into the killing of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, who was shot outside his hotel in midtown Manhattan last week.
According to police, Luigi Mangione was arrested around 9:15 a.m. in Altoona, Pennsylvania with a ghost gun and suppressor that New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said was “consistent with the weapon used in the murder.”
While some have portrayed Mangione as “anti-capitalist,” his social media profiles show him retweeting talks by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, praising Elon Musk, and liking critiques of conservatives for their failure to understand the Unabomber’s comments on “the decay of traditional values.”
Police also say that Mangione was arrested with writings that suggest he harbored “ill will toward corporate America.” The New York Post has separately characterized Mangione as an “anti-capitalist,” citing “law enforcement sources” and other sources portraying the suspect as someone who hated the medical community due to past treatment of his relatives.
While police have not made whatever writings were found on Mangione public, his own post-history suggests that he’s not so clear cut of an “anti-capitalist.”
One of Mangione’s final posts was a retweet of a video of Thiel discussing how many of the “great startups seem to be run by people who seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger’s.” In another retweet, Mangione reposted a statement praising Musk for his “commitment to long-term civilizational success.” The post was in reference to a post by Musk, claiming that he was in “a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke mind virus.”
He reposted another tweet, which was a link to an article calling TikTok “The Smiling Tiger” and making the argument that the short-form video app is an “accelerant” in a Chinese plot to get Western liberal capitalism to destroy itself.
“Slowly but steadily it could turn the West’s youth—its future—into perpetually distracted dopamine junkies ill-equipped to maintain the civilization built by their ancestors,” the article retweeted by Mangione reads.
In one post on X, Mangione responded to a post claiming that people had replaced GOD by “worshipping at the DEI shrine, using made-up pronouns like religious mantras, and firing professors for saying men can’t get pregnant.” In his response, Mangione recommended an article from The Telegraph’s Madeline Grant claiming that atheists now worshipped “intolerant new gods” while attacking Scotland’s 2021 anti-hate crime law.
In another post, Mangione advocated for increasing birth rates in Japan by banning sex toys marketed towards men and by replacing internet cafes with athletics to revitalize “traditional Japanese culture.”
This is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of Mangione’s tweets and retweets, which include self-help threads, long posts about the “Great Fall” of the Roman Empire, and vox populi interviews in which a reporter asks people whether men are important in society.
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One consistent throughline in Mangione’s online presence is his opposition to smartphones. In another post, he retweeted a link to an article on Bari Weiss’ conservative news site, The Free Press, proscribing a “fix” for children using their phones. One of his favorite books on GoodReads was “How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life” by Caterin Prince.
“This little book packs a punch,” Mangione wrote.
Other books on his GoodReads profile include Ted Kaczynski’s “Industrial Society and Its Future,” David Goggins’s “Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds,” and Timothy Ferriss’ self-help book “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.”
On his GoodReads profile, Mangione left a review praising Kaczynski’s book earlier this year, including a passage from it that he said he found interesting.
“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,” the quoted excerpt in the review reads.
His review on GoodReads also included a section on quotes that Mangione liked. In one of these quotes, Kaczynski claims that “conservatives are fools” but only because “it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.”
