No cultural phenomenon — and yes, it’s a phenomenon — has been dominating the discourse more these past few weeks than the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. And in addition to seeming like a dark Hollywood thriller come to life — down to alleged killer Luigi Mangione’s brooding good looks and a literal backpack full of Monopoly money — the story has been raising a lot of important and sometimes uncomfortable questions about the evolving politics of the United States in the 2020s.
What does it tell us about the decline of the American project — and Americans’ faith in everything from the healthcare industry to our legal system — that people on both sides of the aisle have been responding not only with compassion for Luigi, but in some cases celebration and thirst? What are Luigi’s actual politics, and why do so many people think he is a left-wing vigilante when his interests seem far closer to certain center-right, grey tribe, effective altruism-adjacent ideologies endemic to Silicon Valley? And why — between this story, the Trump fist pump, and the New Jersey drones — does it feel like reality is increasingly taking cues from fiction?
To get into it, we invited back Joshua Citarella, an artist and researcher who has spent the past decade studying how the internet and social media are shaping youth political identification and behavior. (You might remember him from our episode on the Boomer Ballast Effect, with the academic Kevin Munger). In addition to launching an excellent new podcast called Doomscroll (check it out!), Joshua recently published an essay called “CEO Murder & the Dark Enlightenment,” where he explores the assassination and its ensuing response in context of the broader social and political shifts (and realignments) that characterize this moment.
We discuss the apparent ideological “buffet” of Luigi’s politics, why the public’s trust in the law — and Democratic institutions more generally — has been eroded to such a degree that it seems to view the killer as the lesser of two evils, and the greater truths that these sort of “stranger than fiction” moments seem to reveal.
Follow Joshua on Substack and check out Doomscroll.
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