What’s Behind the Lionization of Luigi Mangione?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: And we turn now to another polarizing issue and that’s the public reaction to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson. He was shot dead in midtown Manhattan this month after a six-day manhunt. The suspect, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione has been in custody charged with murder as an act of terrorism. Since the killing, the internet has been swirling with divisive conversations about his potential motive and what it says about America’s health care system. Jia Tolentino writes about this in her latest piece for The New Yorker, and she joins Michel Martin to discuss what Thompson’s murder says about the country.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Jia Tolentino, thank you so much for talking with us.

JIA TOLENTINO, STAFF WRITER, THE NEW YORKER: Thank you for having me on.

MARTIN: You’ve talked about the fact that you think the way people are talking about this publicly, because, of course, you know, respectable people have to say this is inexcusable. This is not how we handle situations. You see a number of public officials certainly saying that vigilante violence is not to be tolerated. But you’re saying privately, and certainly social media posts are in some ways public expression of our private thoughts, really said something else. You just want to talk a little bit more about that?

TOLENTINO: Yes, I always think it’s interesting when there is something that happens and people speak about it very differently in private than they do in public. And I think — you know, at first, I was thinking, maybe this is particular to people my age who have no sense of propriety, right, who are letting the memes rip in the group chats. But I think, you know, one thing that we’ve realized in the — you know, the profoundly sort of anarchic and chaotic response to this murder is that you don’t have to be any particular age or gender or race or from any region or even have any sort of political ideology whatsoever to feel that the American healthcare system is profoundly immoral and to feel that everyone, so many people have been pushed to such a breaking point and mostly been able to do very little about it, other than to try to raise money however they can to get out of bankruptcy or start a GoFundMe or simply just suffer and I think we found that in the response that the sense of glee — you know, frankly, the glee that was uncomfortable, maybe for some people to withhold — to behold in public, it was indicative of something that really has cut across all sort of traditional divisional lines in this country.

MARTIN: Well, I want to go back to something you wrote in the piece that you wrote for The New Yorker. You wrote that Thompson’s murder is one symptom of the American appetite for violence. His line of work is another. Say more about that.

TOLENTINO: One thing that I think I’ve been thinking about in the last couple of weeks, and I think a lot of people have too, is that the American health care system, there is no reason for it to exist in the way that it does. And we take it for granted that this is just how we live, that we are locked into the system because, you know, attempts to push for a single payer public system, they have not succeeded and there are a lot of things in America, like gun control, et cetera, that people feel sort of powerlessly locked into, that there is no way to do anything about it when you vote fundamentally. But this has provided a moment for, I think, a lot of people to step back and think, why do we have a healthcare system that works like this? Why are we the only developed nation in the world that doesn’t guarantee healthcare to all citizens? Why do we have private health insurance companies like UnitedHealthcare playing such a primary role in the system? We pay more per capita in health insurance — in healthcare costs than any other country that’s comparable. We have the lowest life expectancy at birth out of any other comparable country. We — our system is so expensive. It is so profitable for a very select few companies and people. And it is so, so punitive in terms of what it does to people’s actual health and ability to live. And there is is no reason that it has to be like this. UnitedHealthcare’s annual revenue is hundreds of billions of dollars a year. It’s annual profits. Brian Thompson, during his tenure, raised those profits from $12 billion to $16 billion, that we have this profit-making machine and what it comes off the back of. You know, there are lots of different kinds of violence, right? Someone shooting someone in the street is one. I think our healthcare system is quite clearly another. And that’s something that has emerged full force in the way people are reacting.

MARTIN: So, talk more about that because you’re making an argument that structures can create violence. That violence isn’t just a person doing something bad to another person, that systems themselves can create violence or certainly harm. And one of the things you write, you know, to most Americans, a company like UnitedHealth represents less the provision of medical care than an active obstacle to receiving it. Can you say more about that?

TOLENTINO: Yes. You know, I mean, this goes back to the Friedrich Engels conception of social murder, which he wrote about in the mid-19th century, right? That when a society withholds the conditions that are necessary to live from its people, which we do in this country, in terms of, you know, I would say the minimum wage, housing, and very particularly healthcare, the most direct way. When a society denies the conditions that are necessary to live to its people, and they die because of it, that that itself, he called it social murder. And, you know, there’s another — you know, another Norwegian social scientist termed it structural violence in 1969. And I just think, you know, there are a lot of ways to unjustly and immorally end someone’s life before it should have ended. One of them, the kind of violence that we fixate on in this country is a single person with a weapon that intends harm upon another person and then causes it, but there’s a lot of other ways to end a life early and unjustly and immorally, and denying people healthcare is one of them, especially when you know, there is so clearly — you look at CEO compensation in this country, healthcare companies aside, you look at the revenues of a company like UnitedHealthcare and the fact that it denies one-third of all the care that doctors ask for for their patients. Every single one of those denied claims is a potential bankruptcy is a potential sickness, potential death. And I think, you know, we talk — we fixate so much on this one kind of violence at the expense of recognizing that the conditions of life in this country for many, many people are that of the denial of the tools that are necessary to simply live.

MARTIN: You know what I think — what I found fascinating is the very day that the alleged shooter, Luigi Mangione, was arrested was the very day that another young man was acquitted of the chokehold death of a man on the New York City subway. Now, yes, he didn’t flee. You know, he presented himself to authorities. He said, I did this. He said, I had an explanation for this. This — I thought this man was threatening and I felt that I was doing my part. But I found it so fascinating that there were people outside of his trial calling him a hero.

TOLENTINO: Right.

MARTIN: Calling him a hero. I mean, and subsequently, the president-elect invited him to sit in his box, you know, at the Army-Navy game this weekend, basically lionizing him. And I just found it so fascinating that there has been this — you know, obviously people weren’t allowed to go shoot people in cold blood on the street because they’re mad at them. But I did find it so fascinating that there was such a different reaction to these two deaths. And I’m just curious if you noticed that too.

TOLENTINO: Yes, I have a lot of thoughts on this, right? I mean, both men were 26 years old and, you know, maybe the reaction isn’t so different, right? There are — you know, we can’t dance around the fact that Luigi Mangione is — he is an enormous folk hero to people, I think, on both sides, on, you know, everywhere on the ideological spectrum, where Daniel Penny, he is a folk hero, very firmly and only on the right. But, you know, both people are being celebrated for taking someone out that was seen to be a danger to public safety, right? But when you compare their victims, I think that’s when that’s when things really get much clearer, right? I think the — you know, there were not congressmen, there were not CEOs mourning Jordan Neely, Daniel Penney’s victim, mourning him as someone that whose life was precious, whose the end of life was unjust, right, but reflexively, the response of people in power to Brian Thompson’s murder was men like this, men that make $10 million a year, men that shepherd their Fortune 500 companies to, you know, shareholder profits, quarter over quarter, this is supposed to — in America, this is supposed to confirm morality, right? The simple fact that someone is that wealthy, you know, that they preside over many employees, that they can generate capital gains for so many people, that in itself is almost one to one in this country, at least among the powerful with morality. Although, as we all know, the way that you acquire money like that is often through profoundly compromising systems, and none of which are as stark as the private healthcare system itself, right? And so, in this way, Brian Thompson, he is seen as automatically deserving of respect where Jordan Neely, the victim of Daniel Penny, he was the victim of that same exact system. He was seen as a danger simply because he did not have money and because the systems that some people can make $10 million a year benefiting from, those systems operate by neglecting and ignoring and casting aside people like him.

MARTIN: Yes, I think you may have seen this. Andrew Witty, who is the UnitedHealth Group CEO, wrote an op-ed last week, saying that the — emphasizing the company’s mission to make healthcare more compassionate to people and transparent. And he said, and I’ll quote here, “We know the health system does not work as well as it should, and we understand people’s frustrations with it. No one would design a system like the one we have. And no one did. It’s a patchwork built over decades. Our mission is to help make it work better.” Like how do you or do you reconcile these statements with the realities that you wrote about in your piece? And then, frankly, they have to know we’re true. I mean, they know what their numbers are.

TOLENTINO: And I found it kind of shocking and amazing that The Times would publish, you know, like a PR newsletter from UnitedHealthcare. I think it is — I thought it was really honestly funny that Andrew Witty, the CEO of UnitedHealth Group, thought that after all of the things that have come out about UnitedHealth in recent days, all of these investigations from the last few years, all of these government investigations, all of these class action lawsuits about how the company employs algorithms to kick elderly patients out of rehab beds 14 days after they have surgery, right? How there are internal programs that have been deemed illegal in multiple states about how they have to kick people off reimbursement once they’re getting too much therapy. You can’t get around the fact that this is how the systems work, that how they generate their profits is not despite the fact that because of the fact that they deny so many people care. You know, obviously it’s complicated. It’s not exactly that black and white. But that is how this company makes money. So, I applaud the PR team at UnitedHealth Group for spending five days, you know, working every little sentence in there to try to, you know, convince people that they’re working their hardest to take care of people. But I think, I — you know, I think it’s not true. I think The Times had to shut down comments on that one because it was — you know, it was not a successful winning hearts and minds campaign on the part of UHG.

MARTIN: Do you think that people who claim not to know why people are angry, do you believe them? I mean, do they — can they really not know?

TOLENTINO: That’s a really, really good question. I think that there is a degree of cognitive dissonance that comes from living in this country that comes from, you know, the profoundly immoral systems on which all of our lives rest and the fact that we have to simply live still, right? And I think a lot of people resolve that cognitive dissonance by saying, well, the way that it is, is the way that it is. And we have to just keep going the way that we’re going. Otherwise, who knows what kind of chaos, disorder, and hell we will slide into. Kind of not realizing that many people already live in that hell. I think there’s something real where to understand where people are coming from you have to admit the baseline immorality of a system upon which kind of all of our lives depend. And I think we’ve seen with the sort of teaching of American history with, you know, the idea of taxing the rich, right? Like I think that there are a lot of people that have erected an immovable wall that will not — you know, that because there are so many things about this country that are singular and amazing that are — that they are unwilling to admit that there are other things that are rotten to the core and have always been, right? And I do think that perhaps many of the people were baffled at the reaction, that’s a result of those walls. I also think that one of the things that the reaction is shown and one of that is that there is a hunger for direct action in this country. I think this is an opportunity for people to consider that there are obstructive forms of protest that used to be alive in this country. I always think about act up in the 80s, right? There are — you know, if people want to make CEOs of profoundly immoral companies, if we want to make their lives miserable, we can do that without shooting them. We can do that by protesting, by occupying, you know, the act up, shut down the stock exchange and the FDA. You know, there is a hunger for that. There are a lot of forms of that kind of resistance that are not violent and murderous. And it’s one of the things that I’m hoping, like, that I want that to push through very badly.

MARTIN: I guess and one of the things that I’m sort of puzzling over here is that, you know, former president and now future President Trump assembled the richest cabinet in history, to our knowledge, and is poised to do so again. And you had — he had a wider margin of victory than he had the last time he ran. And, you know, he did — no one is disputing that he won this election. They can like it or not like it, but no one’s disputing that he won it, which means that more people voted for him. And so, then how do you square that with this sort of outrage at these systems, which he shows no inclination to disrupt?

TOLENTINO: Yes. I mean, I think that, you know, there are a lot of people — there are a lot of perhaps under informed voters that still get this sort of baseless whiff of populism off of Trump, despite every single thing that he’s ever showed in his life. He’s still positioned himself as a populist leader, right, as someone that’s like fighting for it. And, you know, if you scratch that one second, it all falls apart, but he has pretty successfully pushed that message. And I think it’s — you know, the sharp right return that every single city and state in the country basically took is — I don’t know, it’s — I mean, it is terrifying to me for a variety of reasons, but I think there’s actually something promising in the fact that this reaction has been bipartisan, that you don’ — that actually, this is something that people on the right and on the left and in the center and in the weird sort of diagonal horseshoe, maha (ph), right, left, you know, all of these kind of contemporary configurations of politics or anti-politics that we have right now, there is a populist agenda here that neither party is actually pushing that is profoundly popular, right, that CEO pay is out of control and that these companies are operating immorally and that the enrichment of multimillionaires and billionaires at the direct expense of ordinary people, you know, is unjust. And I find something a little bit promising in the fact that when I was writing the piece, just to make sure that I wasn’t getting, you know, lost in my sort of Brooklyn socialist bubble, I was checking lots of places, right? I was checking comment sections on local Fox affiliates, I was checking The New York Post, I was checking The New York Times, I was checking random TikToks, sort of all of these things. And everywhere no one was really saying like, yes, these companies are corrupt. It’s all Trump’s fault, or it’s all Biden’s fault, right? Like, people were recognizing that this is a system that kind of neither party is really trying to do anything about. And there is a — there is like a real political opportunity there, and there’s a real potential locus of political promise if only someone would take it up, in actuality, which obviously Trump’s not going to do.

MARTIN: Jia Tolentino, thanks so much for talking with us.

TOLENTINO: Thank you for having me.