Brian Thompson’s Killer: Leftist, Privileged, and Apparently a Kazinski Fanboy

by Jeff Childers

The New York Times ran a breaking, true-crime story this morning headlined, “Suspect Is Charged in C.E.O.’s Murder After Arrest in Pennsylvania.” The killer wasn’t poor. He wasn’t uneducated. He was never denied medical treatment. Luigi Mangione — which sounds like a made-up name — is a 26-year-old, MENSA-qualified Ivy League honors graduate who 3-D printed the gun he used to murder Brian Thompson.

Two local police officers nabbed Mangione while he was munching fries in an Altoona, Pennsylvania McDonalds. (He’s probably not MAHA.) According to unconfirmed reports, even though Mangione was wearing his blue surgical face mask, an anonymous tipster recognized his distinctive eyebrows.

Consider that for a second. Here is a link to some affordable eyebrow trimmers. Had he used them, who knows how things might have turned out. Just saying.

Officers reported that on arrest, six days after the shooting, Mangione was still carrying the murder weapon. I guess he really liked that gun. They also said that, even though he had a laptop, Mangione —who earned an honors engineering degree— had a three-page handwritten “manifesto” folded into his pocket.

Apparently, Mangione’s manifesto was an anticapitalist screed against big insurance companies, which he called “parasites.” NYPD Chief Detective Joe Kenny said, “It does seem he has some ill will toward corporate America.”

Yes, it does seem that way.

According to police descriptions of his manifesto, murderous Mangione targeted UHC only because it was one of the biggest and most profitable companies, and targeted Brian Thompson specifically only because he was UHC’s CEO.

Mangione doesn’t fit the New York Times’ preferred assassin’s profile. Maybe they were hoping for someone more diverse:

 
Who knows what the Times thinks likely assassins are like (it never said), or why it believes it is qualified to profile assassins in the first place. Dumb, but arrogant.

On an aside, I found it very curious Mangione recently lived in Hawaii, where Trump assassin Ryan Routh lived for a long time. I wonder whether they ever crossed paths.

Between the fake ID he used to check into the hostel, and the one he had on him when he was arrested, Mangione had at least two fake ID’s — both with the un-counterfeitable “Real ID” flag. So much for Real IDs. He was a fitness buff, sporting a tight six-pack, but friends said he had a bad back injury. People stretching to lionize the murderer seized on his back pain as a potential justification, though the logic was murky.

Perhaps most tellingly, Mangione once sympathetically reviewed Theodore “Unabomber” Kazinzki’s book. In other words, Mangione looks like a privileged, overeducated leftist who was taught to hate capitalism in college. I’d bet that, had Mangione pursued his video-game-designing interest instead of going to Penn, he’d be in Silicon Valley right now making millions instead of in a cell.

Americans are experiencing a wide range of strong emotions over this story. I searched around to find a good media example to frame that point. I nearly dropped my eyebrow scissors when I saw the next headline. It was perfect.

I’m sure you’ll recall the Washington Post’s former pet progressive and proud ever-masking doyenne, Taylor Lorenz, whose age appears to be a state secret. Taylor, an energetically single white female, rose in the ranks of leftwing affections after doxxing Chaya Raichik, who operates the Libs of TikTok account. Four days ago, the Times of India ran a story headlined, “Taylor Lorenz defends ‘celebrating’ Brian Thompson’s murder: ‘If you have watched…’”

 
Why anyone would possibly care what Taylor Lorenz thinks remains an open question. But over on far-left BlueSky, she posted an inflammatory pro-murder skeet, or whatever they’re calling them:

 
Taylor supposedly writes for a living. When she wrote, “we want these executives dead,” the “we” included “I,” so the perfectly clear meaning was: Taylor Lorenz wants these executives dead. In her doubling-down blog post, perhaps sensing the looming danger, Taylor unsuccessfully tried to rhetorically split hairs with a laser beam and create a little strategic ambiguity. I don’t recommend her article.

To make sure it was completely dead, in case her career had any life left in it, a laughing Taylor trotted onto the Piers Morgan show, where she giddily defended feeling “joy” at Brian Thompson’s assassination:

PURE EVIL: There are no words to describe how sick and evil Taylor Lorenz is. She literally laughed and says she felt "joy" when Brian Thompson was killed.

Taylor Lorenz is a heartless, disgusting subhuman piece of trash. pic.twitter.com/up4ds5Rt6b

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) December 10, 2024

But wait, there’s a sequel coming. Back in October, after calling Joe Biden a “war criminal,” Lorenz mutually separated from her high-profile job at the Washington Post. The obnoxious wokescold then landed a lucrative video podcasting gig with far-left Vox Media, to produce a show called “Power User.” Sadly, though, an appalled Vox noticed her BlueSky skeet and her Piers Morgan interview, and then this happened. The Washington Free Beacon, yesterday:

 
Womp womp. For the record, Vox and Lorenz both claim they decided to part ways before Taylor ran her murderous mouth, but they just hadn’t announced it yet. So. Also for the record, my best guess after research is that Lorenz, who often shares with readers her adventures in New York’s fast-paced singles scene, and even more frequently refers to herself as “hot,” is 46.

She may have trashed the last trace of her journalism career, but Taylor tapped into two trends. First, she tapped into a foul mood. Regular people who are feeling powerless are encouraged whenever the powerful also face problems. It’s a dark and dangerous mood and leads to chaos, anarchy, and French Revolutions if not vented somehow.

The solution is to reduce ordinary people’s feelings of powerlessness and being out of control. (Paging the Pandemic.) Hopefully, Trump’s election will suffice this time.

The second trend is an obvious part of Democrats’ evolving anti-Trump strategy: to gin up a class war — the Marxists’ comfortable original neighborhood and their narrative castle of last retreat. Despite being cozier with many more billionaires than are conservatives, liberals are currently on an all-out campaign to make the “b-“ word bad again.

For example, note how this BlueSky user calls billionaires “the worst people”:

 
What should we do to “the worst people?”

If you want evidence for this evolving narrative strategy, simply search for “billionaire” in X or BlueSky. The class war narrative is already seeping into corporate media headlines:

 
The Mangione-Thompson assassination was a perfect setup for the Democrats’ emerging class war narrative. Mangione’s weird, three-page handwritten manifesto wasn’t whining about healthcare. He aimed his 3-D printed pistol not at a particular person but at corporate greed and profits. Now, useful nitwits like Taylor Lorenz have taken the narrative ball and are running down the field with it.

Finally, have lots of questions. Mangione’s arrest did not resolve the most bizarre facts in his case. For example, how did Mangione know where Brian Thompson would be standing, without security, on the morning of December 4th? Who did Mangione talk to on his burner phone? Who helped Mangione?

Related: did the CIA ever try to recruit the young Valedictorian from boarding school or while he was at Penn?

I’m just asking.

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