Mangione Design
On December 4, 2024, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in the early hours of the morning on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk. Security-camera footage captured the assassin firing three rounds from a homemade pistol. Two bullets struck Thompson in the back; the third tore through his right calf. He collapsed instantly and later succumbed to his injuries at the hospital.
From a pure filmmaking standpoint, the composition of the video is pretty good. The players are positioned well, without giving away too much. The framing, the tension in the blocking, the way the viewer’s eye is drawn to the weapon, the white gloves, the victim’s bright blue blazer. It’s all there.
You can almost rewind the clock to 1983 and drop that frame into a lost Brian De Palma film. Maybe with a touch of heavier static and a black and white filter. The unmade sequel to Blow Out.
The man charged with the murder of Brian Thompson was then 26-year-old Luigi Mangione.
It took five days and a couple of false ledes before they nabbed Mangione in Altoona, Pennsylvania at a McDonalds. There he nervously claimed to be a man named “Mark Rosario” when confronted by police. Mangione is currently imprisoned and awaiting trial.
In the months following Luigi Mangione’s arrest, pieces of his backstory trickled out to the public, along with photos of his charming smile and four-pack abs. Mangione’s appearance is like if Boy Meets World’s Cory Matthews had a membership to Equinox. His face reads of a certain youthful, liberal city “aw shucks” nature in a way that has a direct appeal to gay men and millennial women. You couldn’t pick a more visually redeeming assassin. Especially after the deformed mutant-child that was Thomas Crooks, who had missed his shot at President Donald J. Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania earlier that year.
Like many shooters who had sought publicity, Luigi Mangione (allegedly) wrote a manifesto. In it, he had claimed to be suffering from a severe back injury called Spondylolisthesis and chronic pain. This apparently drove him to develop a personal vendetta with the United States healthcare system.
However, UnitedHealth stated not long after the assassination of Brian Thompson that Mangione was never one of their customers. Additionally, Luigi Mangione comes from a wealthy family. The Mangione family owns millions of dollars worth of property throughout Maryland. This sort of financial privilege allowed Mangione to take a six-month staycation in Hawaii after his injuring his back, where he was regularly able to rock climb and surf.
Luigi Mangione would go off the grid in June 2024. His mother Kathleen Mangione would report him missing in November 2024. In early December 2024, he would take Brian Thompson’s life.
There remains a big question mark about Mangione’s 2024 leading up to the slaying of Thompson. According to his friends and family, there was no contact made with him after June. There’s one written entry in Mangione’s journal dated to August 15th of that year where he makes reference to lazily planning the assassination, “I’m glad – in a way – that I’ve procrastinated, bc [because] it allowed me to learn more about [acronym for Company-1] […] the target is insurance […] it checks every box.”
This is where Mangione and the previously mentioned Thomas Crooks share a commonality: cloudy timelines. Crooks, who was 20-years-old at the time he’d attempted to murder then-candidate Trump, had his home and digital footprint scrubbed by the FBI sometime after being identified. Records still show that Crooks had visited a nearby gun range called the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club over 40 times in the year leading up to the assassination attempt. There he would mainly focus on rifle practice. The Clairton Sportsmen’s Club, strangely, is a training grounds for the FBI, DHS, and local and state police.
There are several troubling elements in the Crooks investigation that both the Biden-era FBI and the current Trump-led FBI have largely dismissed, at least publicly. Neither has explained why cell phone data showed an unidentified individual repeatedly visiting Thomas Crooks at his home and his workplace, then later stopping by a building near an FBI office in Washington, D.C. in June 2023. The FBI was also caught with their pants down after Tucker Carlson presented contradictory evidence that Crooks had no social media presence. What we learned from this exclusive from Carlson was that Thomas Crooks was a DeviantArt pervert with a strong interest in furries and gender-confused artwork. The illustrations he perused often portrayed athletic-bodied girls with exaggerated muscles and feminine characters with penises, sometimes falling into a cartoon bestiality context.
From the investigation into Thomas Crooks’ online accounts and his public sexual interests, we now have a second shared link between he and Luigi Mangione: an interest in gender nonconformity. While traveling in Thailand, Mangione reportedly spent time with transgender sex workers, seven of whom, according to accounts, allegedly assaulted him for reasons that remain unclear.
When Trump was shot in the ear by Crooks in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, the first response from the public was shock. It was a ‘wake-up’ moment that made, for the first time since 2015, openly supporting Donald Trump a comfortable public position to take. The blowback from attempting to kill Trump was instantaneous.
But that didn’t stop detractors from presenting theories of their own about the shooting, even as it was unfolding. Some took to claiming that shrapnel had ricocheted from the podium and that the bullet didn’t actually hit Trump. A handful of people speculated that it was a false flag orchestrated by Trump himself and the secret service. There were also more than a handful of liberals and leftists who openly lamented that Crooks hadn’t sealed the deal, that he was so close. Among this crowd, the attitude quickly shifted from “that didn’t happen” to “it should’ve happened.” The latter was not as persuasive to the otherwise politically unmotivated American-center. These individuals, to most, looked deranged and helped Trump secure victory in the November election.
When Brian Thompson was gunned down by Luigi Mangione, almost no one was surprised and even fewer seemed truly invested in the horror of the act itself. Why would they be? Most Americans had no idea who Brian Thompson was and once they learned he was a UnitedHealthcare CEO, the default response was a collective shrug.
We’re expected to mourn a health-insurance executive? In a country where the social consensus has been crystal clear for the past two decades: that the American healthcare system is fundamentally unfair, predatory, and broken? Sympathy for the top brass of that machine does not exist, at least not easily.
Simple thinking wins the day, always. And right now, the simplest and most widespread thought is that the system is rigged against ordinary people and that those running it are the last ones who deserve tears. It’s difficult to argue with that. And many people now find themselves unable to resist the seductive logic that committing acts of extreme, inhumane violence is somehow the more compassionate, the more humanist choice in the end.
The aftermath of Brian Thompson’s murder was more striking than the murder itself. When Luigi Mangione was identified, his image catapulted him to a level of ‘rockstar’ that the Boston bomber and Rolling Stone magazine could have only dreamed of. American journalist Taylor Lorenz, a frequent punching bag of the right, would appear on CNN and refer to Mangione as, “a morally good man.” It wouldn’t stop there. Mangione would garner the respect of at least thousands of young women and men, and even celebrities like Bill Burr.
Brian Thompson, in most avenues of life, was probably considered a good man. His widow and his young children now live in a world where the husband and father that they loved, who played by society’s rules and was successful at that game, was brutally slain and his killer became an adorned heartthrob for it. It draws to mind a bevy of Joker quotes from The Dark Knight and Todd Phillips’ Joker that could be served up, deep-fried meme style. The palpable human sickness that the Thompson family has and will continue to have to look directly in the face and absorb can be overwhelming to consider.
And that’s why people don’t.
That’s why, instead, attitudes like, “Fuck dem kids,” prompt increasing public support. Simple thinking wins the day — always.
Luigi Mangione’s good looks built him a fan base. Thompson’s career made him difficult to relate to and unappealing to empathize with. If you were trying to mainstream the public acceptability of murder, this would be a healthy first step.
Moreover, if you were looking to activate radical neurons in opening a door towards violent action that may have previously been closed, this is something that would work. And did work.
By the time we arrived at Charlie Kirk’s assassination on September 10, 2025 in Orem, Utah, the taboo of openly lauding the murder of a social opponent had disappeared for many. In fact, there was at least one audience member present at the Turning Point USA event where Kirk was killed who threw their arms up to cheer after the bullet arrived at Kirk’s neck.
Compared to the relatively minimal number of people who openly praised or celebrated the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, by the time Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the trend had metastasized into something far more alarming. A significant and growing segment of Americans openly expressed joy over bloodshed, with the volume and intensity of that celebration becoming impossible to ignore.
If we’re judging by the real world impacts tied to their respective professions, Kirk could arguably be considered the least culpable of the trio (Trump, Thompson, Kirk). Yet a staggering segment of the population met his assassination with unfiltered glee, and the cruelty hasn’t stopped: people still mock his widow Erika Kirk for her grieving (or her lack of grieving, depending on the day) and condemned his young children as “little fascists” without a second thought.
What began as isolated fringe voices had, in just a little over a year, become a loud and unapologetic chorus with even A-listers like Amanda Seyfried taking a moment to dunk on the deceased Kirk, and doubling down later while simultaneously begging for “nuance” towards her own public perception.
It is also important to keep in mind that with Charlie Kirk’s murder, a stud wasn’t required to pull off a near socially acceptable assassination.
Like Thomas Crooks and Luigi Mangione before him, Tyler Robinson’s path to the shooting of Charlie Kirk remains mostly in mystery. While a rough timeline of events can be pieced together, the picture is far from clear. And unfortunately, a handful of Discord servers linked to Robinson and published by Ken Klippenstein appear to have been strategically scrubbed of key content before they were made public. As a result, we have no idea why there were several X users who seemed to know that Kirk was going to be assassinated before September 10th.
Like Crooks and Mangione, Tyler Robinson had an interest in gender-nonconformity and transexuals. In fact his partner Lance Twiggs happened to be one. It gets even stranger when you realize that one of the people who posted those cryptic messages before the shooting happened actually knew Twiggs. Twiggs, following Robinson’s arrest, has disappeared.
To date, nothing published by the FBI or independent sources has offered meaningful insight into what ultimately pushed Tyler Robinson to pick up a rifle and carry out the murder.
By all accounts, the assassination of Charlie Kirk has been an undeniable success for his once ideological enemies. His murder has been effortlessly folded into our endless timelines of ironic, carefree posts. Photos and illustrations of his exploding jugular and the blood spraying from his neck became fast memes with leftist reply-posters on X. Meanwhile, the American right has descended into making themselves the platform of petty infighting and showboating minimal victories — while losing what used to be slam-dunk elections for their party. Kirk’s murder handed his opponents a perfect victory while leaving the right more divided it was before.
The purest takeaway from that, and from Thompson’s murder, is that this ‘very online’ American civilization of the 21st century respects winners and hates losers. To be alive is to win, to die is to lose. If you were someone with the authority to arrange or assist in these acts of murder, and your goal was to push humans to a more primitive mindset and perspective about violence, towards barbarism, your scorecard would be looking green.
Tyler Robinson’s trial will not be broadcast. Luigi Mangione’s New York State trial may be. If the cameras do roll, what will the national temperature be when Mangione suddenly finds himself back in the spotlight, riding a second wave of publicity? Will it matter less now that Mangione appears to be one of the few young men to visibly ‘hit the wall’ after spending 2025 in jail? More importantly, can anything be done to pull back this mass psychosis that has been unleashed, that not only tolerates the murder of social and cultural opponents but celebrates it?
We are about to find out.
I remember as a small child watching various factions in Beirut fighting it out on the evening news. You saw people living in literal ruins getting excited whenever a leader of an opposing force got killed. I remember asking my dad about this and he said: "Don't worry, this can never happen in the US." Now, I am not so sure, seems there are large groups of people here who would be more than happy to live in the rubble as long as they get to see people on the opposing side get tapped.
Ah yes, a NY Post “source” for Mangione’s “obsession with transgenders.” Jesus Christ, I thought I unsubscribed from your drivel.