Luigi Mangione and the blackpilling of America

In the days after a hooded gunman shot and killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the middle of Manhattan, people on the internet endlessly speculated about the identity and motives of the shooter. Perhaps he was an aspiring folk hero suffering under delusions of grandeur, or a redpilled manosphere type seeking power and revenge — or maybe he was a leftist vigilante fighting an unjust system.

That was until authorities announced they had arrested Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old data engineer, and a complicated portrait began to emerge. Journalists and online sleuths quickly dug into his background, spoke to friends and relatives, and discovered his purported accounts on social media platforms like X, Reddit, and Goodreads. Raised in a wealthy real estate family in Maryland, Mangione attended a prestigious private high school, where he became valedictorian and went on to study computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. He was in a frat at the Ivy League school and enjoyed an active social life. He had stints as a teaching assistant in AI at Stanford and at the video game studio that produces Civilization VI.

On an X account that’s believed to be his, he follows podcasters Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, biologist Richard Dawkins, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, Vox co-founder Ezra Klein, as well as prominent figures in the pro-technology “effective accelerationism” community like @BasedBeffJezos (real name: Guillaume Verdon). On Goodreads, he listed among his favorites self-help tomes like Atomic Habits and The 4-Hour Workweek, classics like Brave New World, and nonfiction bestsellers The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Sapiens.

His most recent posts and retweets indicate an interest in pop science, anti-establishment sentiment, effective altruism and self-improvement, as well as concern over men’s unlimited access to pornography, declining marriage and birth rates, and simultaneous skepticism and optimism about rapidly evolving technology.

Or, as Max Read described the worldview: “It’s a loudly non-partisan, self-consciously ‘rational’ mish-mash of declinist conservativism, bro-science and bro-history, simultaneous techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, and self-improvement stoicism — not left-wing, but not (yet) reactionary, either,” he writes. “The basic line is something like: The world is getting worse and phones are killing us; politics won’t save us but technology might; in the meantime, lift weights, take supplements, listen to podcasts.”

This is not the media diet of the radicalized men we’ve seen commit brazen acts of violence in this country over the last decade. It’s a far cry from the misogynistic incel ideology that propelled Elliot Rodger to kill six people, or the white supremacist motivations of Dylann Roof, who killed nine. Mangione’s media consumption is, in fact, oddly typical, especially for a 20-something American man. If what he consumed online is not a complete picture of an average US citizen, many could probably find something in it to agree with. Rather than aligning with ideologies that strongly believe in something, it’s defined by its lack of faith in the systems that exist. Like many young men, Mangione seemed to be some level of “blackpilled,” which in internet terminology is to say he was generally pessimistic about the state of the world and ready to go to extreme lengths to do something about it.

The most salient element of Mangione’s worldview, of course, appeared to be a deep loathing of the American health care system. “The US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy,” he wrote in his alleged manifesto. “They continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.”

This too is a view that transcends the left-right spectrum: While some on the left have advocated for a single-payer, Medicare-for-all health care system, movements like RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” have found a strange resonance on the left and the right by criticizing the pharmaceutical, factory farming, and public health industries. A large portion of Americans feel deeply alienated and let down by the United States’s system of health care, its high costs, and its byzantine bureaucratic procedures for getting expenses covered.

The problem isn’t just health care or young men: All swaths of Americans increasingly appear to find themselves in a nihilistic mood. More of us, in other words, seem to have taken the black pill. Though the idea comes from the proudly misogynistic manosphere, “black pill” is now used more commonly to illustrate the general disillusionment and nihilism that many Americans share.

They’re disenchanted with the economy, and feeling pessimistic about climate change, the dating market, and their own loneliness. They’re losing faith in nearly every major US institution, from the public school system to police departments, the military, unions, organized religion, and, of course, the media. It’s no wonder that more people are being drawn to influencers and online pundits — the very ones that Mangione apparently followed — who reflect their skepticism and resentment back to them in a way that feels satisfying and authentic. Many of these people don’t even come across as particularly extreme; they simply capture the spirit of self-reliance and straightforwardness that people are hungry to hear.

Anti-capitalist sentiment has soared on platforms like TikTok in recent years (and so has an irony-inflected brand of MAGA conservatism). Meanwhile, an entire generation — Mangione’s — has been dubbed “doomers” thanks to the demographic-spanning belief that “humanity is doomed.”

Much of that anger has been exploited by bad-faith actors online with massive followings who tell their followers that the real problem is feminism, or immigrants, or “wokeness.” But it’s also apparent in less extreme online spaces. You can see it in regular people’s reactions to events like Thompson’s killing, which was met with a flood of memes, jokes, horny chain texts, and lookalike contests that valorized Mangione.

While the gleeful public reaction was seen as shocking and distasteful in some corners, it’s not necessarily surprising given how many people appear to believe that there is nothing left to do but burn it all down. Even the reelection of a president who is himself a mess of ideological contradictions reflects this particular national mood. In that sense, Mangione’s politics are particularly reflective of where the country is right now — and perhaps more familiar than many of us would like to admit.