The mysterious ideology of Luigi Mangione: Anti-corporate hero? Far-right tech bro?
LA Times has some good writers. Comments from experts follow, I reached the MovieChat limit.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-12-14/luigi-mangione-politics-united-healthcare-shooting
The former valedictorian of an elite Baltimore prep school and Ivy League graduate shared posts on social media from an eclectic stream of populists, entrepreneurs, neuroscientists, centrists and disruptors. On X, he followed comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan; President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; liberal columnist Ezra Klein; and democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
A computer science major with an interest in rationalism, self-improvement and effective altruism — a philosophical movement that uses evidence and reason to help others — Mangione enthused about technological innovation. But he also worried about how corporations and ordinary people used tech, sharing a stream of posts on smartphones’ effect on mental health, the downside of Netflix and Doordash, and an AI chatbot’s threats to carry out revenge.
Mangione appeared skeptical of some of the core tenets of left-leaning “identity politics.”
Two years ago, he shared a post from British Indian writer Gurwinder Bhogal challenging the idea that asking “Where are you from?” is impolite: “If wokeism teaches minorities to be traumatized even by friendly gestures, it cannot claim to bridge divides.” In April, Mangione retweeted a blogger who complained that modern-day atheists “disprove[d] God” only to end up “worshipping at the DEI shrine” and “using made-up pronouns like religious mantras.”
Some on the left are now dubbing Mangione right-wing, but they do not seem to agree on whether he is a “center-right biohacking Thiel-loving tech bro” or “another far right MAGA Trumper Terrorist.”
On Goodreads, he gave “Industrial Society and Its Future” by the late Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, a four-star review. Kaczynski was “rightfully imprisoned,” he wrote, but he also noted: “it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.”
Though Mangione came off as anti-capitalist and anti-corporate in his manifesto, Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and professor emeritus of criminal injustice at California State San Bernardino, said that didn’t necessarily make him hard-left. Increasingly, Levin noted, anti-corporate and anti-institutional subcultures operate across the ideological spectrum.
Online, some pundits and extremism experts have suggested that Mangione expressed views associated with “the gray tribe”, a term coined a decade ago by Bay Area psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander, to refer to an online collective of rationalists, online tech enthusiasts, atheists and free thinkers who fall outside conventional left- or right-wing tribal thinking.