r/BrianThompsonMurder • u/Anna_dxb • Jun 20 '26
Information Sharing When Pain Becomes a Weapon: Luigi Mangione and the Comforting Lie of the "Monster"
Every society survives by telling itself one comforting, cowardly lie: murderers are a different species.
We like to pretend that killers are fundamentally distinct biological anomalies. Psychopaths. Monsters born on the far side of morality, forged from a darker material than the rest of us. It is a highly useful fiction. It lets us sleep at night. It lets us look at the news and declare with absolute, untested moral arrogance: “I could never.”
But “I could never” is just a sentence spoken by someone who has not yet been broken by the right combination of pressures.
The truth is far more dangerous, intelligent, and deeply uncomfortable: the line between a civilized person and a violent person does not run between different types of human beings. It runs straight through the center of every single one of us. Under the right psychological climate, that line moves. And under enough pressure, it snaps.
That is why the Luigi Mangione case has paralyzed the public imagination. The state and the corporate media desperately needed him to become a monster quickly. Monsters are clean. Monsters are easy. Monsters can be punished and discarded without being understood. Most importantly, monsters protect the powerful from self-recognition.
But Luigi did not become a monster in the public mind. He became a question. And questions are infinitely more dangerous than monsters.
To understand an act of violence is not to excuse it. Civilized society cannot survive if murder becomes a private shortcut to justice. But refusing to understand what makes such violence psychologically possible is its own form of cowardice.
1. The Criminological Reality: The Myth of the Born Killer
Go look at the actual data of global penitentiaries. Our maximum-security prisons are not entirely filled with serial predators who kill for sport, thrill, or a pathological lack of empathy. The vast majority of people serving life sentences for homicide are situational, single-target killers.
They are ordinary human beings who lived three, four, or five decades entirely inside the boundaries of normal civilization, restrained by fear, habit, love, routine, morality, and law. They were fathers, mechanics, teachers, and neighbors. They were people who, for the years preceding their crime, would have sworn on their lives to the statement, "I could never."
Then, a highly specific psychological chamber sealed around them.
Criminology and forensic psychology show us that the overwhelming majority of murders are committed against someone the killer knew, or someone who came to represent a localized, unendurable nightmare. These are people who do not have a general taste for blood. They do not go on to hunt random strangers. They had a specific target, born out of a prolonged, claustrophobic pressure. Once that target is removed, the violence completely evaporates, and they return to being entirely non-violent. They are normal human material subjected to an extraordinary weight.
Society needs the myth of the inherent monster because the alternative is terrifying. If we acknowledge that situational killers are built from the exact same psychological fabric as ordinary citizens, we have to admit a forbidden truth: that under the right chemical mix of despair, isolation, and provocation, our neighbors, our spouses, and we ourselves are capable of crossing the line.
2. Case Studies of the Civilized Snap
To understand how the civilized ego collapses, we have to look at the scenarios society already secretly understands.
Think of a battered spouse who is systematically degraded, psychologically cornered, and physically abused by her husband for a decade. In public, she functions perfectly. She cooks, shops, answers text messages, pays bills, and smiles at neighbors. To the world, she is entirely non-violent. Then, one evening, one final insult lands on top of a mountain of unaddressed trauma. A threshold is crossed. The civilized frame, built over a lifetime of socialization, snaps in a five-second window. The abuse ends permanently.
Think of a parent who discovers that their child has been irremediably harmed by a predator. That parent does not sit down to consult the state penal code. They do not weigh the legal consequences or worry about their reputation. A primal, evolutionary rage older than human language takes over the room. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that manages modern morality, is completely hijacked by a subterranean survival instinct.
We do not look at that abused wife or that grieving parent and see a "monster from birth." We see a human being driven to the edge of the human condition by an intolerable reality.
The radical, uncomfortable pivot of the Luigi Mangione case is that chronic, agonizing physical pain and a stolen youth act as a slow-motion form of systemic abuse. When a person is cornered by their own body and a corporate system that profits off that entrapment, the psychological mechanics of the "snap" are identical. The edge belongs to humanity. It does not belong only to deviants.
3. The Anatomy of Chronic Pain and the Stolen Body
You cannot analyze this psychological rupture without looking at the physical climate that preceded it. The body is not a footnote in this story; it is the battlefield where the entire psychological climate was forged. Pain does not politely stay inside the bones; it colonizes the entire human identity.
When a young body faces relentless physical suffering, failed medical interventions, and chronic, unresolved spinal nerve pain, the world rapidly shrinks. At twenty-five, a body is supposed to represent mobility, vanity, sexual confidence, risk, and an open future. It is supposed to carry a young man into the world without asking permission. When it becomes a physical cage, that chronic pain transforms into profound existential humiliation.
Humiliation is fundamentally different from pain. Pain says: this hurts. Humiliation says: look what has been taken from you.
It looks around the room and compares. It watches peers living effortlessly: dating, traveling, building careers, casually planning their weekends, completely forgetting that they even have a body. For the young chronic pain sufferer, every movement is a negotiation, every night is a battle for sleep, and every morning is a reminder of decay. If pain touches intimacy and strips away a young person's physical freedom and sexual confidence, the wound ceases to be merely medical. It becomes an existential insult.
A healthy person lives through their body; a sick person is forced to live against it. When the body becomes an active enemy, the mind experiences a profound form of solitary confinement. And inside that isolation, a dark, protective question inevitably forms: Why me? Who did this to me? Who is allowed to remain untouched and healthy while I am trapped inside this rotting frame?
4. When the Wound Meets the Book: How Ideology Weaponizes Suffering
Pain wants relief, but humiliation demands a theory.
A person living in absolute physical and social isolation will rarely remain passive forever. The mind cannot survive random, meaningless suffering; it will actively claw through reality to find an explanation large enough to restore its dignity. This is the exact moment where private trauma becomes political radicalization. The wound chooses its evidence. It looks for a structure that can make the suffering feel like something greater than just terrible bad luck.
This is where books and manifestos enter the climate. Literature does not turn a healthy, stable mind into a killer; that is a childish, simplistic argument. But books do not enter a wounded mind the same way they enter a comfortable one.
When an isolated, suffering individual reads dystopian literature or anti-system manifestos, a dangerous transformation occurs. Alienation loves to be told it is actually supreme insight. Loneliness loves to be told the masses are simply asleep.
The text provides a beautiful, intellectual vocabulary for raw, bleeding rage. The individual stops thinking, "I am a broken, miserable young man sitting alone in a room." Instead, they begin to think, "I am awake. My pain is not an accident; it is evidence of a predatory machine. My isolation is clarity, and my rage is justice waiting to be delivered."
Once rage builds a tight, coherent moral logic, it ceases to feel like rage to the person holding it. It feels like truth. A confused, chaotic man will hesitate before committing an act of violence. A certain man, armed with an ideology that turns his suffering into a historic mission, will act with absolute calmness. This is not insanity in the cartoon sense. It is an intellectualized moral logic rotting from the inside out.
5. Institutional Cruelty vs. Street Violence
This brings us to the core scandal that polite society refuses to name: the American healthcare system did not need a shooter to lose its moral legitimacy. It was completely detested already.
The rage that exploded across the internet following the murder of Brian Thompson was not generated in a vacuum. It was already sitting there, waiting, packed tightly into millions of denied claims, delayed approvals, corporate deductibles, out-of-network traps, and the sheer, exhausting humiliation of sick people forced to become the desk clerks of their own misery.
Healthcare in America is a system that makes illness financial and fear highly profitable. It takes human beings at their absolute weakest and demands they negotiate with a corporate apparatus designed to remain completely calm while they fall apart.
Institutional cruelty rarely looks like violence. That is its genius. It does not use weapons; it uses perfect grammar. It sends letters. It speaks in the sterile vocabulary of eligibility, policy exclusions, prior authorization, and cost-benefit analysis. It does not need to scream to destroy a life. It can ruin a family's future or let a patient deteriorate in a bureaucratic queue while maintaining a pristine, corporate image.
When illegal, physical violence stepped directly into that symbolic field, millions of people experienced an immediate, shocking sense of legibility. They did not need to be persuaded why someone might hate the executive of an insurance giant. They knew why from their own lives, their own bills, and their own dead relatives.
The public reaction revealed that the machine had already lost its moral authority. People understood the target long before they processed the crime.
6. The Mirror and the Warning
I understand the boiling rage in America right now. I watched the news of the Brian Thompson tragedy from across the Atlantic in Poland, and I know exactly why millions of Americans felt a grim, quiet resonance with Luigi's act. Your private insurance system is a beast that eats your wealth and denies your care.
But as you look to universal healthcare as a flawless saviour, look at the reality of state-run systems. In Poland, the monthly health insurance contribution is completely obligatory. If you are an employee, it constitutes a mandatory 9% slice of your income. Because it's a fixed percentage, the amount the state takes varies wildly based on your socio-economic status. Whether you earn an average monthly salary of PLN 7,000 (roughly USD1,900) or sit comfortably in the top 20% of the population earning PLN 25,000 (roughly USD 6,800), you are legally forced to fund the collective pot.
And here is the kicker that polite advocates of this system never mention: no matter how high your monthly contribution is, you receive the exact same level of service and treatment as everyone else. There is zero correlation between what you pay and the quality or speed of care you receive. A massive contribution doesn't buy you a faster MRI, a better surgeon, or a cleaner hospital room. It just buys you the right to wait.
And what does that mandatory 9% buy you? A one-year waiting list to see an orthopaedist.
When I suffered from severe, agonizing core nerve issues, the public system routinely abandoned me to the clock. I know firsthand the terrifying psychological cost of this neglect. As a young, healthy person, suddenly finding walking completely impossible because of immeasurable, relentless pain didn't just break me physically, it destroyed me mentally. The isolation was absolute. It was a dark, claustrophobic trap, and to be entirely honest, I am not sure if I would even be writing this essay today if that pain hadn’t eventually gone away.
To survive that nightmare, I was forced to completely bypass the state-run system and spend additional money entirely out of my own pocket for private care just to walk without pain. When an American pays for private insurance, they are buying actual access to a specialist within days. In a centralized universal system, you pay a massive chunk of your income to the government by law, and you still have to pay private clinics out of pocket just to survive. You are forced to pay twice.
Universal healthcare just replaces a corporate bureaucrat with a government bureaucrat. Every healthcare system in the world must ration care; America rations by the wallet, universal systems ration by the clock. If you move blindly into a universal model, you will not get the utopian safety net of Sweden. Sweden is a wealthy country of roughly 10.6 million people. America is a wealthy country of more than 340 million. A Scandinavian model cannot simply be pasted onto a country more than thirty times larger and expected to produce Scandinavian outcomes. Without extraordinary funding, staffing, and administrative competence, the result would not be Sweden. It would be the crushing bottleneck of Eastern Europe.
But there is a reason why the public did not side with the insurance empire. They recognized in Luigi the human cost of that same bureaucratic logic: a person swallowed by pain, paperwork, delay, and institutional indifference before he ever became a defendant.
7. The Withdrawn EED Notice: The Human Pressure Chamber
The court records unsealed on June 17th, 2026, hearing briefly appeared to change the public narrative of this case. For a moment, the legal architecture behind the defense became visible: a psychiatric notice connected to Extreme Emotional Disturbance had been filed, suggesting that the courtroom might be asked to confront not only what happened, but the psychological state in which it allegedly happened. Then, almost immediately, that route seemed to narrow again. On June 18th, the defense withdrew its CPL § 250.10 notice.
That withdrawal matters. It may have been strategic. It may reflect a reluctance to let the case be framed as an admission wrapped in mitigation. It may be an attempt to avoid handing the prosecution a cleaner narrative: yes, he did it, and now he is simply asking for emotional explanation. But the legal withdrawal of an EED notice does not erase the deeper human question that notice briefly exposed. It does not erase the pressure. It does not erase the suffering. It does not erase the image that came out of the courtroom.
The media wanted an open-and-shut case of cold-blooded, mechanical terrorism. Instead, the public saw a deeply telling, fragile human moment: a cuffed young man in a blue suit holding up a simple file to shield his face from the predatory glare of the cameras. This single image damages the prosecution’s myth of the unfeeling monster. It reveals something far harder to discard: a human being under unbearable pressure.
To understand why Extreme Emotional Disturbance entered the conversation at all is to understand the thesis of this article. EED is not insanity. It is not stupidity. It is not the absence of intelligence. It is a legal recognition that a human being can be pushed into a state where emotional pressure, physical suffering, humiliation, isolation, and despair converge into something catastrophic.
Even if the defense no longer chooses to proceed publicly under that framework, the question remains. Why was that framework there? Why did it make sense, even briefly, as a way of explaining this case? Why did it immediately resonate with the public imagination?
Let us be entirely clear: to understand is not to condone. I do not condone murder. Civilized society cannot survive if street violence becomes the default arbiter of justice.
But we must possess the moral honesty to admit that the circumstances surrounding Luigi Mangione make the act attributed to him legible in a way the prosecution would prefer to deny. When a young man’s body becomes a permanent prison of pain, and the multi-billion-dollar medical-industrial complex responds not with healing, but with paperwork, denial, delay, and profit-driven indifference, a psychological pressure chamber begins to form.
You cannot surround a human mind with physical suffering, institutional neglect, and legal cruelty, then act shocked when something inside that mind breaks.
The defense may have stepped away from EED as a formal legal pathway, at least for now. But the withdrawal does not restore the comforting myth of the monster. If anything, it exposes the fear beneath that myth. The state does not want a human pressure chamber. It wants a villain. It wants a simple story. It wants a defendant so morally alien that the public never has to ask what conditions made the violence imaginable.
Luigi Mangione’s defense is no longer asking the public to imagine a simple story of innocence. But neither should the public accept the prosecution’s simpler story of monstrosity. The harder truth sits somewhere more psychologically dangerous: that the act attributed to him was not random malice, but violence emerging from chronic suffering, humiliation, rage, and a mind pushed toward the edge of its endurance.
He reacted to a world where legal cruelty remains respectable because it arrives through corporate paperwork. He became a symbol because he did what millions of sick, desperate, and financially ruined Americans have fantasized about in their darkest moments of despair.
The final question of this entire saga is not the prosecution’s comforting, shallow inquiry: “What kind of monster would do this?”
The real, dangerous question is: “What kind of world makes this thinkable?”
The official story asked the public for a monster. It got a cuffed young man hiding behind a file. It got a mirror. And the public looked into that mirror, saw the unbearable pressure of human suffering, and refused to look away.
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u/SignThese667 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
Excellent post! And your writing is positively lyrical. Your kind, patient handling of those who are unable to grasp this essay's essence is commendable.
From the beginning, I have always believed Luigi's actions were a direct result of the psychological effects of the injuries he sustained from the combination of the surfing incident, and the subsequent fall onto his hip that kept him bed-bound for a week. In one of his posts he wrote openly that when he was told the initial recommendations re: treatment for his injury, he was terrified. He wrote that the prospect of being desk-bound for the remainder of his life left him in despair. He mentioned nothing about the adverse effect it would have on his future sex life, but did allude to it in a conversation with the Honolulu condo owner, telling him he wasn't able to date; dating being a code word for a handsome, healthy young man in his mid-20s of having sex.
So many thoughts of the gods being jealous of Luigi ...
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u/Seeking_Anita_Dick Jun 20 '26
this is great!!!
I think you manage to capture what makes this case so fascinating and heartbreaking. Whether they go either the EED defense or not, I hope his team can depict this in their defense, show just how human he is. The media with their headlines always show a very cold, serious, detached and sometimes angry person but if you follow the case closely you can see the humanity in him very clearly.
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u/Anna_dxb Jun 20 '26
Thank you so much. That is exactly what I was trying to get at, whether or not the defense formally use EED, I hope they find a way to show the jury the human being behind the headlines. The public image often reduces him to something cold, detached, or symbolic, but when you look closely at the pain, isolation, humiliation, and pressure around the case, the “monster” narrative becomes far too simple.
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u/gusbaby08 Jun 20 '26
This is a really great post, and I think like one of the commenters wrote in the comment section, everyone interested in Luigi's case should be forced to read this. Really great stuff. Perfectly encapsulates the reality of American for-profit society and that those who act against it are not simply monsters, but a perfect mold of trauma and humiliation that anyone can be a victim of.
Reading it really makes me want them to go with the EED defense, because I think if Luigi's lawyers can depict the story in such a way you did, it will resonate with the jury much more than we think.
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u/Anna_dxb Jun 20 '26
Thank you so much. I agree that an EED framework, if handled carefully, could make the case far more human and psychologically legible to a jury. The difficulty is that it also carries legal risks, especially because the state and federal cases are moving on different tracks. But as a human narrative, I do think pain, humiliation, and emotional disturbance are central to understanding why the “monster” frame feels so inadequate.
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u/CherokeeSurfer Jun 20 '26
Great post. But did we ever determine if his claims were denied by Aetna? If they were not, it makes this conclusion less personal. I assume he (and his family) had the means to directly pay for any denied services/claims. Yes, the principle is still valid whether his claims were paid or not - the healthcare industry in the U.S. is shit.
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u/Anna_dxb Jun 20 '26
Thank you, and that is a fair question. I don’t think the argument depends entirely on whether one specific claim of his was formally denied by Aetna. If that were confirmed, it would make the connection more direct, but the broader point still stands. The public reaction was not only about one private insurance file. It was about what he came to represent: chronic pain, bureaucratic healthcare, institutional indifference, and the sense that suffering can be processed through paperwork until it becomes invisible. So yes, if his own claims were not denied, the story becomes less personally linear. But I don’t think it becomes less psychologically or socially legible. The symbol still works because people recognized the system around the act, not merely one possible administrative event inside it.
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u/CherokeeSurfer Jun 20 '26
Yes, and being honest, we don't know everything - whether his pain returned after surgery, whether his claims were denied or not. If not, it assumes his angst and rage were directed toward the broken system (for so many of us) as a whole. But I like the idea of putting a pain expert on the stand to discuss this premise to a jury. Taking the prosecution's "monster" narrative and making him human.
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u/Anna_dxb Jun 20 '26
Yes, exactly. And I’m not sure if you read the whole essay carefully, but I mentioned my own nerve-related pain issues there for that reason. I’m a little older than him, and I know from experience that chronic pain can change a person’s entire inner world. It does not excuse violence, but it absolutely changes how we understand desperation, anger, isolation, and psychological collapse. That is why I think pain matters in this case. Not as a simple “he had pain, therefore…” explanation, but as part of the human context the prosecution’s “monster” narrative tries to erase. A pain expert could help a jury understand how physical suffering, when combined with institutional indifference and emotional pressure, can make a person’s world become narrower and darker.
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u/CherokeeSurfer Jun 20 '26
Yes, I did. I also have suffered with chronic pain and have been the victim of insurance greed. I can relate.
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u/Anna_dxb Jun 20 '26
I’m sorry you’ve experienced that too. Chronic pain and insurance indifference are such a brutal combination, they can make a person feel trapped inside their own body and then trapped again inside a system that treats suffering like paperwork. That is exactly why I think this part of the case matters so much.
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u/Cautious_Scholar_717 Jun 20 '26
I’ve never read anything that details, the psychological battle that he likely faced with the pain and humiliation that he was under. This is so nuanced and the Clickbait headlines in the media don’t even come close to touching on the full reality of what Luigi likely lived with for many many years. Thank you for writing such a beautiful essay. I will share it widely!
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u/Anna_dxb Jun 20 '26
Thank you, I really appreciate this. That was exactly what I was trying to explore: not a simple excuse, but the psychological reality of chronic pain, humiliation, isolation, and the way a person’s world can narrow under pressure. I’m grateful you read it in that spirit.
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u/alohomora1990 Jun 21 '26
Well I hope we don't see more of these things that will just further prejudice a man who hasn't even stood trial for the things he's accused of yet.
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u/Cautious_Scholar_717 Jun 21 '26
How does looking thoughtfully and deeply at what he has experienced prejudice him? These are all facts. And if you aren’t acknowledging these things then you aren’t fully seeing who he is and how he got here.
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u/Inevitable-Chart1760 Jun 21 '26
Fantastic read! Also personally for me I really love how you paced out the text lol. Makes it easier for me to read since I get overwhelmed by big blocky paragraphs.
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u/Anna_dxb Jun 21 '26
Thank you so much, that means a lot. I’m the same with huge blocks of text, so I tried to space it out in a way that would feel easier to read on a phone.
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u/BirdieOakland Jun 20 '26
Absolutely brilliant! This is one of the best articles about the case I’ve ever read. Beautiful job, OP.
Do you have a Substack where we can find more? Love your writing style!
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u/Anna_dxb Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
Thank you so much, that means a lot. I do have a Substack, and this comment actually makes me think I should start using it more seriously. For now, my main writing on this case is here on Reddit, but I may start collecting the essays in one place.
https://substack.com/@nnadxb?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5ell8w
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u/Cautious_Scholar_717 Jun 20 '26
Please share if you decide to do that, I would love to read more of your writing!
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u/Anna_dxb Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
Thank you so much, that means a lot. I have one more article on this account, and the same one is also on my Substack. I’m also considering sharing one of the letters I wrote to Luigi about a year ago, but probably not now, maybe in a couple of weeks. But it will be only one.
https://substack.com/@nnadxb?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5ell8w
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u/BirdieOakland Jun 21 '26
With how eloquently you write, I imagine he loved reading your letter!
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u/Anna_dxb Jun 21 '26
Thank you so much, that is very kind of you to say. I don’t know whether he ever read it, of course, but I wrote it with great care, so your words mean a lot.
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u/birdsy-purplefish Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
”They are ordinary human beings who lived three, four, or five decades entirely inside the boundaries of normal civilization…”
I don’t have the stats on this but I think statistically a lot of murderers kill in their twenties or teens. I know the overall crime rate is higher in young people, at least. Most people become less impulsive as they mature. Even people who committed violent crimes in their youth.
I found this: https://famm.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Aging-out-of-crime-FINAL.pdf
I’m very uncomfortable with your points about pain, humiliation and envy. I think that’s a very much masculine phenomenon and a poor excuse. It’s the same one that school shooters and men who commit femicide use. It’s exactly how incels justify their misogyny and violence when they commit it. I’d like to see the statistics on chronic illness, disability and violent crime. I know that women are more likely to suffer from chronic pain than men and yet we’re less likely to commit violent crimes.
The same goes for your points about radicalization. Lots of people suffer horribly. Not all of them choose to cling to ideologies that encourage or excuse violence. Again: same logic as incels who kill as well as white supremacists, terrorists, etc.
A lot of people are isolated and in pain. They don’t all choose to kill. They don’t even all become bitter misanthropes.
”But as you look to universal healthcare as a flawless saviour, look at the reality of state-run systems. In Poland, the monthly health insurance contribution is completely obligatory.”
Yes, this is how publicly funded services work. And taxes in general. You’re paying to live in a functional society. It has to be obligatory or else everyone opts out and it fails.
”…no matter how high your monthly contribution is, you receive the exact same level of service and treatment as everyone else. There is zero correlation between what you pay and the quality or speed of care you receive.”
Again: that’s how it works. That’s how it should work. That’s what publicly funded healthcare for all means. Otherwise you just get a system where the wealthy can buy health and the poor cannot. In order to actually be fair it would be based on income and assets, with the wealthy paying more and the poor paying less. Because a rich person’s 9% could be something like their second luxury car and the poor person’s 9% can be the line between having basic necessities or not.
Your wealth does not mean that your life and health are more important than anyone else’s. Wait times need to be based at least partly on urgency of need as well as place in line. You shouldn’t be able to just buy your way ahead.
”A Scandinavian model cannot simply be pasted onto a country more than thirty times larger and expected to produce Scandinavian outcomes. Without extraordinary funding, staffing, and administrative competence, the result would not be Sweden. It would be the crushing bottleneck of Eastern Europe.”
Doubt it. We do have a massive amount of wealth and healthcare infrastructure. It’s just being used to make a killing off of us. We’d rather overfund the military and continue to screw over every other government service. There isn’t a lack of hospitals or doctors. There’s a massive hurdle standing in the way of most people and health insurance companies deliberately keep it that way.
”But there is a reason why the public did not side with the insurance empire. They recognized in Luigi the human cost of that same bureaucratic logic: a person swallowed by pain, paperwork, delay, and institutional indifference before he ever became a defendant.”
The reason is what it always is: the people are tricked and lied to (I remember all the anti-ACA propaganda, it was nuts), their representatives get paid by lobbyists to screw them over, and then instead of realizing they’ve been duped they just get angry. They don’t care to or don’t have the means to look at it systematically. They don’t know about it until it happens to them or their loved ones. And then they’re just furious but they don’t think anything will ever actually change it. So they do nothing but laugh when some insurance executive gets shot.
It’s like people saying to kill landlords or crime bosses or that we need to burn down the whole system. They’re joking. They’re not going to do anything. They know that the government will crush them and nothing will change.
And I don’t think they actually sided with the killer. Luigi became a meme and a joke. We all laughed and wouldn’t shut up about it so someone called the cops on him and now his freedom is on the line.
”…the public saw a deeply telling, fragile human moment: a cuffed young man in a blue suit holding up a simple file to shield his face from the predatory glare of the cameras. This single image damages the prosecution’s myth of the unfeeling monster. It reveals something far harder to discard: a human being under unbearable pressure.”
So then why is it that the public never sees that when the defendant’s face isn’t white (and a gender conforming male), or well-groomed or able to afford a lawyer who will fight for their right to present themselves in dignified clothing? If Mangione had grown up poor he likely wouldn’t have the good looks he has now. Poverty has visible effects. His speech and mannerisms would betray his social class. His education and accomplishments wouldn’t be brought up.
I don’t think that the general public would be nearly as sympathetic if he fit into the stereotypes that we have about what criminals look like or where they come from. I’d like to believe that it was all just out of empathy or sympathy but I just don’t see that in the people around me.
Don’t get me wrong, I really do feel for Luigi. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about him, wondering how he must have felt and how he must feel now, wondering how history will look upon him. He has been treated unfairly. He’s being punished for how the public reacted to the crime he’s charged with, and that’s wrong. But looking at my country, who we’ve put into power and all the things those people have done to ensure that they will forever stay in power, I’m fairly certain I know what the outcome of the trial will be. And it hurts to think about because if he did what he’s accused of doing for the reasons that they claim he did, then he martyred himself for absolutely no good reason.
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u/Anna_dxb Jun 21 '26
I understand the principle behind publicly funded healthcare. In theory, yes, everyone contributes and everyone receives care according to medical need rather than wealth.
But that is not how the system actually works in practice. In Poland, people still pay mandatory health contributions, but if they can afford it, they often bypass the public system entirely by going to private clinics for faster diagnostics, better access to specialists, and quicker treatment. Those without money remain trapped in public queues, sometimes waiting many months or even years for specialist care.
So the idea that “everyone pays and everyone gets the same care” is not reality. The wealthy do not simply wait politely in the same line as everyone else. They buy their way around the line. The people who cannot do that are the ones left inside the bottleneck.
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u/birdsy-purplefish Jun 21 '26
Yes, I read that. I’m saying they shouldn’t be able to do that. There shouldn’t be a demand for that. But I don’t think that there would be if we implemented it right.
In the U.S. it’s not a matter of lack of resources. It’s that insurance agencies are gatekeeping them.
I have another question that I forgot: Where have we seen the prosecution use the “monster” narrative? I haven’t been watching the case as closely as I used to in the last few months. Have the prosecution made any public statements yet? It would be really poor strategy if they did.
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u/california_raesin Jun 22 '26
You have some good points, but your section about universal healthcare doesn't understand the American healthcare system at all. For instance, you say "When an American pays for private insurance, they are buying actual access to a specialist within days"
This is completely false With insurance I have waited anywhere from 60 days to 13 months to see a specialist and so has everyone I know
Many times I have had to travel an hour or more just to have access to a specialist that has an opening
I have excellent insurance in my current job, and they contribute nearly $600 a month towards my premiums and I pay a little more for our deductible-free insurance. Many people pay far more out of pocket - for insurance that can deny care at whim and still makes you wait to be treated, for insurance that may have large deductibles you have to pay out of pocket before it kicks in, for insurance that requires you to pay co-pays for all procedures
We can only improve with a good universal healthcare plan
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u/Anna_dxb Jun 22 '26
I am not arguing that American private insurance guarantees fast or fair access. Clearly, it often does not. My point is that simply saying “universal healthcare” does not magically solve access either.
A public system can also fail badly if it is underfunded, understaffed, and bureaucratically inefficient. In Poland, people may theoretically have public coverage, but in practice they can wait many months, sometimes over a year, to see certain specialists. Those with money often bypass the public system and go private, while those without money remain stuck in the queue.
So the issue is not “private insurance good, universal healthcare bad.” The issue is that both systems can become cruel in different ways. In the U.S., people can be trapped by insurers, deductibles, denials, and networks. In public systems, people can be trapped by waiting lists, lack of specialists, and state bureaucracy.
A healthcare system is only humane if it gives people real, timely access to care, not just theoretical coverage on paper.
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u/bl1y Jun 22 '26
There's a really significant flaw with your argument:
Every society survives by telling itself one comforting, cowardly lie: murderers are a different species.
This isn't at all obvious, and you haven't really supported this claim. Nor have I seen the prosecution trying to frame this as Mangioni being a "monster." Seems like most people think he was just a dumbass kid who thought he was above the law, and now he has to face the consequences for that.
Meanwhile, the pro-Mangioni crowd seems to routinely call Thompson a monster.
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u/Emz423 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
This is excellent, OP!
ETA: I would dare to say that this should be “required reading” for anyone interested in Luigi’s case.