When the identity of the person who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was a mystery, Americans grafted their own ideas about the gunman onto the little information available. Now that a person of interest in the case has been arrested, that imagined character is bumping up against the identity and writings of a named suspect, who appears to have left an extensive trail of book reviews, including for an anti-technology manifesto written by the Unabomber and treatises on managing back pain.
Along with a three-page, handwritten manifesto reportedly in the possession of Luigi Mangione upon his arrest, those online traces may offer insight into the motives of a man accused of a killing that touched a nerve for Americans exhausted with profit-hungry health care companies.
Much of the online chatter has centered on the book written by Ted Kaczynski, the man known as the Unabomber, who conducted a nearly 20-year campaign of mail bombings designed to reverse society’s accelerating technological revolution.
“You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.”
“You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution,” an account bearing the name and likeness of Mangione wrote on Goodreads in a review of Kaczynski’s 1995 essay “Industrial Society and Its Future.” “Fossil fuel companies actively suppress anything that stands in their way and within a generation or two, it will begin costing human lives by greater and greater magnitudes until the earth is just a flaming ball orbiting third from the sun. Peaceful protest is outright ignored, economic protest isn’t possible in the current system, so how long until we recognize that violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self-defense.”
The book’s anarchist-inflected take on modern society mocked leftists and has recently found a second life on TikTok among people who reject the traditional left-right divide. In 2021, The Baffler described Kaczynski as an “unlikely unifying figure, embraced on TikTok by both jaded environmentalists and right-leaning doomer nihilists.”
Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson have also cited Kaczynski. “He might not be wrong,” Musk said, of Kaczynski’s insistence that tech had been bad for society.
Other books drawing Mangione’s interest included a mish-mash of self-help bestsellers, pop psychology analyses, and self-optimization volumes such as Tim Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Workweek.”
One of Mangione’s favorite books, judging by his glowing review, was a diagnosis called “What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies” by blogger Tim Urban. The author said in his description of the book that it eschews “the usual left-center-right horizontal political axis” in favor of “a vertical axis that explores how we think, as individuals and as groups.”
“I believe this book will go down in history as one of the most important philosophical texts of the early 21st century,” Mangione wrote.
Urban took to Twitter Monday afternoon with a comment apparently directed at Mangione’s appreciation for his writing: “Very much not the point of the book.”
While Kaczynski’s book provides an obvious possible influence for political violence, other books in Mangione’s reading history also stood out given his alleged target.
They included at least three tomes about managing pain: “Becoming a Supple Leopard: The Ultimate Guide to Resolving Pain, Preventing Injury, and Optimizing Athletic Performance,” “Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery,” and “Back Mechanic.”
A Twitter account bearing Mangione’s name featured an X-ray of a back with a surgically implanted medical device.
Details were beginning to leak out Monday about a manifesto that Mangione allegedly had on his person when he was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
“These parasites had it coming,” one line in the document said, according to a police official who spoke to CNN. “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”
New York Police Department Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said the NYPD did not yet have possession of the full, three-page document but that it appeared to betray “some ill will towards corporate America.”
