The Luigi Mangione Psyop

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For the better part of 5 years, the right wing of America's political landscape has made the healthcare industrial complex — and the bureaucrats in Washington that have empowered them — all but public enemy number one. While establishment media has distorted the animosity directed their way into a liberal fever dream rife with all of the empty platitudes they unleash anytime the establishment is challenged in order to stoke a culture war between the left and right bookends of the existing political paradigm, the hatred directed at the likes of Anthony Fauci and his appendages was justified in the wake of the COVID-19 plandemic. The likes of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and his counterpart at Moderna, Stephane Bancel, also justifiably bore the brunt of the vitriol coming from outspoken critics of the response to COVID-19 that advanced what may have been the largest human experiment in history with the release of mRNA-technology gene therapy under the guise of a mass vaccination program. As that unfolded, calls for non-political action against this cadre for their crimes against humanity only became amplified. The echoes of those outcries ultimately waned into a faint whisper as Fauci, et al. faced no accountability for their actions.

Conversely, the hatred of the healthcare industry from the right was met by a reaction from the left that featured all of the hallmarks of its hypocrisy and lack of either substance or self-awareness. All of the sudden, the anti-corporate left became the biggest advocates of the likes of conglomerate enterprises like Pfizer, Moderna, and other big pharma companies in a role-reversal marked by cognitive dissonance at a level so surreal that Franz Kafka would find too absurd to believe. In the wake of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, it is the right wing faction of America's political landscape that is now showcasing that same hypocrisy the left had in the wake of COVID as they have now become apologists for the healthcare industrial complex they once maligned.

Much like the anti-science narrative pushed by the left from 2020, the right has fallen into the rhetorical trappings of the establishment propagandists by framing Thompson's assassination as the latest shots fired in a culture war between socialism and capitalism. This narrative has largely been furthered by the reaction to Thompson's assassination, in which the covetous nature of America's health insurance industry has been thrust back into the spotlight. UnitedHealthcare undoubtedly exemplified that avarice as it doubled the industry-average for rejected claims for healthcare coverage. However, criticism of the joy that many took in the murder of Thompson as the instigation of class warfare has begun to be conflated with the purported motive of his alleged murderer Luigi Mangione in a manner that makes the real reasons behind the killing even more difficult to ascertain.

If one is to take the narrative that has emerged about Mangione seriously then classifying his alleged actions as an instance of class warfare is an overly reductive explanation, but of course, simple answers are for simple minds. The widely propagated theory is that Mangione killed Thompson due to personal grievances with UnitedHealthcare which fueled a hatred for the healthcare insurance industry at large. Given that those issues aimed at the industry are impossible to refute, the specificity of that rationale behind his alleged motive isn't evidence of the onset of class warfare at all. Through that lens, Thompson was not killed simply because he is a wealth executive but because of his actions as CEO of UnitedHealthcare that exploited people's pain and suffering for material gain. Equating that rationale to Marxism is as fallacious as accusing someone who wants Anthony Fauci to answer for his crimes of not believing in science. It's a false equivalency that effectively absolves him of wrongdoing by using the threat of a looming culture war to deflect away from the substance of the underlying issue.

That is of course, if you believe the narrative being put forward about Luigi Mangione being Thompson's assassin to begin with; a narrative that has more red flags than a vexillography pageant between China, Albania, Morocco, and Vietnam. The mental gymnastics the media has gone through to paint him red-handed would take home gold at the Olympics. From the weapon going from a bolt-action handgun to a 3D printed ghost gun the likes of that which opponents of the Second Amendment are pining to crack down on, to him being arrested in a McDonald's in possession of everything but a sign that said "I'm guilty," the story made out against him is an example of the truth being stranger than fiction, if it is even the truth at all.

Alternative theories about his suspected use of psychotropics like psilocybin or ayahuasca being the catalyst for him being driven to murder read like big pharma fan fiction, as if SSRIs and other prescription medicines aren't more likely to cause the dissociation seen in murderers and mass shooters. Suddenly, the bulk of right wing media that once was the lone source of opposition to medical technocracy has begun to push narratives that make them sound like they have turned into a mouthpiece for big pharma and its cohorts. The politically convenient narratives they have advanced aimed at reaffirming a particular worldview instead of arriving at the truth are enough to keep them from even exploring the possibility of any alternatives behind what led to Thompson's killing.

It isn't as if those possibilities don't exist. In May, Thompson was named as a defendant in a lawsuit along with UnitedHealth Group Chairman Stephen Hemsley and CEO Andrew Witty. The 3 co-defendants faced a class action lawsuit for violations of federal securities laws led by the City Of Hollywood Firefighters' Pension Fund. The suit alleges that Thompson, Hemsley, and Witty committed insider trading when they sold shares in excess of $120 million combined between them. The sales personally netted Hemsley $102 million. Thompson made $15.1 million when he exercised stock options and sold shares in February, the first such sales he made during his tenure at the helm of UnitedHealthcare. At the time of the sale, Thompson's stock options had several years until they expired but were sold just weeks before news broke that UnitedHealth Group and its subsidiaries including UnitedHealthcare and the healthcare-related services company Optum were under investigation by the DOJ for violations of US antitrust laws. Following the revelation of that antitrust probe, the price of the shares sold by Thompson, et al. dropped significantly by $27 per share, erasing $25 billion in shareholder value.

According to the class action suit filed against Thompson, et al. he and his co-defendants were aware of the DOJ investigation since "at least October 2023" but failed to disclose the antitrust probe to investors. The complaint continues to allege that the defendants' stock sales took place over the course of the 4 months between from when they were informed about the DOJ investigation and when it become public knowledge. The plaintiffs in the class action suit sought damages for the losses they incurred from what they describe as knowingly false and misleading statements and omissions designed as part of a scheme to deceive the market and inflate the value of shares in UnitedHealth Group.

The lawsuit filed by the City Of Hollywood Firefighters' Pension Fund is being litigated as the DOJ antitrust probe continues. UnitedHealth Group is being investigated for antitrust law violations it has been suspected of committing since 2021 following its January 6th acquisition of the company Change Healthcare. UnitedHealth Group sought to integrate Change into its existing subsidiary Optum which is responsible for first-pass claims editing, a process in which the insurer receives and reviews healthcare insurance claims to determine whether or not they should be approved or rejected. DOJ officials sued UnitedHealth Group for antitrust violations in 2022 following the acquisition of Change Healthcare. However, the court ruled in favor of UnitedHealth after the company implemented a new firewall policy that assuaged the court's concerns that data being shared between UnitedHealthcare and Optum would give the healthcare insurer unfair access to customer sensitive information from nearly every health insurer following the integration of Change Healthcare into the UnitedHealth Group family of companies. 

Although UnitedHealth Group emerged victorious following that lawsuit, the concerns raised by the DOJ re-emerged as it opened a new investigation that would put Thompson in its crosshairs which ultimately led to the class action lawsuit for insider trading being brought against him. What the DOJ probe and related class action lawsuit show is that Thompson had many enemies other than those disenfranchised with how UnitedHealthcare functions as an insurer. According to the slain CEO's wife, Paulette Thompson, he was intimately aware of the threats he faced. "Yes, there had been some threats," Thompson told NBC News. On the nature of the threats, Mrs. Thompson speculated on their cause, stating "Basically, I don’t know, a lack of coverage? I don’t know details. I just know that he said there were some people that had been threatening him." Despite the prevalence of these threats, law enforcement officials have not identified any suspects nor have tied Mangione to them.

The admission that Brian Thompson had received multiple threats against him beckons questions about whether they were tied to his murder. If Mangione was not behind those threats, as it has not been asserted that he was, then what other parties could have been and what would their motives have been? While Thompson's wife speculated that it pertained to claims denials, the multitude of legal issues he faces opens the door for possibilities that shareholders who Thompson is alleged to have conspired against and his own corporate colleagues who were under investigation alongside him before his death had motive to murder him. Could Thompson's assassination have been perpetrated by a hitman as the result of corporate espionage to keep him from potentially cooperating with the DOJ? Could the assailant have been tied to the parties involved in the class action suit against him? These possibilities have all been swept under the rug and completely ignored by the coverage surrounding his death as the allegation that Luigi Mangione has completely obfuscated any alternative theories from public purview, despite the circumstantial evidence surrounding them arguably being more compelling.

In comparison, alternative explanations for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson convey how implausible the case against Mangione sounds. The specter of communism being dangled atop the empty headed masses like the Sword Of Damocles to push the narrative that Mangione was the killer shows how malleable people's minds are. As the media covering promoting fears of class warfare shows, the general public so easily swayed by their emotions is still as susceptible to a psyop as they were at the onset of COVID-19 when fear mongering led to mass formation psychosis on a global scale. The oscillation of the right from the most fervent opponents of the healthcare industrial complex to now being some of its biggest apologists offers further proof of how fragile the human psyche is in lieu of any true will to power driving one toward pursuing the truth.