“Luigism” is a growing plague
The nihilism and evil expressed by those who celebrated Luigi Mangione’s murder of United Health executive Brian Thompson has been chilling. A rock was overturned and some very disturbing things came crawling out.
At first it seemed as though the main reason might have been Mangione’s supposed good looks, and certainly that had something to do with it. But the phenomenon has much deeper roots, and those are the reason another murder of an executive is now being celebrated online by the same people (or bots?) who lauded Mangione and cruelly mocked Thompson:
Wesley LePatner was a senior managing director at Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager. She was CEO of the firm’s Real Estate Income Trust—a $53 billion portfolio. She was also a mother of two, a philanthropist, and an engaged member of New York’s Jewish community. On Monday, she was shot and killed in the lobby of her midtown Manhattan workplace, one of four victims of Shane Tamura’s murder spree.
There’s some evidence that her killer was targeting the National Football League, which shares an office building with Blackstone. But within hours, it was clear that his motive was irrelevant to the hordes now celebrating LePatner’s execution online. Across Reddit, Facebook, X, and other social media platforms, users—many anonymous, and some displaying transgender or Palestinian flag emojis—seized on the executive’s death as symbolic retribution. Her position at the investment firm became a license for cruelty. Commenters mocked her success, dismissed her philanthropy as sinister, and portrayed her employer as an unmitigated force for evil. The message was unmistakable: her death was something to relish.
Most of these people (and again, I’m not at all sure they are all actual people) appear to be capitalist-hating leftists angry that they’re not getting a big enough cut of the pie. And, in the case of LePatner’s murder, that perennial favorite of so many vicious people worldwide – Jew-hating – is thrown into the mix. So no doubt some are also old-fashioned anti-Semites on the right, although I believe the vast majority are on the left.
From the link:
This grotesque display is part of a broader trend of class rage and Internet nihilism that justifies violence by turning innocent victims into scapegoats for moral fury. The permission structure for such ghoulishness is now fully operational. What were once the disturbing mutterings of the fringe are now public, performative, and proudly cruel.
A political movement is testing its power. Call it Luigism.
I’ve written several posts on the “Luigism” phenomenon, although I didn’t call it that. Here’s one, and here’s another that’s not about Luigism but is about what’s behind it. Praise of this latest murder doesn’t depend on anything about the shooter, unlike Luigism. It seems to have morphed into pure victim-hatred, a vile and ominous sign.
In mid October Mark Halperin (who I would characterize as moderate) told Tucker Carlson a Trump victory will trigger “the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country.” Halperin does not seem like a guy who engages in hyperbole. He further said this would not go away quickly (if at all). Could this be a symptom of this predicted insanity? Halperin worked for the corporate media for many years and seems to know these people. BTW, he now has his own podcast through the efforts of Megyn Kelly. He was Me tooed (what a verb phrase!) around 2020 and has experienced the “tolerance” of his former co-workers.
Socialist emotional energy comes from envy, the desire to destroy the success or good fortune of others.
In the great movie It’s a Wonderful Life, the bad guy actually does steal the money, showing he’s really bad. But the good guy never really finds out how bad the bad guy is, tho we watchers see it.
Many people feel that the successful have almost all been bad guy thieves, in some way, even if the rest of us don’t have any evidence. This feeling is rationalized to be true, and thus the killing is justified as part of Justice.
Life is not fair. That doesn’t make it an injustice, but many egalitarians claim it is an injustice that justifies punishment, social Justice.
Every justice system is mostly a punishment system, and the Social Punishment Warriors want to punish those who are more successful.
There are a lot of people who view anything connected with Finance as a form of evil magic, even / especially when they don’t know anything about it. I even saw one blogger assert that it doesn’t matter to banks if they don’t get paid back for their loans, since ‘they can always print more money.’
This attitude about finance heavily overlaps with anti-Semitism. I am sure there are many people who believe that Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan is Jewish (his original family name was Papademetriou)…some probably even think that Brian Moynihan (Bank of America) is Jewish.
wearing my columbo, hat the motive for the crime, seems murky, I don’t think the NFL had much to do with it, someone this obsessed wouldn’t be distracted by an errant elevator, so it is about Blackstone’s corporate holdings but CTE served as a better pretext, what made me curious, because the shooter’s own behavior, was his citing of a prior incident who allegedly was CTE related, but the subject was being charged with arson and fraud, a rather ornate combination of offenses,
It’s good to see Cincinnati brings in a Rev. Lynch to the aftermath of a lynching (albeit unsuccessfully murderous). Puts an affirmative stamp of approval on the matter.
“He further said this would not go away quickly…”
I will report that in the last two weeks or so, the left minions I follow seem to have lost a lot of energy. The one fellow who usually starts it off is not getting nearly the volume of comments that were there a month ago. Maybe sustaining hate 24/7 has finally become too tiring.
miguel, this shooter was apparently nuts. Getting confused about the elevators in a building with which he was not familiar would be easy to do.
“Mark Halperin… told Tucker Carlson a Trump victory will trigger “the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country.”
Of the seven deadly sins, Envy, Greed and Wrath fester like boils within these troglodytes.
Hate that for them but then you wonder how many of these execs have been riding the tiger by stoking and encouraging these types of leftists.
I’ve long said the most dangerous one to the cynical exploiter of a scam is the true believer that follows after them. Especially after their system has been selecting for the most faithful, not the most competent.
I have kind of pictured a personality with a hole in it. Something must fill it. But the something must satisfy….what? Are there other examples where the something is more benign?
I guess it’s another kind of issue. But the…hole…view still has some validity for me.
@chazzand: …a Trump victory will trigger “the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country.”
Perhaps overstated, but real. Trump’s second victory has driven a lot of Americans over the edge. We are seeing increased violence and justification for violence.
Nonetheless, consider that in the 60s/70s there were hundreds of political bombings in the US. Not to mention successful high-level assassinations.
Todays mental health casualties are mostly in the bleachers egging on other nuts. Which isn’t good, but not so bad as if they really were hurling themselves onto the barricades and into Weather Underground-style violence.
I could be wrong, but I see Luigism as performative cowardice.
_____________________________
Donnie: Are these the Nazis, Walter?
Walter: No, these men are nihilists. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
–“The Big Lebowski – Parking / Nihilists scene”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AEMiz6rcxc
_____________________________
It seems the sort of minimal commitment that people can easily get over. 70s radicalism gave way to pet rocks, Saturday Night Fever and Saturday Night Live.
How about a dating service that matches up Luigi supporters with pro-Palestinians? There’s probably already a lot of overlap – both are cluelessly adopting radical poses to shore up their egos and social standing.
And it would make things easier and safer for all us normies.
Richard Aubrey,
I’ve heard your analogy of “the hole” expressed in quite a few sermons. The first time I heard it, it struck a chord with me. We have a God sized hole in our hearts. Now that I think more of it, maybe a puzzle piece is more apt. God is the piece that fits perfectly, ideally, but we humans try to stuff all manner of other things into it.
huxley,
Walter Sobchak: “Nihilists! … I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
chazzand, physicsguy,
I’ve written about this several times; I still don’t know if it will happen, but I recall a lot of similar pushback and rage as Reagan tried to right the shape after all the political unrest of the late ’60s and ’70s, and the economic decline of the ’70s and early ’80s. Even his own Vice President mocked his economic plan, “trickle down economics.”
There is a lot of “rhyming” today with that history. Once the Reagan “miracle” economic upswing hit a certain point a lot of the outrage and lashing out dimished to a low hum. The true believers didn’t go away, or give up, but the culture shifted to promoting capitalism and striving for prosperity. I think it can happen again if we get the economy chugging.
I’m also not the first to notice that so many practicing performative outrage; the woman in the knit cap who knelt very publicly screaming, “NO!” at Trump’s first inauguration, the legions who film themselves raging and upload the clips to social media, the violent attackers, the street protesters shouting at vehicles … are indistinguishable from historical writings of what was referred to as demon possession.
Giving oneself over to hatred leads to darkness.
well in the 80s, there was some residue of the 60s, notably the Capitol Bombing, in 84, by the May 19th Maoist, there was the Brinks Car Robbery orchestrated by the earlier faction, https://www.hstoday.us/subject-matter-areas/counterterrorism/1981-brinks-armored-car-robbery-how-this-tragic-event-strengthened-the-first-joint-terrorism-task-force
Law and Order tried to minimize the set type of acts as did the series Numbers,
perhaps to pay for direct action like that, and the bombing of Ft McNair, bySalvadoran sympathizers, there were the Macheteros, who split off from the FALN, but the temperature was not as high as say in the Troubles when they tried to take out Thatcher, or the Brigatte Rossi
— David Foster
That overlaps with another impulse that runs throughout history, and is especially strong in Puritan-influenced America: that finance is by definition theft. That is, money obtained by ‘interest’, simply or complexly, is money you didn’t work for. No work, no legitimate money. Parasitic.
It’s a visceral, sub-intellectual sort of attitude, that is esp. common in people who do earn their money by hard physical labor. It infuriates that sort of person when a laborer sees a house foreclosed by someone who, from his POV, is a parasite who steals for a living.
It’s made the worse by the fact that finance easily can turn shady and parasitic, though it is not inherently so.
— Nate Winchester
Oh yes. See the French Revolution for a classic example of what can happen in extreme cases. Something along the same loose lines happened in the final decades of the Roman Republic.
— Huxley
On the contrary, it never went away, it just went dormant for a while. The political/social controversies of today are the same ones as the 1970s, awake again.
Also, and I do not mean this as a defense of the lionization of these killers, the widening class divides in our Western societies are unsustainable, at least for a working democratic republic. The emerging signs of class hatred are a symptom.
The labor-violence of the late 19th century was a similar symptom. If we want to retain our republican system of government and a sane society, the class divisions will have to narrow again, one way or another. Otherwise, we’ll get some flavor of nastiness, whether it’s hard socialism, Caesarism, or whatever it ends up being.
Human beings are a-rational, and at a gut level we run our societies with caveman instincts. Which means that there are limits to how far things can be perceived to be ‘unfair’ (meaning a danger to the survival of the tribe) before logical arguments just fail, regardless of the merits.
(See my point above about the instinctive distrust of finance. It’s based in tribal instinct that logic can not entirely overcome.)
— Chazzand
The thing is that one of the articles of faith of the Lefty religion (and modern Leftism is a pseudo-religion, all the way back to its emergence in the aftermath of the French Revolution) is Progress. Capital P. “The ratchet only turns one way.” The ‘arc of history’. Whatever you want to call it, the gradual total dominance of the Left mindset is just inevitable.
Which makes Trump particularly maddening. His election in 2016 was bad enough, but could be chalked up to a freak of the Electoral College system. The restoration in 2020 was seen as normality returning, meaning Progress defeating Reaction.
But in 2024 Trump not only returned, but did so with a substantial majority of the popular vote. Which means the voters meant. Which feels unnatural, wrong to a sincere Leftist who believes in Progress.
The belief in inevitable Progress is of course itself actively irrational in a purely secularist movement. In a purely materialist universe, there can be neither Progress nor Degeneracy, only change, and personal perceptions of it based on personal viewpoints.
In practice, of course, Progress is just the secularized Christian view of history moving toward the Second Coming and eventually Judgement Day, repurposed for a different faith. The Lefties are just as much creatures of Western Christendom as the rest of us, they can’t escape their origins, they’re just in denial about it.
It’s made vastly worse, of course, because it’s not just Trump. All over the West, we’re seeing nationalist and traditionalist movements, parties, and so on rising up and derailing Progress. This wasn’t supposed to happen, it was supposed to be impossible, but there it is. Maddening.
HC68…class divisions. Here is what I think is starting to happen:
Trump is committed to improving the well-being of hourly workers, and numerous initiative will affect this positively: tax benefits for overtime and tips, reduction of illegal immigration, tariffs, tax incentives for capital investment. At the same time, people who have college degrees or are working on such degrees…but lack much in the way of marketable skills or problem-solving personality…are likely to do much worse economically than they feel themselves entitled to do…a function of the increasing pushback against credentialism combined with AI, pressure on NGOs, and a general realization among many employers that they have hired way too many people that they didn’t really need.
I learned two lessons when I was young. Both shaped my attitude toward work, wealth, and money.
I grew up in a summer resort town. We had many very wealthy summer residents. My mother had a beauty shop where many of the wives were her customers. They liked my mother and recognized how had she worked. Most tipped her generously and spoke kindly to my two brothers and me. We looked up to these women and their husbands. These people weren’t bad, greedy, or thieving. We had no idea how they had become rich, but we aspired to be rich one day as well. And we knew that hard work was one of the keys to getting ahead.
As a young geologist fresh out of college, I was assigned to sit on a well that was being drilled in partnership with Gulf Oil Co. That was a lucky assignment for me.
The Gulf geologist taught me how to read well mud samples to see where we were in the drilling process. A skill that I needed to learn on the job. He was a great teacher.
He was also very interested in investing -something I had no knowledge of whatsoever. He introduced me to no load mutual funds, dollar cost averaging, and the time value of compound interest. Had he not been so enthusiastic about these issues, I might not have caught on. But his enthusiasm was catching and when the well was completed, I left with a plan for trying to accumulate some wealth.
Did I become wealthy? No, but that plan got me to a comfortable retirement. Hard work, saving, investing, and being consistent over time helped get us there.
We value hard work, good companies that produce good products, and an economic plan that tries to keep growing the GDP for all citizens. Some people may be lucky enough to inherit their money or win the lottery. I don’t care. This system produces better results for more people than any economic system yet devised.
We need good people like my friend, the Gulf geologist, to preach the gospel of simple, long term investment plans. Government redistribution of wealth simply does not, and has not, ever worked.
Old corporate joke
“How many people work at xxxxx?”
“About half.”
Race and gender also plays a big part in this phenomenon vis a vis the media. If Thompson were a “person of color” or even a white woman, while there would be some who would cheer the murder of any healthcare CEO, the media would quickly tamp down on any enthusiasm shown for this murder instead of helping to push the snowball down the hill. It may not work well on conservatives any more, but if the media came out an declared anyone who championed the murderer of a black or woman CEO a “racist” or a “sexist”, it would get their own people on the Left to shut up very quickly.
I like to make the connection to Eric Rudolph of the abortion bombings. But at least Eric was preventing actual abortion deaths instead of statistical ones that Luigi was preventing. It’s an unsettling comparison for most leftists, but I think quite accurate.
Faith2014…”statistical (deaths) that Luigi was preventing”….are you saying that if healthcare insurers did not exist, no one would be denied care?…the care would somehow automatically fund itself?
sythan:
Wesley LePatner was a woman, a white woman. They are applauding her murder.
She was also Jewish, and so to them she becomes evil.
HC68:
And so Europeans banned Jews from many professions and left the field of money-lending to them, and proceeded to hate them for it.
@HC68: On the contrary, it never went away, it just went dormant for a while. The political/social controversies of today are the same ones as the 1970s, awake again.
No, as you say, the radical left never went away.
However, I was speaking of the cultural shift away from the radical left as fashionable in the 70s. The big demos stopped. People wanted to have fun. Hence disco. The left was very disappointed. Trudeau in Doonesbury called the 70s “a kidney stone of a decade.”
I think we are seeing something similar today as Woke fades as a scolding cultural imperative.
J.J. on August 3, 2025 at 2:59 pm
Reference your geology mentor and his incentivizing investments.
With the labor vs. capital mix appearing to be growing more towards replacing both mental and physical labor with machines, the question becomes “for whom are the machines doing the work or providing output?” if there are fewer humans with an income to buy that output?
Conversely, to have an income to buy the machine output, more and more humans are going to need to become invested owners of the automation, or capitalists in some form.
Various UBI ideas don’t really provide that, as they are a simple substitute for “wages/salary”.
One idea is called capital homesteading, where I understand a newborn child is allocated a sum of $, added to until age 18 or 21; after which that portfolio adds to his adult income. Maybe the original capital is then returned to a common fund and recycled for the next child? Not sure of those kinds of details.
I saw a headline about Ramasamy’s ideas about a $10K program of some sort, but I never learned any of the details and it did not seem to catch on in the media.
And as Megan McArdle said some years ago, it does not matter what form of retirement income you plan for or institute (SS, pension, IRA, 401K, etc.), they all depend on a robust economy to generate the wealth being distributed in retirement. It appears most Dems and too many Republicans don’t understand this simple reality, as they continue failing to incentivize private sector advances as the most prolific source of such income.
R2L, the same questions were being asked in the 1970s as more sophisticated machinery was being developed for the factory floors.
I remember deadheading on a flight from SFO to DEN where I sat next to an executive who had just been in Japan and seen Toyota build a car body without it ever being touched by a human. He was asking how we were going to keep employing factory workers? I could understand his concern. That was fifty years ago.
He told me my job as an airline pilot was also endangered. Made me think. Yes, the autopilots were getting better, and the flight guidance systems were becoming more useful. So far though, the humans are still in charge in the cockpit. 🙂
Well, we know that we’re doing less manufacturing here, but it’s been a conscious choice. For the last fifty years or so, we’ve wanted to become an “information economy.” We’ve gotten rid of our basic industries – mining, logging, manufacturing, ship building, pharmaceuticals, etc. If Trump is successful, we’re going to reverse that. Many new, decent paying jobs will be created. And though machines will play a bigger role, it will still take humans to build and repair them.
There’s a shortage of houses. We will need to build a couple million a year for a few years to catch up. I see a role for modular and factory bult homes that can be built more cheaply so first-time buyers can get a foothold on the ladder of home ownership.
One thing I see here in WA is that basic labor has become more expensive since Covid. In 2020 I could hire someone to do some simple handyman work for $15 an hour. Today, they’re all asking for $50 and up. So, maybe wage patterns will shift.
Another thing that’s apparent is that we have too many college educated people with degrees in useless majors. Underemployed and with a load of student debt. That’s a societal issue I see looming.
It has never been easier to invest than it is today. And there are no longer buy and sell commissions. All kinds of investments from T-bills to penny stocks. ETFs, which I didn’t think would be very popular, are very popular. 🙂 Many, many choices. And IRAs. They were a gift from the Gipper and have made a lot of difference for investors.
All in all, I think growth and resuming basic industries can solve a lot of our problems. If the Democrats get back in power, all bets are off because they don’t want either.
For example, a bank with an “investment services” division selling annuities. (I learned that the hard way that it’s an insurance product, the vast majority of which are unsuitable for anybody. Wish I had heard of index funds and other similar investments.)
J.J. on August 3, 2025 at 11:12 pm said:
“Many new, decent paying jobs will be created. And though machines will play a bigger role, it will still take humans to build and repair them.”
That is a bit of the history of production that is frequently overlooked. I recently read a [1922] autobiography of Henry Ford. (See link below.)
One of the primary lessons of his theory of production was that every individual on his assembly line (or, before that, on the assembly floor) was a future consumer of his manufactured product. And that, as his machines spread throughout the country, it would create an opportunity (for those who would see and take it) for maintenance and repair of his product, for sales and distribution of his product, and for expansion of the universe for adaptation of his product, and for varying levels of models of his product to appeal to the individual tastes of his consumer “audience.” And that, ultimately, that we would see not just one automobile in any family and/or business, but multiple machines: one for each licensed driver, even, …perhaps. :- )
Every new product, every new process, develops its own “downstream” support system(s).
I am now in the middle of another book of that time, “My Forty Years With Ford,” written by Charles Sorensen, Ford’s right-hand man who (according to himself) made it all work. This book offers a slightly different perspective: Ford as the visionary, Sorensen as the doer. …highly recommend both!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1122054.My_Life_And_Work
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1122090.My_Forty_Years_with_Ford
David Foster:
“”statistical deaths that Luigi was preventing””
No, that’s their argument – that he killed because this CEO was causing the death of many people by denial of care.
It’s a ludicrous argument, but one held by many of the cheerleaders.
Many people are talking about automation as if it was something entirely new, but actually there is a long history of automation…and of automation panics. See my post series Attack of the Job-Killing Robots:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/60616.html
Although automation has historically led to more jobs and higher real wages, this is not to deny that it has sometimes led to periods of transition which were very painful for a lot of people. Here’s a very interesting book about the social effects of the Industrial Revolution, published in 1836:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/71371.html