The New York Times ran a breaking, true-crime story this morning headlined, “Suspect Is Charged in C.E.O.’s Murder After Arrest in Pennsylvania.” The killer wasn’t poor. He wasn’t uneducated. He was never denied medical treatment. Luigi Mangione — which sounds like a made-up name — is a 26-year-old, MENSA-qualified Ivy League honors graduate who 3-D printed the gun he used to murder Brian Thompson.
Two local police officers nabbed Mangione while he was munching fries in an Altoona, Pennsylvania McDonalds. (He’s probably not MAHA.) According to unconfirmed reports, even though Mangione was wearing his blue surgical face mask, an anonymous tipster recognized his distinctive
eyebrows.
Consider
that for a second.
Here is a link to some affordable eyebrow trimmers. Had he used them, who knows how things might have turned out. Just saying.
Officers reported that on arrest,
six days after the shooting, Mangione was still carrying the murder weapon. I guess he
really liked that gun. They also said that, even though he had a laptop, Mangione —who earned an honors engineering degree— had a three-page
handwritten “manifesto” folded into his pocket.
Apparently, Mangione’s manifesto was an anticapitalist screed against big insurance companies, which he called “parasites.” NYPD Chief Detective Joe Kenny said, “It does seem he has some ill will toward corporate America.”
Yes, it
does seem that way.
According to police descriptions of his manifesto, murderous Mangione targeted UHC
only because it was one of the biggest and most profitable companies, and targeted Brian Thompson specifically
only because he was UHC’s CEO.
Mangione doesn’t fit the New York Times’ preferred assassin’s profile. Maybe they were hoping for someone more
diverse:
Who knows what the Times thinks
likely assassins are like (it never said), or why it believes it is qualified to profile assassins in the first place. Dumb, but arrogant.
On an aside, I found it very curious Mangione recently lived in Hawaii, where Trump assassin
Ryan Routh lived for a long time. I wonder whether they ever crossed paths.
Between the fake ID he used to check into the hostel, and the one he had on him when he was arrested, Mangione had at least two fake ID’s — both with the un-counterfeitable “Real ID” flag. So much for Real IDs. He was a fitness buff, sporting a tight six-pack, but friends said he had a bad back injury. People stretching to lionize the murderer seized on his back pain as a potential justification, though the logic was murky.
Perhaps most tellingly, Mangione once sympathetically reviewed Theodore “Unabomber” Kazinzki’s book. In other words, Mangione looks like a privileged, overeducated leftist who was taught to hate capitalism in college. I’d bet that, had Mangione pursued his video-game-designing interest instead of going to Penn, he’d be in Silicon Valley right now making millions instead of in a cell.
Americans are experiencing a wide range of strong emotions over this story. I searched around to find a good media example to frame that point. I nearly dropped my eyebrow scissors when I saw the next headline. It was perfect.
You won't believe what the UnitedHealthcare killing and Danny Penny's not-guilty verdict have in common. And wait till you see how the Democrats are trying to undermine the Trump Administration. More.
www.coffeeandcovid.com
