I want to start with the moment that actually broke something open for me, which was not some grand political betrayal or a policy fight, it was small, almost embarrassingly small, it was a string of laugh react emojis under a comment I made pointing out that Luigi Mangione grew up wealthy, went to one of the most expensive private schools in the country, and had a level of access to healthcare, legal resources, and social capital that most Americans, including most of the people defending him online, will never sniff in their entire lives. That was the claim. Not an opinion about his guilt or innocence, not a moral judgment about violence, just a factual observation about class, and the response from a bunch of self-identified leftists and progressives was not engagement, it was mockery, it was dismissal, it was people acting like I had said something absurd or in bad faith, when in reality I had said something that should be trivially, boringly true to anyone who claims to care about class analysis in the first place.
What got me was not that people disagreed, disagreement is fine, disagreement is the whole point of talking to people, what got me was the shape of the disagreement, because it did not sound like leftist analysis, it sounded like fandom. I would bring up his background and get told that his family’s wealth does not matter, that it is irrelevant, that focusing on it is some kind of distraction technique, as if class background suddenly stops mattering the moment it becomes inconvenient to the story someone wants to tell. I would point out that he attended Gilman, one of the most expensive prep schools in Maryland, and then the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school that costs more per year than many Americans make in a year, and I would get told that going to a good school does not make someone rich, which is a strange thing to hear from people who otherwise spend all day talking about how elite educational access is a mechanism of class reproduction. It was like watching people who have built entire political identities around understanding structural privilege suddenly develop total amnesia the second the person benefiting from that privilege became useful to their narrative. And underneath the amnesia was something uglier, which was a kind of gleeful certainty that anyone raising these points must be a cop, a shill, a centrist concern troll, someone secretly rooting for the insurance industry, because apparently in this specific corner of online political discourse, the only two positions available were total uncritical support or secret allegiance to UnitedHealthcare, with no room in between for the extremely basic idea that a person can be both a victim of a broken system in some sense and also a spoiled, privileged person whose actions do not represent the class he is being held up as a symbol of.
The “so what if he’s rich” argument is the one that really got under my skin, because it reveals something people do not want to admit about how selective their class consciousness actually is. If wealth and privilege genuinely do not matter to how we should evaluate a person’s actions or their symbolic status, then that logic should apply everywhere, consistently, all the time, and it very obviously does not. Nobody on the online left is out here saying it does not matter that a hedge fund manager or a tech CEO is rich when evaluating their behavior, wealth is treated as central, as damning, as the whole point, when it is someone people are inclined to dislike. But the second wealth belongs to someone people want to defend, it becomes irrelevant, a footnote, a “so what,” an accusation of bad faith against anyone who brings it up. That is not class analysis, that is picking a favorite and then reverse engineering the politics to fit. And it is exactly, structurally, the same move I have watched conservatives make for Donald Trump for a decade, waving away his billionaire status, his private jets, his inherited fortune, because he was on their team and therefore his wealth stopped being disqualifying and started being, somehow, proof of competence or independence. Watching people who would mock that exact rhetorical move when Trump supporters do it turn around and do the identical thing for their own guy was one of the more surreal experiences I have had in online political spaces, and it left me with this sinking, uncomfortable feeling that maybe tribal loyalty really does eat ideology alive given enough time and the right emotional hook, regardless of which side of the aisle you are standing on.
And then there is the innocence argument, the “he didn’t even do it” line, which is its own strange contortion, because it gets deployed selectively and inconsistently in a way that suggests it is not really about legal principle at all. I actually think the presumption of innocence matters, genuinely, as a legal and moral principle, he has pleaded not guilty, the trials have not happened yet, and in a fair world nobody should be treated as a convicted murderer before a jury has actually convicted him of murder. But that is not really the spirit in which “he didn’t do it” gets deployed in these online arguments, because it is not paired with the kind of careful agnosticism you would expect from someone genuinely committed to due process, it is paired with merchandise, with fan art, with a kind of winking celebration that treats the shooting itself as a righteous act while simultaneously insisting that maybe he did not even do the righteous act, which is an incoherent position if you sit with it for more than five seconds. You cannot simultaneously lionize someone for striking a blow against the healthcare industry and also insist he is innocent of striking that blow, those are two different defenses that contradict each other, and yet I watched people flip between them mid-argument, whichever one was rhetorically convenient in the moment, because the actual goal was never legal accuracy, the actual goal was defending the symbol at any cost, using whichever argument happened to be lying around.
This is the part where the gamergate comparison clicked into place for me, and I want to be careful here because I am not saying the politics are the same, they are not, gamergate was fundamentally a harassment campaign dressed up in the language of ethics in games journalism, aimed disproportionately at women in the industry, and I am not interested in laundering that history into something more flattering than it was. What I am saying is that the social mechanics, the vibe, the texture of the discourse, felt uncomfortably familiar, because back then I watched, from the sidelines, as people who raised legitimate points about harassment, about the treatment of women in gaming spaces, about the toxicity bubbling up in certain online communities, got dogpiled, mocked, laughed at, told they were overreacting, told they were humorless, told they were bringing politics into something that should not be political, and the mockery was not really a counterargument, it was a social technology for making dissent feel embarrassing, for making the person raising the uncomfortable point feel like the weird one, the killjoy, the person who does not get it. I watched people I generally respected participate in that mockery back then, sometimes out of genuine conviction, sometimes just because it was the easier, funnier, more socially rewarded position to hold in the moment. And now here I am, years later, watching a version of that same social technology deployed by people who would furiously reject any comparison to gamergate, using laugh reacts and dismissive one-liners to make an extremely basic observation about class privilege feel like some kind of faux pas, some kind of bad-faith intrusion into a conversation where I am apparently supposed to already know better than to bring up facts.
I think what makes this sting in a specific way, as someone who identifies with the left, is that the left is supposed to be the political tradition that takes structural analysis seriously, that insists on looking past individual sympathetic narratives to ask who actually benefits and who actually gets protected by a given system, that is allergic, at least in theory, to hero worship of individuals precisely because hero worship tends to obscure the material and institutional forces that actually shape outcomes. And yet here was a real-time demonstration of exactly the kind of cult-of-personality thinking the left claims to be immune to, applied to a young man from a wealthy healthcare-adjacent family, a family that owns nursing homes and assisted living facilities, which is its own strange irony given the whole affair started as a story about the American healthcare system failing ordinary people. If a story landed on my desk about a spoiled rich kid connected to a healthcare empire who ended up at the center of a national news event, and I had to guess in advance whether progressive Twitter would treat him with skepticism about his class position or with breathless devotion, I think, before all of this, I would have guessed skepticism, because that used to be the reflex, that used to be the muscle memory, the automatic move of asking who this person actually is beneath the story being told about them. That reflex just did not show up here, or it showed up and got shouted down, and I think that says something uncomfortable about what happens to political analysis when it collides with a story that feels emotionally satisfying enough.
You mentioned the land development scandal hypothetical, and I keep coming back to it because I think it is the cleanest possible thought experiment for exposing what is actually happening in these defenses. Imagine, for a second, that instead of being connected to the killing of a healthcare executive, this same young man, same background, same family money, same Ivy League education, ended up at the center of a very different kind of scandal, say a real estate deal where his family’s development company was accused of displacing longtime residents of a working-class neighborhood to build luxury condos, or a story where he was caught using family connections to dodge consequences for some reckless or harmful act, something with a less romantic, less anti-corporate gloss on it. Does anyone seriously think the same online left crowd would be making dating profile jokes and selling merchandise and laugh-reacting at people who brought up his privilege? Of course not, in that hypothetical his family wealth and private school background would be presented as exhibit A, the whole point, the explanation for everything, evidence of exactly the kind of entitled, insulated, consequence-free existence that let him do whatever harmful thing he did. The only variable that changed between that hypothetical and the actual situation is the target of the alleged violence, an insurance executive that a lot of people, for understandable and often legitimate reasons, feel almost no sympathy for. That is not class analysis. That is target selection dressed up as class analysis, and once you notice that the “so what if he’s rich” defense only gets deployed when the rich person did something the audience already wanted to cheer for, the whole thing stops looking like principle and starts looking like something closer to a permission structure, a way of letting yourself enjoy a story you already wanted to enjoy without having to sit with the more complicated parts of it.
I do not say any of this because I think anger at the healthcare industry is unjustified, it is not, insurance companies in this country really do deny claims that should be approved, really do bury people in paperwork and appeals designed to exhaust them into giving up, really do treat human suffering as a line item to be minimized, and that anger is legitimate and it is not going away and it should not go away, because the underlying system genuinely is cruel to an enormous number of people in ways that deserve sustained political attention and organizing, not just a single viral moment of catharsis. But legitimate anger at a broken system does not automatically transfer legitimacy onto whichever individual happens to become the symbolic outlet for that anger, and it definitely does not obligate anyone to pretend that individual’s own privilege and wealth are irrelevant just because acknowledging them complicates a satisfying story. I also want to be fair to the other side of this, because I think there is a real, defensible version of the argument that focusing on Mangione’s personal wealth is a distraction from the actual policy failures of the healthcare system, that the conversation should be about denied claims and prior authorizations and out-of-pocket costs rather than about one defendant’s prep school transcript, and there is something to that, the healthcare industry’s structural failures matter more, in the long run, than any single person’s biography. Where that argument goes wrong, in my experience of these conversations, is when it gets used not to redirect attention toward policy but to shut down an accurate observation entirely, to treat any mention of his privilege as inherently bad faith rather than as a fair and relevant piece of context. You can hold both things at once, the healthcare system is genuinely broken and cruel, and the person currently being lionized as its avenger is a wealthy, privileged young man whose life experience does not remotely resemble the people he is supposedly speaking for. Refusing to hold both of those truths at the same time is not sophistication, it is just picking the version of reality that feels better and laughing at the people who won’t join you in it.