I want to be clear about something before I go any further, because I think it matters, my position on this has not moved an inch since the very first post I made about it, and that consistency is not an accident, it is not stubbornness for its own sake, it is because I was never working from vibes in the first place, I was never taking a poll of what felt good to say in a given moment or checking which way the crowd was leaning before deciding what I believed. I looked at the actual facts, the actual biography, the actual material reality of who this person is, and I said the simple, boring, true thing, which is that Luigi Mangione is privileged, full stop, no asterisk, no exception carved out because of who he allegedly shot. I do not care what the majority thinks, I never have, and I am not about to start now just because a bunch of people online decided that mockery was easier than actually engaging with the substance of what I said. Facts do not become less true because they are unpopular, and popularity was never the bar I was trying to clear.
Here is what actually gets me, though, more than the mockery itself, more than the laugh reacts, more than the dismissiveness, and it is this, a huge number of the people doing this mockery are the exact same people who spend the rest of their time online insisting that we need to center marginalized voices, that we need to listen when marginalized people speak, that lived experience and structural position matter, that you cannot just wave away someone’s material reality because it is inconvenient to your argument. That is supposed to be a core piece of what it means to be on the left, actually taking seriously the idea that your position in a system shapes your experience of that system, and that people speaking from positions of less power deserve to be heard rather than talked over. And then the exact same people turn around and mock, dismiss, and talk over someone pointing out an obvious fact about class and privilege, the second that fact does not serve the narrative they have already decided to believe. That is not a small inconsistency, that is not a minor lapse, that is the whole framework collapsing in real time, because if you are only willing to center marginalized voices and material analysis when it is convenient, when it fits the story you already wanted to tell, then you were never actually committed to the principle at all, you were just using the language of the principle as a costume, the same way Mangione’s defenders use the language of class struggle as a costume for what is actually just tribal loyalty to a guy they think is cool.
And I will say this plainly, if you claim to be leftist, if you claim to be progressive, if you build your entire online persona around calling out injustice and centering marginalized voices, and then you turn around and mock people, including actual marginalized people, for pointing out something as simple and factual as class privilege, the second it becomes inconvenient, you are not just falling short of your own stated values, you are doing something worse than a garden variety centrist liberal or even a Republican would do in that same situation, because a centrist or a Republican never claimed to care about this stuff in the first place, they are not violating a principle they never held. You, on the other hand, built your whole identity around holding that principle, made it central to how you present yourself politically, and then abandoned it the second it stopped being convenient, which is not just hypocrisy, it is a kind of betrayal, a betrayal of the actual people who need that principle to be applied consistently, not selectively, not only when it flatters the story you want to tell about who deserves to be a hero.
I want to be specific about my own position here too, because I think it is relevant, I am mixed, part white and part Hispanic, and I say that not to claim some kind of trump card in this conversation, not to say that my background automatically makes me right, but because I have actually watched, over the last several years, how differently people get treated by this country’s justice system depending on who they are and what they look like and where they come from, and that pattern is not subtle, it is not something you have to squint to see. We watched what happened to George Floyd, a black man killed during an arrest over an alleged twenty dollar counterfeit bill, an event that set off a summer of protest because it crystallized something so many people already knew about how policing in this country actually works for black Americans. We watched what happened to Jacob Blake, shot multiple times in the back by police in front of his own children, left partially paralyzed, another name added to a list that keeps getting longer, another reminder that being black in this country can turn an ordinary encounter into a life altering or life ending one in a way that white Americans mostly do not have to fear in the same visceral, constant way. And then we watched Kyle Rittenhouse, a white teenager who crossed state lines with an AR-15 during a period of civil unrest, who shot and killed two people and injured a third, walk through the legal system and ultimately walk free, acquitted on all charges, treated by a significant portion of the country not as a cautionary tale but as a hero, someone to be celebrated, someone whose actions got reframed as self defense and patriotism rather than the kind of reckless, lethal escalation that would have almost certainly ended very differently for a young black man carrying the same weapon into the same situation. These are not abstract examples to me, these are the actual visible proof of a system that does not treat everyone the same, that extends a kind of grace and benefit of the doubt to some people that it simply refuses to extend to others, and anyone who claims to be leftist, anyone who claims to actually care about justice, is supposed to be the person naming that pattern loudly and consistently, not the person who suddenly goes quiet or makes excuses the second the person benefiting from that same unequal system happens to be someone they like.
Because that is what this is, at its core, that is the thread connecting all of it. Luigi Mangione comes from a land development and healthcare adjacent family, the kind of family whose business model, expanding assisted living facilities, building out commercial and residential property, accumulating generational wealth through exactly the kind of development and real estate practices that displace working class communities and concentrate resources upward, is precisely the kind of background that leftist and progressive politics has spent decades identifying as part of the problem. If you handed someone with this exact biography, this exact family business, this exact educational pedigree, to any of these same online leftists in a completely different context, a labor dispute, a housing fight, a story about a land developer’s family squeezing out longtime tenants to build luxury units, they would recognize him instantly for what he structurally is, a beneficiary of exactly the kind of capital accumulation the left claims to be fighting against, and they would not hesitate to say so. The only reason that recognition disappears here, the only reason people suddenly develop total amnesia about class background and family wealth, is that he is currently useful to them as a symbol, he did something to a person they hated more than they hate him, and that single fact was apparently enough to override every other piece of analysis they would normally apply without a second thought. That is not solidarity, that is not justice, that is just picking a favorite and building a justification around him after the fact, and the fact that it takes someone actually being killed for people to suddenly forget everything they claim to believe about class and privilege should tell you how thin that belief actually was in the first place.
So no, I am not going to soften this, and I am not going to pretend the mockery has made me reconsider anything, because being unpopular was never evidence that I was wrong, it was just evidence that a lot of people would rather protect a comfortable story than sit with an uncomfortable fact. I will keep saying it as many times as it takes, Luigi Mangione is privileged, that privilege is not a footnote, it is not irrelevant, it is central to understanding who he is and why the narrative built around him does not hold up under any real scrutiny, and any leftist or progressive who mocks that observation instead of engaging with it is not defending marginalized people, they are doing the exact thing they claim to despise, deciding whose voice gets heard and whose gets laughed off based entirely on whether it flatters the story they already wanted to believe. I would rather be right and unpopular than popular and wrong, and if that means getting laughed at by people who are supposed to be on my side, so be it, because I did not get into any of this to win a popularity contest, I got into it because I actually believe the things I say I believe, consistently, whether or not the crowd happens to be with me that day.