It has been a day since I put the last piece up, and if anything the response has gotten weirder, not because anyone actually engaged with the substance of what I said, but because the mockery has just kept rolling in, the same laugh reacts, the same dismissive one liners, the same little chorus of people who apparently think that pointing out a rich kid’s rich background is some kind of gotcha they are clever enough to see through, when in reality they are the ones missing the point so badly it is almost impressive. And sitting with that for a full day now, watching it continue, I keep landing on the same word over and over, which is weird, genuinely weird, because what I am watching is not a disagreement about facts, it is a room full of people who call themselves leftists deciding, in real time, that class privilege stops mattering the second the privileged person does something they find satisfying.
Let me say the actual argument as plainly as I can, because I do not think it is complicated. Luigi Mangione is accused of killing a healthcare executive, and a huge number of people online have decided that because the alleged victim represented something they hate, the person accused of killing him gets a pass, gets celebrated, gets treated as one of the good guys, gets welcomed into the fold. That is the whole mechanism. It is not more sophisticated than that, no matter how many people dress it up with talk of structural violence or self defense against a predatory industry. Strip away the justification and what you are left with is a simple transaction, he took out someone we view as a bigger bad, so now he is on the team, and I think that transaction, once you see it clearly, should embarrass anyone who claims to actually believe in left wing politics, because it is not solidarity, it is not class consciousness, it is just picking a side based on who you are angrier at, which is the emotional logic of a sports rivalry, not a political movement.
Here is the thing that I cannot get past, and that nobody arguing with me seems willing to sit with even for a second, which is that the standard being applied here is not a standard at all. If a wealthy, privileged person commits an act of violence against another wealthy, privileged person for reasons that have nothing to do with organized political struggle, and the online left decides that act is righteous purely because of who the target was, then there is no actual principle at work, there is only vibes, there is only whichever side feels more satisfying in the moment. And if your politics amount to whichever side feels more satisfying in the moment, you do not have politics, you have a grudge with a flag on it. I do not care how bad the target was, and Brian Thompson ran a health insurance business that genuinely harmed people, I have said that clearly and I will keep saying it, but hating an industry and hating the specific executive who ran a piece of it does not automatically transform whoever killed him into a hero, especially not when that whoever is, by every available account, someone who has never experienced the kind of harm that industry inflicts on ordinary people. If your bar for welcoming someone into left wing politics is simply did they hurt someone I already hated, your bar is not on the floor, it is underground, and pretending that bar represents some kind of coherent ideology is insulting to the actual work of people who have spent years organizing against the healthcare industry through unglamorous, non violent, deeply unsatisfying methods like union drives and legislative campaigns and mutual aid networks, none of which get you a defense fund or fan art but all of which actually move the needle in ways a single act of violence against a single executive structurally cannot.
I want to be honest about something else too, something I noticed scrolling through the accounts most aggressively defending him, most eager to laugh off any mention of his privilege, and it is that a striking number of them share a similar ethnic background to Mangione himself, which is to say white, often specifically of the kind of white ethnic identity, Italian American in his case, that gets folded pretty easily into a broader white American identity in most day to day contexts. I want to be careful here, because this is an observation, not a study, it is based on scrolling through replies and quote tweets over the last day or two, not on any actual data, and I recognize that the sample of people yelling at me online is not a representative sample of anything, it is shaped by algorithms and by who happens to find my posts and by all sorts of selection effects I cannot control or fully see. But for whatever it is worth, and I think it is worth something even as an anecdotal impression, I have not seen anywhere near the same intensity of defense coming from Black or Latino or Asian American voices in these same left wing spaces, not that they are condemning him either, mostly they just seem less invested in the whole thing, less willing to treat it as some kind of sacred cause, and I find that difference worth sitting with rather than dismissing, because if the people most eager to excuse a wealthy young man’s alleged violence and wave away his privilege happen to disproportionately share that privilege with him in other ways, that is not nothing, that might actually be part of the explanation for why the excusing is happening at all. People tend to identify most easily with people who look like them, who come from backgrounds that feel familiar, even when they would never admit that is what is happening, and I think there is a real possibility that some of what I am watching is less about ideology and more about a kind of unconscious in group loyalty dressed up in the language of class struggle.
What makes this whole thing sting in a specific way is that I am not coming at this from outside the left, I am not some centrist tone policing people from a safe distance, I actually believe in the underlying anger at the healthcare industry, I actually think the system is cruel and needs to be torn down and rebuilt, and it is precisely because I take that project seriously that watching people cheapen it like this makes me furious. Real class politics requires actually being willing to hold your own side accountable, to say that a rich person doing something violent and dramatic is not automatically a comrade just because the violence was pointed in a direction you approve of, to say that solidarity with the working class means something more specific and more demanding than simply enjoying the spectacle of a wealthy man getting killed by another wealthy man. The second you drop that standard, the second you let category membership get decided by vibes and satisfaction rather than by actual material conditions and actual political commitment, you have stopped doing left politics and started doing something closer to tribal sports fandom with better vocabulary. And I think a lot of people participating in this defense do not actually see themselves that way, I think a lot of them genuinely believe they are doing solidarity, that this is what class struggle looks like, and that is almost the saddest part of it, watching people mistake catharsis for politics and then get defensive, get mocking, get dismissive the second someone points out the difference.
I am not going to pretend the mockery does not bother me, because it does, there is something genuinely disorienting about being laughed at by people who theoretically share your broader political goals, about watching your own side treat an accurate, fairly obvious observation like it is some kind of heresy, and I understand now, in a way I only understood intellectually before, why people who get dogpiled for saying true but unwelcome things inside a community often just stop saying them, because the social cost is real and it is exhausting and it does not feel good to keep getting laughed at by people you are ostensibly on the same team as. But I also think that exhaustion is exactly the mechanism that lets bad ideas calcify inside political movements, the discomfort of being mocked convinces people to just stay quiet, and the people willing to keep saying the obvious thing anyway end up being a smaller and smaller group, which makes the whole dynamic self reinforcing, the loudest and most certain voices win by attrition rather than by being right. I would rather be the person still saying it a day later, still getting laughed at, still pointing out that a spoiled rich kid does not become a working class hero just because the person he allegedly killed was even richer, than be the person who let the mockery talk them into silence. If that makes me unpopular in certain corners of my own political side right now, so be it, because a left that cannot hold its own symbols to any standard at all is not a left that is actually going to win anything, it is just a left that is going to keep handing itself over to whoever tells the most satisfying story, and I refuse to pretend that is the same thing as justice.