Luigi Mangione is a Gen Z icon

It's been a big week for internet sleuths, meme page admins, and opinion columnists, as the saga of alleged CEO-killer Luigi Mangione continues.

Every detail is weirder than the last: The guy's name, the allegation he stopped for a McDonald's hash brown with the murder weapon still in his backpack, his inmates calling for his freedom on live TV, and the manifesto that begins with the line: "To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country."

Like everyone else I was scouring his online history, reading through his old tweets and Goodreads reviews. At one point, I even found myself in a Google Doc of an essay he'd written in high school about early Roman Christianity.

I was a little disappointed by the ideological and cultural preferences his online presence implied – not because they weren't sufficiently leftist, but because they were way less weird than I expected. Here I was thinking he'd be really into Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin, Drain Gang, Slavoj Žižek, or Michel Houellebecq. Turns out, his tastes veered more basic, towards Dr. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Jonathan Haidt, and Dr. Suess. He's been diagnosed on X as a "birthrates center-right pop science centrist type".

Sure his Goodreads profile suggests he appreciated the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski, but being a fan of 'Uncle Ted' (with varying degrees of ironic distance) is fairly entry-level when it comes to radical Zoomer politics. When I first got on TikTok in 2020, forever altering my neurochemistry, I was fascinated by the anti-civ and am-prim memes the algorithm served me with, many of which focussed on Kaczynski. Making TikToks praising the Unabomber's critique of industrial society and its future seems like a quintessentially Gen Z past-time. The kids are aware we are going to hell in a handbasket – but are going to keep shitposting throughout, not worried by liberal niceties such as the custom to not make light of murder. Those 'Uncle Ted' TikToks now feel like a precursor to the current wave of Mangione memes – except the ripped and relatable Luigi has much more mainstream appeal than Kaczynski ever did, bringing in a much wider audience.

It's fitting, really, that Luigi Mangione is a bit of a Gen Z normie with an ideology that appears somewhat incoherent. He's an everyman's radical; the reason he's gained the sympathy of so many is because he was not acting from some hardline ideology, but because he was responding to a lived experience shared by so many Americans. As Robert Evans writes, Luigi Mangione was radicalised by pain.

Besides, what can you really learn of someone from their online footprint, particularly that left in their teens and twenties, when they're trying on ideas and identities? Mangione hadn't updated his Goodreads since January. I'm curious as to what he read since then, including in the six month period in which he's said to have isolated himself from family and friends. That's plenty of time to go deep on one online rabbit hole or another.

Regardless of ideology, Mangione has tapped into the zeitgest. As I mentioned on the podcast last week, the public enthusiasm for his actions is an expression of the same anti-establishment rage that has animated populist politics around the world and resulted in the reelection of Donald Trump. That rage, like Mangione, isn't necessarily tied to traditionally 'left' or 'right' politics. It's a force that's going nowhere and is going to find new outlets, especially as Trump inevitably disappoints his supporters. If progressive political parties and mass movements can harness that energy to take on elite interests and genuinely make lives better for the masses, it should lead fewer people to resort to gunning down one percenters in the streets.

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