Smarter than other people: Accused Ivy League killer sure does come across like a lot of them
In central Pennsylvania, reports say an alert McDonald's customer managed to recognize Luigi Mangione, the Ivy League suspect accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in cold blood in Manhattan a week ago. He got a McDonald's employee to call the cops, who are still functional in that part of the country, and Mangione was scooped up.
The evidence against him looks pretty damning, a trial attorney told CNN:
Mercedes Colwin said the fake ID that police believe Luigi Mangione used to check into the hostel on the Upper West side before the shooting, the document expressing grievances against the insurance industry and a potentially 3-D printed ghost gun — all found on the suspect when he was arrested — are “very problematic,” she said.
“Of course, that will have to be lined up with ballistics experts and they will have to show some connection to all of that evidence to the shooting of Brian Thompson. But it is very difficult and something that the defense is going to have to overcome,” Colwin said.
In light of this, it's striking to learn about the background of this accused killer.
News reports say he was rich, the son of a prominent resort owner near Baltimore. I don't find that surprising based on the earlier news of his understated $279 tech-oriented gray backpack. Poor kids don't strut around with those.
He wasn't just rich, though, he was accomplished, graduating as a valedictorian at his private high school, and then going on to Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, picking up an undergraduate and graduate degree in non-gut-major computer science. Reports from his classmates suggest he wasn't a social misfit, either.
He was privileged in other ways, too -- traveling widely, showing off his sculptured torso in his social media posts, living in deep blue San Francisco and Hawaii, and apparently coming from an intact and decent family, which stated their shock and sorrow at his evil deed. I feel bad for them.
So now like Richard Cory, the toff who committed suicide in the Edward Arlington Robinson poem, he seems to have pretty much done the same to himself, since the case against him looks pretty strong even to the New York's politicized prosecutors.
What a waste.
All the same, it's hard not to think both good luck and leftism had something to do with this, namely, creating a sense of entitlement, which drives a lot of crooks.
Cops will always tell you that crooks get caught because they think they are smarter than other people. When that starts to infect their sense of right and wrong, bad things happen. Note that in one of his arrest transfers, wearing a bright orange jumpsuit, he bellowed something about "an insult to the intelligence of the American people," focusing on I.Q. in his outrage, rather than right and wrong.
News reports say he seems to have identified with the Unabomber, the elite-college far-left hermit freak who mailed package bombs to academics he didn't like in the 1990s, gravely injuring some of them. Cops on that case have told me that he got caught for this very reason -- that he thought he was smarter, better, superior to other people. In this regard, he resembles another elite college student accused of a heinous murder -- the Moscow, Idaho alleged killer of four University of Idaho students in their rented house, Bryan Kohlberger, who was in a doctoral program in criminal justice at Washington State University. Those who knew him said he always thought he was smarter than other people, too. He allegedly did his planned out killings over a student who wasn't interested in dating him.
But unlike Kohlberger, who seems to have wanted to get his rocks off on his resentment over the girl who spurned him, reveling at his technical prowess at not getting caught, cops say Mangione, was more of an activist in his mindset and motive, like the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who created a "manifesto" of crazed Luddite ravings that he insisted newspapers print in a special segment for all to read. The Oakland Tribune, acting on the view that it might prompt some people to recognize the writing, actually did that on the grounds that it might help catch the freak. In that pre-Internet era, they guessed correctly, and it did.
Mangione had a manifesto, too, raving about the evils of private health care, and definitely seemed to admire the Unabomber in his social media post. He knew all about the Unabomber.
He also didn't like Jordan Peterson, that advocate of personal responsibility and morality, according to Daniel Kalder, writing on UnHerd after a two-hour conversation with Mangione prior to the accused murder.
And unlike other kinds of crooks, who stay silent to help their cases, Mangione, like Lori Berenson, another elite-college leftist who was convicted of assisting terrorists in Peru, preferred to go out shouting.
And like Radion Raskolnikov, the protagonist college student in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, who murdered a pawnshop owner and rationalized it as proof of his exceptionalism, him being like Napoleon and all, and the murder target being little more than a plague on humanity, Mangione insisted the murder he allegedly committed "had to be done" in his manifesto. Thompson, his victim, was seemingly collateral damage -- which is what the Bolsheviks used to say on their mass killing sprees to build a New Soviet Man.
Issues & Insights noted the entitlement attitude in its lede here:
A manifesto recovered from the alleged shooter of UnitedHeathCare CEO Brian Thompson says that “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”
Combine it with leftism, and it's like electrons getting activated, a very ugly picture indeed:
Issues & Insights continues:
This is music to the ears of many on the left, who cheered when they learned that Thompson had been gunned down and are treating the shooter as some sort of folk hero.
“Social media users have sometimes outright gloated at the killing,” is how The Hill put it, describing it as an expression of “populist rage” and then spending the rest of the article trying to obliquely pin the blame on Donald Trump.
The Atlantic dismissed the “mockery and disdain” of the cold-blooded murder as an “expression of widespread fury at a broken system.”
CNN has since reported even worse stuff:
After police found the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” printed on shell casings near the site where UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down, merchandise bearing those words started to appear online. Soon after, those words appeared on several items on Amazon’s store, including hats, T-shirts and pint glasses as the suspect in the case garnered sympathy from social media users who expressed frustration over insurance claim denials.
The phrase might be linked to a 2010 book critiquing the health insurance industry titled, “Delay Deny Defend,” a common description of the industry’s tactics.
Amazon has pulled the merchandise from the website for violating the company’s rules, according to a person familiar with Amazon’s decision making. Meanwhile, “deny, defend, depose” merchandise remains on sale on eBay.
They're selling t-shirts now? And eBay, owned by a far-leftist, has let this trash stay up?
There's even more ugly stuff, as CNN described:
The restaurant’s page on Google and Yelp has since been flooded with negative reviews, calling workers “rats” and “snitches.” One now-deleted review on Google that was spotted by Reuters said the “location has rats in the kitchen that will make you sick and your insurance isn’t going to cover it.”
A Google spokesperson said that the “reviews violate our policies and are being removed.” Also, additional protections are being added to the profile page to prevent more of these reviews. Commenters also shared a similar sentiment on Yelp. However, Yelp turned off commenting on the McDonald’s location’s page.
Combine entitlement at being told one is great all one's life and thus, blameless and morally superior no matter what one does, with radical leftist resentment-cheering as a response, and you can see how murder can become a new normal, how the accused, Mangione, might have thought he do what he is accused of doing, and could think he could get away with what he did.
Kalder, whose piece on UnHerd was featured on RealClearPolitics today, notes that this confluence of mentalities is nothing new:
It is a tradition that goes back a long way. Fyodor Dostoevsky made Stavrogin, the central character of his great study of revolutionary violence The Devils, an aristocrat. At the time, Russia was experiencing a wave of violence at the hands of students and the children of minor nobles that would ultimately lead to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Intellectuals were also participants in the second wave of Russian violence that erupted in the early 20th century, which led to the deaths of thousands; when the intellectuals finally seized control of the country, the death toll reached into the millions.
Well-educated practitioners of terrorism can also be found among the radical groups of the later 20th century. The members of the murderous Red Army Faction in Seventies Germany were almost all university graduates. Bill Ayers, co-founder of the bomb-planting Weather Underground, was the son of a CEO and graduate of the University of Michigan, a so-called “public Ivy”. Ali Hassan Salameh, one of the men behind the 1972 Munich attack, was educated in Germany and married to 1971’s Miss Universe. Meanwhile, Mohamed Atta, leader of the 9/11 attackers, studied architecture in Cairo and town planning in Hamburg.
Of course, for all that these radicals were college graduates, their beliefs were strikingly Manichaean and simplistic. The advantage of being highly educated is that you can rationalise violent and dark deeds while dressing up your personal grievances in theory.
Eric Hoffer also wrote a lot about these spoiled children of the rich, turning on the civilization and all its blessings bestowed upon them, fusing with leftist entitlement and resentments, and then unleashing destruction.
Which rather suggests that maybe there is a problem with too much abundance for some. Not everyone, of course, but it underlines that some of the young need to be grounded much deeper in Jordan Peterson personal morality and less in wokester grievance culture. This is a sad story, and this kid if he is found guilty, is going to prison for the rest of his miserable life. But that still doesn't bring Brian Thompson back. It shows how weak a reed even justice is in the face of this kind of fusion of evils.
Image: Screen shot from WBFF FOX45 Baltimore video, via YouTube