Murder, and Other Natural Disasters

Luigi Mangione And The TikTok Revolution

I want to wholeheartedly condemn the December 4th murder of Brian Thompson, I really do. I don’t want to live in a world where where people get gunned down on the streets of Manhattan. Functional societies do not solve political and social problems with acts of vigilante violence. It’s politics by other means, to paraphrase Clausewitz: lead-based arguments designed to literally blow your mind. Survival of the fittest, rule by the strongest, blood in the streets. Nobody wants to live in a society like that, not even the people who think they do. So yes, I condemn the killing. Extrajudicial murder is wrong.

I would also like to condemn the trees that fall on power lines and cause electrical outages. I condemn earthquakes that destroy cities and kill thousands of people. Wildfires, famines, floods: I condemn them all. Yet these things happen regardless.

There are a few ways that a law-abiding society can descend into Wild-West dystopia, and one of those ways is by eliminating every legal and nonviolent method for regular people to make their voices heard and advocate for their own wellbeing. When you trap people in intolerable situations without recourse or options, life (death) finds a way.

In June of 2020, 66 percent of Americans wanted to end qualified immunity for police officers. After Sandy Hook, 92 percent wanted federal background checks at gun shows. Today, 63 percent support a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body. Thanks to gerrymandering, endless dark money, and hyper-concentrated wealth and power, none of those things happened. A few thousand assholes at the very top have a permanent veto over a supermajority of the American people. All hail the shareholders.

The BLM protests in the summer of 2020 were the largest in American history. As many as 26 million people hit the streets that summer, demanding change, police reform, an end to institutionalized racial violence…and nothing changed. Occupy Wall Street: nothing. Protests against genocide in Gaza: nothing. The only thing that seems to work in any capacity are unions, which is why the wealthy and powerful have spent decades crushing them with a two-pronged assault of PR and legal attacks. Also, people think of unions as just a work thing. Things like tenant unions have promise, but it’s slow going, highly stigmatized for anyone not already on the left, and most people don’t know about it regardless. The culturally approved American ways to effect policy change remain: vote, call your congressperson, and protest. None of those things are working.

What’s left?

It’s not the actual shooting that’s upset people so much, despite repeated reminders that Thompson was a husband and a father and a human being with thoughts and feelings. Everyone who gets shot is a human being with thoughts and feelings, and yet no one called me in hushed, shocked tones to tell me about, say, the four kids gunned down at Apalachee High School last September or the three people who died in the Abundant Life shooting yesterday . Kids getting merc’d at school is normal. We take it for granted.

Speaking of which:

@gachelraedethoughts & prayers to our CEOs 🙂‍↕️

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TikTok is wild right now, in ways that must be seen to be believed. The best way to see it is to log onto TikTok yourself, but if you’d rather not, don’t worry: I made a playlist of some of the extremely popular videos that made it onto my “for you” page. Everything on this list either has hundreds of thousands of views or is a repost of a video with hundreds of thousands of views that got removed. I recommend scrolling through to get an idea of the breadth of this reaction.

But Substack tells me how many people click on links (not who, don’t worry), which means I know that most of you won’t click on the link. And it’s really important, so rather than working on a months-overdue draft or getting ready for Christmas or touching NYC’s dead grass I have spent hours compiling this short video mashup, and yes, I am channeling your most passive-aggressive relative in an attempt to guilt you into watching it:

The media is mostly referring to this avalanche of support as some kind of fringe groupie madness — the BBC calls it a “dark fandom,” New York Magazine calls it a “fan base” that is “ideologically scattered [and] conspicuously online.” That’s a very comforting perspective for certain members of society. But is it true? How fringe is this, really?

According to polling by the Center for Strategic Politics, 19 percent of Americans view Mangione positively, while 61 percent either somewhat or strongly dislike him. This sounds like an extreme disparity, but that’s nearly one in every five Americans: a shockingly high number for murder apologia that does not take into account the 21 percent of respondents who said they didn’t know. The survey question explained the killing, everyone who answered was aware of the basic facts. And still, 40 percent of the American population refused to condemn this murder. That’s unusual.

Things get even more unusual when we zoom in on the younger generations: nearly one in every three people under 45 view Mangione positively. Add in the 28 percent of that age group who said they don’t know how to feel and you’ve got a strong majority of younger people — 59 percent!! — unwilling to condemn a murder. In the heart of Manhattan. With a ghost gun.

The people at the top are terrified. They are right to be terrified, because this is how revolutions start. They need to put a stop to this eruption of enthusiastic rage as soon as possible, which I suspect is why the media keeps trying to change the narrative to literally anything else. People like Ben Shapiro, for example, keep trying to shove this incident into that too-small soggy cardboard box labeled WOKE by drawing absurd parallels between shooting a CEO for political reasons and canceling a comedian for jokes you don’t like; the worst fate this terminally online gremlin can imagine, apparently. UnitedHealthcare, he reminds his audience, is a legal business that operates in accordance with free market principles. The profit margins for hospitals and medical facilities are small, he tells us, conveniently forgetting to mention what the profit margins for insurance companies are. But Shapiro’s real sleight of hand occurs when he pivots smoothly into praise for Daniel Penny, the recently acquitted Number 2 Pencil who took down a subway busker in the midst of a mental health episode, restrained him, then held him in a blood choke for six minutes, starving his brain of oxygen and killing him.

It’s bait. In that NYMag article I mentioned above, entitled “The Bigger Vigilante-Worship Problem Is Happening on the Right,” the author pushes back rhetorically on efforts to put Mangione in a Blue Team jersey, then implicitly puts him on that team anyway by comparing him to Red Team vigilante killers, all while minimizing the unprecedented groundswell of support for the alleged killer with that “fan base” label. Whether NYMag meant to or not — and I like to think they didn’t — the done-to-death culture war chess match is their best bet for turning “Deny, Defend, Depose” into just another TikTok trend and not a rallying cry.

It’s not working. 18 percent of Trump voters and 21 percent of Harris voters view Mangione positively; that’s a damn near 50/50 split. Shapiro’s comment sections tend to be hugboxes, but his two big videos on the murder aren’t like that. The top comment on his first video, with over 6K upvotes, reads “Slave owners were also running a company legally. Legality does not define morality.” The second-highest, with over 4K upvotes: “I am a lefty, and I just wanted to extend an olive branch to everyone here on the right. I think we see now that many times we actually agree on the issues.”

All of this is a natural reaction to decades of deprivation and helplessness. Most people understand that the system is rigged — that’s what Trump kept saying, and he won with that message despite his deep commitment to making this country weaker, poorer, and vastly more authoritarian. In much the same way many Harris voters were really voting against Trump, many Trump voters cast their ballot against an increasingly intolerable and dystopian status quo that the Democrats refused to distance themselves from or pledge to significantly change. Medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy in this country: most of us are one health catastrophe away from not being able to rent an apartment. Those under-45s are mostly renting, not owning, because finance capital has transformed housing from a basic human requirement for survival into an investment vehicle. Speaking of human requirements, 13.5 percent of Americans — over one in ten! — were food insecure at some point in 2023, probably because grocery prices rose 25 percent and rent rose 30 percent between 2019 and now, while median income only increased by 17 percent.

Yes, people are angry. Yes, people are cheering the murder of a man who made $10 million in a single year. Trees keep falling on powerlines. Earthquakes continue to occur. “Fuck around and find out” is more than just a saying, it’s a law of nature. The people at the top have been fucking around for a really long time. Now they’re finding out.

And I am genuinely sorry they are finding out, for my sake and for yours. I don’t want Manhattan to become the Wild West, I don’t want to dodge bullets on my way to happy hour, I don’t want the go-to solution to our political and social problems to involve bloodshed and death. But it does not matter what I want or what any of us feel. History is very clear on this point: when bread prices rise too high, governments fall. You can get as angry about this as you want to, write a thousand thinkpieces about the immorality of violence and the virtue of the invisible hand and how everyone is doing great actually, we’re all so rich and happy and we all have TVs and phones and other consumer goods — you can do that all you want, but the realities of human society persist regardless.

The reaction to this shooting is an alarm clock, and the establishment is hitting that snooze button over and over again. Brian Thompson’s murder is unlikely to kick off a class uprising, but the reaction shows just how fertile our soil has become for exactly that, and it’s time to wake up. When people are this sick and tired, this cheerfully nihilistic, deep systemic change is coming. The only question is: will it come about through peaceful means, or inconceivable and immeasurable violence?

(TikTok disabled sound on on this video by @mipsomusic, but the Internet is forever)