Luigi Mangione and the Madness of Modern America

Luigi Mangione was once the sort of young man about success stories were written: sharp, disciplined, and quietly ambitious. A programmer with promise, he preferred patterns to platitudes, structure to sentiment. Then, last December, he shot United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street, and the country cracked along familiar fault lines. To many, the then-26-year-old was a cold, calculating killer; to others, a kind of crusader — disenchanted, disillusioned, and reflecting what America has become. He embodied what more and more young Americans feel and now openly confess: they were promised everything, yet are left with nothing.

John H. Richardson’s Luigi: The Making and the Meaning arrives with unsettling urgency. The veteran journalist doesn’t merely recount events, but exposes how a killing became content, how a mind came undone, and how America turned the aftermath into ritual. The book’s most arresting passages trace Mangione’s psychic breakdown: a gifted student who begins by questioning the world and ends by waging war against it. His early journals burn with idealism, but the flame soon dims. What begins as frustration deepens into fury; curiosity stiffens into conviction. Before long, Mangione is reading the Unabomber’s manifesto and echoing it with eerie precision.

The parallels to Ted Kaczynski are particularly striking. Both were obsessive intellects drawn to the purity of logic and the promise of order. Kaczynski wrote from a Montana cabin; Mangione coded from a rented loft. Richardson knew Kaczynski personally — corresponding with him for years — and draws on those letters like confessionals. The author shows the cost of obsession, and what happens when the search for meaning becomes the road to madness

But Luigi isn’t merely a study in madness. In many ways, it’s a portrait of a culture that feeds on it. Within hours of Thompson’s death, the internet performed its familiar liturgy of shock and amusement. The words Mangione allegedly engraved on his bullet casings — “Deny”, “Defend”, “Depose” — were printed on hats and hoodies. TikTok transformed him into “Saint Luigi”. Richardson captures this digital delirium with surgical clarity, showing how predation becomes a perverse form of entertainment.

Here, the book finds its cruel heartbeat. Richardson shows how Mangione’s act struck a national nerve — how anger over medical costs, denials, and debts spread and deepened into something darker. For millions, Thompson’s death seemed less senseless than symbolic. In fact, millions of young Americans saw the act as justified — a desperate response to a system deaf to their pain.

The book isn’t without its flaws. Richardson’s reliance on the online echo chamber makes the story feel distant and less personal. The book leans heavily on Reddit threads, livestream rants, and anonymous posts, the very places where the loudest and angriest voices rise to the top. It makes for gripping reading, but it overshadows what matters most — the voices of those who actually knew Mangione. Friends, family, mentors, and the few who could expose the man beneath the myth are conspicuously absent. Perhaps they can’t speak, bound by law or loss. Yet without them, the story stumbles, starved of the truth it set out to find.

The Kaczynski parallel, though powerful, occasionally threatens to dominate the narrative. Richardson frames Mangione as the digital heir to the Unabomber’s fury — the prophet reborn with better hair and billboard cheekbones. The comparison lands strongest when he contrasts Kaczynski’s self-imposed solitude with Mangione’s digital confinement. The Montana cabin has become the internet’s wilderness.

What Richardson never quite resolves is how modern despair differs from the old. Kaczynski raged against the machines. Mangione was raised by them, and, in the end, consumed by them. Kaczynski’s solitude came from the woods, Mangione’s from the web. One fled the insanity of the age, the other was formed by it — fed, followed, and finally undone by the very feed that sustained him.

Where Luigi truly shines is in connecting one man’s despair to America’s crisis of care. Richardson paints a jarring portrait of a nation where healing has become a hustle, where hospitals bill the dying, and insurers deny the living. When compassion is extortionately priced and sold, rebellion begins to look like reason.

Richardson shows how Mangione’s mugshot became iconography, his manifesto fragments became memes, and his crime a kind of collective confession. What he calls “the energy of a culture changing” feels instead like a culture cannibalizing itself — especially now, as the more radical fringes of the left arm themselves and enforce their own gospel of good and evil.

The question Richardson leaves us with is larger than guilt or innocence. What happens when vengeance feels like virtue? When a man’s descent into violence mirrors the public’s descent into voyeurism? Luigi offers no comfort and little closure. But it captures the mood of a civilization losing faith in peaceful reform, where every moral failure feels one outrage away from explosion.