CEO Slaying Person of Interest Left Online Trail Showing How He Was Radicalized
The man who’s been deemed a “strong person of interest” in the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson once wrote online that “violence is necessary” when “other forms of communication fail.”
That’s a damning look into the mindset of Mangione, who was arrested in western Pennsylvania on Monday morning. Authorities have suggested he may soon face charges in connection to Thompson’s cold-blooded slaying on a Manhattan sidewalk last week that experts say was likely tied to the gunman’s disdain for the U.S. health insurance industry.
Mangione, 26, had an online presence that suggested he was sympathetic to the work of radicals. Most notably, Mangione “liked” online quotes from the infamous “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, who terrorized the U.S. for decades and wrote that technology was destroying the environment and human freedom.
“Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness,” Kaczynski wrote in one of the quotes that Mangione liked on the website Goodreads.
The New York Post reported that Mangione’s handwritten manifesto “mirrored the quotes” that he’d liked on Goodreads. It totaled two-and-a-half pages, with Mangione allegedly writing that “these parasites had it coming” at one point.
Mangione also reviewed Kaczynski’s book, Industrial Society and Its Future, on Goodreads. He rated it as being a four out of five stars and offered measured praise for it in a public post.
“Reads like a series of lemmas on the question of 21st century quality of life,” he began. “It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.”
Mangione’s review pointed out that Kaczynski was a “violent individual” who harmed “innocent people” and was “rightfully imprisoned.” However, he made clear that he believes violence is sometimes the only answer to the world’s issues.
“When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive,” Mangione wrote. “You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.”
Elsewhere on social media, Mangione posted photos of his travels to Instagram along with snaps of him smiling alongside his friends and family. He attended a private high school in his native Maryland, where he was a wrestler and was the school’s valedictorian. In a speech at his 2016 graduation, he spoke about “maintaining tradition while also pioneering innovations.”
The whiz kid attended the Ivy League’s University of Pennsylvania and graduated from 2020 with a degree in engineering, his LinkedIn page showed. He went on to get his masters there and spent time living in Maryland, San Francisco, and in Hawaii.
On X, formerly known as Twitter, Mangione was a regular poster up until the summer. His most recent post was to reshare a podcast in June about the effects of smart phones and social media on mental health.
Mangione’s page went viral after his arrest on Monday, spiking to 60,000 followers by the early afternoon. A review of his page showed that he commented on a number of topics and often shared quotes from what he was reading.
In January, Mangione shared a quote on X from the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti that read, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Also included in Mangione’s post was a screenshot of a comment that said “we need to stop generating psychopaths as a culture.”
More recently, multiple posters tagged Mangione’s account and asked about his whereabouts in late October and November.
