Six months ago, after back surgery, Luigi Mangione fell off the grid. On social media, his friends were pinging him asking if he was okay. Today, he is in jail and expected to be charged with the murder of United Health CEO Brian Thompson.
Mangione graduated at the top of his class in a private school in Maryland, went to the University of Pennsylvania, then worked in tech. Some University of Pennsylvania students, yesterday, were overcome with joy that one of their own is alleged to have murdered someone.
Mangione’s ramblings in what is, charitably, being called a manifesto show him to be anti-capitalist, anti-private healthcare, but, as revealed by his social media, he is also anti-woke. His mind was filled with competing, heterodox thoughts. He leans left but also has views that some would classify as rightwing. We must still use “alleged” because he has not been convicted of a crime, but it seems he was driven by anger over problems with private health insurance, which has sparked the zeal of progressives.
What has me disturbed beyond both the murder and the justifications people have used to explain it away (Charlie Cooke is a must read on this point), is both Mangione’s descent into odd paranoia and those on social media who are “just asking questions.”
Behold:
.The photo on the left is older before his serious back surgery. The newer photo is from yesterday. But she is not alone in “just asking questions.”
Then there is this dance around the point of asking questions:
Followed by this:
We’ve gone from not trusting the feds to not trusting the local police in Altoona, PA.
But it is just asking questions. Can I ask one: Do any of the people just asking questions have monetized Twitter accounts?
It’s a social media-driven phenomenon. During the Dominion Voting v. Fox News case, we got the inside text messages of Fox News hosts, including Tucker Carlson. It turns out almost all of them thought Trump was full of crap and the “stolen election” stuff was a lie.
However, their public thoughts were more obtuse or contradicted their private thoughts. Surprisingly, people preferred to believe Tucker Carlson questioned the election and had Trump’s back rather than believe his private thoughts conveyed to friends and colleagues that both doubted Trump’s claims and said, “I hate him passionately.”
Now, everybody is just asking questions. It is a clever way of seeding doubt and then watering it.
First, you cast doubt on the local police in Altoona, PA. Or just highlight Mangione’s questions. Then you sprinkle in doubts about federal prosecutors and investigators in something entirely different, tie it all together in the name of just asking questions, and hope your Twitter account is monetized for the traffic.
The Rubes will believe it, hopefully.
Too many are willing to believe it.
In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis wrote about men without chests. But he also had this:
[Y]ou will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.
People just asking questions are not trying to see through things. They are hoping to make you see nothing, so you must rely on them. Too many people are. In the end, we have a nation that trusts no one and nothing and, therefore, is unable to get answers while asking questions.
Luigi Mangione began his descent into rage by just asking questions. He saw through the system and saw through whatever might be on the other side and finally saw nothing except revenge. He explained away the explanation itself and, on the other side, found violence.
Now, people who just a few days ago insisted something must be wrong because the police should have surely arrested someone quickly because look at Lee Harvey Oswald will now question who got arrested because it just seems so damn convenient.
Our society is dangerously close to spiraling out of control. The people who intend just to ask questions are helping sow the seeds, and those who, because of their distrust of “the system,” cannot grapple with basic answers will be the tip of the spear.
Mangione got stopped because, in New York, he pulled down his mask to flirt with a girl and then got recognized by a senior citizen at a McDonalds in Pennsylvania. The police arrived and found fake IDs, a gun, a suppressor, and a statement of his rage, among other things. Now, Mangione is “just asking questions” in court about the cash in his backpack.
We don’t have to believe him. We don’t have to believe the police. We can just keep asking questions. But maybe we should start with why the police in Altoona, PA, would plant evidence on the guy for a murder hundreds of miles away in New York City. And if you want to explain that by conspiracy, good luck seeing the garden and the world beyond it.
We live in mentally unhealthy times, and social media is increasingly becoming a virus in our brains.
