Also media. Hi everyone, It's me James, and I'm coming at you today with one of these little requests that I make sometimes when there's something that we would like you to do, when it's very important to do. So today I want to talk to you about Syria, and specifically North East Syria. So with the world's eyes fixed on Syria, many are rightly celebrating as a brutal dictatorship of Basha a Lasad comes to an end. But for Kurdish and other minority communities, recent days have bought violent attacks, ethnic cleansing and occupation by Turkis back to Jahadis groups in an attempt to take advantage of the chaos by crushing the Rajava Revolution. Turkey and its mercenaries are openly committing war crimes against the region's autonomous communities. Many thousands have already been forced to be displaced and thousands more are in danger. To make matters worth this remains largely absent from the mainstream media reporting on Syria. If you'd like to share your solidarity with the people of northern and Eastern Syria, please call on Congress to take urgent action by passing the Emergency Legislation to stop the final hold Turkey accountable and commit US support to the Syrian democratic forces and the diverse communities under their protection. If you want to take action today, you can go to Defendrojaba dot org. That's d E F E N d R oja VA dot org. If you are able to the most effective action we can take right now is to call a couple of representatives. One representative and one senator. Representative would be Gregory Meeks. He's from New York. He's a Democrat. He is a ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. His phone number is two zero two two two five three four six one. The other one will be Senator James Rish He's an Idaho Republican. He is a ranking member's Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His phone number would be two zero two two two four two seven five two. If you'd like to have some talking points, you can find those on Defendrojaba dot org. If you'd like to donate financially instead, especially to this humanitarian aid effort for the tens of thousands of people who have been displaced by the SNA's advances, you can donate to two organizations that I would suggest to. First, we be Heavier store the Kurtis Red Crescent. That's h E Yva s O r dot com and you want to go slash e n If you want to see their website in English, you can donate there. The other one will be the free Burmer Rangers who are currently working in Raka. I was talking to my friend Abat who works with them. You can donate to them at www dot free fr e E Burma b U r m A rangers dot com. We will put all of this in the show notes al the URL so if you're driving you don't have to write them down. Those are the concrete ways that we can help right now and what is unfolding as a very terrible situation in nor Syria. Thanks, I hope you enjoyed the episode.

Also media. Hi everyone, It's me James, and I'm coming at you today with one of these little requests that I make sometimes when there's something that we would like you to do, when it's very important to do. So today I want to talk to you about Syria, and specifically North East Syria. So with the world's eyes fixed on Syria, many are rightly celebrating as a brutal dictatorship of Basha a Lasad comes to an end. But for Kurdish and other minority communities, recent days have bought violent attacks, ethnic cleansing and occupation by Turkis back to Jahadis groups in an attempt to take advantage of the chaos by crushing the Rajava Revolution. Turkey and its mercenaries are openly committing war crimes against the region's autonomous communities. Many thousands have already been forced to be displaced and thousands more are in danger. To make matters worth this remains largely absent from the mainstream media reporting on Syria. If you'd like to share your solidarity with the people of northern and Eastern Syria, please call on Congress to take urgent action by passing the Emergency Legislation to stop the final hold Turkey accountable and commit US support to the Syrian democratic forces and the diverse communities under their protection. If you want to take action today, you can go to Defendrojaba dot org. That's d E F E N d R oja VA dot org. If you are able to the most effective action we can take right now is to call a couple of representatives. One representative and one senator. Representative would be Gregory Meeks. He's from New York. He's a Democrat. He is a ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. His phone number is two zero two two two five three four six one. The other one will be Senator James Rish He's an Idaho Republican. He is a ranking member's Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His phone number would be two zero two two two four two seven five two. If you'd like to have some talking points, you can find those on Defendrojaba dot org. If you'd like to donate financially instead, especially to this humanitarian aid effort for the tens of thousands of people who have been displaced by the SNA's advances, you can donate to two organizations that I would suggest to. First, we be Heavier store the Kurtis Red Crescent. That's h E Yva s O r dot com and you want to go slash e n If you want to see their website in English, you can donate there. The other one will be the free Burmer Rangers who are currently working in Raka. I was talking to my friend Abat who works with them. You can donate to them at www dot free fr e E Burma b U r m A rangers dot com. We will put all of this in the show notes al the URL so if you're driving you don't have to write them down. Those are the concrete ways that we can help right now and what is unfolding as a very terrible situation in nor Syria. Thanks, I hope you enjoyed the episode.

Hey everyone, Robert Evans here and this is it could happen here obviously. One of the things that's been happening here, probably the biggest story of the last week or so at least, is the shooting of United health Care CEO Brian Thompson by an alleged shooter named Luigi Mangione. Meggione is an interesting character. People have had a lot to say about him and so I went through his online footprint, everything I can find on his social media, and I wrote an article for my substack Shatter Zone, and I'm going to be reading that in a slightly amended form for you now as today's episode. I've spent much of the last ten years reading manifestos and being a fly on the wall in different little online bolt holes where extremists plan and seek to incite mass shootings. When Luigi Mangione, the suspected shooter of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was arrested at a McDonald's, it didn't take long for digital sleuths to put together a comprehensive record of his online activity. I will tell you now that nothing he read or posted explains why he gunned down an insurance executive better than this single image in the background of his Twitter profile and the images, of course, of an X ray showing four screws in someone's lower base spine, apparently due to a lumbar spinal fusion surgery. The day after I wrote this article, The New York Times published a piece after finding Luigi's read it. The piece by Mike Baker, Mike Isaac, and my old boss at bellancat Eric Tohler confirms that he had a spinal fusion surgery that he had dealt with back pain for years, which had been minor and then gotten much worse after a surfing injury, and had grown even worse after slipping on a piece of paper caused persistent problems, including pain when he sat down, twitching leg muscles, and numbness in his growing in bladder. According to The New York Times, he had that spinal fusion surgery, which he had been deeply frightened of ahead of time, but which resolved those symptoms, and then he continued to have other symptoms, probably unrelated to the back pain. It's unclear if the back pain came back, but what is clear is that he wrote constantly online about pain and about his struggles with various other health issues, including a persistent brain fog that he seemed unable to get care for. His friend r J, who lived with him at an intentional community for digital workers in Honolulu starting in twenty twenty two, confirms that Luigi suffered an injury shortly after taking a basic surfing class after moving there. This laid him up in bed for about a week, unable to move his friends had to seek the special bed to help him with the pain. In general, we have ample confirmation that he was someone who dealt with a series of escalating health issues that changed him from an extremely active, physically fit young man into somebody who felt like they were no longer able to do or enjoy the things they had previously been able to do and enjoy. Now this is most of what we know about the health history of Luigi Maggione as of December tenth. Now when I record this twenty twenty four. As I write this, a purported manifesto is making the rounds online which discusses health issues his mother faced. It's still unclear if that manifesto is real. kN Klippenstein has finally gotten access to what he claims is the draft of the manifesto that the shooter had on him when he was arrested by the police. I don't know if that's a manifesto or something he wrote while nervous, because he largely addresses the cops in it and tells them you know what to expect when searching him. But again, at the moment, this purported manifesto that was also posted on substack very unclear. As to whether or not that's real. So for this today, we're going to stick with what we can verify, and what we can verify is that Luigi Mangione suffered from chronic back pain. He had five different books in his Goodreads that he read about dealing with back pain and healing from back pain, as well as other chronic health issues. If he is the shooter, then we can confirm he also chose to act out by targeting an insurance ceo. The New York Times has stated that he was arrested with a two hundred and sixty two word manifesto which has since been leaked, and in that manifesto, he describes the executives who run insurance companies as parasites who quote continue to abuse our country for a mince profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it. In addition to all this, we know that Luigi came from a wealthy family. His grandfather made millions running a series of country clubs, nursing homes and office buildings and hospitals. One of his cousins is a Republican state legislator. It is unclear if Luigi had any access to the family money but he was clearly financially comfortable enough to move to Hawaii and pay to join an intentional community. He had engineering degrees and a promising early employment history. This is a man who had options. He could have been almost anything he wanted to be, and the thing that he ultimately chose to do with his life, after suffering a debilitating series of health issues, was to shoot the CEO of United Healthcare. Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. It's a well known fact that most terrorists tend to be radicalized in communities. Much of my career was spent watching eight chan turn from an imageboard dedicated into gamer gate into a machine for generating white nationalists mass shooters. These people often appeared as lone wolves to the untrained eye, but they were radicalized intentionally, in and by a community. Much will be made in the coming days and months about Luigi's online footprints. I will go into some detail about where he spent his time and how we should characterize it, but I want to be clear at the outset that his intellectual diet does not seem to be what made him choose to take action, although it may have influenced the specific kind of.

Hey everyone, Robert Evans here and this is it could happen here obviously. One of the things that's been happening here, probably the biggest story of the last week or so at least, is the shooting of United health Care CEO Brian Thompson by an alleged shooter named Luigi Mangione. Meggione is an interesting character. People have had a lot to say about him and so I went through his online footprint, everything I can find on his social media, and I wrote an article for my substack Shatter Zone, and I'm going to be reading that in a slightly amended form for you now as today's episode. I've spent much of the last ten years reading manifestos and being a fly on the wall in different little online bolt holes where extremists plan and seek to incite mass shootings. When Luigi Mangione, the suspected shooter of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was arrested at a McDonald's, it didn't take long for digital sleuths to put together a comprehensive record of his online activity. I will tell you now that nothing he read or posted explains why he gunned down an insurance executive better than this single image in the background of his Twitter profile and the images, of course, of an X ray showing four screws in someone's lower base spine, apparently due to a lumbar spinal fusion surgery. The day after I wrote this article, The New York Times published a piece after finding Luigi's read it. The piece by Mike Baker, Mike Isaac, and my old boss at bellancat Eric Tohler confirms that he had a spinal fusion surgery that he had dealt with back pain for years, which had been minor and then gotten much worse after a surfing injury, and had grown even worse after slipping on a piece of paper caused persistent problems, including pain when he sat down, twitching leg muscles, and numbness in his growing in bladder. According to The New York Times, he had that spinal fusion surgery, which he had been deeply frightened of ahead of time, but which resolved those symptoms, and then he continued to have other symptoms, probably unrelated to the back pain. It's unclear if the back pain came back, but what is clear is that he wrote constantly online about pain and about his struggles with various other health issues, including a persistent brain fog that he seemed unable to get care for. His friend r J, who lived with him at an intentional community for digital workers in Honolulu starting in twenty twenty two, confirms that Luigi suffered an injury shortly after taking a basic surfing class after moving there. This laid him up in bed for about a week, unable to move his friends had to seek the special bed to help him with the pain. In general, we have ample confirmation that he was someone who dealt with a series of escalating health issues that changed him from an extremely active, physically fit young man into somebody who felt like they were no longer able to do or enjoy the things they had previously been able to do and enjoy. Now this is most of what we know about the health history of Luigi Maggione as of December tenth. Now when I record this twenty twenty four. As I write this, a purported manifesto is making the rounds online which discusses health issues his mother faced. It's still unclear if that manifesto is real. kN Klippenstein has finally gotten access to what he claims is the draft of the manifesto that the shooter had on him when he was arrested by the police. I don't know if that's a manifesto or something he wrote while nervous, because he largely addresses the cops in it and tells them you know what to expect when searching him. But again, at the moment, this purported manifesto that was also posted on substack very unclear. As to whether or not that's real. So for this today, we're going to stick with what we can verify, and what we can verify is that Luigi Mangione suffered from chronic back pain. He had five different books in his Goodreads that he read about dealing with back pain and healing from back pain, as well as other chronic health issues. If he is the shooter, then we can confirm he also chose to act out by targeting an insurance ceo. The New York Times has stated that he was arrested with a two hundred and sixty two word manifesto which has since been leaked, and in that manifesto, he describes the executives who run insurance companies as parasites who quote continue to abuse our country for a mince profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it. In addition to all this, we know that Luigi came from a wealthy family. His grandfather made millions running a series of country clubs, nursing homes and office buildings and hospitals. One of his cousins is a Republican state legislator. It is unclear if Luigi had any access to the family money but he was clearly financially comfortable enough to move to Hawaii and pay to join an intentional community. He had engineering degrees and a promising early employment history. This is a man who had options. He could have been almost anything he wanted to be, and the thing that he ultimately chose to do with his life, after suffering a debilitating series of health issues, was to shoot the CEO of United Healthcare. Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. It's a well known fact that most terrorists tend to be radicalized in communities. Much of my career was spent watching eight chan turn from an imageboard dedicated into gamer gate into a machine for generating white nationalists mass shooters. These people often appeared as lone wolves to the untrained eye, but they were radicalized intentionally, in and by a community. Much will be made in the coming days and months about Luigi's online footprints. I will go into some detail about where he spent his time and how we should characterize it, but I want to be clear at the outset that his intellectual diet does not seem to be what made him choose to take action, although it may have influenced the specific kind of.

Action he took. Luigi followed a lot of accounts on Twitter that are wildly popular with young men, like Joe Rogan. He listened to Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson and agreed with them on certain things, but he also had cogent criticisms of their arguments and presentation. Here's what he said about Jordan Peterson on May fourteenth. This is why Jordan Peterson always bothers me. Overcomplicates everything he says aloud, wasting everyone's mental bandwidth and having to decipher its. Teachers are the best communicators, clear, succinct, simple language, which does kind of gel with the fact that he wrote three words on the bullets he used to shoot that CEO. Luigi also expressed frustration with wokeness and expressed opinions common on the libertarian tech influenced right, like a belief in the social benefits of Christianity, without expressing popular religious beliefs himself. I've found one post where he talks about how nature of wares a vacuum and shares an article about how Christianity's decline has unleashed terrible new gods. Some of his posts took the form of memes typical to online discourse of this type. But I've also read an essay that he wrote when he was fifteen years old discussing how Christianity persevered over Paganism in ancient Rome, and that essay exhibits a long standing interest in this topic and a capacity to treat it with nuance. His paper is very well written, particularly for a fifteen year old, and while his conclusions are highly arguable, it's not the work of someone hopelessly brings washed by culture war bullshit. Luigi liked to think and read and come to his own conclusions. He was interested in AI, in cryptocurrency, in life extension, and in a constellation of tech bro adjacent attitudes and philosophies often described as the Gray Tribe. I found one post where he talks about a senior speech he gave on the Future quote topics ranging from conscious artificial intelligence to human immortality. The term gray tribe was coined by an influential rationalist blogger and psychiatrist named Scott Alexander Siskin. He used it to refer to an intersection of nerd culture with Silicon Valley influenced ideology descending from the online rationalist movement. This community existed outside of traditional right left ideology. Now I've not found any evidence that Luigi was a specific fan of Scott, but he expressed appreciation for several figures associated with this big Tent movement, including Peter Teel. If we described Scott as representing the more liberal flank of the Gray Tribe, Luigi seemed to be drawn to folks closer to the right wing side of things. The worst person to use this terminology would probably be Teel associate Bilaji Shrinivasan, who has used Gray Tribe framework to describe his ideal big tech takeover of San Francisco and purging of progressives. However, I must stress that Luigi Mangione never expressed any support for this end of the ideology that I can find. He was a young man of libertarian inclinations who worked in big tech and had ties to San Francisco, but he was also clearly someone still making his mind up about the world. As information about him has come out, I have seen people on the left who initially saw his axis heroic lament that he was a bigoted tech bro. Scott Alexander has been credibly described as a eugenic supporter, as have many other people adjacent to the strains of rationalism and big tech ideology in which Mangione dabbled. Luigi's Twitter account does indeed include weird posts from his time in Japan, where he theorizes on how to solve falling birth rates by panning pocket pussies and video game cafe. At other points, he complains about Japanese citizens acting like quote unquote NPC's but race science and eugenics don't seem to have been a focus for him, and I would caution anyone against being overly reductive about a twenty six year old beliefs based purely on a handful of posts that bear no relation to his actions in the world. The evidence that we have of his online footprints suggests someone who was not unmoved by certain arguments rooted in social justice. He expressed admiration for a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's slaughter House five about criminalization of poverty in the United States. Quote America is the wealthiest nation in the world, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Ken Hubbard, it ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be. It is, in fact a crime for an American to be poor. Even though America is a nation of the poor, every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more esteemable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. Meluigi is certainly not the idealized leftist icons some had hoped, but he doesn't easily fit into any other box We've got. His interest in gray tribe adjacent thinkers and self help books written by productivity hackers like Tim Ferriss is incredibly common among young men. Much has been made of the four st hour review. He gave industrial Society and its Future the manifesto of Ted Kazinski, But as with the rest of his media diet, he did not view Ted through the simple lens of hero worship. Here's what he wrote quote he was a violent individual, rightfully imprisoned, who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luttite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary. Now we know those words. His condemnation of Kazinsky maiming innocent people are not just words, because we have seen the attack he allegedly chose to carry out. Not a series of bombings that killed and maimed innocent people with no real power in our society, but a surgical strike against a man that the very top of the system he hated, and one that caused no collateral damage. He was capable of appreciating some of Kazinsky's conclusions, but ultimately the quote he chose to highlight in his review came not from the manifesto, but from a Reddit post made by a guy with the user name boss Potatoess, who otherwise mostly commented on the grateful dead. This post praises Kazinski for having the balls to realize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere, and complains economic protest isn't possible in the current system. As a result, violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self defense. Quote. These companies don't care about you, or your kids or your grandkids. They have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck, so why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive. This is not the kind of radicalization pathway our media is good at discussing or analyzing. The things Luigi read and the people he interacted with online absolutely influenced what he did and how. But Boss Potatoess is not some nazi on aib Chan trying to provoke a shooting spree for the lulls. He's a random dude angry about the things seventy percent or more of the country is angry about, and he's expressing a lack of faith in a peaceful way forward. If you read this post in its entirety as Luigi did, you can't miss the pain there, anxiety and horror at the inevitability of climate change and the looming knowledge that everything good and green on this earth is being fed into the bloody maw of an industry concerned only with maximizing profit. In more ways than one, Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. I know many people who suffer with chronic pain and ongoing medical issues. I will tell you that it is not uncommon in dark moments, after fruitless, hours long calls about dropped medications or receiving surprise bills for them to joke about what they'd like to do to the executives who run these companies. These are jokes made in moments of despair and pain. No one I know would ever act on them, because they all have lives people to care for into whom they are responsible. They would never really do anything because the consequences to their own loved ones would be so severe. In the months before the shooting, Luigi had cut off all contact with his family. He admitted this in court. His parents eventually filed a missing's persons report in November of this year, and we have evidence that friends tried to contact him on his family's behalf via social media. As was first noted by a Twitter account, Luigi Mangione expressed interest in the works of Paul Scalis, a tech lawyer, writer, and prominent poster who writes about the Lindie effect, a concept that boils down to this the only effective judge of things is time. Scalus is popular among the set of people Mangione found himself drawn towards, and writes about the wisdom of ideas from antiquity. It's not hard to grasp what a man with an academic interest in ancient Rome might see in him. On December fourth, twenty twenty four, Paul made this post. Look, if you don't have any kids and you one of these guys just floating around the big cities. You got your education, but you never really used it to make money. You got a dead end back office job and a future of just working somewhere until you're seventy five and then dying. Go ahead and do something. It's been suggested that this may have influenced Luigi, and I think the timeline makes it clear that cannot be the case. Luigia cut off contact with his family in most of his friends months before this. The evidence suggests that he had planned this attack for quite some time. He arrived in New York City on November twenty fourth, on a bus bound from Atlanta, where he did not reside. So I don't think this post represents a piece of his radicalization journey. Nor was Scallus advocating for people to kill CEOs. But the situation in mindset Scallus described does speak to a lot of young men like Luigi, young and educated, but without intense responsibilities or much hope for the future. This subset of society has always overproduced terrorists, revolutionaries, and of course mass shooters. The United States has a mass shooter culture over the last several decades since Columbine, we have grown used to the idea that people who are angry and no longer care if they live or die will sometimes choose to go down killing strangers. In most cases, these shootings are totally random, the victims chosen with no concern beyond maximum body count and maximum attention. More recently, especially since twenty nineteen, mass shootings have become increasingly politicized. Different extremists, mostly right wing, have used them to put theory into praxis and earned free pr for their causes. Most people abhor these actions, but we have grown used to the idea that other people will use such acts as a way to spread messages that might otherwise get ignored. It is not coincidental that the white genocide conspiracy theories from Brenton Terence christ Church Manifesto are now mainstream talking points and conservative politics. Luigim Mangione grew up with all of this. He would have come to the same conclusions about the roles shootings play in our society as any other reasonably aware person. What he did, was, of course, not a mass shooting, but the assassination, his actions afterwards, and his possession of a manifesto were all clearly plotted out by someone who knew the social script for how this kind of thing goes in the USA. In the wake of this shooting, every media organization commenting on it has had to grapple with the waves of public enthusiasm for Luigi's actions. Right wing media figures condemning the left for celebrating this assassination have been criticized by their own readers and listeners. Insurance companies have pulled down lists of their executives from the Internet. This is because they too, understand the shooter culture of the United States. Like everyone else, they know that any mass shooting that meets with massive media coverage and interest will spawn copycats. The assassination Luigi is believed to have carried out was new and exciting. It demanded the public's attention in a way that most mass shootings don't. At almost the same time, the United Healthcare CEO was gunned down, a gunman walked into a Relie school near Oraville, California, and shot two young children before killing himself. This shooting drew almost no national attention. It was entirely drowned out by the execution of an insurance industry CEO. The armed and disaffected young men who are most drawn to this sort of thing will not miss this fact. I believe Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. The shooters who follow him will all have their own reasons for what they do, for their own journeys to that violent end, but ultimately they'll do what they do because Luigi proved. It's what gets attention.

Action he took. Luigi followed a lot of accounts on Twitter that are wildly popular with young men, like Joe Rogan. He listened to Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson and agreed with them on certain things, but he also had cogent criticisms of their arguments and presentation. Here's what he said about Jordan Peterson on May fourteenth. This is why Jordan Peterson always bothers me. Overcomplicates everything he says aloud, wasting everyone's mental bandwidth and having to decipher its. Teachers are the best communicators, clear, succinct, simple language, which does kind of gel with the fact that he wrote three words on the bullets he used to shoot that CEO. Luigi also expressed frustration with wokeness and expressed opinions common on the libertarian tech influenced right, like a belief in the social benefits of Christianity, without expressing popular religious beliefs himself. I've found one post where he talks about how nature of wares a vacuum and shares an article about how Christianity's decline has unleashed terrible new gods. Some of his posts took the form of memes typical to online discourse of this type. But I've also read an essay that he wrote when he was fifteen years old discussing how Christianity persevered over Paganism in ancient Rome, and that essay exhibits a long standing interest in this topic and a capacity to treat it with nuance. His paper is very well written, particularly for a fifteen year old, and while his conclusions are highly arguable, it's not the work of someone hopelessly brings washed by culture war bullshit. Luigi liked to think and read and come to his own conclusions. He was interested in AI, in cryptocurrency, in life extension, and in a constellation of tech bro adjacent attitudes and philosophies often described as the Gray Tribe. I found one post where he talks about a senior speech he gave on the Future quote topics ranging from conscious artificial intelligence to human immortality. The term gray tribe was coined by an influential rationalist blogger and psychiatrist named Scott Alexander Siskin. He used it to refer to an intersection of nerd culture with Silicon Valley influenced ideology descending from the online rationalist movement. This community existed outside of traditional right left ideology. Now I've not found any evidence that Luigi was a specific fan of Scott, but he expressed appreciation for several figures associated with this big Tent movement, including Peter Teel. If we described Scott as representing the more liberal flank of the Gray Tribe, Luigi seemed to be drawn to folks closer to the right wing side of things. The worst person to use this terminology would probably be Teel associate Bilaji Shrinivasan, who has used Gray Tribe framework to describe his ideal big tech takeover of San Francisco and purging of progressives. However, I must stress that Luigi Mangione never expressed any support for this end of the ideology that I can find. He was a young man of libertarian inclinations who worked in big tech and had ties to San Francisco, but he was also clearly someone still making his mind up about the world. As information about him has come out, I have seen people on the left who initially saw his axis heroic lament that he was a bigoted tech bro. Scott Alexander has been credibly described as a eugenic supporter, as have many other people adjacent to the strains of rationalism and big tech ideology in which Mangione dabbled. Luigi's Twitter account does indeed include weird posts from his time in Japan, where he theorizes on how to solve falling birth rates by panning pocket pussies and video game cafe. At other points, he complains about Japanese citizens acting like quote unquote NPC's but race science and eugenics don't seem to have been a focus for him, and I would caution anyone against being overly reductive about a twenty six year old beliefs based purely on a handful of posts that bear no relation to his actions in the world. The evidence that we have of his online footprints suggests someone who was not unmoved by certain arguments rooted in social justice. He expressed admiration for a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's slaughter House five about criminalization of poverty in the United States. Quote America is the wealthiest nation in the world, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Ken Hubbard, it ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be. It is, in fact a crime for an American to be poor. Even though America is a nation of the poor, every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more esteemable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. Meluigi is certainly not the idealized leftist icons some had hoped, but he doesn't easily fit into any other box We've got. His interest in gray tribe adjacent thinkers and self help books written by productivity hackers like Tim Ferriss is incredibly common among young men. Much has been made of the four st hour review. He gave industrial Society and its Future the manifesto of Ted Kazinski, But as with the rest of his media diet, he did not view Ted through the simple lens of hero worship. Here's what he wrote quote he was a violent individual, rightfully imprisoned, who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luttite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary. Now we know those words. His condemnation of Kazinsky maiming innocent people are not just words, because we have seen the attack he allegedly chose to carry out. Not a series of bombings that killed and maimed innocent people with no real power in our society, but a surgical strike against a man that the very top of the system he hated, and one that caused no collateral damage. He was capable of appreciating some of Kazinsky's conclusions, but ultimately the quote he chose to highlight in his review came not from the manifesto, but from a Reddit post made by a guy with the user name boss Potatoess, who otherwise mostly commented on the grateful dead. This post praises Kazinski for having the balls to realize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere, and complains economic protest isn't possible in the current system. As a result, violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self defense. Quote. These companies don't care about you, or your kids or your grandkids. They have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck, so why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive. This is not the kind of radicalization pathway our media is good at discussing or analyzing. The things Luigi read and the people he interacted with online absolutely influenced what he did and how. But Boss Potatoess is not some nazi on aib Chan trying to provoke a shooting spree for the lulls. He's a random dude angry about the things seventy percent or more of the country is angry about, and he's expressing a lack of faith in a peaceful way forward. If you read this post in its entirety as Luigi did, you can't miss the pain there, anxiety and horror at the inevitability of climate change and the looming knowledge that everything good and green on this earth is being fed into the bloody maw of an industry concerned only with maximizing profit. In more ways than one, Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. I know many people who suffer with chronic pain and ongoing medical issues. I will tell you that it is not uncommon in dark moments, after fruitless, hours long calls about dropped medications or receiving surprise bills for them to joke about what they'd like to do to the executives who run these companies. These are jokes made in moments of despair and pain. No one I know would ever act on them, because they all have lives people to care for into whom they are responsible. They would never really do anything because the consequences to their own loved ones would be so severe. In the months before the shooting, Luigi had cut off all contact with his family. He admitted this in court. His parents eventually filed a missing's persons report in November of this year, and we have evidence that friends tried to contact him on his family's behalf via social media. As was first noted by a Twitter account, Luigi Mangione expressed interest in the works of Paul Scalis, a tech lawyer, writer, and prominent poster who writes about the Lindie effect, a concept that boils down to this the only effective judge of things is time. Scalus is popular among the set of people Mangione found himself drawn towards, and writes about the wisdom of ideas from antiquity. It's not hard to grasp what a man with an academic interest in ancient Rome might see in him. On December fourth, twenty twenty four, Paul made this post. Look, if you don't have any kids and you one of these guys just floating around the big cities. You got your education, but you never really used it to make money. You got a dead end back office job and a future of just working somewhere until you're seventy five and then dying. Go ahead and do something. It's been suggested that this may have influenced Luigi, and I think the timeline makes it clear that cannot be the case. Luigia cut off contact with his family in most of his friends months before this. The evidence suggests that he had planned this attack for quite some time. He arrived in New York City on November twenty fourth, on a bus bound from Atlanta, where he did not reside. So I don't think this post represents a piece of his radicalization journey. Nor was Scallus advocating for people to kill CEOs. But the situation in mindset Scallus described does speak to a lot of young men like Luigi, young and educated, but without intense responsibilities or much hope for the future. This subset of society has always overproduced terrorists, revolutionaries, and of course mass shooters. The United States has a mass shooter culture over the last several decades since Columbine, we have grown used to the idea that people who are angry and no longer care if they live or die will sometimes choose to go down killing strangers. In most cases, these shootings are totally random, the victims chosen with no concern beyond maximum body count and maximum attention. More recently, especially since twenty nineteen, mass shootings have become increasingly politicized. Different extremists, mostly right wing, have used them to put theory into praxis and earned free pr for their causes. Most people abhor these actions, but we have grown used to the idea that other people will use such acts as a way to spread messages that might otherwise get ignored. It is not coincidental that the white genocide conspiracy theories from Brenton Terence christ Church Manifesto are now mainstream talking points and conservative politics. Luigim Mangione grew up with all of this. He would have come to the same conclusions about the roles shootings play in our society as any other reasonably aware person. What he did, was, of course, not a mass shooting, but the assassination, his actions afterwards, and his possession of a manifesto were all clearly plotted out by someone who knew the social script for how this kind of thing goes in the USA. In the wake of this shooting, every media organization commenting on it has had to grapple with the waves of public enthusiasm for Luigi's actions. Right wing media figures condemning the left for celebrating this assassination have been criticized by their own readers and listeners. Insurance companies have pulled down lists of their executives from the Internet. This is because they too, understand the shooter culture of the United States. Like everyone else, they know that any mass shooting that meets with massive media coverage and interest will spawn copycats. The assassination Luigi is believed to have carried out was new and exciting. It demanded the public's attention in a way that most mass shootings don't. At almost the same time, the United Healthcare CEO was gunned down, a gunman walked into a Relie school near Oraville, California, and shot two young children before killing himself. This shooting drew almost no national attention. It was entirely drowned out by the execution of an insurance industry CEO. The armed and disaffected young men who are most drawn to this sort of thing will not miss this fact. I believe Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. The shooters who follow him will all have their own reasons for what they do, for their own journeys to that violent end, but ultimately they'll do what they do because Luigi proved. It's what gets attention.

For now, It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website poolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

For now, It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website poolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

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