The Crime They Actually Care About

The chess match between the ruling class and public outrage begins

As some of you know from my recent post, I had been debating whether to step away from Bartleby on Trial, at least temporarily, because I was concerned I was inadvertently contributing to the problematic subculture that has built up around this case. From the moment Luigi Mangione was identified as a suspect in the December 4th shooting of Brian Thompson, I knew we were headed toward a historic confrontation between the ruling class and the rest of us, and I wanted to document that. But lately I’d felt like an outlier in the discourse.

In the days that followed that post, I was surprised to receive many incredibly kind and generous e-mails from readers encouraging me to press on, that there is, in fact, a community of people interested in this very angle. They’ve just been waiting, like me, for something other than letters, TMZ “documentaries,” and tweet-by-tweet social media analyses to begin. It may sound naive, but I had no idea. Writing can be a lonely endeavor. We really only know if we’ve reached someone if they tell us.

Then, yesterday, Pam Bondi announced that the Justice Department would be seeking the death penalty for Mangione, and Karen Friedman Agnifilo released her blistering response, it was like an engine had roared back to life. To shamelessly mix (or at least juxtapose) my metaphors, the chess match had commenced.

What’s happening now isn’t just about Mangione’s fate. It’s about the ruling class’s fear of losing control. The federal government, acting as a proxy for the rich, is trying to put Mangione to death for the murder of Brian Thompson in order to main that control.

An estimated 20,900 people were murdered in the United States in 2024. Mothers, fathers, beloved community members, native women, immigrants—the list goes on, seemingly endlessly. And yet none of those murders resulted in a federal response that included an Avengers-style perp walk, two television documentaries framing the suspect as a cold-blooded criminal, a terrorism enhancement, and a coordinated media effort to manipulate the public’s view of the suspect.

That’s because none of the murder victims were CEOs.

The ruling class wants the Mangione trial to send a message: their lives are worth more than ours, and anyone who disrupts that order will pay with his life.

Mangione, then, is both an “example” and a test case. His trial is meant to perform a function: to reassert the power of the oligarchy by making sure the public understands the consequences of challenging it. They charge him with terrorism not because they believe it will hold up in court, but because they believe it will hold up in our minds.

They are attempting to warp reality itself, to make us believe that attacking the powerful is an attack on the nation itself. That their safety is synonymous with national security.

But in their desperation to reassert control, the ruling class and their enforcers in the federal government, I argue, have badly misread the public. They have tried, over and over, to control the narrative. As we’ve seen, every attempt has failed. The response they want, that they need—fear, submission, a rallying cry for the status quo, requiems for health insurance CEOs—never materialized. Instead, they have only deepened public outrage by their obvious attempts at manipulation.

Understand this: they live in constant fear of losing their power. They are afraid of us. We have such power that the absence of appropriate social niceties in the wake of a murder shook them to their foundations. And they think this overreaction will work in getting us back in line.

Bu they do not understand how we live. Do you think they understand what it’s like to wake up every day knowing that your survival depends on forces entirely beyond your control— medical debt, corporate layoffs, the idiotic whims of a tariff-happy president? No, they don’t understand us, but they don’t understand that they don’t, so they keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

By turning the Mangione case into a spectacle, the ruling class and the federal government has also turned it into a reckoning. Like the embarrassing perp walk, which they clearly thought was going to provoke shock and awe instead of the chuckles and guffaws that resulted, the more they attempt to make an example of Mangione, the clearer it becomes that this trial is not about him at all.

So this is where the chess match begins. The opening moves have been made.

The game is on.