The Pathos of Luigi Mangione's Misplaced Admiration

The Gray Man to Grave Robber Pipeline

Note: This week I posted a Note about Minor Dissent/Max’s teased four-part “exegesis” of Luigi Mangione, but managed to delete it while editing to remove a stray link. In lieu of rewriting that note, I just decided to write a post on the same topic.

Luigi Mangione had the misfortune of having bad intellectual taste. Many of the social media personalities he seemed to admire were members of a coterie of twenty- and thirty-something men who act as if they’ve blended into the background, making them dangerously trenchant observers and super-competent operators (/s) but who, in fact can’t help but seize clout opportunities and impose their opinions, jokes, trolling, and Big Ideas on everyone.

The quality of the ideas that apparently spoke to Mangione—even if he had complicated responses to them—can be seen in Jash Dholani’s thesis that “old books” are superior because their authors weren’t afraid of being “canceled.” Because, as we all know, literary greatness hinges on the absence of possible “woke” backlash. Such a take is ahistorical and simplistic, ignoring the obvious fact that censorship, persecution, and societal taboos have always shaped what is written and, crucially, what is published.

Aristotle was free of the shackles of “cancel culture” and “wokeness.”

I don’t know if Dholani knows better and is just trying to capture a readership hungry for a stupid take like this or if he really believes it. If the latter, then his ignorance of the authors he celebrates is astonishing.

Huxley, Aristotle, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Pushkin, Wilde—several of whom Dholani highlights as the “uncanceled” heros of literature wrote because they were challenging the rigid conventions of their own time. And they were, in fact, “canceled.” Canceled by scandalized reviewers, by morality police, by book censors, by entire governments.

Even Aristotle, whom Dholani offers as an example, was buffeted by vigorous disagreements in the Athenian intellectual circles in which he ran. Just his significant departure from Plato’s Theory of Forms could have gotten him “canceled” by a number of his peers.

Because of the paucity of Dholani’s “cancel culture” thesis, I’d argue it’s nothing more than a cynical attempt to capture the attention of the Yarvinite tech bros and Angel Investor Autocrats like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. And it worked (along with a lot of fawning tweets). Musk is a fan.

Why Luigi Mangione felt this thesis resonated with him will take some unpacking that I won’t do here (or ever, most likely, for any meaningful deconstruction would require a conversation with Mangione himself).

But Dholani’s book Hit Reverse: New Ideas from Old Books really seemed to strike a chord in him, to the point that he apparently tried to order 400 copies of the book and made a point of visiting Dholani in Mumbai in 2024.

Then there’s Gurwinder, the patron saint of threadbois who offer algorithm-friendly faux-wisdom for guys who are “too rational” for self-help but will devour repackaged common sense so long as they think it’s a “life hack” or intellectual contraband. Of course, for all his warnings about status games and mimetic traps and information cascades, he’s just another bro building a brand off the same dynamics he criticizes. (“Why You Are Probably an NPC,” is one of Gurwinder’s more popular Substack posts and clearly spoke to Mangione.)

As with Dholani, Mangione reached out to Gurwinder for conversation and connection. Of course, we only know about this because post-December 4th, Gurwinder hopped on Substack to write about his interactions with Mangione. Fearing his reach wasn’t big enough, he then published his account with The Free Press (see link below). He subsequently appeared on The Hill, CNN (in which he is described as Mangione’s “friend”), and other outlets.

My Conversations With Luigi Mangione

Gurwinder, who is British, subsequently tried to get into why Mangione’s alleged act didn’t mean anything or was stupid by offering a completely uninformed breakdown of the U.S. health insurance industry, to which I responded with this post.

Finally, there’s Max, or Minor Dissent, a Twitter/X personality who alternates between Musk-ovite shock-jock philosopher (“All the fags that flipped their shit at Elon Musk for his skepticism on COVID, are providing infinitely less value than his company toward solving it”) and self-styled intellectual insurgent who’s unlocked the secret architecture of power and truth (“There is a reasonable debate worth having over whether a monarchy structured in the right way such that it avoids common pitfalls [ex hereditary succession] would be better than the oligarchical structure it appears democracy has succumbed to every single time it has been tried.)

His timeline is a chronicle of verbal fellation of Elon Musk and Curtis Yarvin and apologia for Trump’s syphilitic sundowning, along with the stray poll about whether “the fats” or “the gays” should be killed first. He’s a maidservant to guys who consider democracy an unfortunate UX problem waiting to be hard reset. On Substack, he’s probably best known for his cri du coeur “Why You Should Considering Killing Yourself.”

On December 9th, Max amusedly tweeted that he’d discovered that he’d traded a few DMs with Mangione. “Should I post screenshots”? He was surprised that they’d communicated, suggesting the exchange had not been memorable to him.

Now these forgotten DMs have transformed into “my relationship with Luigi” (direct quote) and Max has penned a four-part “exegesis” of Luigi Mangione.

Without trying to understand why Mangione followed Minor Dissent or reached out to Max, consider that this terminally online dollar-store nihilist barely even registered that Mangione had reached out to him in the first place, but has now penned a saga built on the strength of a couple DMs like he’s Capote imbedded in the story of the century.

This is the gray man-to-grave robber pipeline in action. The burn-it-all-down edgeling who sneers at human connection but the minute there’s a little cultural blood in the water, he’s sprinting over to Substack to produce an “exegesis” on the basis of some forgettable Twitter messages.

Both Gurwinder and Max have claimed that sharing the details of their “relationship” with Mangione has been an attempt at understanding. But isn’t it interesting that these soul-searching journeys to understanding always seem to require an audience?

There’s been a lot of consternation among the throng of Mangione supporters that Gurwinder and Max have “sold him out” or “betrayed his confidence” by writing about their conversations or message exchanges with him. I think it’s worth looking critically at this response as well.

No one should be surprised that neoreactionary neckbeards are going to turn around and capitalize on a tenuous connection with a notable figure. (It’s notable, however, that Jash Dholani did not try to capitalize on his interaction with Mangione and, in fact, seemed uncomfortable with it.)

When it comes to Max, in particular, Mangione himself should be unsurprised. The only thing that is surprising about Max’s cash-in is that he’s trying to do it without trolling. While venture feudalists and cloud grifters might mistake the trolling for legitimate philosophy—or at least an excuse to pretend there’s widespread support for their democracy-destroying dreams of a new Minecraft level powered by crypto—no one with a few brain cells would, or should.

It is almost touchingly naive that, according to Max, Mangione chided him for his misogyny and racism in those DMs. In fact, naïveté is the predominant trait that emerges from Mangione’s earnest interactions with these guys. And I think that ingenuous earnestness is what is triggering much of the fierce backlash to Max’s four-parter. No one who knows Max from his X account could possibly imagine that he would have any compunction about exploiting his connection with Mangione.

But here’s the thing. The infantilization and saint-ification of Luigi Mangione by his most ardent supporters (mostly female) does him almost as much of a disservice as the “betrayal” of Gurwinder and Max.

I get that it’s uncomfortable for some people who see Mangione as a hero to contemplate his very human flaws. However, the fact is that the limerence-on-steroids vibe we see in some of the Mangione subreddits makes Max’s uncharacteristically measured responses to criticism in the comments section of his now post look sober and rational in comparison.

The absurdity of the parasocial aspects of Mangione fandom finds its peak at the tortuous argument made by a subsection of what I call “prison wife applicants” that Mangione is a hero and a saint but also definitely did not shoot Brian Thompson in an act of social norms-enforcement.

So then why is he a hero and a saint? The truth is banal: he’s considered attractive and he’s young. If Luigi Mangione looked like Curtis Yarvin, the events of December 4th would’ve already been largely forgotten (certainly by the prison wife applicants, anyway).

To those who do not condemn Luigi Mangione for his alleged crime (the majority of the American population, apparently), the man is only worthy of veneration if he, in fact, did shoot a healthcare CEO.

If he didn’t, he’s just another privileged twenty-something white guy in tech with a back problem.