Luigi Mangione, Assassin for the Optics Age

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at recent revelations from Luigi Mangione’s latest court hearings on his state of mind after his arrest last year, and we cover more media misses.

Luigi Mangione Gets What He Wanted

Luigi Mangione, the alleged United Healthcare CEO killer, is back in the news this week as he attends a series of hearings on his legal team’s attempts to get key evidence thrown out in his New York murder case.

The first day of the hearings on Monday brought with it several interesting revelations from the corrections officers who were charged with overseeing Mangione during his ten days in a Pennsylvania following his arrest, before he was extradited to New York.

Pennsylvania correction officer Thomas Rivers testified that during the 16 hours he monitored Mangione, the alleged killer asked how the public was perceiving his crime. Rivers said he told Mangione that “mainstream media and traditional TV news focused on the crime, whereas people on social media were talking about wrongdoings, potential wrongdoings in the health care industry.”

Rivers went on to say that Mangione was disappointed that he was being compared to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski after the media reported that Magnione had reviewed Kaczynski’s manifesto on Goodreads, though he can't have been disappointed by the friendly media coverage he's received and the broader reaction from morally confused young people on social media.

As we first reported in this column back in April, Mangione has received a warmer media reception than one would expect of a man who allegedly murdered a father of two on the streets of NYC. That glowing coverage began with his arrest in December 2024, and it kicked into high gear when Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Mangione earlier this year. At the time, Politico warned that the move was “How Trump loses Gen Z,” while The View co-host Joy Behar suggested there could be “backlash” against Republicans over the DOJ seeking the death penalty in the case.

Now, with Mangione’s trial set to begin, CBS News reports that Mangione “continues to draw supporters,” while Rolling Stone brings readers “Inside the World of Luigi Mangione’s Most Fervent Supporters.”

The magazine article says that “some fans swoon online while activist groups make him the face of health care and social-justice reform” — likely exactly what Mangione wanted when he allegedly committed his gruesome crime last year.

Mangione allegedly committed the murder because of his hatred of “parasitic” health care companies, as described in his manifesto that was discovered upon his arrest. His resentment for the health insurance industry may have been exacerbated by a debilitating back injury, though Mangione probably never received a bill he couldn’t pay, given that he comes from a Maryland family whose net worth ranges into nine figures.

Mangione, the Rolling Stone article explains, receives as many as 115 notes per day from more than 54 countries.

The article says the crime — which left behind bullet casings that had the words “delay,” “deny,” and “depose” written on them — “captured the anger many Americans feel when it comes to health insurance.”

“Before Mangione was even identified as the main suspect, Thompson’s murder seemed to give people a release valve to vent their distrust in institutions, their pain, and to talk about who our systems were built to protect and why,” Rolling Stone adds.

The favorable news coverage Mangione has received seems to reflect a real phenomenon, judging from the sustained social media activity in his favor and the crowds that have gathered outside the Manhattan courthouse this week.

The New York Post reported that “dozens of swoony loony Luigi Mangione fans stood for hours in frigid temps” outside the court on Monday, including several who had camped out since Saturday, just to catch a look at their hero.

Mangione has also successfully crowdfunded more than $1.3 million for his legal costs.

Mangione, now 27, allegedly shot Thompson from behind in cold blood outside of a Manhattan hotel last year before he fled to central Pennsylvania, where he was arrested in a McDonalds five days later.

Now his lawyers are asking a New York court to suppress evidence collected between the time of his arrest and his extradition to New York. Some of that evidence includes the suspected murder weapon and his journals, along with statements he made to police before they Mirandized him.

While state-level terrorism charges were thrown out against Mangione earlier this year, he still faces several charges in New York, including second-degree murder, seven counts of criminal possession of a weapon, and possession of a forged ID. The charges carry a maximum of life in prison.

Meanwhile, he is facing federal charges that could see him facing the death penalty, if convicted. His next federal court appearance is scheduled for next month.

Headline Fail of the Week

The Atlantic says the recent shooting of two National Guards members was “A Terrible and Avoidable Tragedy in D.C.”

Writing for the outlet, Juliette Kayyem, like other pundits, concluded that President Trump is to blame for the shooting, which was carried out by an asylee from Afghanistan, purely because Trump had deployed the Guard members to the district. “There are costs to performatively deploying members of the military, one of which is the risk of endangering them.”

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reached a similar conclusion: “This is so tragic, so unnecessary, these poor guardsmen should never have been deployed. I live in DC and watched as they had virtually nothing to do but pick up trash. It was for political show and at what a cost.”

Author John Pavlovitz claimed that “Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are culpable for endangering the National Guard by putting them in harm’s way.”

As NR’s Charles C.W. Cooke writes:

Washington, D.C., is a federal city over which the federal government has plenary control. If, as has been the case this year, the federal government decides that it is necessary to deploy federal agents to enforce the law, it is permitted to do so without the expectation that those agents will be murdered. Certainly, the American social contract has become more complicated over time than it was back in 1787, but at no point has it come to tolerate the proposition that officials who have been sent to keep the peace should expect to be gunned down by assassins if their deployment is disapproved of by the progressive intellectual class.

Media Misses

-- Wajahat Ali blasted white Americans who support President Trump and criticized “white” culture during his podcast on Friday after the president posted on Truth Social outlining a “reverse migration” plan involving a permanent halt to immigration from “Third World Countries.” On his Left Hook podcast, Ali said:

I want you to realize this. You have lost. You've lost. White supremacists, White nationalists, you've lost. You are losers. Your story is a sh**** story filled with misery. It’s filled with bland chicken. It's filled with terrible, terrible dry a** meat. Your music sucks. All your culture sucks.

-- Former MSNBC host Joy Reid distastefully speculated that Vice President JD Vance plans to leave his wife, Second Lady Usha Vance, in favor of Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, simply because Kirk is white. "They can't have the successor to MAGA be the guy with the Brown Hindu wife," she said of Vance on the I’ve Had It podcast. "They're also Christian nationalists. That ain't going to work. That's why he's throwing his wife under the bus. Poor Usha. Or she's in on it." She and co-host Jennifer Welch said Kirk is not behaving like a proper widow because she wears leather pants and is “playing slap and tickle” with Vance. Also, she was, Welch said, “holding on the back of his head and rubbing on his head” when she embraced Vance at a Turning Point event last month. "Wouldn't it be the most perfect fairy tale, MAGA fairy tale, if he finally sees the light that he needs a White queen instead of this Brown Hindu?" Reid asked. "I mean, I'm not saying that's happening, or maybe that Usha is not even in on it."