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The man charged in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson appears to have left a positive review for the Unabomber’s manifesto online earlier this year, and praised the killer as a “political revolutionary.”
Luigi Mangione, 26, is now being held without bond in Pennsylvania as he faces charges in two states.
An account under that name on book review website Goodreads, which also matches photos of the suspect on other social media platforms, gave Ted Kaczynski’s book a four-star review in January.
“Clearly written by a mathematics prodigy. Reads like a series of lemmas on the question of 21st century quality of life,” the review reads.
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“It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out,” the review continues.
“He was a violent individual – rightfully imprisoned – who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary,” the review by an account under Mangione’s name continues.
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Thompson, 50, was gunned down outside a Manhattan hotel early on Wednesday morning by a masked man who escaped on a bike.
Police were given a major clue about the motives of the killer after it was revealed that the words “deny,” “depose,” and “defend” were carved into the live rounds and shell casings found outside the Hilton hotel on Sixth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, where the shooting took place. The words describe methods health insurance companies use to avoid paying for claims.
Mangione was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after he was spotted at a McDonald’s by someone who believed he resembled the gunman, officials said at a news conference.
He was found with a firearm and silencer consistent with the weapon used to shoot Thompson, New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.
He also had multiple fraudulent identifications and a handwritten document that speaks to “both his motivation and his mindset,” Tisch said.
Police are likely combing through social media accounts belonging to Mangione. The former University of Pennsylvania student had accounts on X, LinkedIn and Instagram.
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On Goodreads, Mangione appears to have posted some 65 reviews on books about politics, popular science, health and exercise. Among his latest batch of reviews, posted in January this year, were George Orwell’s 1984, two guidebooks for Hawaii, two books on computer programming, and Dr. Seuss’s Lorax.
Mangione didn’t leave written reviews for all the books — sometimes just giving them a star rating.
Last year Mangione reviewed Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future, the 35,000-word manifesto that he sent to the Washington Post with a promise to end his 1978–1995 mail-bomb campaign if the newspaper published it.
He appears to have read several books about Elon Musk, the Harry Potter series, and the autobiography of Jackass star Steve-O, titled Professional Idiot: A Memoir.
The memoir written by incoming vice president JD Vance was also on Mangione’s reading list. He gave it 3.86 stars.
In 2022 and 2023, he recorded that he’d read books about pain, specifically back pain, including: Becoming a Supple Leopard: The Ultimate Guide to Resolving Pain, Preventing Injury. And Optimizing Athletic Performance, Back Mechanic by Dr Stuart McGill and Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery. The Twitter banner photo of an account that matches his name and photos includes an X-ray of a spine showing pins in it, although it is unknown if the X-ray was his own.
