On Tuesday this week, Nathan Mahoney, 32, of Walker, Michigan, walked into a conference room at Anderson Express Inc. and stabbed his boss. No warning.
Mahoney fled the scene and was apprehended a day later. He’s now being held on a $500,000 bond for attempted murder.
The victim, Erik Denslow, was airlifted to hospital in a critical condition. He’s expected to survive.
The case is puzzling. Mahoney had only been working at the company, a manufacturer, for a few weeks, and little about his background—at least as far as we know—suggests an obvious motive for the attempted killing.
But the timing—now there’s a potential clue.
One clear avenue of investigation, the cops say, is that this was a copycat assassination attempt, the model being Luigi Mangione, who brutally gunned down the CEO of insurer United Healthcare in New York, nearly three weeks ago.
The motivation for the killing of Brian Thompson, we’re told, was anger at the medical industry, after Mangione had botched spinal surgery; although it’s worth noting that neither Mangione, nor any member of his family, appears to have used United as an insurer. The target was simply, as far as we know, a representative of what the killer believed to be an unfair industry, an industry that had robbed him of his money, his health and even his ability to have sex, and does the same or worse to thousands of others.
The similarities between the Mangione and Mahoney cases are twofold at this stage. We have the type of target (“boss”) and a similar approach—cold, dispassionate, in from the side / behind. An assassin’s approach, even if Mahoney failed to kill his target.
The copycat theory is credible. But it’s still speculation.
Maybe Mahoney was having a very bad day at the office and snapped?
Maybe he got the wrong loot box on his favourite pay-to-play online shooter and decided to take out his frustration on someone else? People are strange.
Copycat or not, the Mahoney case should alert us to the very real possibility that others will imitate Mangione. And not just one or two either.
Indeed, the Mangione case could serve as a template for leftist “resistance” during the second Trump term: individual rather than collective, specifically targeted rather than diffuse, and, of course, violent.
As far as I’m concerned, I think this is certain to happen. I say this because the left, as an organized movement or series of movements, has simply run out of steam. Even Axios are saying so: “The Resistance Goes Quiet” was the headline a few weeks ago to a story that detailed the left’s collective exhaustion in the wake of Trump’s victory.
It probably won’t have escaped your notice that the leftist response to Trump’s victory was nothing like 2016. There were protests, sure, but they were so low-energy and so poorly attended it was hard not to feel a tinge of pity.
The realisation that eight years of mass mobilization against Trump has resulted in a bigger, badder version of Trump getting elected with an even broader mandate and the support of the world’s richest man (who now owns Twitter)—that must be crushing, frankly.
In short, mass mobilisation against Trump has failed.
And so what does that leave? Well, one thing it leaves is individual action. The man against the system. The lone wolf. Robin Hood—without the Merry Men.
That’s precisely how Mangione is being portrayed right now: as Robin Hood, a folk hero.
There’s been plenty of praise for Mangione on account of his boyish good looks and chiselled abs. We also know some funny things happen downstairs for the so-called fairer sex when a man becomes a killer—just peer inside Ted Bundy’s mailbag if you don’t believe me. But we shouldn’t be fooled by any of the flippant stuff we see on social media about Luigi Mangione. There’s a genuine depth of feeling that goes far, far beyond the ephemeral and the horny.
An image circulated on Twitter of Mangione as a Catholic saint, halo and all. The picture is hanging in a pizza joint in Mangione’s hometown. People are dressing up as Luigi from the Super Mario Brothers and discoursing to the assembled media and anyone who’ll listen about the iniquities of the American healthcare system. TikTok has been awash with videos of leftists promising further retribution for bosses and CEOs and company owners.
The Mangione model, if you like, will be popular not just because of the absence of satisfaction to be found in leftist mass movements in the years to come, but also because it gives license to the widespread and utterly retarded worldview in which a small number of fat cats, plutocrats, call them what you will, control everything and fix the world in their favour. This worldview is prevalent on the left, but it’s also found on the right too.
Just kill these rich people and everything will be okay!
In truth, if you wanted to fix America’s healthcare system, you’d be MAGA at this point. You’d be willing RFK Jr. to go all the way and gut the Food and Drug Administration, end the revolving-door culture between regulators and industry, eliminate the vaccine schedule, get the fluoride out of the water, stop Americans eating processed food, and so on.
There’s corruption in America’s healthcare system all right, but it’s not a bunch of Monopoly Men in top hats diving into swimming pools filled with drug money. It’s a system that favours corporations over the American people, that allows products to be introduced to the market on the basis of nonexistent safety testing and treats problems with ad-hoc “solutions” that don’t address the underlying causes and instead create more problems that are then treated with more ad-hoc “solutions” and so on, in a kind of endless medical regress.
But these people—the people dressing up as Luigi—don’t want that system to change. They don’t want America to be healthy again. They want Ozempic and they want it for free.
Leftists also want to feel powerful again. Luigi Mangione showed them they can do that—even if their actions, in truth, change nothing.