Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused of brazenly gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson turned celebrated vigilante, was indicted by a federal grand jury on Thursday.
The federal charges include stalking, a firearms offense, and murder through use of a firearm, according to NPR. If convicted, the murder charge makes Mangione eligible for the death penalty. Mangione is also facing additional charges from state prosecutors in New York and in Pennsylvania, where he was arrested.
Attorney General Pam Bondi recently directed prosecutors at the Department of Justice to seek the death penalty for Mangione. “If there was ever a death case, this is one,” Bondi told Fox News. “This guy is charged with hunting down a CEO, a father of two, a married man, hunting him down and executing him.”
In the months since Thompson’s murder in December, Mangione has become a lightning rod of controversy. For many, he represents the resentment and disappointment many Americans harbor about the US health care system. Mangione’s online activity has also become the subject of intense scrutiny, from his banner photos on X to his more than 200 Goodreads reviews.
His review of the so-called “Unabomber Manifesto” has attracted particular attention. “It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless [to] write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies,” he wrote. “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.”
Sean Fleming, a research fellow at the University of Nottingham who studies ant-tech radicalism, has been trying to better understand that essay’s author, Ted Kaczynski, who he’s currently writing a book about. Although Fleming is cautious about saying Mangione was inspired by Kaczynksi, it’s hard not to notice a few parallels in their cases. “Assassinating corporate executives to create a media spectacle is straight out of the Unabomber’s playbook. The assassin of Brian Thompson also left some engravings on the shell casings, which reminds me of the engraving that Kaczynski left on the components of his bombs,” Fleming says. “And more generally, Kaczynski and Mangione are both disaffected overachievers with backgrounds in STEM fields.”
Fleming shared some of his insights about the Unabomber with the host of Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, Sean Rameswaram. Read an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, below. And listen to Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.
What stood out most to you when you first read the manifesto?
What struck me is how unconspiratorial it was. Kaczynski doesn’t think there’s an evil cabal of technocrats plotting to oppress us all. His entire worldview is evolutionary. And so I thought: This is interesting as political theory. It’s extremely radical and there’s a lot I disagree with, but as a historian of political ideas, I thought it would make an interesting side project. And then it took on a life of its own.
For those who don’t remember, who was he, what did he do, and how did people come to know him?
Ted Kaczynski was born in Chicago in 1942, and he started out as a child prodigy in mathematics. He went to Harvard on a scholarship at the age of 16, and then he went on to do a PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan. And he was then hired as an assistant professor in math at Berkeley, and at that time he was the youngest in the institution’s history.
The reason we’re still talking about Kaczynski is that he managed to blackmail the media into publishing his writings.
But after two years at Berkeley he abruptly resigned, and after a little while, he bought himself a piece of land outside Lincoln, Montana, where he built himself a one-room cabin that was 10 feet by 12 feet with no electricity or running water. And from there, he launched his one-man war against modern technology. He began sending bombs to corporate executives and scientists in 1978. And his bombs killed three people and injured 23 others by the time he was arrested in 1996.
Why are we still talking about the Unabomber all these years later?
The reason we’re still talking about Kaczynski is that he managed to blackmail the media into publishing his writings. In April 1995, he sent a letter to the New York Times promising that he would stop bombing if his 35,000-word essay titled “Industrial Society and Its Future” were published in the Times or some other major newspaper. The Manifesto was published in the Washington Post on September 19th, 1995.
Which is, I think, hard to imagine today, but hundreds of thousands of people in this country were mailed this dude’s manifesto.
Yes, that’s right. Without exaggeration, it might be one of the most read manifestos since The Communist Manifesto. Soon after that, it was published in paperback. It also was uploaded to Time Warner’s Pathfinder platform. It became what might be the first ever internet manifesto, and set the template for the manifestos that have become all too common in the aftermath of violent attacks.
Not long ago, the Unabomber Manifesto was still a bestseller on Amazon. In the philosophy category, it was ahead of classics by Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine.
Kaczynski writes that “There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is.” I think a lot of people could find some truth in that statement. What was he trying to get across with this manifesto?
In the passage, you’ve just quoted, what he’s arguing is basically that human beings are biologically maladapted to the modern world. This is a big claim from evolutionary psychology. The argument is that, biologically speaking, we’re still Stone Age hunter-gatherers. We evolved hunting large animals on the savannah and in the span of just 10,000 years — the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms — we’ve constructed this world of concrete, steel, and screens. So Kaczynski argues that because of this, we suffer from depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance abuse, and so many other psychological pathologies that so-called primitive human beings do not.
And what’s his solution?
His solution is to destroy all modern technology and return ourselves to a more primitive condition, to crash out of the modern world. What he envisions is a group of anti-tech revolutionaries sabotaging the electric grid, blowing up the gas pipelines, and attacking the nervous system, so to speak, of modern society. He wanted to plunge us back into, if not the Stone Age, then something like small-scale agriculture and a shepherd society.
How was this manifesto received in the ’90s when it was published by the Washington Post and delivered to front porches around the country? And how has his reputation changed over time?
Well, there was a lot of debate about it. Many journalists treated Kaczynski as a serious intellectual, and many members of the public, in letters to the editor and on talk radio shows, hailed him as a folk hero. He was often described as a modern-day Thoreau.
His warnings about the negative consequences of modern technology began to seem prophetic to many people.
Kaczynski fell out of fashion from the late ’90s until the early 2010s. But then he was rediscovered as concerns about climate change, artificial intelligence, and the consequences of digital immersion became so much more salient. And his warnings about the negative consequences of modern technology began to seem prophetic to many people. So there’s been a Unabomber revival.
Who are the types of people who are glomming on to this manifesto?
During the Unabomber mania of the mid-1990s, Kaczynski gained a following on the radical left, especially among green anarchists. But he’s returned to cultural prominence with the opposite political valence. Today he’s seen more as a figure of the right. As you may have noticed, he spends the first 3,000 words of his manifesto railing against leftism.
And in the context of the culture war in the 2010s, conservatives rediscovered and rehabilitated him and co-opted him onto their side in the culture war. So Kaczynski has now been appropriated by neo-Nazis, eco-fascists, far-right accelerationists, a rag bag of people on the right who are drawn to his critique of leftism.
Which is so interesting because Luigi Mangione has been hailed as something of a hero on the left, right? How is it that Kaczynski appeals to a figure like Mangione but also neo-Nazis?
What makes Kaczynski appealing to so many different sorts of radicals is that he defies easy categorization. And this makes his ideology like an à la carte menu of ideas. For instance, green anarchists were enthralled with his critique of technology while neo-Nazis, generally speaking, ignore the critique of technology and focus solely on the critique of leftism.
Does Kaczynski ever show any remorse for murder?
No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t show any remorse for the people he killed and his bombings. He says they’re not innocent. At one point, he says the people who are responsible for the advancement of technology are worse than Stalin, worse than Hitler. What they’re doing to humanity is even more grotesque, he says. But he does acknowledge that his anti-tech revolution would kill millions if not billions of people. This is an extremely apocalyptic vision.
Many people accept his argument up until the point where he suggests that we should blow up the electric grid and knock ourselves back to the Stone Age. In other words, many people accept parts of his diagnosis of the problems with the modern world. But they’re completely unwilling to take his prescription seriously.
Do you think the ideas in Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto will stand the test of time?
I think the points about evolutionary mismatch will stand the test of time and will become increasingly appealing to a new generation of radicals. The parts about intelligent machines look especially prophetic in our current moment.
In the ’90s, he looked like a one-off. He could easily be dismissed as an isolated crank, with a sort of idiosyncratic ideology. But in the 2020s, it looks like the world’s caught up with him. As concerns about the negative consequences of modern technology become especially acute, I think it will become increasingly likely that others will follow in Kaczynski’s footsteps.
