00:00:26.540that's right caroline today we are talking about terrorism we are talking about who becomes a
00:00:35.620terrorist in the united states of america inspired by luigi mangioni the state's suspect in the
00:00:42.600shooting of brian thompson being charged with terrorism in the state of new york this is0.97
00:00:48.500fucking lit i'm so excited i'm locked in let's go if you're listening to this that means you're0.85
00:00:52.780listening to the free preview this is actually going to be a shorter preview today because we0.97
00:00:57.200are talking about some serious stuff terrorism in america i don't think caro and i want to end up on
00:01:03.940a watch list before our books come out that would kind of suck um but in the meantime since our0.93
00:01:10.500chosen genre is intellectual shit talking i figured we could open today with some of the0.97
00:01:16.280worst takes about the shooting of the united healthcare ceo just to warm us up for talking0.99
00:01:21.480about the fucking NSA. Wait, I also hold on. I just have to pause right now and let everyone0.99
00:01:25.820know Katie and I had never met in person until this week. And we finally met in person this week
00:01:31.500in SF. We had like a little date that was chaperoned by my husband. And so I just feel
00:01:36.480like the conversation today is going to be especially electric because it's like you've
00:01:40.160been dating online for a while and then you met IRL and you touched. And you were like,
00:01:45.060what a mutual catfish. We'll put the picture of us literally frolicking on the beach
00:01:51.260in the episode show notes i sent it to thomas and he was like i think this is the happiest i've ever
00:01:57.820seen you look and then it was like two hours of like getting to know you like what are your
00:02:04.360parents like and then katie and i were just like all right now down to brass tacks about the
00:02:07.860terrorism episode that we're doing this week and riley was like whoa we literally had that
00:02:12.900conversation inside a waymo yeah we did like one of those like self-driving surveillance cars
00:02:18.560we're like maybe we shouldn't talk about this in here okay so unsurprisingly the vast majority of
00:02:25.020these takes are just finger wagging at the public for not being sufficiently overcome with sadness
00:02:30.860that like a man was killed who earned a million dollars a month from denying Americans health
00:02:35.360care so um yeah I think the thing to know about the media response is that the shooting of Brian
00:02:40.300Thompson in midtown Manhattan created a real environment of fear among the prominent and the
00:02:48.080wealthy because it was this moment where like the socially enforced illusion of their separation
00:02:54.480and invincibility was really shattered right and it became clear immediately that not only is it
00:03:01.460technically possible to use violence to remove someone from power which is something that i
00:03:06.740think everyone knows in theory but is like very different when it happens in real life
00:03:10.560but and this is the key that there are evidently many americans who would like to do so or at the
00:03:17.900very least are not like widely condemning it when it happens. Right. Like the echoing of support,
00:03:23.920I'm sure, would be very unnerving if you were one of the hyper, hyper elites. Can't relate
00:03:29.520personally, but I like to practice a tool called empathy because I'm a fiction writer. And so I can
00:03:35.320imagine that that would be really hard for them. So something that's becoming a common theme on
00:03:40.900this show, I think, is the incentive structure of corporate media. And this was like the perfect
00:03:47.100example of an event where you see the corporate media closing ranks around the ruling class
00:03:53.740oh my god that's so true so we're gonna look at some editorializing uh from these newspapers and
00:03:59.840institutions and so i picked three pieces that rushed to denounce the public response as a means
00:04:05.960to defend the legitimacy of the status quo so first up we have yale insights calling what
00:04:13.020transpired in the weeks following the murder quote a very un-american response to the murder
00:04:19.060of brian thompson caroline please read i love the like profound amnesia that these people seem to
00:04:26.600have about how america was founded as a country just like profound and just like wildly reckless
00:04:32.600violence okay while abhorrent it was sadly not surprising to see so many influencers mocking
00:04:39.340and celebrating thompson's death and fits an emerging pattern of populists on both the far
00:04:44.380left and far right increasingly coming together to attack business both drawing on a shared
00:04:49.620populist resentment of pillars of american society this unholy alliance between the far left and the
00:04:56.160far right seems to think that businesses cannot succeed without doing something unethical or
00:05:01.800hurting others to democratic socialist senator bernie sanders pew pew pew father has entered
00:05:07.440the room we need a rap air horn for this it is impossible to make money quote without stepping
00:05:14.100over children sleeping on the street end quote not dissimilar to republican congresswoman marjorie
00:05:19.400taylor green's fiery attacks on businesses for quote corporate communism green's democratic
00:05:25.620counterpart alexandria ocasio-cortez wow that's absolutely wild i was like all right well that's
00:05:33.580fucked up equivalency but okay has railed against ceo pay pointing out that while ceos of major u.s
00:05:39.640companies earned 21 times as much as the typical worker in 1965 they now earn 290 times more0.65
00:05:46.660how is that okay i'm not gonna get i'm not gonna get caught up in this i'm gonna finish the
00:05:50.860segment this anti-business vitriol and hostility is deeply misplaced and historically americans
00:05:58.760generally do not resent businesses and the prosperity their successes have created i'm
00:06:03.200going to place a little sticky right there to return to as a prominent american economist
00:06:07.140thorsten veblen pointed out a century ago in the theory of the leisure class running up through
00:06:12.640entertainment journalist robin leach's lifestyles of the rich and the famous iconic reference
00:06:17.620incredible citations americans are fascinated by those who succeed and do not resent their
00:06:23.600success as long as they are not scoundrels who cheat to get ahead whoa okay but if they succeed
00:06:29.540through honest hard work and innovation did the free hand of economics write this segment
00:06:34.620that's what's happening but if they succeed through honest hard work and innovation the
00:06:39.980american public tends to admire those successful people and want to identify with and emulate them
00:06:44.900in fact the 2024 edelman trust barometers survey of 36 000 respondents across 28 countries
00:06:51.900shows that business is the most trusted institution by far interesting quote my ceo end quote inspired
00:06:59.520is far more public trust than all other figures in society including elected officials media types
00:07:05.540clergy and academics some 77 percent even identify quote my employer end quote as their most trusted
00:07:12.660source of information this suggests that to a majority of americans outside the far fringes
00:07:17.320business leaders are seen as widely admired stabilizing forces in society not caricatured
00:07:23.080greedy villains out to harm regular people what am i reading so basically if you're mad about
00:07:30.960exploitation and you don't love capitalism no you're not and yes you do our survey said so
00:07:38.060that survey feels like a rabbit hole that we could go down i feel like i would be really curious to
00:07:43.880read more about that but we have a lot to go through today well there's also something funny
00:07:47.460going on here with categorizing the anger as fringe and frenzied it's like okay well if that
00:07:53.140were true you wouldn't be writing this article the very reason you're writing a piece about how
00:07:58.200americans love ceos actually is because you're being confronted with the reality that no the0.91
00:08:03.560fuck they do not right and i would also say it's it's very effective and frankly very smart to0.97
00:08:09.040describe this as a movement that is defined by you know the quote far right and the quote far left0.99
00:08:14.140But the reality is that it's very rare that corporate media will spend a lot of time on anything that the quote far left cares about or even the quote far right cares about.
00:08:24.360Like we were not extensively covering QAnon in corporate media when that was a huge thing on the far right.
00:08:29.280And so it's like, by definition, the fact that you're writing about this means that there are people in whatever moderate center you deem to be the moderate center that you are trying to convince not to, you know, stray outwards into a political sphere that they might be embarrassed to be associated with.
00:08:45.060Yeah, I mean, the very reason the public response was so uniform is because people largely did not view Brian Thompson as an innocent person.
00:08:54.460And that view is inseparable from his role as the CEO of the health insurance company that denies double the claims of the industry average.
00:09:01.940People didn't have something against him personally.
00:09:04.400They just saw him as representative of a system that they do not view as innocent.
00:09:09.140And his CEO-dom, his role as CEO is inseparable from that.
00:09:13.860It's so interesting because I always feel like I am gaining legitimacy by associating
00:09:18.600myself with you because you're such like a legitimate person.
00:09:21.440And I'm just like, okay, so Katie, case in point, this is just a quick digression.
00:09:25.700I saw someone referenced us in a very nice shout out on Substack and they described you
00:09:29.900as like Katie of money with Katie success, like a business woman.
00:09:32.940And then they described me, Caro, quote of internet excellence.
00:09:37.000all of it just to say i i understand that i'm not technically legitimate yet but i feel so
00:09:46.700legitimate talking about this topic and especially talking about it with you because we're talking
00:09:50.760about the health care industry and i have learned so much from the deep dives that you have done0.97
00:09:54.900on just how like corrupt the health care industry is yeah it's fucked and i think when we're looking0.99
00:10:01.520at these editorials that are basically slapping people on the nose like they're a bad dog for0.95
00:10:08.400finding any sort of entertainment in what's happened, it's also a really effective redirect
00:10:13.220to make it seem like everyone's talking about the death of a person when in fact everyone's0.98
00:10:17.380talking about how fucked up healthcare is. And it's really convenient that you're moving past0.97
00:10:21.080all of that part of the discourse to just claim that everyone's running around the street going
00:10:25.540ding dong, the witch is dead. No one who talks about this even knows who Brian Thompson is. He
00:10:29.180is a metaphor like this is all a metaphorical conversation so i want you to keep reading
00:10:34.640because in the beginning i was like yeah i can see why these people are freaked out but i think
00:10:39.600they're making a good faith like to them it's a good faith argument but then i kept reading and
00:10:43.920i was like oh no it's not and wait who wrote this two yale faculty members okay likewise it is0.99
00:10:52.120important to recognize the massive benefits wrought by american businesses writ large oh my fucking0.97
00:10:56.820God, and the net positive impact of business on society. At the end of the day, American0.98
00:11:02.020businesses have provided not only U.S. citizens with a more prosperous life, but they have
00:11:06.880exported prosperity around the world in the form of wealth, innovation, ideas, and improvements
00:11:13.280in quality of life. Furthermore, our form of American capitalism has made it uniquely
00:11:18.660possible for anyone to rise to the top of society, regardless of where they were born,
00:11:23.760and for normal people to access goods and services which were once reserved for elites
00:11:28.680so i'm like all right yeah um katie's just raising her hand in the back of the lecture hall
00:11:34.320excuse me um what are you talking about like the line exporting prosperity around the world in the
00:11:42.320form of wealth sent me to another dimension i was like that is an almost unbelievably bad faith
00:11:48.800representation of how the united states has become as wealthy as it is it's like no no we're not like
00:11:55.180creating it here and then sending it elsewhere we have been involved in a centuries-long
00:12:01.780extraction process from the rest of the world that's how we got it and then this line about
00:12:07.360how american capitalism has made it uniquely possible for anyone to rise to the top of society
00:12:12.660regardless of where they were born also makes me wonder like what does it take to get a job at an
00:12:17.960ivy league school because that is just plainly wrong like the u.s ranks 10th in income mobility
00:12:23.560in the oecd which is a metric that the world economic forum designed to basically determine
00:12:28.660if you are born lower class how many generations would it take you to reach an average income
00:12:34.760oh that's interesting and in the u.s it's like five like it is so hard so hard to break out of
00:12:42.940your class. Social mobility in the U.S. is, I think the last I checked, it was in The Economist.
00:12:48.400They looked at perceptions of social mobility and compared it with the actual social mobility.
00:12:54.620And the United States is like one of the only places where people overestimate their chances
00:12:59.780of making it into the upper class. I was about to say it's a convenient outcome. It is the
00:13:04.520intended outcome of us talking nonstop about the American dream, is that you just internalize it
00:13:10.720is true. Wait, I'm curious, though. Do you know who's at the top of the list in terms of income
00:13:15.220mobility for countries? Yes. Okay. The places with the highest income mobility in order, Denmark,
00:13:22.320Sweden, Norway, Finland, Spain, Australia, Canada, Japan, Italy, and then the US.
00:13:29.340Cool. So that actually, that maps pretty similarly to that list that we had
00:13:33.260a few episodes back about the happiest countries, right?
00:13:36.520so i also liked the line where they were like normal people to access goods and services which
00:13:43.980were once reserved for the elites it's like oh you mean like health care that normal service
00:13:49.160that is considered a basic right in every other place that tens of millions of americans don't
00:13:53.940have access to is that the kind of thing you're talking about when you say basic services it's
00:13:58.660also just like i don't want to beat this dead horse but the reference of that survey of people
00:14:02.440trusting quote business as the most trusted institution the word business is doing so much
00:14:08.300work there and it makes me think about the conversation we had about what happened after
00:14:12.820the election and how people were like well what what does economy mean to you because that's a
00:14:17.040word that people were like well the economy is great and it's like well the economy is a nightmare
00:14:21.080and it encapsulates so much that it also makes me wonder like what were the questions that were in
00:14:25.760that survey did they determine what business is because when I think of healthcare corporations
00:14:30.060When I think about, like, the consolidating of wealth and power in the healthcare industry, I don't think, like, little B business.
00:14:37.100I think, like, capital B fuck you up business, which I don't think most Americans, myself included, frankly, have, like, a working understanding of.
00:14:45.100Yeah, you think, like, multinational monopolies.0.99
00:14:48.980Okay, so this next one kind of feels like dunking on a three-foot hoop, but fuck it, we ball.0.99
00:14:54.040This is Bret Stephens, Brian Thompson, not Luigi Mangioni.0.98
00:14:58.280is the real working class hero presented without comment and by without comment i mean we're gonna
00:15:04.960dunk on it for the next 10 minutes just also want to pause here and just remind everyone
00:15:09.260that if you have a relative who is saying the new york times has become too woke0.81
00:15:12.940uh brett stevens is making like fuck you up money at the new york times as an opinion columnist so0.83
00:15:18.660publishing these horrific takes okay go ahead thompson grew up in a working class family in0.96
00:15:24.640Jewell, Iowa, a tiny farming community north of Des Moines, Amy Julia Harris and Ernesto
00:15:29.900Londoño report. Quote, his mother was a beautician, according to family friends,
00:15:34.280and his father worked at a facility to store grain. Thompson's childhood was spent, quote,
00:15:38.980going row by row through the fields to kill weeds with a knife or working manual labor at turkey
00:15:43.880and hog farms. Those details are worth bearing in mind as some people seek to cast his killing as a
00:15:50.040tale of justified or at least understandable fury against faceless corporate greed one x times a
00:15:56.860reporter taylor lorenz just want to clarify uh she left the times because the washington post
00:16:02.100offered her more money but that's really smart framing on his part one x times reporter taylor
00:16:07.340lorenz said she felt quote joy at the killing elizabeth warren the massachusetts senator
00:16:12.700offered that quote violence is never the answer but quote people can only be pushed so far
00:16:18.020pictures of luigi mangioni the 26 year old hottie that's my edition the 26 year old charged with
00:16:25.040the murder of thompson have also elicited a fair amount of oohing and aahing on social media over
00:16:30.380his tone physique and bright smile wow i added the hottie at the exact right point brett stevens was
00:16:35.480like hold my beer babe it's going from like six to midnight while he submits this like horrific
00:16:40.840draft um but if mangioni's personal story at least what we know of it so far is supposed to serve as
00:16:47.760some sort of parable, it isn't one that progressives should take comfort in. He is the scion of a
00:16:53.860wealthy and prominent Maryland family, was educated at an elite private school in the
00:16:58.840University of Pennsylvania, and worked remotely from a nice apartment in Hawaii. And while Mangione,
00:17:04.540like millions of people, apparently suffered from debilitating back pain, excellent health care is
00:17:09.380not generally an issue for Americans of great wealth. Isn't that an amazing self-own? That
00:17:14.720sentence is doing a lot of work well if he's so rich shouldn't he have awesome health care0.97
00:17:19.620it's like yeah dude that's the point that is exactly the point oh my fucking god all this
00:17:24.540suggests that mangioni may prove to be a figure out of a dostoyevsky novel raskolnikov with the0.89
00:17:30.580silver spoon it's a familiar type elique ramirez sanchez better known as carlos the jackal was a
00:17:37.680lawyer's son who moved him to london before he went on to become an international terrorist
00:17:42.120osama bin laden came from immense wealth angry rich kids jacked up on radical nihilistic
00:17:48.220philosophies can cause a lot of harm not least to the working class folks whose interests they0.99
00:17:52.920pretend to champion first of all subtle flex that you can pronounce dostoyevsky yeah bitch what do0.96
00:17:59.780you think my mfa was worth it was the worth that one word dost how do i say it dostoyevsky0.61
00:18:04.920dostoyevsky amazing and that's on public education in the sec uh university system
00:18:12.060okay it is such a tired american trope to suggest that someone who grew up poor and then went on to
00:18:19.260become wealthy is unilaterally admirable regardless of how they did it even if they do it via legalized
00:18:26.220rent seeking it's like well he grew up poor so so it's really funny to me that he characterizes
00:18:32.100this crime as like angry rich kid jacked up on radical nihilistic philosophies causing harm to
00:18:38.660quote working class folks and I actually don't even think it's all that helpful to analyze this
00:18:44.940from an interpersonal lens to begin with but if you do they are both class traitors like that's0.98
00:18:50.980the more interesting interpersonal angle than like well he used to work on a farm yeah I would
00:18:57.080also say it is an equally tired trope to suggest that wealth immediately disqualifies you from
00:19:03.520class consciousness. And I think that this is something that you and I work very hard to
00:19:07.500dispel in this podcast. And that actually was like a late term realization for me in the research
00:19:13.620that I've done. But it makes complete sense. Like Shea Guevara was also from a very wealthy family.
00:19:17.900It is not accidental that a lot of radicals come from places of stability and wealth because
00:19:23.040that is what is required for you to take the time to learn things that are outside of the parameter
00:19:29.240of what a given society wants you to learn and to feel comfortable taking risks. It is a very smart
00:19:35.780flip to point out someone's wealth because I think we ironically connote wealth with immorality,
00:19:42.080but we don't think of that directly. And so instead we go, well, a wealthy person would
00:19:47.420never care about poor people in a sincere way because wealthy people don't care about poor0.98
00:19:51.540people and then it's like well what if they did what if you fucking did care about poor people0.79
00:19:56.040what if he did care about class consciousness what if that is why a person would behave the0.78
00:20:00.300way that they behaved but they don't want you to think that it's possible to have stability and to0.83
00:20:04.360also believe that class consciousness matters because then the whole fucking gig is up i think0.88
00:20:09.960nathan robinson wrote something interesting about this for current affairs he was talking about how0.74
00:20:14.460it's clear in the manifesto that luigi has a pretty high opinion of himself like he's like
00:20:19.740well I'm the only person willing to face this with such brutal honesty and he's like yeah this
00:20:25.440kid needed like a social movement like yeah he had the right anger but he had nowhere to put it
00:20:31.520and so he acted out in this like ultimately tragic way like one person is dead the other is going to
00:20:37.680be in prison for the rest of their lives nothing is going to change but to your point I do think
00:20:42.580that some level of wealth instability is necessary for the ability to take risks right and like like
00:20:50.480see the world for what it is it's very difficult when you are living paycheck to paycheck and you
00:20:55.740are just laser focused on your own survival and you can only look five feet in front of you
00:21:00.760right to think about things like organizing or like taking radical action like you're not going
00:21:05.720to risk getting arrested because you don't have any ways to get bail and as we'll learn the risk
00:21:11.380of arrest is actually quite high when you are dissenting okay so lastly we have graham woods
00:21:17.160luigi mangioni's commonplace deplorable politics in the atlantic classic this is the deck for the
00:21:25.660article from his actions and the glee that they have elicited one learns not that the health care
00:21:32.060system is broken but that many people are yes so this article is sort of a big nothing burger
00:21:39.320the argument. I'm like, what is the argument you're trying to make? To the point that I'm
00:21:44.040actually, I had a hard time even trying to summarize it. There's really no analysis.
00:21:49.200It's just like, Luigi sucks. Y'all suck if you don't think he sucks. And the only person who1.00
00:21:53.640doesn't suck is me. So I'm just going to have you read it. Quote, the philosophers have only0.98
00:22:00.400analyzed the world, Karl Marx wrote in 1845, but the point is to change it. It is a very long fall
00:22:07.420from thesis on Feuerbach to laughing on Pierce Morgans' show. Taylor Lorenz, like Mangione,
00:22:13.520gives no evidence of acquaintance with the debates on the left about the uses and abuses of violence,
00:22:18.540let alone the more recent research on the potency of nonviolence. Moreover, she and Mangione seem
00:22:24.660to have disregarded Marx's point, which was that changing the world is inseparable from the process
00:22:29.240of understanding it. In Mangione's notebook, he reportedly derided the United Healthcare
00:22:33.780executive as holding a quote bean counting conference that's hilarious as if the counting
00:22:38.800of beans were not an important part of allocating scarce resources wow okay only the most incurious
00:22:45.960moral observer could accuse the ceo whose name few activists knew until they started tattooing
00:22:51.160his assassin's face on their legs of mass killing as if his company hunted its customers and gunned
00:22:57.000them down in the streets we'll go back to that the claim that insurance company executives are
00:23:01.560murderers, and therefore fair game for murderers, is the healthcare equivalent of Berthold Brecht's
00:23:07.000quip about not knowing who was the greater thief, the one who robs a bank or the one who opens one.
00:23:11.960Kind of cooked, honestly. That is a lit phrase. Okay, tattooing that on my face. But most serious
00:23:19.880Marxists have by now come around to the idea that only with a well-regulated banking sector can an
00:23:24.660economy grow enough to let people live decently. In Cuba, one of the few countries that still takes
00:23:29.660a brechtian view of banks the poverty is such that beggars approach tourists in the street to
00:23:33.980ask them for leftover soap bars they might have brought from abroad we should also at some point
00:23:38.360talk about cuba and how the u.s plays a role in cuba's poverty but that's another episode by
00:23:43.340contrast otherwise smart people seem not to realize that health care involves trade-offs
00:23:47.680that countries without private insurance tend to ration it and and that many health care systems
00:23:54.440healthier than our own still have extensive private insurance administered by maddening0.99
00:23:58.740bureaucracies that sometimes refuse claims i do you think that people who are writing this shit0.98
00:24:03.340are just like relying on the high likelihood that most americans are so tired and overworked and0.87
00:24:08.900overwhelmed that they're just not going to double check these claims i mean probably but i think
00:24:13.080what what really there were a couple things here that drove me crazy but i thought it was really
00:24:17.660really annoying that he was like most serious marxists understands that a banking sector
00:24:23.900needs to be well regulated it's like okay well first of all ours isn't uh see also the great
00:24:30.560financial crisis and like the the steady period of deregulation that we have been subjected to0.68
00:24:36.700over the last 25 years so beyond that we're not fucking talking about the banking industry this
00:24:42.760is a why are you bringing in regulations for banks the entire reason someone would take like0.92
00:24:48.480a vigilante act in the way that the suspect in the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting did
00:24:55.740is because there is a broad sense amongst the American public that just wanting regulation
00:25:02.820or like voting, taking nonviolent action, protesting, that these things don't actually
00:25:07.960change anything, that nobody's listening to us. Right. I would also say I'm thinking now it's
00:25:14.020really interesting to me that we're using so many terms to describe health care that aren't health
00:25:20.040care like health care as a business like health care as a bank it's like well what about health
00:25:26.720care what do americans think about health care putting aside business and banks what do we think0.99
00:25:31.260about fucking health care we know what we think about it you know that americans hate their0.98
00:25:35.100health care options you can't grapple it with with it directly because the second you start0.99
00:25:39.400talking about it directly you have nothing to fall back on there are no cutesy little analogies0.96
00:25:44.860no historical analogs it's like no you just have people who are fucking mad although in brett0.68
00:25:50.400stephen's piece he did try to like completely misrepresent a kaiser family foundation study
00:25:54.500to suggest that people are like super happy with the health insurance system actually and like this
00:25:59.200is all just one big misunderstanding i won't even begin to address the claims here about the so-called
00:26:04.000necessary trade-offs of administering a health system and rationing because then we'll be here
00:26:08.560all night but let's link some of the episodes that you've done on this for anyone who wants to
00:26:13.320learn more about it because you've done some incredible work on health care for money with
00:26:16.840katie well thank you yeah we will link the one that kind of explains why that argument is
00:26:22.340in bad faith and how nothing about our current system is focused on allocating care properly
00:26:29.200because it's not what it's designed to do it's not what it's set up for um but now that we've
00:26:33.740had our fun let's talk about the surveillance state uh that takes aside in order to get our
00:26:39.980arms around this we have to talk about the suspect in this crime what he's been charged with uh and a