Luigi Mangione remains a strong person of interest in the recent UnitedHealthcare shooting—and it seems he left behind quite a digital footprint.
Mangione, who was taken into custody by police this morning, appears to have written a Goodreads review for the book, Industrial Society and Its Future, which was written by the Unabomber, Theodore John Kaczynski.
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On the social platform for bookworms, Mangione stated that the book was “clearly written by a mathematics prodigy.”
“Reads like a series of lemmas on the question of 21st century quality of life,” he continued. “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.”
“He was a violent individual—rightfully imprisoned—who maimed innocent people,” Mangione wrote of the Unabomber. “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.”
Mangione, who allegedly resented the medical community for its poor treatment of patients, then stated he found an “interesting” take online about the book. (After some research, I realized it came from this Reddit thread):
“Had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere and at the end of the day, he’s probably right. Oil barons haven’t listened to any environmentalists, but they feared him,” the Reddit user wrote.
“When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive,” they continued. “You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.”
The comment also posed the question: “Peaceful protest is outright ignored, economic protest isn’t possible in the current system, so how long until we recognize that violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self-defense?”
The comment, which Mangione quoted, ends with: “‘Violence never solved anything’ is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.”
