TRUST NO ONE — In the days since the arrest of Luigi Mangione, the alleged shooter of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, his public social media accounts have been picked clean to better understand his political leanings. In conservative media spaces, Mangione’s review of the Unabomber’s Manifesto on Goodreads has been viewed as an indication that he’s a radical leftist. A comprehensive review of his public persona in a piece in the San Francisco Standard suggests that he could be a member of the “TPOT” community, an internet subculture that’s interested largely in self-improvement and personal agency. We’ve learned thinkers, writers and podcasters like Andrew Huberman, Michael Pollan, Jon Haidt, Jash Dholani and Tim Urban were staples of his information diet, frequently reposted from Mangione’s X account. On a traditional right-left spectrum, Huberman, Pollan, Haidt, Dholani and Urban share few political views. They’re linked, instead, by a couple of common themes. Each of their careers is defined in large part by their ideological heterodoxy — their willingness to challenge what might be considered “mainstream” or “acceptable” thought. What’s most notable about Mangione’s philosophy, it turns out, is just how common it appears to be. His media consumption suggests that he was broadly interested in AI, self-improvement, mental and physical health and how the modern world can make it difficult to be well-adjusted or content. His interests and political leanings are mostly shared not by the mainstream left or right, but by people like him: young, well-educated men who often work in tech or a related field. Essentially all of the thinkers that Mangione has promoted online traffic in — to greater or lesser extents — a break from the orthodoxy, a different path than what the government or the American school system teaches. In doing so, they’ve found immense popularity. They have hundreds of thousands of social media followers and regularly find themselves on bestseller lists and atop podcast charts. Taken together, Mangione’s influences ironically replace an old kind of conventional thinking defined by an inherent trust in civic institutions with a new one. Its main tenet is one of distrust. The two prominent politicians that Mangione follows on X — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — are similarly bound together by little except a willingness to challenge political shibboleths. And that willingness to challenge orthodoxy has made them popular. The same goes for Huberman — who talks a lot about biohacking and personal enhancement — and Pollan, who’s concerned with sustainability and environmentalism. Even the more frightening thinkers to hold Mangione’s interest subscribe to a similar worldview. The most naturally shocking piece of content on Mangione’s reading list — the Unabomber Manifesto — was actually suggested to him as part of a book club of like minded individuals by his landlord, roommate and friend in Hawaii. And its content served to reinforce Mangione’s politics of distrust; the manifesto is in large part a screed against technology and industrial society that wouldn’t look particularly out of place on an episode of The Huberman Lab. The increasing popularity of Mangione’s philosophical outlook stands in stark contrast to his alleged actions — his distillation of all these ideas was uniquely disturbed. Given that Mangione’s online footprint cut off earlier this year and he was reportedly missing for months, it’s impossible to know how his outlook on the world or his personal health circumstances may have shifted in the leadup to the alleged murder. But it’s exactly that contrast that makes Mangione fascinating. He’s not a right-wing or left-wing nutjob who spun off the rails. He’s someone who seems to share a belief system with much of his generational cohort. In the wake of Thompson’s death, much has been made about how growing anger with the American health insurance system played a part in his murder. Today on Capitol Hill, for example, Ocasio-Cortez, after condemning the violence, said that “for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them.” Yet there’s also another issue implicated by Mangione’s worldview. The growing distrust central to Mangione’s politics doesn’t stop with the health care industry. His media diet suggested he’d lost faith in American institutions across the board — and modernity in general. And the thinkers that encourage those sentiments regularly find themselves at the top of bestseller lists and podcast charts, powered by a generation of young, disaffected men. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh .
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