The right-wing media (starting, I believe, with the New York Post) has dubbed him an "anti-capitalist," despite no evidence of that. Before his Goodreads page went private, you could see that on his list of books he'd read were drivel by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and that on his list of books he was planning on reading soon was Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged--pretty standard fare for a bright young "tech" person. As one NYT opinion writer, Michelle Goldberg, observed, Mangione is no "leftist; he appears to have had pretty typical heterodox podcast guy politics." (His "manifesto" makes clear that this is specifically about the health insurance industry, not capitalism.) Goldberg made some other apt observations about what this whole incident has revealed:
A huge number of people feel — with good reason — that they’ve been personally injured by the insurance industry, and by coverage decisions that seem highly arbitrary, impenetrable and unfair. So people feel like Mangione’s avenged them....
Whenever I’ve had a health scare, or am waiting for the results of routine tests like mammograms, I tend to be as panicked about all the potential paperwork as about, you know, dying. And the thing is, these companies are purely extractive. Relative to a single-payer system, they create no value whatsoever....
I think the reaction to the assassination shows there is a political opportunity for anyone who can harness all this free-floating fury toward the health care industry and plutocracy more broadly. Right now it has nowhere productive to go.
If only Clinton and the Democratic Party hadn't sabotaged Bernie Sanders in 2016....
UPDATE: As Walter Benn Michaels points out to me, Goldberg herself, at the time, was part of the pro-Clinton Sanders smear marchine, for example. What we now know, of course, is that tens of thousands of Demcratic Sanders voters from the primaries flipped to Trump in the general. We also know (vide Achen & Bartels) that at the end of the day most voters vote for their party's candidate (witness Trump and Republicans), regardless of their views (or, in Trump's case, conduct). That means the whole fight is over issues that are genuinely salient to "flippable" voters, like bread-and-butter economics and healthcare: on those issues, Clinton was very weak (and an obvious fake), while Sanders was a winner.
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