what do you think about Mangionistas?
First of all, I don’t want to make personal judgments about those girls because I don’t know them, and I don’t think that would be fair.
That being said, what happened yesterday was genuinely indefensible. I’ve tried to reason through what could possibly have led them to think that saying those things — and saying them in that way — was a good idea, but I honestly cannot come up with a logical explanation.
Even the comparison to Osama Bin Laden: yes, Brian Thompson has very likely caused more indirect deaths than Osama ever did. But you would have to be incredibly socially unaware not to understand that there is a time and place for certain arguments, and that was neither. “Telling Americans the truth to their faces” is not going to trigger some revolutionary awakening. The Epstein files alone should have proven that by now.
And then, on top of that, you pair a potentially legitimate systemic critique with genuinely appalling comments directed at the victim’s family. It creates the impression that some people view the world as if it were a cartoon divided into “good guys” and “bad guys,” when reality is far more morally and socially complex than that.
I read an interesting comment on Reddit suggesting that perhaps Mangionistas see this kind of verbal aggression as a way to provoke revolt or inspire revolutionary sentiment. It’s possible that they believe that, but I also think it reflects a very immature and naïve understanding of how social change actually happens. Sometimes I genuinely wonder whether these people have ever seriously studied history. Revolutions do not emerge this way.
(Realistically, this is where I could write an entirely separate post about revolution as a political phenomenon, but I doubt anyone wants that.)
Very briefly: over the last century, it has become extraordinarily difficult to produce the kind of revolution historically associated with events like the French Revolution within developed Western countries. The situation is entirely different in nations facing extreme instability or conditions associated with the so-called “third world.”
Meaningful social change has never come from randomly provoking crowds and shouting inflammatory things into the void. Schools obviously do not teach people “how to start a revolution,” but the historical patterns are not difficult to recognize if you actually pay attention. Organized social upheaval has almost always involved sections of the “bourgeoisie”, institutional coordination, economic leverage, and long-term political structure behind it. Only after that do mass movements become effective.
Ironically, there people who identify with the political left should remember Trotsky’s observation that the true challenge of revolution is not the uprising itself, but the day after. Anyone is capable of protesting, using violence, or destroying institutions. The difficult part is building something sustainable afterward. Without structure, organization, and a coherent long-term plan, everything collapses into chaos.
At one point I also considered whether this behavior might simply be an attempt to bring public attention back to Luigi’s case. As Andy Warhol famously said, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.” And honestly, there is truth to that — the internet constantly rewards trashy behavior with visibility and clout. But this situation is fundamentally different because there is a real person involved — Luigi — who is not free to publicly clarify his position, respond, or distance himself from any of this. So yes, perhaps these actions generate attention (especially considering how many views yesterday’s video received), but they generate attention around someone who currently has very limited ability to speak for himself. I genuinely struggle to see what the actual benefit is supposed to be.
If anyone has a perspective on that, I would honestly like to hear it!
As for the “Mangionistas” movement itself, I’ve never fully understood what it is attempting to be (though admittedly I have never followed them very closely). Is it a movement advocating for fair trials? Healthcare reform? Both?
If the goal is fair trials, then logically the movement would need to advocate for the rights of the entire American population. And unless I’m mistaken, I have not seen these people show comparable engagement with other defendants, cases, or incarcerated individuals. If fairness matters only in Luigi’s case, then by definition this stops being activism and becomes a personal cause centered around one individual.
The same logic applies if the movement is supposedly about healthcare reform.
And if the intention is somehow to combine both causes, then the project becomes even more difficult because healthcare reform and criminal justice reform are already two enormous and distinct political issues. Even with excellent organization, sustaining a movement that effectively merges both would be extraordinarily difficult — and, frankly, the organization here does not appear particularly strong to begin with.
Most importantly: you do NOT build movements like this around the name of a single person. That is one of the most basic principles of political and social organizing. Otherwise, comparisons to things like the Manson Family become inevitable. Again, this feels almost painfully obvious. Political and social movements should not revolve around a single individual, especially someone currently accused of murder and awaiting trials.
I honestly have many more thoughts about that, but I’ll stop here.
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