Magdeburg, Manhattan and the age of rage

What do these two horrors have in common? Since Thompson was murdered, leaving behind two bereaved sons, Mangione has been lionised and idolised as a glamorous pimpernel and justice-seeking matinee idol. 

Jimmy Kimmel devoted a segment of his late-night talk show to the “huge wave of horny” sweeping his staff and parts of America, swooning over the alleged assassin. Professor Julia Alekseyeva, English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Mangione’s alma mater, posted that he was the “icon we all need and deserve”. 

Champions young and old have queued up to explain the assassination as a regrettable but inevitable act of social protest. The formula has invariably been to voice a brief, generalised condemnation of murder – and then, in effect, to justify what happened to Thompson as a legitimate response to the health insurance industry’s avarice. 

As Taylor Lorenz, a journalist feted by Gen Z, posted on Bluesky: “and they wonder why we want these executives dead”. Elizabeth Warren, senator for Massachusetts, insisted that “people can only be pushed so far”.

As far as I am aware, nobody is queuing up to make similar excuses for al-Abdulmohsen or to sell T-shirts, stickers and mugs bearing his face (there is a brisk trade online in “Luigi” merch). But he and Mangione have more in common than might first be thought. For all their differences, in generation, background, and apparent motive, they both incarnate something sick in the spirit of the age.

For a start, each is an ideological hot mess. In spite of his embrace by the global left as a Robin Hood for the 2020s, Mangione is much more closely aligned with the so-called “gray tribe” of confused tech nerds who lurch unpredictably between libertarianism. AI, Darwinism and lofty contempt for those whom they consider lesser mortals. He read and relished Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, but also the Unabomber’s 1995 manifesto.

Taleb al-Abdulmohsen’s ideas, if that is the word for them, are no less impenetrable. He has postured as a defender of asylum seekers against “the German nation and the German citizens”. But his preposterous pretext for this position is that “they welcome refugees because they want to Islamise Europe”.

He has praised Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam Dutch politician; Tommy Robinson; Elon Musk; and AfD, the far right, anti-immigration German party that has made significant electoral gains in 2024.

Just as Mangione’s ramblings make little sense, al-Abdulmohsen’s statements have been a cascade of performative nonsense. “Germany,” he has claimed, “is the only country – other than Saudi Arabia – that chases female Saudi asylum seekers all over the world to destroy their lives”. In a five-minute audio message posted online shortly before Friday’s attack, he even blamed Germany for the killing of Socrates in 399 BC.

He and Mangione should be understood as traders in the hypermodern attention economy, not moral actors. Both are braggarts.

Al-Abdulmohsen has boasted that he is “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history”. Mangione, meanwhile, preened himself as a pioneer in the battle against the healthcare insurers: “Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty”.

What they have in common is limitless narcissism posing as just rebellion. Both are creatures of the Society of the Spectacle described by the “Situationist” Guy Debord in 1967: desperate for the spotlight and the clicks.

Both personify an era in which violence for speciously political ends can be a fast track to fame, infamy or both. Underpinning each man’s alleged actions is not a moral imperative but the most infantile impulse of all: “Look at me!”

Unfortunately, these acts of cold-blooded murder cannot be filed away as the work of two deranged individuals; random acts of unspeakable cruelty. In their different ways, al-Abdulmohsen and Mangione are extreme examples of the much broader pathology described by Pankaj Mishra in Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017): “An existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, ressentiment [Nietzsche’s word for envy and bewilderment], as it lingers and deepens, poisons civil society and undermines political liberty, and is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism”.

This ugly suite of emotions leads, as we have seen, to carnage, bereavement and misery. It also reflects and oxygenates disillusionment with the rule of law and social norms. This is the virus that has infected the global information machine.

Since the re-election of Donald Trump last month, there have been dangerous hints of a new perspective: that if the man who was equivocal about the Charlottesville riots and incited the January 6 insurrection can win both the popular vote and electoral college in a presidential election, then all bets are off. If the law can be over-ridden with impunity by the populist Right, then why should the rest of us cherish it?

Joe Biden did nothing for his already-tarnished legacy by pardoning his son Hunter, having promised repeatedly not to do so. In this act of moral apostasy, the outgoing president seemed to be saying: it’s every man for himself now – sauve qui peut. 

Tangled up in this is the notion that lawlessness is fine when the good guys are responsible. On which basis, it’s understandable that a young man should want to murder a healthcare insurance company CEO. 

The trouble is that the far right has long used precisely the same argument to justify the assassination of abortion doctors; or, for that matter, its racist attacks. There are many reasons why the rule of law is so important: the prevention of violence, the ability to trade and make contracts, the basic level of security that is necessary for day-to-day life to proceed.

But the most precious is that the rule of law is the best protection that the weak, the vulnerable and the disenfranchised have against the mighty. It is imperfect, of course. But nobody has yet devised a better guard-rail between the strong and the weak.

The populist right, in contrast to traditional conservatives, despise the rule of law. They feed on chaos, disorder and confusion. This is why, quite illogically, there have already been anti-migrant protests in Magdeburg, even though the man allegedly responsible for the atrocity was an outspoken friend of the anti-Islamic far right in Germany and abroad. 

This inconsistency will not bother the nativist thugs and their political friends in suits. They crave only the bedlam, hatred and heartache which has always nurtured fascism. They want progressives to throw in the towel and renounce the rule of law, too.

This is one of many elephant traps that lie in wait in 2025. If you think “hot Luigi” is a friend of progress, think again. Look at the tragedy of Magdeburg – look at the whole board – and ask where the true interests of social justice lie.

Vanity and violence command attention, as they always have. But they are the deadliest enemies of the decent society.