Speaker 1: Also media. Hi everyone, It's me James, and I'm coming
Speaker 1: at you today with one of these little requests that
Speaker 1: I make sometimes when there's something that we would like
Speaker 1: you to do, when it's very important to do. So
Speaker 1: today I want to talk to you about Syria, and
Speaker 1: specifically North East Syria. So with the world's eyes fixed
Speaker 1: on Syria, many are rightly celebrating as a brutal dictatorship
Speaker 1: of Basha a Lasad comes to an end. But for
Speaker 1: Kurdish and other minority communities, recent days have bought violent attacks,
Speaker 1: ethnic cleansing and occupation by Turkis back to Jahadis groups
Speaker 1: in an attempt to take advantage of the chaos by
Speaker 1: crushing the Rajava Revolution. Turkey and its mercenaries are openly
Speaker 1: committing war crimes against the region's autonomous communities. Many thousands
Speaker 1: have already been forced to be displaced and thousands more
Speaker 1: are in danger. To make matters worth this remains largely
Speaker 1: absent from the mainstream media reporting on Syria. If you'd
Speaker 1: like to share your solidarity with the people of northern
Speaker 1: and Eastern Syria, please call on Congress to take urgent
Speaker 1: action by passing the Emergency Legislation to stop the final
Speaker 1: hold Turkey accountable and commit US support to the Syrian
Speaker 1: democratic forces and the diverse communities under their protection. If
Speaker 1: you want to take action today, you can go to
Speaker 1: Defendrojaba dot org. That's d E F E N d
Speaker 1: R oja VA dot org. If you are able to
Speaker 1: the most effective action we can take right now is
Speaker 1: to call a couple of representatives. One representative and one senator.
Speaker 1: Representative would be Gregory Meeks. He's from New York. He's
Speaker 1: a Democrat. He is a ranking member of the House
Speaker 1: Foreign Affairs Committee. His phone number is two zero two
Speaker 1: two two five three four six one. The other one
Speaker 1: will be Senator James Rish He's an Idaho Republican. He
Speaker 1: is a ranking member's Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His phone
Speaker 1: number would be two zero two two two four two
Speaker 1: seven five two. If you'd like to have some talking points,
Speaker 1: you can find those on Defendrojaba dot org. If you'd
Speaker 1: like to donate financially instead, especially to this humanitarian aid
Speaker 1: effort for the tens of thousands of people who have
Speaker 1: been displaced by the SNA's advances, you can donate to
Speaker 1: two organizations that I would suggest to. First, we be
Speaker 1: Heavier store the Kurtis Red Crescent. That's h E Yva
Speaker 1: s O r dot com and you want to go
Speaker 1: slash e n If you want to see their website
Speaker 1: in English, you can donate there. The other one will
Speaker 1: be the free Burmer Rangers who are currently working in Raka.
Speaker 1: I was talking to my friend Abat who works with them.
Speaker 1: You can donate to them at www dot free fr
Speaker 1: e E Burma b U r m A rangers dot com.
Speaker 1: We will put all of this in the show notes
Speaker 1: al the URL so if you're driving you don't have
Speaker 1: to write them down. Those are the concrete ways that
Speaker 1: we can help right now and what is unfolding as
Speaker 1: a very terrible situation in nor Syria. Thanks, I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed the episode.
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, Robert Evans here and this is it could
Speaker 2: happen here obviously. One of the things that's been happening here,
Speaker 2: probably the biggest story of the last week or so
Speaker 2: at least, is the shooting of United health Care CEO
Speaker 2: Brian Thompson by an alleged shooter named Luigi Mangione. Meggione
Speaker 2: is an interesting character. People have had a lot to
Speaker 2: say about him and so I went through his online footprint,
Speaker 2: everything I can find on his social media, and I
Speaker 2: wrote an article for my substack Shatter Zone, and I'm
Speaker 2: going to be reading that in a slightly amended form
Speaker 2: for you now as today's episode. I've spent much of
Speaker 2: the last ten years reading manifestos and being a fly
Speaker 2: on the wall in different little online bolt holes where
Speaker 2: extremists plan and seek to incite mass shootings. When Luigi Mangione,
Speaker 2: the suspected shooter of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was
Speaker 2: arrested at a McDonald's, it didn't take long for digital
Speaker 2: sleuths to put together a comprehensive record of his online activity.
Speaker 2: I will tell you now that nothing he read or
Speaker 2: posted explains why he gunned down an insurance executive better
Speaker 2: than this single image in the background of his Twitter
Speaker 2: profile and the images, of course, of an X ray
Speaker 2: showing four screws in someone's lower base spine, apparently due
Speaker 2: to a lumbar spinal fusion surgery. The day after I
Speaker 2: wrote this article, The New York Times published a piece
Speaker 2: after finding Luigi's read it. The piece by Mike Baker,
Speaker 2: Mike Isaac, and my old boss at bellancat Eric Tohler
Speaker 2: confirms that he had a spinal fusion surgery that he
Speaker 2: had dealt with back pain for years, which had been
Speaker 2: minor and then gotten much worse after a surfing injury,
Speaker 2: and had grown even worse after slipping on a piece
Speaker 2: of paper caused persistent problems, including pain when he sat down,
Speaker 2: twitching leg muscles, and numbness in his growing in bladder.
Speaker 2: According to The New York Times, he had that spinal
Speaker 2: fusion surgery, which he had been deeply frightened of ahead
Speaker 2: of time, but which resolved those symptoms, and then he
Speaker 2: continued to have other symptoms, probably unrelated to the back pain.
Speaker 2: It's unclear if the back pain came back, but what
Speaker 2: is clear is that he wrote constantly online about pain
Speaker 2: and about his struggles with various other health issues, including
Speaker 2: a persistent brain fog that he seemed unable to get
Speaker 2: care for. His friend r J, who lived with him
Speaker 2: at an intentional community for digital workers in Honolulu starting
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty two, confirms that Luigi suffered an injury
Speaker 2: shortly after taking a basic surfing class after moving there.
Speaker 2: This laid him up in bed for about a week,
Speaker 2: unable to move his friends had to seek the special
Speaker 2: bed to help him with the pain. In general, we
Speaker 2: have ample confirmation that he was someone who dealt with
Speaker 2: a series of escalating health issues that changed him from
Speaker 2: an extremely active, physically fit young man into somebody who
Speaker 2: felt like they were no longer able to do or
Speaker 2: enjoy the things they had previously been able to do
Speaker 2: and enjoy. Now this is most of what we know
Speaker 2: about the health history of Luigi Maggione as of December tenth.
Speaker 2: Now when I record this twenty twenty four. As I
Speaker 2: write this, a purported manifesto is making the rounds online
Speaker 2: which discusses health issues his mother faced. It's still unclear
Speaker 2: if that manifesto is real. kN Klippenstein has finally gotten
Speaker 2: access to what he claims is the draft of the
Speaker 2: manifesto that the shooter had on him when he was
Speaker 2: arrested by the police. I don't know if that's a
Speaker 2: manifesto or something he wrote while nervous, because he largely
Speaker 2: addresses the cops in it and tells them you know
Speaker 2: what to expect when searching him. But again, at the moment,
Speaker 2: this purported manifesto that was also posted on substack very unclear.
Speaker 2: As to whether or not that's real. So for this today,
Speaker 2: we're going to stick with what we can verify, and
Speaker 2: what we can verify is that Luigi Mangione suffered from
Speaker 2: chronic back pain. He had five different books in his
Speaker 2: Goodreads that he read about dealing with back pain and
Speaker 2: healing from back pain, as well as other chronic health issues.
Speaker 2: If he is the shooter, then we can confirm he
Speaker 2: also chose to act out by targeting an insurance ceo.
Speaker 2: The New York Times has stated that he was arrested
Speaker 2: with a two hundred and sixty two word manifesto which
Speaker 2: has since been leaked, and in that manifesto, he describes
Speaker 2: the executives who run insurance companies as parasites who quote
Speaker 2: continue to abuse our country for a mince profit because
Speaker 2: the American public has allowed them to get away with it.
Speaker 2: In addition to all this, we know that Luigi came
Speaker 2: from a wealthy family. His grandfather made millions running a
Speaker 2: series of country clubs, nursing homes and office buildings and hospitals.
Speaker 2: One of his cousins is a Republican state legislator. It
Speaker 2: is unclear if Luigi had any access to the family
Speaker 2: money but he was clearly financially comfortable enough to move
Speaker 2: to Hawaii and pay to join an intentional community. He
Speaker 2: had engineering degrees and a promising early employment history. This
Speaker 2: is a man who had options. He could have been
Speaker 2: almost anything he wanted to be, and the thing that
Speaker 2: he ultimately chose to do with his life, after suffering
Speaker 2: a debilitating series of health issues, was to shoot the
Speaker 2: CEO of United Healthcare. Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain.
Speaker 2: It's a well known fact that most terrorists tend to
Speaker 2: be radicalized in communities. Much of my career was spent
Speaker 2: watching eight chan turn from an imageboard dedicated into gamer
Speaker 2: gate into a machine for generating white nationalists mass shooters.
Speaker 2: These people often appeared as lone wolves to the untrained eye,
Speaker 2: but they were radicalized intentionally, in and by a community.
Speaker 2: Much will be made in the coming days and months
Speaker 2: about Luigi's online footprints. I will go into some detail
Speaker 2: about where he spent his time and how we should
Speaker 2: characterize it, but I want to be clear at the
Speaker 2: outset that his intellectual diet does not seem to be
Speaker 2: what made him choose to take action, although it may
Speaker 2: have influenced the specific kind of.
Speaker 3: Action he took. Luigi followed a lot of accounts on
Speaker 3: Twitter that are wildly popular with young men, like Joe Rogan.
Speaker 3: He listened to Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson and agreed
Speaker 3: with them on certain things, but he also had cogent
Speaker 3: criticisms of their arguments and presentation. Here's what he said
Speaker 3: about Jordan Peterson on May fourteenth. This is why Jordan
Speaker 3: Peterson always bothers me. Overcomplicates everything he says aloud, wasting
Speaker 3: everyone's mental bandwidth and having to decipher its. Teachers are
Speaker 3: the best communicators, clear, succinct, simple language, which does kind
Speaker 3: of gel with the fact that he wrote three words
Speaker 3: on the bullets he used to shoot that CEO. Luigi
Speaker 3: also expressed frustration with wokeness and expressed opinions common on
Speaker 3: the libertarian tech influenced right, like a belief in the
Speaker 3: social benefits of Christianity, without expressing popular religious beliefs himself.
Speaker 3: I've found one post where he talks about how nature
Speaker 3: of wares a vacuum and shares an article about how
Speaker 3: Christianity's decline has unleashed terrible new gods. Some of his
Speaker 3: posts took the form of memes typical to online discourse
Speaker 3: of this type. But I've also read an essay that
Speaker 3: he wrote when he was fifteen years old discussing how
Speaker 3: Christianity persevered over Paganism in ancient Rome, and that essay
Speaker 3: exhibits a long standing interest in this topic and a
Speaker 3: capacity to treat it with nuance. His paper is very
Speaker 3: well written, particularly for a fifteen year old, and while
Speaker 3: his conclusions are highly arguable, it's not the work of
Speaker 3: someone hopelessly brings washed by culture war bullshit. Luigi liked
Speaker 3: to think and read and come to his own conclusions.
Speaker 3: He was interested in AI, in cryptocurrency, in life extension,
Speaker 3: and in a constellation of tech bro adjacent attitudes and
Speaker 3: philosophies often described as the Gray Tribe. I found one
Speaker 3: post where he talks about a senior speech he gave
Speaker 3: on the Future quote topics ranging from conscious artificial intelligence
Speaker 3: to human immortality. The term gray tribe was coined by
Speaker 3: an influential rationalist blogger and psychiatrist named Scott Alexander Siskin.
Speaker 3: He used it to refer to an intersection of nerd
Speaker 3: culture with Silicon Valley influenced ideology descending from the online
Speaker 3: rationalist movement. This community existed outside of traditional right left ideology.
Speaker 3: Now I've not found any evidence that Luigi was a
Speaker 3: specific fan of Scott, but he expressed appreciation for several
Speaker 3: figures associated with this big Tent movement, including Peter Teel.
Speaker 3: If we described Scott as representing the more liberal flank
Speaker 3: of the Gray Tribe, Luigi seemed to be drawn to
Speaker 3: folks closer to the right wing side of things. The
Speaker 3: worst person to use this terminology would probably be Teel
Speaker 3: associate Bilaji Shrinivasan, who has used Gray Tribe framework to
Speaker 3: describe his ideal big tech takeover of San Francisco and
Speaker 3: purging of progressives. However, I must stress that Luigi Mangione
Speaker 3: never expressed any support for this end of the ideology
Speaker 3: that I can find. He was a young man of
Speaker 3: libertarian inclinations who worked in big tech and had ties
Speaker 3: to San Francisco, but he was also clearly someone still
Speaker 3: making his mind up about the world. As information about
Speaker 3: him has come out, I have seen people on the
Speaker 3: left who initially saw his axis heroic lament that he
Speaker 3: was a bigoted tech bro. Scott Alexander has been credibly
Speaker 3: described as a eugenic supporter, as have many other people
Speaker 3: adjacent to the strains of rationalism and big tech ideology
Speaker 3: in which Mangione dabbled. Luigi's Twitter account does indeed include
Speaker 3: weird posts from his time in Japan, where he theorizes
Speaker 3: on how to solve falling birth rates by panning pocket
Speaker 3: pussies and video game cafe. At other points, he complains
Speaker 3: about Japanese citizens acting like quote unquote NPC's but race
Speaker 3: science and eugenics don't seem to have been a focus
Speaker 3: for him, and I would caution anyone against being overly
Speaker 3: reductive about a twenty six year old beliefs based purely
Speaker 3: on a handful of posts that bear no relation to
Speaker 3: his actions in the world. The evidence that we have
Speaker 3: of his online footprints suggests someone who was not unmoved
Speaker 3: by certain arguments rooted in social justice. He expressed admiration
Speaker 3: for a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's slaughter House five about
Speaker 3: criminalization of poverty in the United States. Quote America is
Speaker 3: the wealthiest nation in the world, but its people are
Speaker 3: mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.
Speaker 3: To quote the American humorist Ken Hubbard, it ain't no
Speaker 3: disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.
Speaker 3: It is, in fact a crime for an American to
Speaker 3: be poor. Even though America is a nation of the poor,
Speaker 3: every other nation has folk traditions of men who were
Speaker 3: poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more esteemable
Speaker 3: than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are
Speaker 3: told by the American poor. Meluigi is certainly not the
Speaker 3: idealized leftist icons some had hoped, but he doesn't easily
Speaker 3: fit into any other box We've got. His interest in
Speaker 3: gray tribe adjacent thinkers and self help books written by
Speaker 3: productivity hackers like Tim Ferriss is incredibly common among young men.
Speaker 3: Much has been made of the four st hour review.
Speaker 3: He gave industrial Society and its Future the manifesto of
Speaker 3: Ted Kazinski, But as with the rest of his media diet,
Speaker 3: he did not view Ted through the simple lens of
Speaker 3: hero worship. Here's what he wrote quote he was a
Speaker 3: violent individual, rightfully imprisoned, who maimed innocent people. While these
Speaker 3: actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luttite, however,
Speaker 3: they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme
Speaker 3: political revolutionary. Now we know those words. His condemnation of
Speaker 3: Kazinsky maiming innocent people are not just words, because we
Speaker 3: have seen the attack he allegedly chose to carry out.
Speaker 3: Not a series of bombings that killed and maimed innocent
Speaker 3: people with no real power in our society, but a
Speaker 3: surgical strike against a man that the very top of
Speaker 3: the system he hated, and one that caused no collateral damage.
Speaker 3: He was capable of appreciating some of Kazinsky's conclusions, but
Speaker 3: ultimately the quote he chose to highlight in his review
Speaker 3: came not from the manifesto, but from a Reddit post
Speaker 3: made by a guy with the user name boss Potatoess,
Speaker 3: who otherwise mostly commented on the grateful dead. This post
Speaker 3: praises Kazinski for having the balls to realize that peaceful
Speaker 3: protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere, and complains economic protest
Speaker 3: isn't possible in the current system. As a result, violence
Speaker 3: against those who lead us to such destruction is justified
Speaker 3: as self defense. Quote. These companies don't care about you,
Speaker 3: or your kids or your grandkids. They have zero qualms
Speaker 3: about burning down the planet for a buck, so why
Speaker 3: should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive.
Speaker 3: This is not the kind of radicalization pathway our media
Speaker 3: is good at discussing or analyzing. The things Luigi read
Speaker 3: and the people he interacted with online absolutely influenced what
Speaker 3: he did and how. But Boss Potatoess is not some
Speaker 3: nazi on aib Chan trying to provoke a shooting spree
Speaker 3: for the lulls. He's a random dude angry about the
Speaker 3: things seventy percent or more of the country is angry about,
Speaker 3: and he's expressing a lack of faith in a peaceful
Speaker 3: way forward. If you read this post in its entirety
Speaker 3: as Luigi did, you can't miss the pain there, anxiety
Speaker 3: and horror at the inevitability of climate change and the
Speaker 3: looming knowledge that everything good and green on this earth
Speaker 3: is being fed into the bloody maw of an industry
Speaker 3: concerned only with maximizing profit. In more ways than one,
Speaker 3: Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. I know many people
Speaker 3: who suffer with chronic pain and ongoing medical issues. I
Speaker 3: will tell you that it is not uncommon in dark moments,
Speaker 3: after fruitless, hours long calls about dropped medications or receiving
Speaker 3: surprise bills for them to joke about what they'd like
Speaker 3: to do to the executives who run these companies. These
Speaker 3: are jokes made in moments of despair and pain. No
Speaker 3: one I know would ever act on them, because they
Speaker 3: all have lives people to care for into whom they
Speaker 3: are responsible. They would never really do anything because the
Speaker 3: consequences to their own loved ones would be so severe.
Speaker 3: In the months before the shooting, Luigi had cut off
Speaker 3: all contact with his family. He admitted this in court.
Speaker 3: His parents eventually filed a missing's persons report in November
Speaker 3: of this year, and we have evidence that friends tried
Speaker 3: to contact him on his family's behalf via social media.
Speaker 3: As was first noted by a Twitter account, Luigi Mangione
Speaker 3: expressed interest in the works of Paul Scalis, a tech lawyer, writer,
Speaker 3: and prominent poster who writes about the Lindie effect, a
Speaker 3: concept that boils down to this the only effective judge
Speaker 3: of things is time. Scalus is popular among the set
Speaker 3: of people Mangione found himself drawn towards, and writes about
Speaker 3: the wisdom of ideas from antiquity. It's not hard to
Speaker 3: grasp what a man with an academic interest in ancient
Speaker 3: Rome might see in him. On December fourth, twenty twenty four,
Speaker 3: Paul made this post. Look, if you don't have any
Speaker 3: kids and you one of these guys just floating around
Speaker 3: the big cities. You got your education, but you never
Speaker 3: really used it to make money. You got a dead
Speaker 3: end back office job and a future of just working
Speaker 3: somewhere until you're seventy five and then dying. Go ahead
Speaker 3: and do something. It's been suggested that this may have
Speaker 3: influenced Luigi, and I think the timeline makes it clear
Speaker 3: that cannot be the case. Luigia cut off contact with
Speaker 3: his family in most of his friends months before this.
Speaker 3: The evidence suggests that he had planned this attack for
Speaker 3: quite some time. He arrived in New York City on
Speaker 3: November twenty fourth, on a bus bound from Atlanta, where
Speaker 3: he did not reside. So I don't think this post
Speaker 3: represents a piece of his radicalization journey. Nor was Scallus
Speaker 3: advocating for people to kill CEOs. But the situation in
Speaker 3: mindset Scallus described does speak to a lot of young
Speaker 3: men like Luigi, young and educated, but without intense responsibilities
Speaker 3: or much hope for the future. This subset of society
Speaker 3: has always overproduced terrorists, revolutionaries, and of course mass shooters.
Speaker 3: The United States has a mass shooter culture over the
Speaker 3: last several decades since Columbine, we have grown used to
Speaker 3: the idea that people who are angry and no longer
Speaker 3: care if they live or die will sometimes choose to
Speaker 3: go down killing strangers. In most cases, these shootings are
Speaker 3: totally random, the victims chosen with no concern beyond maximum
Speaker 3: body count and maximum attention. More recently, especially since twenty nineteen,
Speaker 3: mass shootings have become increasingly politicized. Different extremists, mostly right wing,
Speaker 3: have used them to put theory into praxis and earned
Speaker 3: free pr for their causes. Most people abhor these actions,
Speaker 3: but we have grown used to the idea that other
Speaker 3: people will use such acts as a way to spread
Speaker 3: messages that might otherwise get ignored. It is not coincidental
Speaker 3: that the white genocide conspiracy theories from Brenton Terence christ
Speaker 3: Church Manifesto are now mainstream talking points and conservative politics.
Speaker 3: Luigim Mangione grew up with all of this. He would
Speaker 3: have come to the same conclusions about the roles shootings
Speaker 3: play in our society as any other reasonably aware person.
Speaker 3: What he did, was, of course, not a mass shooting,
Speaker 3: but the assassination, his actions afterwards, and his possession of
Speaker 3: a manifesto were all clearly plotted out by someone who
Speaker 3: knew the social script for how this kind of thing
Speaker 3: goes in the USA. In the wake of this shooting,
Speaker 3: every media organization commenting on it has had to grapple
Speaker 3: with the waves of public enthusiasm for Luigi's actions. Right
Speaker 3: wing media figures condemning the left for celebrating this assassination
Speaker 3: have been criticized by their own readers and listeners. Insurance
Speaker 3: companies have pulled down lists of their executives from the Internet.
Speaker 3: This is because they too, understand the shooter culture of
Speaker 3: the United States. Like everyone else, they know that any
Speaker 3: mass shooting that meets with massive media coverage and interest
Speaker 3: will spawn copycats. The assassination Luigi is believed to have
Speaker 3: carried out was new and exciting. It demanded the public's
Speaker 3: attention in a way that most mass shootings don't. At
Speaker 3: almost the same time, the United Healthcare CEO was gunned down,
Speaker 3: a gunman walked into a Relie school near Oraville, California,
Speaker 3: and shot two young children before killing himself. This shooting
Speaker 3: drew almost no national attention. It was entirely drowned out
Speaker 3: by the execution of an insurance industry CEO. The armed
Speaker 3: and disaffected young men who are most drawn to this
Speaker 3: sort of thing will not miss this fact. I believe
Speaker 3: Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. The shooters who follow
Speaker 3: him will all have their own reasons for what they do,
Speaker 3: for their own journeys to that violent end, but ultimately
Speaker 3: they'll do what they do because Luigi proved. It's what
Speaker 3: gets attention.
Speaker 4: For now, It Could Happen Here is a production of
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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.