In the wake of the assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare insurance company, some Americans have taken to social media to express a range of sympathetic feelings for the assassin, Luigi Mangione. For many of them, Mangione’s actions were understandable given the injustice of the American health insurance racket. The bald immorality of state-mandated private health insurance amounts to nothing less than legalized extortion. Insurance companies have immense power over our lives. They have whole teams dedicated to denying their paying customers needed medicine and treatments. The private market has, ironically, spawned the “death panels” that Republicans warned a public system would create.

Nevertheless, the celebrations of Mangione are disturbing. The assassin himself seems to have been operating under a condition of mania or psychosis. His total disappearance leading up to the act, and his behavior since, were inexplicable to those who knew him best and suggest that he was severely unwell. While many want to insist that the murder was a political act, what does it say if the actor was a madman?

Violence, of course, is among the worst ways to persuade people. Democratic politics requires reasoned debate, honest deliberation, and the exercise of sound judgement. The cold-blooded and cowardly killing of a defenseless man is none of these things, no matter how much one might despise said man’s complicity in social corruption. So even those who hope the act would spur a newfound zeal for healthcare reform—or some broader class revolt—will find their hopes dashed. The event, then, seems even more tragic. It was all for nothing.

Still, many insist that the outpouring of outrage on the internet demonstrates some profound truth about class in America, and it does. Though not the truth they think it shows.

Because the murder was that of a CEO of a particularly evil corporation, many have assumed sympathy with the shooter is broadly felt among the working class; that the comments and jokes at the expense of Thompson and his family reflect a genuine popular rage. Take this entertaining account from a viral Substack post:

If I was an alien from another country and you told me that we have a “democracy” where elite rich people hold parties and dinners to fund the campaigns of approved rich people to then run a country of poor people, I could probably predict that someone with a Starbucks Ethos Water would rise up and start shooting the rich.

If you told me that homelessness was rising, birth rates were declining, credit card debt was skyrocketing, but that the stock market was at an all time high, I could absolutely predict that the poors were about to shoot the club up.

The writing is on the wall. IT’S OVER FOR ALL YOU HOS. THE POOR PEOPLE ARE COMING.

The author’s description of American society is accurate, and in this sense, his frustrations are completely righteous. The problem is, the “poors” aren’t who shot Thompson. Mangione himself grew up incredibly wealthy. He attended a private all-boys school with tuition that would rival many elite colleges, and then he attended an Ivy League college with a tuition twice that amount. One of the ironies that this episode highlights, then, is not that the “poors” are rising up, but instead that the violence among the poor is remarkably socially contained. So unequal is our society that the poor almost never kill the rich. They don’t even have access to them. The poor, without the price of admission to elite society, can only afford to kill each other.

Another myth maintained by those who insist Mangione’s actions were in some way justified is that the act represents the vast will of the people. But it does not. Only a small minority of Americans find Mangione’s actions defensible. Recent polls have shown a consistent majority do not approve of the act nor do they see Mangione in a favorable light. Furthermore, a large portion of Americans have no clue who he even is.

These facts haven’t stopped the constant stream of headlines declaring that Mangione has won the support of the public. They certainly haven’t stopped the memes and internet comments insisting on Mangione’s heroic status. And this too says a lot about our current class conundrum. Who are the people who insist on making a hero out of Mangione? They aren’t politically unified. Outsiders on the Left and Right have loudly celebrated the murder. Meanwhile, mainstream condemnations of Mangione ring out from MSNBC, Fox News, and the New Yorker. Age is a better predictor, with younger people more likely to sympathize with the killer than their parents or grandparents. But what about class? Though Mangione was a son of privilege, maybe his supporters make up the proletarian vanguard. Well, not quite.

From the same Subtack post, celebrity chef and media personality Eddie Huang writes:

Despite writing multiple books and having multiple shows, I am on fucking Substack because there are no jobs. I know directors that moved to Scottsdale. I got writer friends that moved back in with their parents in PHILADELPHIA. No one actually wants to live in PHILADELPHIA. I know actors from major shows chopping wood in Maryland. I know DJs who are loan sharks, I know former executives selling street wear, I know art advisors that are now strippers, everyone is standing on their heads trying to make ends meet. I’m about to get a job at Boston Sand and Gravel if this keeps up.

This sums up the class quality of all the Mangione fawning. Huang’s condescension here, as if a job at “Boston Sand and Gravel” is something to be ashamed of, or as if living in Philadelphia is a great embarrassment, betrays the status anxieties of a professional class—not the populist rage of blue-collar workers nor the social alienation of the desperately poor. And that suggests that this was not the first shot in a revolutionary class war, but instead the narrow rebellion of elite scions who feel squeezed by the greed of the rich. Mangione’s manic episode might be best understood as a form of class patricide.

The super rich in this country sponsor the culture industry, and their investments and charitable giving determine the prosperity of the entertainment, media, tech and academic sectors—all of which operate in a state semi-autonomous from the free market. When jobs in these sectors shrivel, the professionals who staff the operations, quite rightly, hit out against the plutocrats who control vast sums of wealth that sit uninvested in giant Scrooge-McDuck-style bank vaults, multiplying like rabbits thanks to the wonders of compound interest. Again, this outrage is correctly pointed at the real villains in the contemporary economy. But the expression and forms of this outrage is nonetheless born of the social conditions of professional-class life in the digital age. The memes and online mobbings betray this. And as the main consumers and producers of internet “content,” the professional-class perspective helps to skew digital reality to reflect their worldview. That’s why so many are convinced that Mangione’s supporters make up throngs of pitchfork wielding populists, rather than the less romantic reality of keyboard warriors in relatively comfortable jobs.

The dominance of the professional class also explains so much of what gets left out of the class narrative in the Mangione affair. That it was a McDonald’s customer who recognized him, and a McDonald’s employee that alerted the authorities, is often overlooked. That it was a newly hired local Pennsylvania police officer that apprehended a potentially dangerous suspect is almost never mentioned. Yet these people are much more like the vast majority of working Americans than either Mangione or his sympathizers, both in terms of their social position and in terms of their moral outlook. Those who apprehended him did not think Mangione a hero or a great leader of the proles. They instead acted in accordance with a more traditional understanding of morality. And for their collective service, a slew of threats and accusations of being “rats” have rained down on them from the balconies of those who consider themselves their social betters.

So yes, the Luigi Mangione episode does illuminate America’s class divides: not only the yawning gap between Brian Thompson’s CEO-class and the professional class, but also that between the professional class and the vast majority of American workers.

Dustin Guastella is Director of Operations for Teamsters Local 623 and an associate researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics.