The Prospect of a Vigilante Class War

The image above was made by @amberjyang with Midjourney using the prompt 'hooded man with a gun targeting the rich and powerful.'

Someone recently hung a banner over Lakeshore Drive in Chicago that said, "Defend, Deny, Depose." And according to the Daily Beast:

Merchandise bearing words written on the bullet casings found at the scene of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson's killing are available to buy on online retail sites. Everything from pint glasses and baseball caps to Christmas tree ornaments and a sweater with an image of a guillotine and the words "Deny, Defend, Depose" are being hawked online. ... eBay still has plenty of merch available, including stickers, hoodies, t-shirts, buttons and lawn signs. A spokesperson for eBay told the Post that its policies do not ban the sale of items featuring the phrase "Deny, Defend, Depose." But "items that glorify or incite violence, including those that celebrate the recent murder of UHC CEO Brian Thompson, are prohibited." It's a similar story on Etsy and TikTok Shop, the video-sharing site's retail section.

No one was shocked when the insurance bigwig was killed by a vigilante for his company's terrible practices. A man named Luigi Mangione has been arrested for Thompson's murder. He's being legally represented by the wife of Diddy's lawyer. On social media, Mangione is quickly becoming a folk hero. Some of my facebook friends are now posting support for his brand of vigilante justice.

Personally, although I can't condone the violence, I am surprised that this kind of thing doesn't happen much more often. We don't have a system that holds the powerful accountable for the damage they do. And there are millions of downtrodden people looking to strike back against the system that wronged them. Corporate executives are perfect symbols of oppression to these downtrodden masses.

The folly in this is that killing an individual corporate executive does nothing to the corporation itself. The greater folly is that large numbers of people might suddenly realize that they too favor vigilante justice for the untouchable bigwigs working the levers of power. Imagine thousands of killings like Thompson's a year. Imagine the control regime's security response to a scenario like that.

According to the New York Post, Mangione was arrested with "an unregistered ghost gun that uses 9mm bullets, a silencer, a US passport, four fake IDs" and a handwritten manifesto. Or what the media is calling a manifesto. This document, as published by Ken Klippenstein, is actually just a few paragraphs scrawled in a notebook. Here's the complete text:

To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has [allowed] them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.

Pop Culture Phenomenon

This so-called manifesto seems pretty tame. While some commentators have suggested that the media is suppressing the document to keep people from reading it, I think the document is being suppressed because it's not a manifesto at all. The powers that be want to us to view Mangione as some supercriminal. I've even seen Unibomber comparisons in several news articles. But Mangione is no Unibomber. He's just a well-to-do guy who apparently bought a weapon and shot a corporate fat cat with it.

In the media, the emerging narrative is a dry argument about whether insurance companies are denying coverage too much. Meanwhile, there are predictable calls for increased gun control. No one is talking about holding other insurance executives personally responsible for their companies' policies. No one is talking about scrapping the medical insurance industry entirely and replacing it with universal healthcare.

At the same time, this murder is already a pop culture phenomenon. The accused assassin has a famous lawyer and people are buying merch that showcases his cause. There might be copycats. There might be drama around his trial.

In my newly released novel The 321 Incident, I explore the idea of people all over the country giving up on the control regime and taking matters into their own hands. This general scenario is already playing out on the fringes. A few more events like the Thompson killing could bring it into the mainstream.

This isn't necessarily desirable. Societal instability rarely is. But ignoring the possibility of a vigilante class war won't make it go away. Personally, I favor defeating our corporate overlords using more peaceful means. Instead of using violence, we could instead quickly limit their power over us using social and economic cooperation.

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Read my novels:

• Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
• The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
• Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
• One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
• Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
• Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
• The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
• Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.

See my NFTs:

• Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
• History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
• Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.