America has long idolized violent killers. What's new is the "progressive" political culture that turns murder fandom into moral high ground.

This week, everyone is frothing over the so-called “Mangionistas” — the small but suddenly infamous band of Luigi Mangione devotees who showed up at his Manhattan court appearance with official New York City press credentials.

Mangione, of course, is accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was shot in the back on a Manhattan sidewalk last December. 

Thompson was walking to an investor conference. He was not on a battlefield. He was not holding anyone hostage. He was a man going to work when someone allegedly decided he had become a symbol of everything wrong with American health care.

That is where the story should have ended: with a murder — which matters much more than any defendant’s “reasons” — a trial, and the ordinary presumption of innocence that belongs to every accused person in America.

But that is not where it ended.

Outside court, the Mangionistas turned the case into performance art.

Unfortunately for them, and all of us, “Murder fandom” is hardly new under the sun.

Women have written letters to serial killers, visited them in prison, married them, defended them, and convinced themselves that the rest of the world simply failed to see the beautiful misunderstood soul inside the monster. 

The Night Stalker had so many admirers he needed letterhead to reply to all the letters. Ted Bundy had admirers. Charles Manson had admirers. This is an old American sickness, though not exclusively American, and it has always suggested something unsettling about human nature.

So the fact that Luigi Mangione has fans is not the new part. Murder defendants have always attracted disturbed admirers.

The new part is that the murder groupie has been given a political vocabulary.

The old version said: I love him even though he is a killer.

The new version says: I love him because he killed the right kind of person.

The old version was understood by everyone to be a disturbed individual. The new version is being turned into a hero by elements on the progressive left.

Mangione is accused of killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, outside a Manhattan hotel in December 2024. 

Prosecutors have said a note found with Mangione included the line, “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.” That word — parasites — is doing a lot of work. It takes a human being and turns him into an infestation. It takes a man with children, parents, friends, colleagues, private sorrows, and whatever mixed record any life contains, and reduces him to a subhuman symbol fit for extermination.

That is how violence becomes thinkable.

And then came the Mangionistas.

Three women showed up to Mangione’s court proceedings not merely as spectators, but with official New York City press credentials. They were not simply sitting in the back row with the rest of the curious public. They had been admitted into the world of formal access, the world supposedly reserved for people gathering and reporting news. 

Outside court, they made statements so grotesque they would have sounded fictional if someone had written them into a satire. One said, “I don’t give a flying f — — he died.” Another said Thompson’s children were “better off without him” and should “enjoy the blood money.”

This is not journalism. It is not even activism, exactly. It is murder fandom dressed up as political witness.

And that is what makes it more dangerous than the old killer-groupie phenomenon.

The old murder groupie was understood as a disturbed admirer. She might be pitied, mocked, psychoanalyzed, or ignored. But she was not treated as a moral authority. Nobody looked at a woman marrying a serial killer and said, well, perhaps she has something important to teach us about capitalism.

Now, though, parts of the political left have discovered a way to launder the groupie impulse through ideology. The accused killer is no longer just handsome, forbidden, or famous. He is allegedly a messenger. His victim is no longer merely dead. He is “the system.” The murder is no longer merely murder. It is a statement about health care, capitalism, greed, empire, policing, Israel, or whatever hated institution can be attached.

That is the trick: Turn the victim into an abstraction, and the killer into a symbol.

This is how dehumanization works. It does not begin with blood. It begins with language: Parasite. Ghoul. Colonizer. Oppressor. Fascist. Settler. Billionaire. CEO.

Some of these words describe real categories. Some describe real abuses of power. But when they are used as moral erasers, they stop being political language and become permission slips. Once a person has been placed outside the circle of human sympathy, almost anything done to him can be rebranded as justice.

That is why the Mangionistas matter. Not because they are large in number. They are not. Not because they represent every Democrat, liberal, or progressive. They do not. They matter because they show where a certain kind of politics leads when it loses the ability to say one simple sentence: murder is murder, even when you hate the victim’s industry.

Health insurance in America is a mess. People have been denied care, bankrupted, ignored, delayed, and humiliated. There is plenty to reform, plenty to investigate, plenty to condemn. But a civilized society cannot allow policy rage to become a substitute for moral judgment.

If an insurance executive can be shot in the back and a group of young women can stand outside court with press passes saying his children are better off, then something has gone very wrong.

America has always had murder groupies.

The question now is why so many people are willing to pretend they are prophets.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)