‘Luigism’ — meet the online ghouls who celebrate murder

A week after United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down and left bleeding on a Manhattan sidewalk last December 4, Axios ran a poll asking 1,000 registered voters a question that, just a few years ago, would have been unthinkable: Was the killing “justifiable” or at least “somewhat justifiable”?

Seventeen percent said yes.

So 17 percent of Americans thought it was okay — or at least somewhat okay — to shoot an unarmed man in the back because he ran a major corporation. But that’s not even the worst of it. Among voters age 18 to 29, a staggering 41 percent said the murder was acceptable or somewhat acceptable.

That statistic alone should stop us cold. But instead, we got “Free Luigi” rallies for Luigi Mangione, the Ivy League graduate charged with pulling the trigger. At a court hearing in Manhattan, more than 100 women crowded the hallway, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mangione, as if they were teen girls at a Beatles concert. His legal defense fund has raised more than $1 million. Influencers swoon over his good looks. And, according to one report, “the alleged killer has received so much fan mail in prison that he had to ask the public to stop sending him more than five photos at a time.”

We’ve turned Mangione into a matinee idol — a martyr. 

Now something like that is happening again.

This time, the victim was Wesley LePatner, a senior managing director at Blackstone, the giant global investment firm. She was 46, a mother of two, and a philanthropist. She was gunned down in the lobby of her midtown Manhattan office building by a mentally ill man on a murder spree.

The shooter had the delusion that he suffered NFL-related brain damage — even though he had never played beyond high school — and apparently he blamed the league, which also had offices in the building.

He had no idea who LePatner was. He didn’t know she was an executive. He didn’t care. But for some online ghouls, that didn’t matter.

According to City Journal’s Jesse Arm, the internet vultures came out fast. Reddit, Facebook and X were filled with posts mocking LePatner, sneering at her success and calling her death symbolic retribution. One meme was a photo of LePatner with the word “Luigi’d” in bright red letters stamped over her face. Another showed a star-shaped cartoon figure, colorful balloons in the background, the character smiling under the phrase “CEO Down!”

The new name for this grotesque movement? “Luigism.”

As Arm writes, Luigism doesn’t require motive. It doesn’t need facts. All it needs is a corpse and a job title.

The people cheering this on aren’t just angry. They’re sanctimonious. They see themselves as warriors for the little guy, defenders of “justice,” even as they cheer the death of a woman they never knew, for a job she did well. They think their self-righteous rage gives them moral cover to dehumanize — and, in some cases, even justify — the murder of people who happen to work for large capitalistic corporations.

It’s the kind of twisted logic that would make George Orwell blink and Karl Marx smile. And it’s not just immature. It’s immoral.

Because once you start celebrating murder — once you turn real human tragedy into social media culture rot — you’ve crossed a moral line from which it’s very hard to return.

There’s no courage in Luigism. There’s no principle. There’s just cruelty, dressed up as morality.

And if we don’t call it what it is — vile, delusional and dangerously un-American — it won’t be the last time we hear sanctimonious fools cheer when someone else gets “Luigi’d.”

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Substack page. Follow him @BernardGoldberg.