Murder suspect Luigi Mangione shows all the signs of being the latest in a string of lone-wolf extremists, but with a twist.
Whereas religious or political ideology motivates most lone wolves, Mangione allegedly directed his ire at a single industry.
That distinction has led many experts to compare him to university and airline bomber, or Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who killed three people and injured 23 in a 17-year terrorism spree.
However, that comparison only goes so far.
Experts diagnosed Kaczynski with paranoid schizophrenia, and his bizarre anti-technology agenda garnered no support with the general public.
Mangione, on the other hand, shows no signs of mental illness, and to some, his alleged crime turned him into an instant folk hero on social media.
Some people, blaming the multi-billion-dollar health insurance industry for causing them pain, suffering and financial hardship, consider the killing an act of vigilante justice.
Following the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, people flooded social media with stories of their own frustration with insurance companies. The vast majority did not condone the murder, but said they understood the killer’s motive.
Mangione’s notoriety resembles that of Depression-era outlaw John Dillinger, whom many people considered a modern Robin Hood, targeting the banks that exploited them.
The support that this alleged killer has received suggests his crime may not be an isolated incident, but the harbinger of things to come. He may be the first of a new type of lone wolf.
At the turn of the 20th century, police described criminals working by themselves rather than in gangs as “lone wolves.”
In the 1990’s, Tom Metzger and Alex Curtis applied the term to fellow white supremacists they encouraged to act independently on behalf of the cause.
The term has been used ever since to describe any extremist conducting a terrorist attack without formally belonging to a group.
The lone wolves that have plagued the U.S. over the past two decades fall into two ideological categories: Islamist extremists and white supremacists.
In the years since 9/11, the U.S. has suffered a series of Islamist-inspired lone-wolf attacks.
On Nov. 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Hassan opened fire on soldiers in a processing center at Fort Hood Texas, killing 13 and wounding 32. He had become radicalized over a number of years but never joined an extremist organization.
In April 2013, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev planted bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three and wounding more than 260. Neither belonged to a known group, but Dzhokar said they had gotten bomb-making information from al Qaeda’s online magazine, Inspire.
On Dec. 2, 2015, Sayed Farook and Tashfin Malik murdered 14 people at Farook’s workplace in San Bernardino, Calf. Neither had any known affiliation with a terrorist group.
On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen perpetrated the worst lone-wolf terrorist attack by an Islamist extremist in the U.S. He killed 49 and wounded 53 others at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, using a semi-automatic rifle and handgun. He did not belong to any group but pledged allegiance to the Islamic State during the massacre.
A spike in lone-wolf attacks by white supremacists began at around the same time as the increase in Islamist incidents.
On June 17, 2015, Dylan Roof murdered nine African Americans attending a Bible study at a church in Charleston, S.C., saying their race was “taking over the country.” He belonged to no extremist group but had been radicalized online.
Patrick Crusius, who murdered 22 and wounded 20 at an El Paso Walmart in 2019, was also self-radicalized. He espoused “replacement theory,” the belief that Caucasian Americans are being intentionally replaced by nonwhites. He targeted Hispanics.
In October 2018, Robert Bowers, another self-radicalized white supremacist, murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh because they supported the Jewish refugee organization HIAS, which he accused of facilitating white replacement.
Payton Gendron, who also became a white supremacist without belonging to any group, murdered 10 people and wounded three others at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022 because, as he later confessed, “they were Black.”
Whether motivated by Islamic extremism or white supremacy, these lone wolves targeted ethnic, racial or religious groups, killing people indiscriminately to create mass casualties for maximum effect.
Mangione had a quite different objective.
He targeted the United Healthcare CEO in what he described as a “symbolic takedown” of an individual both responsible for and representative of an exploitative industry.
Unlike the ideological lone wolves or even the Unabomber, he avoided collateral damage.
Whether the murder is an isolated incident or the beginning of a new wave of lone-wolf terrorism remains to be seen, but law enforcement and corporate America are worried. Fake “Wanted Posters” naming other CEOs have appeared across Manhattan. The NYPD has warned health care companies of an online hit list. Health insurance companies are increasing security for executives who fear they may be targeted next.
Already upset by the brazen murder of Thompson, senior managers at these companies express shock and even disbelief at the vitriol directed against them, including on a Facebook group frequented by their own employees.
Objectionable though it certainly is, support for Mangione is not difficult to understand. Hating an individual is much easier than addressing a complex systemic injustice. The current political climate may also encourage people to condone the murder of Thompson. NPR correspondent Odette Yousef said extremist analysts she spoke to said, “This really speaks to how Americans have, over time, become more open-minded toward political violence.”
The acceptance of violence as a legitimate response to imagined threats and perceived injustice goes a long way in explaining the prevalence of lone-wolf terrorism.
Social media posts, chat rooms, blogs and podcasts tell these misguided individuals that their anger is justified and empowers them to act against those they blame for their own and the country’s problems.
As long as that supportive environment exists, we can expect more killing.
Tom Mockaitis is a professor of history at DePaul University and the author of “Violent Extremists: Understanding the Domestic and International Terrorist Threat .”
