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Highway signs hacked to read “One CEO Down, Many More to Go.” Laughing emojis flooding corporate condolence posts. “Free Luigi” merchandise. 

The fatal shooting of a health care CEO last December revealed something more unsettling than the violence itself: a public response suggesting millions of Americans understood the rage, even if many couldn’t condone the action.

What transforms an optimistic valedictorian into an assassin? In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, John Richardson, author of Luigi: The Making and the Meaning, argues the answer lies not in individual pathology but in a decades-old ideology that’s been quietly radicalizing young men. 

Through his own correspondence with Ted Kaczynski before his death, Richardson traces how the notorious Unabomber has become an unlikely guru to alienated twentysomethings like Mangione, who see societal systems collapsing around them.

Richardson calls it “the Kaczynski moment” — that instant when a young man concludes the system is intractable, that ordinary protest only reinforces existing power, that violence isn’t merely justified but necessary. It’s the moment desperation crystallizes into action. And it’s happening more frequently, Richardson warns, not because these individuals are uniquely disturbed, but because of what society itself keeps signaling.

The uncomfortable question Richardson poses: Does analyzing this phenomenon help prevent the next act of violence, or does it provide a template for more violence? 

And when these young men point to failures that millions of Americans recognize, how do we respond without either ignoring legitimate grievances — or legitimizing deadly methods?

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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

[00:00:14] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. They’re becoming a recognizable type, young men, angry, rudderless, very online, very political, but whose agendas are difficult to discern. Jonathan Rinderdeck, the Uber driver accused of starting the catastrophic Palisades fire in Los Angeles. Shane Tomura, who killed four people, including a Blackstone executive in New York, before taking his own life. Robin Westman, the Minneapolis shooter who killed two children at a Catholic school. Tyler Robinson, accused of assassinating conservative organizer Charlie Kirk. And of course, Luigi Mangione, the Ivy League graduate accused of shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last December. These aren’t coordinated attacks. There’s no manifesto they all share, no organization claiming responsibility. Yet there’s something disturbingly similar in the profile. Twenty-something men, outraged, blank-faced, in possession of some secret knowledge the rest of us apparently lack. The question isn’t whether this pattern exists. It clearly does. The question is what it means, where it comes from, and whether understanding it risks amplifying it. My guest today, John Richardson, has spent three decades as a journalist observing various forms of American alienation and extremism. He spent 18 years as writer-at-large for Esquire, and his new book is Luigi, the Making and the Meaning, focusing on perhaps the most celebrated of these angry young men, the one who generated not just horror, but something else. Laughing emojis on corporate sympathy posts, free Luigi merchandise, highway signs hacked to read one CEO down, many more to go. Richardson traces Mangione’s path from optimistic valedictorian to alleged assassin, examining his reading habits, his Hawaii book club discussions of Ted Kaczynski’s infamous manifesto, and the ecosystem of ideas that have influenced his thinking. He’s interviewed extremists, corresponded with Kaczynski himself before his death, and immersed himself in ideological currents that seem to be pulling some young American men toward dangerous conclusions. But here’s the tension. Does analyzing this phenomenon help prevent the next angry young man from acting? Or does it provide a template, a pathology, a roadmap? Does understanding equal endorsing? And perhaps most uncomfortable of all, when these young men point to systems that genuinely feel broken to millions of Americans. How do we address their grievances without legitimizing their methods? It is my pleasure to welcome John Richardson here to talk about Luigi, the Making and the Meaning. John Richardson, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

[00:03:06] John Richardson: Thanks, Jeff. That’s quite an introduction. You’ve asked some really good questions.

[00:03:10] Jeff Schechtman: Well, thank you, and thank you so much for being here today. When did you first realize that there was something fundamentally different about the way Luigi Mangione was going to be treated, that becoming a folk hero had a larger significance?

[00:03:28] John Richardson: In an odd way, there’s been a lot, as you said, there’s been a lot of shootings. Some seemingly school shootings that seem more personal and some more political, but the pace of them is accelerating. The remarkable thing about him was the positive reaction that people had. I mean, usually these shootings are pretty dark. And while I don’t want to defend his shooting, this had a different quality that just put a different light on how people process the whole thing, a dangerous one, I would say.

[00:04:01] Jeff Schechtman: And talk about that, that there was something fundamentally different about this, that it was less dark as compared to some of these others that I mentioned.

[00:04:11] John Richardson: An awful lot of the shootings that have a political character are racist. You mentioned the guy who killed people in New York. There was Israeli embassy people down in D.C., I think. So there’s, in a lot of the darker ones, sometimes it’s a church or synagogue. There’s often, like, race is a big factor. And it doesn’t, that doesn’t connect with too many people. It’s a minority passion at that level, I think. But what Luigi Mangione did was attack, like, one of the most, not the individual, but one of the most hated industries in the United States, which is the health care industry, which a lot of people have very strong feelings about. And that hitting a target, or, you know, again, we’re presuming all of this on guilty until proven innocent. And that is not just, people sort of laugh at that in this case, because the evidence seems so strong, but it has a lot of legal implications in how you conduct a case and what evidence is valid. So I don’t think it’s good to forget that. But the quality of the target that he chose changed the reaction of the public. And that’s a really interesting phenomenon, that for someone who has been watching this stuff happen over the years is a little bit besides the point, but also really interesting.

[00:05:42] Jeff Schechtman: And that’s where it’s particularly interesting in that the reaction to it, because of the health care issue and insurance companies, etc., was different. He nonetheless fits into this category of these angry young men that are so frustrated and fed up with the system in so many ways.

[00:06:02] John Richardson: I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because people have been asking me about it. I think, like, you asked is trying to understand them a little bit dangerous at the beginning. Well, I think if you’re a family member, or involved in this case, or any of these cases, you’re obviously going to want to know what motivated this person. And the question that often comes up is what radicalized them. And that’s where I come in with Kaczynski radicalizes a certain number of people. Appearance appeared to have an effect on Luigi Mangione. So I think on an individual level, if it was my relative who was shot, I would want to know what radicalized this guy? How can we stop this from radicalizing other people? But when you look at the larger phenomenon of this happening, they’re all radicalized by different things. And so the individual case doesn’t necessarily tell you about the larger phenomenon.

[00:06:56] Jeff Schechtman: But the one thing about Kaczynski, and you talk about Mangione’s attitude towards Kaczynski, and his manifesto, etc., is that what you referred to as a Kaczynski moment, this realization that somehow a problem or problems are just intractable.

[00:07:13] John Richardson: Yeah, yeah, the Kaczynski moment. I mean, I think having talked to many people who have been interested in this, it often comes like they just are blown away by the ruthlessness of his analysis. I mean, he doesn’t sort of let anyone out. What he says about technology and its tendency towards getting too big and then collapsing is similar to what people have been saying since the start of the Industrial Revolution. And it’s very similar to what his religious inspiration was, was a French Catholic scholar named Jacques Ellul, who basically said the same thing, but then went to, and then we have to have faith that something will happen. Well, Kaczynski doesn’t go to faith. He’s like, we have to do something ourselves. We have to take action or else watch a terrible fate occur. And I think this is where all these young men with their different concerns get activated. They all feel they have to take action. And I think that’s where the real issue is.

[00:08:22] Jeff Schechtman: And part of it is that they argue that the protest alone or objection alone just reinforces the existing power structure, that non-violence action, or that the idea that violence never accomplishes anything is some kind of propaganda put forth by the establishment.

[00:08:41] John Richardson: Well, right. Very standard sort of revolutionary argument. And it goes beyond that. I mean, Kaczynski sort of spends a lot of time attacking leftists because he thinks they’re too motivated by morality and ideas of decency and humanity and stuff like that. Whereas people who are more cool-hearted, more clear-eyed in his point of view, are more willing to do the ruthless things that are necessary. So for him, that would be finding a way to crash the system.

[00:09:14] Jeff Schechtman: There is this connection inherent in that between ideology and action. And it’s part of what Kaczynski talks about. And it’s clearly what Mangione and I guess some of these other angry young men have all picked up along the way.

[00:09:29] John Richardson: Well, see, I think you can say all sorts of things. I mean, Kaczynski has been saying this stuff since the 90s when he was arrested and his manifesto was published. Although he’s refined his tactical ideas about how to attack the system, he’s basically been saying, let’s attack the system. And there’s nutcase revolutionaries or valid revolutionaries saying the same thing right now and have been forever. The difference is that more and more people become receptive to that radical message. And then the question isn’t to analyze these kids who are troubled kids with confused ideas. The question is to analyze the society, I’m sorry, that is saying to so many people, hey, we’ve got no solutions. Maybe you should force yours on ours. That’s the message that these young people are getting. There’s the systems of control, the balance checks and balances and plus the balance is gone. And so they feel like somebody has to do something. And I think like we tend to agree with one person or another, maybe we agree with Luigi more, maybe we agree with one of these other killers more, again, cautioning that he’s innocent until proven guilty. But our ideas might be distributed differently. But the phenomenon of taking up arms and feeling that that’s a valid, okay thing to do is a more troubling thing and widespread and is not something you can just blame on one of these guys, in my opinion.

[00:11:16] Jeff Schechtman: From Mangione, what was that Kaczynski moment? Talk about his radicalization.

[00:11:21] John Richardson: Well, there’s still so much that we don’t know about his radicalization and stuff. I mean, his relationship to Kaczynski itself is actually pretty balanced. He feels that Kaczynski was wrong in killing people, killing innocent people, which Kaczynski did, sending mail bombs out to technologists and scientists and computer store owners and things like that. So Luigi Mangione sort of said, that’s not cool. That’s terrorism. He saw himself apparently as a more of a revolutionary actor than a terrorist. And so he was thinking about moral issues. He didn’t want to hurt innocents. He thought about using a bomb and decided against that because it’s too, you know, not targeted enough. But what specifically radicalized him? I mean, he had a lot of concerns. He was concerned about climate change. He was concerned about AI. He was concerned about the healthcare system. He seems to have been very concerned about the monetization of the healthcare system. He targeted a healthcare executive because it was at the annual, as he called it, bean counters conference, the annual investors conference, where, you know, big companies and billionaires try to decide whether it’s good to invest in this company, which is conducting healthcare. So he was trying to send a message with that. But how he got, how widespread that sense of concern about capitalism or the capitalization of healthcare, whether that spread to other corporations and other aspects of the system. I mean, the police still haven’t released everything he wrote. So maybe there’s more in there. Or maybe he wasn’t that thought, maybe he hadn’t thought it out very well. He didn’t write the kind of manifesto that Kaczynski and some others have done that’s more elaborate. He wrote notes, basically. Exactly how he got radicalized and in what direction he was radicalized is still, I think, lots of unknowns.

[00:13:36] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about the similarities with respect to some of these angry young men that get radicalized, some in different ways, some for different reasons. But this sense of young men and things that they’re seeing or feeling or that they feel are lacking in society and the consistencies in some of these cases.

[00:13:59] John Richardson: Well, I mean, the overall consistency is a sense that things are out of control and that something has to be done. I mean, for some of the racially motivated killers, you know, the great replacement theory is one of the things that echoes around their brains. There’s a birth count issue. The racialized killers seem to think there’s a big concern about dropping birth rates that’s worth killing over. Seems a little bizarre to me. Then there’s actors who are involved in politics in the Middle East who are motivated by that kind of stuff. But I think there’s the one commonality is that the gatekeepers, the guardians, the cops, the people who are supposed to be organizing things are failing at their job. And so we have to step in. I think talking about their anger is a little bit, obviously, some of them are very angry. But I think anger as a motivation is not like really a great place to go because it’s too easy. And actors say you can’t play anger. You know, anger is an expression of a lot of other complicated emotions. And I think it’s more like desperation and a feeling of responsibility and a feeling of brokenness that is motivating these people rather than like righteous anger, which it appears to be, I think.

[00:15:31] Jeff Schechtman: Which raises the broader issue of how one looks at these issues that created this anger and looks at what is broken in society that is justified in many cases without giving validation to some of these acts.

[00:15:49] John Richardson: Well, that’s the thing. And I think like people had complicated feelings about the reaction to the shooting that Manjone has been charged with because, I mean, that was a Kaczynski moment all in itself in a way, because here you’re like, wait a minute, I feel positive towards somebody who just shot somebody in the back. That’s a little disturbing. And it is disturbing. And I would invite people to focus on that. I mean, that’s the way in which I think these young people are disturbed. It’s like, wait a second, how do I process this world that I’ve been plunged into? What’s the righteous thing to do? I’m young, I’m strong, I’m like able to take action. What should I do before I get bogged down in the system myself? And I think they feel, they see, they don’t see a lot of hope.

[00:16:44] Jeff Schechtman: And it’s interesting because there’s a certain irony in the fact that the reaction to this, whether it’s Manjone or any of the others, but the reaction to it, the kind of positive reaction is in so many ways indicative of the problem itself and the inherent underlying problems.

[00:17:04] John Richardson: Exactly. The positive reaction is, yeah, you’ve said it exactly right, because we all feel that things are locked up and, you know, I mean, I think that’s part of the political moment we’re in, that things need a shake-up and people are willing to shake things up in ways that are frightening.

[00:17:27] Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about your correspondence with Kaczynski and your digging into Kaczynski in particular.

[00:17:34] John Richardson: Well, you know, I originally wrote to him because I’d met a couple of these young guys who were fascinated with his analysis and ready to go to revolution. And so I thought I’d, as a journalist, I was like, okay, well, I’ve got these guys, so now let me get Kaczynski and then I’ll have a story. So I started writing to him, basically asking for an interview, and he was very difficult to get an interview with. It ended up like being a five-year process. And he finally said yes when I was ready to give up, sort of yes. But, I mean, it was a process of getting him to trust me to try to find some sort of basis of understanding and communication and all that, which is, as you can imagine, a guy who’s in maximum security prison for life is not really willing to open up. It took a long time to get anywhere personal with him. And then I tried to argue with him about his tactical ideas about how to overthrow the system and he’d get mad or he’d get irritated, annoyed with my stupidity. But I gotta say, like, he was always pretty funny. He was sort of like a guy in a boy’s school. He liked to tease and harass you, like tell you how stupid you were and stuff like that. But we persisted. We finally sort of connected on music and boats, two things we had in common. And he told some lovely stories about being a kid with his dad on his dad’s sailboat and listening to his favorite music, The Messiah by Handel. So, I don’t know, Kaczynski was a hard nut. He was sort of a pen pal after a while, a crazy pen pal I had.

[00:19:19] Jeff Schechtman: How did he respond to the fact that his ideas had infiltrated out there into some of these young men?

[00:19:27] John Richardson: Oh, he was very enthusiastic about that and asked me on several occasions if I would correspond with or interact with some of his young followers. And I know he was quite, he was upset when he was forbidden from corresponding with anyone under 18 towards the end of his life. He very much, he continued to write in prison and correspond very widely with people. He was, I think that for him, it really formed a focus and a meaning of his life to be able to continue to mount the revolution from his jail cell. He read very widely in tactics and politics and, you know, he could lecture you about the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution all day long. So, I think it organized his life and gave him something meaningful to do. And I think he, you know, he obviously believed in it to the end. I personally came to believe in a lot of the things he said too. I mean, his analysis is not that off. It seems like he’s got it pretty good. You know, back in the 90s, he was writing about how AI, we would come to a point with AI when we would either, we wouldn’t understand what it was doing anymore. And at that point, we would either have to like, let it take charge or destroy it. And, you know, his opinion was we would let it take over. And it doesn’t seem like it’s the trend line is so wrong for him.

[00:21:06] Jeff Schechtman: In some ways, it’s become more accurate in terms of not just AI, but technology in general and the integration of technology into virtually everything.

[00:21:17] John Richardson: Right, right. And then you get an electromagnetic pulse to knock out electricity for a few hours and the whole system collapses. That’s Ted’s vision in a nutshell.

[00:21:30] Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about the generational aspect of this. And you talk about this school shooter generation, young people that grew up with seeing these school shootings and a certain level of violence as almost the norm.

[00:21:44] John Richardson: Right. Well, see, I’m an old guy. I’m 71. And I was 70 when I started this book. It’s it’s an alien world to me. And I like I did the best I could to read the Manosphere and listen to Joe Rogan and that kind of stuff. But it’s another world. So many things are different. I mean, even like waiting a week to see the next episode of the show you had to watch. To me, it’s a very alien world. And these the stuff that they listen to, I guess all old folks feel like this, but it seems kind of dangerous, like it’s dumb and it doesn’t have cultural roots that Duff used to have that went back to the Greeks and Shakespeare and stuff like that. It’s it just seems like it just all got invented yesterday. And the kids are trying to make sense out of this incredibly complicated world with fragments of ideas. I feel very sad for these kids. I really do.

[00:22:44] Jeff Schechtman: And somebody like Kaczynski becomes their guru.

[00:22:48] John Richardson: I don’t really have a solution. I just feel like it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. And I guess I would just be try to be more understanding instead of blaming the the young people. I would I would blame the society that has given them a sense that it’s up to them. I mean, they’re only in their 20s if that. It’s not up to you.

[00:23:12] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about why you think it’s going to get worse before better.

[00:23:15] John Richardson: Well, because because the grownups aren’t doing their jobs. You know, I don’t know how it came about that everything is falling apart, but it seems to be that way. And maybe Luigi Mangione is a proto revolutionary. Maybe he’s one of the first soldiers in a revolution to come, in which case he’s a combatant and not a killer, not a murderer. You know, I don’t really know how this is going to play out. I do think that when you have these violent actors, some of them, most of them on the right, a few on the left. I’m sorry, but that’s what the statistics show. I’m just saying look at the phenomenon. Don’t look at the individuals in a way. The individuals will blind you to what’s really happening. Your sympathy for Luigi Mangione or your sympathy for one of these others, if your tastes tend that way, sort of blinds you to the to the overall phenomenon, which is which is that more and more young people seem to be feeling the responsibility or the need to to take action themselves in an extra judicial, extra legal way. Either that will get a lot worse or the fever will burn off suddenly soon. But I’m not optimistic.

[00:24:39] Jeff Schechtman: The overlay to it all is the degree to which it has in our current environment become so politicized. It’s harder to get to, as I’m sure you have discovered in talking to all these people, it’s harder to get to the root causes because you first have to peel away all the politicization about it.

[00:24:58] John Richardson: Well, more to the point, you know, people are trying to use them. People are exploiting them. I mean, you know, Luigi has his defenders who are interested in health care, which enrages the people who are interested in him as an individual, innocent until proven guilty, you know, blinds you to what to the larger phenomenon. And that is our failure, which is a little harder to look at.

[00:25:25] Jeff Schechtman: The other failure is and you do hear this out there is that these were exceptional cases. These were young men gone wrong, that they were radicalized for whatever reason, and that they’re not representative of a broader set of problems.

[00:25:40] John Richardson: That’s like saying that each individual school shooter is not representative of a broader set of problems. And that would be silly. There are political actors who want to exploit individual cases. Some want to exploit Luigi, some want to exploit the Charlie Kirk killings, you know, whatever. In the darker corridors of the Internet, there are people who exploit the really ugly, darkest ones and people who exploit just murder for its own sake, for God knows. And that confuses things, too. It’s like, OK, I’m for the health care guy, but I’m not for the great replacement guy. OK, now we’ve got our teams. Oh, my God. It’s like that you can see where that goes. That just makes that just makes pours more killers into the mix.

[00:26:28] Jeff Schechtman: John Richardson, his book is Luigi, The Making and the Meaning. John, I thank you so much for spending time with us today. Thank you.

[00:26:36] John Richardson: Great questions.

[00:26:37] Jeff Schechtman: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.