It's easy for me to make fun of the guy b/c I'm a skeptic of most things. (And uh, his family was loaded, no pun intended.)
And you also can't deny the insane position of
privilege he was acting from. (Never mind the self-negating ridiculousness of it all. Being born w/a silver spoon in his mouth is what precisely allowed him the time and energy to take this path. Along w/a healthy dose of resentment and an unhealthy one of possible mental illness.)
But let's rock some balance, and allow me to be serious for a sec.
Business Insider is typically a turd of a publication, but I found this excerpt to be insightful:
"On X, he followed the liberal columnist Ezra Klein and the conservative podcaster Joe Rogan. He respected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and retweeted a video of Peter Thiel maligning "woke"-ism. He took issue with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He played the cartoon video game "Among Us," posted shirtless thirst traps, quoted Charli XCX on Instagram, and had the Goodreads account of an angsty, heterodox-curious teenage boy: self-help, bro-y nonfiction, Ayn Rand, "The Lorax," and "Infinite Jest." Yes, he seemed to admire the Unabomber. But mostly, this guy — a former prep-school valedictorian with an Ivy League education and a spate of tech jobs — was exceedingly centrist and boring. A normie's normie. He wasn't an obvious lefty, but he wasn't steeped in the right-wing manosphere either."
"That didn't stop the denizens of social media from pretending to be the most qualified people to lay out exactly who Mangione is. He's "fundamentally anti-capitalist" and "just another leftist nut job." Or he's "a vaguely right-wing ivy league tech bro." Or he was invented by the CIA, or maybe Mossad, as a "psyop." The reality of Mangione — his messy, sometimes contradictory impulses — allowed everyone to cherry-pick the aspects of his personality that confirmed their original suspicions. In the attention economy, patience is a vice."
https://www.businessinsider.com/social- ... er-2024-12
I
still don't think any of this will accomplish shee-it in the long run, much less unite the right and left in some anti-Aetna jihad.
(And fuck, for once, I wish I knew the titles of some Weezer tunes beyond da hitz.)