That Luigi Mangione became a cult figure in the blink of an eye should shock no one—villains are interesting, and Americans have always been drawn to outlaws. Mangione, the reader will recall, allegedly assassinated UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson shortly after Donald Trump’s spectacular finish in the November election, stealing some of the spotlight from the recently elected 47^th president.

Although Mangione claimed in a note found upon his person at the time of his arrest to “respect what [the feds] do for the country,” the young man was immediately adopted as an avatar by elements of both the anti-establishment right and especially the woke left. Anarchists, who count prepaid healthcare plans and their administrators among their top tier foes, staged Mangione look-alike contests, sold $26.50 St. Luigi candles, and printed t-shirts bearing his six pack picture.

His naked torso turned out to be quite a hit. The middle-aged gay chat group at the NeverTrump publication The Bulwark is said to be “on fire” for his radical physique, and the women in major media board rooms are smitten. Young women crowded the hallways of New York Criminal Court in support of his appearance there, Manson family style.

Mangione’s anticapitalist admirers are wrong about healthcare—medical plan providers are tightly regulated, and while the industry is infused with government money, the profits are so modest, it takes a wild flight of fancy to imagine it as a stand-in for untethered capitalism. The executives are not “parasites” who, as the alleged assassin maintained, “had it coming,” but a dispensable element of a government-private partnership.

Unfortunately, it is all but useless to think of making any progress with the left by taking note of Thompson’s humanity. When approaching the far left, it serves no purpose to make such pleas, because the radicalized are now blind to such considerations in their political enemies.

The woke hardened their hearts after the 10/7 massacre in Israel when Somalian journalist Najma Sharif showed them how to rationalize a slaughter: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? Losers.” The former Washington Post reporter and viral influencer Taylor Lorenz picked up on this theme, giggling about the “joy” she felt when she learned about Thompson’s assassination—the way she sees it, he wasn’t the only one who was dead:

So are the tens of thousands of Americans that he murdered! So are the tens of thousands of Americans, innocent Americans, who died because greedy health insurance executives like this one push a policy of denying care to the most vulnerable people.

To an average leftist extremist, the Thompson murder is a matter of calculus: the suffering of class enemies will be eclipsed by the good that would unfold—inevitably, in their opinion—when the socialist phoenix rises from the ashes of the liberal world order. Such people are good at compartmentalizing; they are too busy dreaming up utopias to lower themselves to feel anything at all about an individual life. Although we can and should point to each other every instance of this radical sociopathy, it’s impossible to guilt trip those who are caught up in it into empathy. Like Rodion Raskolnikov, the main character of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, striking the heads of the elderly pawnbroker and her sister, Mangione might have murdered the individual he deemed subhuman, but the act alone, even if it appeals to more Zoomers than it repels, is unlikely to change a damn thing.

A better approach is to press the execution enthusiasts about their plans. Who else deserves to be sacrificed on the altar of history? They themselves concede that the murder of a single CEO won’t change the system, but even if they could off every last one of them that, too, would have limited effect given how deeply the United States government is involved in decision-making about healthcare.

We should remind these would-be revolutionaries that if we are to take a homicidal path, countless other slayings will be necessary. How many exactly and of whom? And why is some millionaire spawn with a broken spine entitled to be the one who makes such decisions when I, too, am perfectly capable of drafting my own enemies list? Revolutionary morality is grounded in an arbitrarily chosen ideology, not God, tradition or, contrary to all of Karl Marx’s assertions, anything resembling a scientific method. Considering the steep competition from all other systems of belief, getting the normies to accept their ideology and practice will be tricky and may require even further carnage than they imagine.

Subjectivity is the least of their problems. Ask the Mangione fan base what, considering the history of armed uprisings worldwide, leads them to think that they themselves would be spared the fate of the revolutionary elites like Joseph Stalin’s nemeses Trotsky who ended up with an ice pick to his skull or Bukharin who took a shower of bullets to his body. They might find it surprising that they will be the ones more likely to perish in a wave of state terror than the average lower middle-class Trumpster.

Then there is the question of individualism. A raised fist over a keffiyeh-wrapped head can feel like a gesture of empowerment. Vegan leather boots can theoretically puncture Nazi foreheads. It all feels good to the revolutionary, but one important reason Zoomer rebels are so excited about Mangione is that he emerged as a decisive and individual assassin figure when their movement has been trained to act like a herd. Dressed in anarchist uniforms, with their faces veiled they repeat their handlers’ chants at rallies. They pine for an antihero who can act as an independent agent—or at least lower his mask for flirting after most of them have become too accustomed to incognito communications and sexless college years.

Yet Mangione, like Raskolnikov, is more surplus material than he is the “great man” destined to change the course of history. If what we know of the Thompson murder so far checks out, like Dostoevsky’s protagonist, he is a rank amateur unable to execute a serious criminal plan. Raskolnikov made a number of errors, most notably his failure to rob his dead victim—when taking her money and using it for a good purpose was his justification for the ultimate transgression. Having dared himself to murder, he was unable to live with the guilt and turned himself in within three days. Mangione apparently made similar rookie mistakes, including briefly revealing his face to a hostel receptionist, enabling the authorities to obtain his picture from surveillance cameras, which quickly led to his arrest.

Raskolnikov at least published a paper on his “great man” theory—proposing that the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte are allowed to transgress every social norm. Mangione had no manifesto. There was a scurry of excitement on social media when it was revealed that the presumed murderer left a favorable review of Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future. Could it be that we have on our hands another Unabomber, a man who can do for single payer healthcare what Kaczynski did for environmentalism?

There were signs that Mangione could be that Gen Z mind whose vision might inspire generations of radicals—and give fodder to essayists. Being made a valedictorian in his $35K-a-year boys’ prep school, he went on to UPenn, graduating with a STEM degree, just like the Unabomber.

Maybe Mangione is too young to produce an extended, well-thought-out pamphlet and maybe he’s too debilitated by pain to focus. More likely he’s just not the type to burden himself with heavy thought. His reading list on Goodreads was unimpressive and his “manifesto” turned out to be a dud. Under 300 words long, it contained zero original insights. Any literate adult can look up how much the United States spends on healthcare and compare our life expectancy to other developed nations. Mangione did that and nothing else.

As evil as he might have been, Kaczynski had a personal philosophy that was coherent. If not particularly original, his writing was lucid and full of surprises — his criticism of liberalism struck a note with conservatives, for instance. He offered a vision and a critique, he advocated a naïve return to nature — a theme that perpetually pops up in American thought.

Technocrats were his nemesis — the kind of people who’d have you believe that they know better how to distribute the funds to get, for instance, the best healthcare for your buck, the self-anointed Mangiones running death panels. Had Kaczynski lived to see the creation of AI, which was Mangione’s academic field of study,  he’d have sent him a bomb in the mail.

The midcentury protégé executed multiple plots to deliver bombs to targeted industries to near perfection and negotiated the publication of his manifesto by The Washington Post. All on his own. Individual against society. Today’s extremists like Antifa and the anti-Zionist movement band together and hardly deviate from the commands of their well-heeled bosses — a far cry from the “great men“.

I don’t doubt that Mangione is smart; he just doesn’t come across as a thinker. Being a valedictorian in a small school where students are likely screened for wealth only is not necessarily much of an achievement—and, in any event, our secondary education is not what it was when the future Unabomber skipped grades. Kaczynski entered college as an autistic outcast and, in lieu of social life, volunteered for the emotional torment of MK Ultra. By contrast, there exists a video of Mangione at a frat party crushing beer cans with his forehead. Ted K would never have been included in something like that.

What works in Mangione’s favor is that he’s a hot incel. Like his prototype, the Gen Z Unabomber wannabe is timid around women. But if a generation ago a man was expected to show sexual prowess, the fact that the anarchist heartthrob never got to third base is not a turn off in the post #MeToo era. A certain segment of women is falling head over heels for him.

Crime and Punishment is a timeless novel because it shows the way out of revolutionary hubris—faith, hard work, and a woman’s love. Raskolnikov started on a downward spiral when his fiancé passed away and he came out of it through a new love who brought him to God. Mangione and any one of the lonely women that fill the ranks of the leftist jackboots these days would be better off if they’d pair up and live ordinary lives. We all would be better off.

What people of good conscience need to do to make these things  possible for these wannabe revolutionaries is just the opposite of what the State of New York did when it staged the entirely unnecessary Mangione walk of shame in the orange prison suit  surrounded by a dozen guards. That just increased his allure. Raskolnikov, after all, didn’t go to what we would consider an equivalent of a maximum-security prison.

The young wokesters need to see that their newfound hero is no great man. We need to demystify him, and explain how his act was senseless—not just because of its cruelty but because, save for his upper body physique, he’s entirely unremarkable and unimpressive. And from the commonsense point of view he’s as ridiculous as Raskolnikov—Dostoyevsky’s villain was admonished by fellow prisoners and called out for being a barin, or a gentleman. And everyone knows that gentlemen don’t run around with axes … or killing healthcare executives in cold blood on the streets.

It would serve us well to explain how, if Mangione only knew history, the Ivy League graduate would have understood that he was doomed from the get-go. He is doomed not because the of any charges levied against him by the State of New York—his legal ordeals will be comparatively charitable—but by the internal dynamics of government overthrow.

Young women inking Mangione’s likeness under their skin might find the idea of the wealthy man who dared to murder ravishing, but the self-proclaimed fed respecter is, by his nature, just another apparatchik of no great intellect who failed in love. And unlike the Unabomber, who perhaps didn’t mind at all spending decades in confinement reading books and receiving guests, the little Luigi will be bored out of his wits in prison.