Degrees of rage: The Ivy League and vigilantism

On December 4, a masked assailant used a homemade firearm to gun down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in midtown Manhattan. 

In security footage of the event, the assailant focuses exclusively on Thompson as he fires two bullets, displaying the calm professionalism of a CIA operative. 

The person charged with the crime is 26-year-old Luigi Mangione. He is not a professional hitman. He had no personal dispute with Thompson. He was not after money. He was not even a disgruntled customer of UnitedHealthcare, who, along with other major US health insurers, routinely deny otherwise reasonable claims driving many customers to rage, albeit the quieter, more impotent kind.

Mangione is simply a rich kid from Baltimore.

He is also a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, an institution that – along with other schools in the “Ivy League” like Columbia, Harvard, and Cornell – have become hotbeds of anti-Israel sentiment.

I’d contend that this is no coincidence. 

Bullet casings at the scene bore the words “delay” and “defend,” suggesting Mangione was motivated by ideologically driven anger at the health insurance system. Police later discovered a handwritten notebook confirming this interpretation: “What do you do? You wack the C.E.O. at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents,” reads one passage in the notebook. 

Clearly, Mangione saw himself as a moral crusader, someone battling a rigged system helmed by the irretrievably evil, such that violence was the only option. 

Sound vaguely familiar? That is because this same type of simplistic narrative has been driving the rebirth of antisemitism in the United States. Although their focal points are different, the same brand of thinking that has turned impressionable 18-year-olds on the campuses of US universities into standard bearers for global jihadism has also created a class of social warriors taking violent aim at economic and political institutions.

The settler-colonial framework, which is at the heart of the anti-Zionist, pro-Jihad movement, divides the world into tidy buckets of racial identity and promotes a universal narrative in which white – or, when convenient, Jewish – conquerors routinely subjugate indigenous populations of color. This ideological template is then applied to any conflict, ignoring the historical specifics of a given region or nation. 

This approach has become de rigueur for teaching about the Middle East at America’s “elite” institutions of higher learning. Tyler Austin Harper, notes, “In recent years . . . college presidents, deans, and HR professionals have cribbed the language of edgy politics, openly framing their institutions and initiatives as aspirationally ‘anti-racist’ and ‘decolonial’ enterprises while welcoming ‘scholar-activists’: professors who see their research, political militancy, and pedagogy as mutually constitutive.”

At Columbia, an Iranian Studies professor casually equated the State of Israel with ISIS, claiming, “The only difference: ISIS does not have a platoon of clean shaven and well coiffured columnists at the New York Times propagating the cause of the terrorist outfit as the Zionists columnists do on a regular basis.” Another professor at that same institution, who referred to the events of October 7th as “astounding” and “incredible,” will be teaching a course on Zionism this spring. The Ivy League and other universities are riddled with this thinking.

Meanwhile, critics of the settler-colonial narrative are dismissed with feigned concern over “academic freedom.” In December, Cornell University’s interim president faced exactly this accusation when he criticized an anti-Israel professor’s planned course entitled “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance.” According to the course’s professor, the course will focus on indigenous populations engaged “in a global resistance against an ongoing colonialism” and “present a specific case” of the Israel-Hamas war as “settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel.”

In an intellectual environment that divides the world into good and evil, it is only a matter of time before that same lens is applied to issues beyond the Israel/Hamas war. The logic of settler-colonialism, with its reductive vision of a world of good and evil, and its implicit (and sometimes explicit) advocacy of violence, can be easily directed by the naive toward any other, often very real, social injustice. In Mangione’s case, that meant the US economy, where an increasingly oligarchic network of large companies exert an absurd amount of influence to the detriment of common citizens. 

While these academic institutions are hardly churning out militant Marxists – 50% of the graduates of the University of Pennsylvania take jobs in finance or consulting – at the same time, a recent poll found 41% of young voters considered Thompson’s killing “acceptable.” This is a frightening statistic. It suggests that whenever a social injustice is considered serious enough, a growing portion of the population is completely on board with vigilante killings. 

Has colonialism been a significant and dangerous force in world history? Of course. Has class exploitation led to significant injustice? Absolutely. 

But these frameworks are starting points. They are lenses through which students and teachers can begin to break down complicated, nuanced situations in search of incremental, non-violent solutions. Academia has been failing in exactly this area: Instead of challenging students to wrestle with nuance and complexity, the academy has provided formulas that remove complexity, encouraging the selective choice of facts to support an anti-humanist, ideologically-driven set of narratives.

Throw in the general erosion of faith in our political institutions and mainstream media, add a dash of youthful impatience and the desire to belong to something larger than oneself, and it’s not hard to understand how college students might come to the conclusion that not only is murder the only way to effect real change, but that in the service of a noble cause, it’s not even murder. By any means necessary. The ends justify the means. Rape is resistance. 

Obviously, Mangione’s actions were not solely the product of his experience at Penn. But if universities insist on exposing impressionable young adults to ideological brainwashing, there will be others. The truly ambitious and/or the otherwise unstable – or perhaps just those who wrestle with the uncomfortable mantle of their own privilege – will turn rhetoric into action. They will parade around with flags of known terrorist groups and repressive states. They will intimidate and attack Jews. They will destroy great works of art in the name of eco-activism. And yes, the really unstable will shoot others down in cold blood on the streets of our cities. 

The academic establishment has demonstrated that they are quite content to tolerate, and even encourage, antisemitism in the name of “academic freedom.” Will they be as tolerant now that their graduates have started taking aim, quite literally, at members of the same moneyed classes that fund their endowments? Maybe now that the ideological chickens have come home to roost in midtown Manhattan, academic institutions will feel pressed to take a harder look at how they are shaping young minds. 

Maybe.