Elon Musk is the Right's Luigi

The cases are not the same but the psychology is

I’m fairly neutral, but leaning toward disapproval, of Luigi Mangione and I hope you’ll let me make my case before I lose too many of you.

I totally get why people approve. It’s the appeal of the vigilante superhero. Subtracting the part where he got caught, his was the same origin story as a hundred comic book characters: Previously law-abiding and upstanding member of the community suffers, or witnesses the suffering of people he loves, at the hands of unaccountable men who act with impunity, untouchable by the law. He therefore decides he must also act outside of the law to make sure justice is served, recognizing that the System will never change anything because the System is, at best, inefficient, and at worst, the enemy.

Mangione even had a superhero name before he was identified—people were calling him The Adjuster. That is, on one hand, brilliant, but on the other hand, evidence of how fucking Marvel-brained we are as a society now. It was almost as good when we found out his name was Luigi—not a superhero in the same sense that Mario is but superhero-adjacent enough to make some hay of it.

Powers: Can jump higher. Weaknesses: Scared of ghosts.

Put aside the type of person Luigi Mangione actually is—we don’t really know—and consider only what people project onto him: A symbol of the immense frustration that people feel over their suffering at the hands of a system, and the thrill of the prospect of something finally being done to tear down that system and all of its horrors. After years of futile effort to work within the system and see nothing change because the system is simply too robust to be thwarted by its own tools. There are laws and regulations and courts that protect the system’s integrity and prevent any dramatic change.

Finally somebody comes along and shoots it with a gun.

I don’t have any particular sympathy for the guy Luigi shot, I can’t even remember his name right now. I remember his face in the news but all that comes to mind is this guy.

Guy sounds like a piece of shit I guess. On the other hand, shooting him obviously hasn’t changed anything. Nobody expected the whole system to collapse around Hoggish Greedly. People just hoped it was the opening salvo of a revolution.

That didn’t happen, and the US for-profit health insurance vampire coven continues to feed unabated, but there still remains the fantasy of what might happen if Luigi were to attract followers. If they could start a trend, a cascade, that could bring down the whole corrupt establishment, ignoring laws, ignoring courts, just going door to door popping off CEOs left and right until they are forced into surrender.

Now consider that’s exactly the thrill that the right is getting from what Elon Musk is doing right now.

Don’t get me wrong, I think what Musk and Trump and the whole DOGE farce is doing is abominable and fascist and I don’t equate it with the frustrations that the left feels about the for-profit healthcare and health insurance matrix (a system that Musk and Trump love just the way that it is). That’s the thing, though, what I think doesn’t matter here. Step back from me and you and Luigi too and you’ll find that there are fundamental philosophical similarities. Musk and Mangione resemble each other in eerie ways even if they are inversions of each other.

In short: We have a Waluigi situation in the US Capitol.

Powers: Wah Weaknesses: Also wah

So first of all: Distrust in the system or the establishment or the power structure is not something that is either left or right coded. The lines just aren’t drawn like that, it’s part of our human psyche. We are a species with a fundamentally libertarian mindset. We don’t like being told what to do and we don’t like our liberties being taken away by someone else who unilaterally decides they know better. The differences between the right and the left tend to be associated with the nature of the liberty and the need.