I Walked Around NYC With a Luigi Mangione T-Shirt And This Is How That Went

During the height of Luigi Mangione fever in January, when the interminably online were posting memes with the general sentiment "depose me daddy," I purchased an airbrush-style t-shirt that reads "Free My Man" alongside a photograph of a shirtless Luigi, from the Radical Resistance Company, a t-shirt line started by the activist Keiajah, who's donating the proceeds to individuals "most impacted by the American Healthcare Industrial Complex: poor and working class people of color."  

Luigi Mangione is accused of gunning down United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a midtown Hilton last December and now, paradoxically or not, New York City is the hub of Luigi Mangione fever. At his court hearing in February, throngs of supporters rallied to his alleged cause, protesting a predatory health insurance system and what many believe is an unfair-trial-by-media, owing in part to his perp walk that was produced by Mayor Eric Adams. The act itself was captured on surveillance video, and a note addressing law enforcement was found at the time of his arrest. Mangione's next federal court hearing is this Friday. The Trump administration is publicly seeking the death penalty, which his defense attorney says precludes his right to a fair trial. 

Because many Mangione fans have noted that the impeccably eyebrowed Italian American 26-year-old is traditionally attractive, there has been a deliberate bimbofication of his female followers; activists inside and outside the courthouse have been infantilized, with the focus directed towards their thirst but not the material and political concerns that propel it. Young women being horny for Luigi online is often a way in to critique the health insurance system that sees people as bots for profit, that accepts our monthly premiums but systematically denies our claims. United Healthcare is particularly culpable among a suite of already-despicable health insurance companies, using algorithms to reject various types of claims, and generally adopting a system meant to hoard premium-created wealth so draconian that some doctors have been moved to speak out publicly, even as UHC targets them for doing so.

The fact that Luigi is traditionally handsome in his very specific white Italian way helps his case, but it does not preclude the fact that his act has exposed a very real schism in a country where people regularly go into crushing debt just to stay alive. At the same time, he has become an avatar onto which the viewer can paint our political belief systems, though based on what publicly available information, his own beliefs were more complicated. As the culture critic Grace Byron wrote, "Luigi Mangione is a portal, one open to telling us all we can ever know about the desire for order and health, for security and destruction."

So it only seemed fair that I should make myself my own kind of portal, hoping for the citizens of New York to use my shirt (and by extension, me) to project their views and opinions about Luigi and, by extension, the state of health care in the United States. Due to various recent events, I have found myself lacking health insurance once again, joining an estimated 23 million Americans per the latest data in 2023. By wearing my Luigi shirt around town and talking to regular New Yorkers about the case, I hoped to glean an empirical gauge of the tenor of a city currently in the throes of an affordability crisis on the subject of the man who allegedly killed a healthcare CEO with bullets engraved "deny," "defend," and "depose." Would the vibes online translate to the streets?