Amy Hamm: Luigi Mangione’s delusional army swoons at his guilty plea

Luigi Mangione, 28, who pleaded guilty Friday to federal U.S. charges of interstate stalking resulting in death, has been a public litmus test for the morality of the political left. Many have failed.

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down on a New York street in December 2024 — shot first in the back (how dastardly) by a masked Mangione, who only now admits to the heinous crime. “I shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan and he died… I knew what I was doing,” Mangione said in court Friday. The plea, and not Mangione’s guilt, was the only surprise.

Yet men and women fawn over Mangione, penning letters to him in prison and even fundraising for his legal fees , while leftist media asks whether his “motivations were noble or evil,” and the intellectual class debates if this cold-blooded assassin is “reminiscent of historical folk heroes.” The legal fundraiser, which has raised more than US$1.5 million, says that Mangione “is being treated in an unprecedented and unfair fashion by a state acting out of cowardice and fear to make a spectacle of his case in an attempt to intimidate us all into submission to state and corporate power.”

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Here’s an idea: don’t assassinate others if you want to retain your freedom.

Outside of the New York court today, a Mangione fan— an attractive young woman with a California uptalk accent — spoke on video to announce her unconditional support for the now admitted killer: “I’ve always said I support Luigi whether or not he did it,” she said. “This is about a movement. It is about Luigi but it’s also about the conversation he started.” Later , she referred to the murder as neither “wrong or right” but instead as “more of a revolutionary act of protest… the likes of which we haven’t seen since the civil rights era.” Have these people lost their minds?

Civil rights hero Rosa Parks did not shoot her bus driver in the back. If she had, she likely would have become a footnote in history. The tragic assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., by contrast, was committed by a violent racist. The heroes of the U.S. civil rights era were not gun-wielding murderers. They were nothing like Luigi Mangione.