The Politics of Murder, Pt. I: Whodunit?
A diagnosis, not a cure, from the depths of the asylum | OPINIONS
INTRODUCTION
It’s 2am, and I’m staring at a screen full of strangers bickering over a wannabe killer, wondering if this is how empires die - not with a bang, but one whimpering post at a time.
It’s a quote-tweet discussing Cody Balmer, who was apprehended after fire-bombing Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home a few days ago in retaliation for Shapiro’s unwavering support of Israel - “stop having my friends killed,” he said in his confession.1 They’re already comparing him to Luigi Mangione, the hunk that allegedly gunned down a CEO to rage against the healthcare machine.
My head’s buzzing like an old neon sign, and I stumble towards my sooty file cabinet to yank out some past case files. Flipping through the faded manila folders, I find what I’m looking for - a ha! There it is: five months before Mangione, the mysterious Thomas Crooks took a shot at Trump’s ear in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing a bystander shortly before the Secret Service turned him into a human colander. Had Trump’s head been titled a few degrees differently, it would have been a killshot. Two months after Crooks, Ryan Routh, a 58-year-old drifter camped out on Trump’s golf course with a rifle, dreaming of finishing what Crooks started. And don’t forget the fresh batch of lunatics: the racist FSU mass-shooting this past week, the arrests of a transgender vegan terror-cult in Maryland linked to five murders across the country, and the Wisconsin kid who killed his parents on his way to try for a third crack at Trump, all in the past month or so.
The rogues gallery just keeps expanding, with no sign of letting up.
If you’re new here - well, shit, welcome to America: where every Tom, Dick, and Luigi with a grudge is one trigger pull away from making history, and the line between the law-abiding citizen and assassin is apparently thinner than a dollar-store razor.
America is no stranger to the madness and the killings - we’ve seen some shit - but this feels different; modern America is like a blunt toke you inhale before realizing it’s laced with something you didn’t ask for. This recent rash of violence strikes me as a new beast, a tidal wave of explicitly partisan politics crashing over real people - CEOs, presidents, neighbors - and fueled by a culture that’s cripplingly politically paranoid. “Polarized” doesn’t quite capture it; American politics has become suspicious and accusatory to the point of delusion, catastrophizing every “wedge issue” or offhand comment into a matter of life or death. It’s a minefield, and you’re gonna step on something if you’re not careful.
Pro-choice? You’re a baby-killer sacrificing fetuses to Satan. Pro-life? You want to perversely control women’s vaginas and get off on victims of rape giving birth to children they never asked for. You start to get the feeling that you can’t quite win.
Assuming that such accusations were accurate - sacrificing babies to Satan is pretty bad - you’d have a hard time arguing that a little vigilante justice ain’t warranted. But we know it’s not true, unless you don’t. Robert Lewis Dear, Jr. who shot up an abortion clinic and killed three people, declared himself “a warrior for the babies.” It’s no longer enough to agree to disagree; people seem to increasingly adopt the attitude to burn the heretic at the stake, lest they spread anymore blasphemy. Much of the nation is ready to light the match: a 2023 survey found 23% of Americans believe political violence is justified to “save the country,” specifically 1/3 of Republicans, 22% of independents, and 13% of Democrats.2 That’s not so much a statistic as it is a ticking time bomb. And the bodies are already piling up.
THE KILLER NEXT DOOR
The telephone in my office is screaming now, the familiar brr-brr! of the bell ringer. The heavy stench of cigarette ash clogs up my ears to the point where I almost don’t hear it. Is it a tip, or a threat? I just ignore it.
I recollect my thoughts: is all this just media sensationalism? They’ve cried wolf before - we know now that Sadaam never had WMDs, no one at the McMartin Preschool was sexually abused, and Richard Jewell didn’t bomb the 1996 Olympics. Killers like Luigi Mangione grab the headlines with their explosive violence and square jaws, but is it just the media salivating for a juicy narrative, or is political violence - terrorism - really on the up and up?
Though it can be difficult to track the number of terrorist incidents in a given year owing to differing research methods and criteria, a review published by the Government Office of Accountability looking at defendants charged in terror plots by year showed that the number of indictments has sharply increased since 2018:3
This would seem to suggest that terrorism (or at least, attempts at terrorism) is on the rise. Similarly, when looking specifically at government targets, the Center for Strategic Studies has found that domestic terror attacks are at the highest they’ve been in the past 30 years:4
They also note that these attacks are increasingly “motivated by partisan political beliefs” far more often than their historical predecessors:
Alright, enough of the statistics - so we know shit is blowing up more often. But why?
Luigi Mangione was a 26-year-old ivy-league valedictorian from a Baltimore blue-blood family: by all measures, the kind of kid who should’ve been sipping martinis at a yacht club, not gunning down Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan Hilton and quoting Ted Kaczynski, of all people. But from what we know, a botched back surgery left him in chronic pain, and as a result the healthcare system became his personal Satan. When he was arrested, he carried a three-page manifesto calling healthcare corporations “parasites.” When he pulled the trigger on December 4, 2024, the reaction was surprisingly sympathetic - half the internet rallied behind him like he was John Brown reincarnated. “Eat the rich!” was their rallying cry, eventually turning Mangione not just into a meme, but a martyr and even a sex symbol. No one seems to be asking why the kid with a silver spoon traded that in for a gun - no, they’re too busy picking teams. We have an idea why he was mad, that’s not my question, but what made him think violence was his best option?
Then there’s Crooks, the enigma who climbed a roof in Butler, PA on July 13, 2024, apparently outsmarting the secret service and nearly rewriting history. A 20-year-old from Bethel Park, he’s far less sexy than Mangione, and had virtually no online footprint or manifesto: just a confusing $15 donation to a liberal PAC while also possessing a Republican voter registration. The shots from his AR-15 grazed the former president’s ear, killed a spectator, and wounded two others before he ate a Secret Service bullet. Five months later, the FBI’s seemingly got nothing - or at least, nothing they’ve told us. No motive, no ideology. It’s like Crooks wasn’t even real, just a physical manifestation of America’s chaotic, violent id unleashed, directionless in its anger, one that builds up and finally explodes if the pressure has no where to go, typically with no regard for who might be in the way.
Routh’s a different breed from these two in many ways, but also the same in a few key ones, too: Routh was a 58-year-old drifter with a rap sheet and thirst for purpose. On September 15, 2024, he waited 12 hours in the shrubs of Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course, an assault rifle in hand, until a Secret Service agent spotted him. He fled, got collared, and later wrote a jailhouse letter comparing himself to Crooks, claiming he was, “ready to die for freedom and democracy.” His X feed was a bizarre and unpalatable cocktail: pro-Ukraine rants, anti-Trump screeds, even a call for Iran to kill the man. Eventually, it seems he decided to take matters into his own hands.
What ties these three and Balmer together? Clearly not politics - Mangione’s a healthcare vigilante with views spread all over the place like buckshot (certain sections of both the right and the left have claimed him), Crooks’ an enigma, Routh a nutcase gripped by an obsessive hatred for Trump, and Balmer a guy who thought he was fighting against a genocide in the Middle East. The feeling that unites them though, and what many Americans can probably sympathize with, is their anger over their view that the system’s screwed them, in whatever way that might be; it won’t listen to them, and now? The only way to get its strict attention is a gun or a bomb. They felt so unbelievably helpless about the prospect of anything changing in their lives that they had no choice but to open fire.
It’s not hard to see where they’re coming from, either: the 118th Congress last year passed the fewest number of bills than any other Congress since 1947, and Congress’ approval rating sank to 13% in 2023, one of the lowest since tracking began.56 Take healthcare reform, for instance: America holds the rather unprestigious title of being the only developed country across the globe without socialized medicine in some form - unless you consider Chad the first-world. People have been begging Congress for decades to make American healthcare more available and affordable, but despite the fact that almost 2/3 Americans support some form of universal healthcare, virtually no progress has been made to seriously implement such a system.7 Sure, we got Obamacare in 2010, which was so wildly successful that 15 years onward the CEO of United Health Care got shot over it. With people quite literally dying to avoid medical bills, is it any surprise people have started blasting?
THERE’S A SPECTER HAUNTING AMERICA…
This violence isn’t like the revolutions of old, either: many people have compared it to ‘60s unrest, but I think that analogy is flawed and unhelpful for a number of reasons.
Ok, have some patience with me as I blow off the dust from my history book: in the shadow of 9/11, many Americans probably don’t even realize that terrorism was much more common in the ‘60s and the ‘70s than any other time in American history - according to historian Bryan Boroughs there were, “2,500 domestic bombings in just 18 months in 1971 and 1972, with virtually no solved crimes and barely any significant prosecutions.”8 The radicals saw themselves as urban guerilla fighters, and they certainly earned that title. Their terrorism was also based on specific issues, not religion - say, civil rights, anti-capitalism, or attempting to bring an end to the war in Vietnam by “bringing the war home.”
But what divides someone like Mangione or Routh from someone like the Weather Underground? For one, the “who” was typically a collective of organized groups that fed off the communal nature of the counter-culture: sit-ins, Woodstock, campuses, and ghettos were used to attract members discreetly, not the radicalizing power of the internet. Lone actors existed (re: Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan), but groups were the dominant force. There was also typically a bigger picture. The Weather Underground, one of the most notorious terror organizations of the 60s, was composed of a group of hard-core Marxists that “called on America’s youth to create a rearguard action against the U.S. government that would bring about its downfall.” Not exactly the same as a vengeful guy who wants healthcare reform and to shove it to corporations. Communists, black separatists, Puerto-Rican nationalists, whoever - weren’t so interested in “saving America” (whatever that might mean) as they were interesting in tearing the whole thing down and remaking it in their own image. Both eras love bombs and guns, but the ‘60s focused on symbolism: government buildings and draft offices. 2025’s targets are personal (CEOs, Trump) or scattershot (neighbors, parents). It was about ideology with a capital “I”; it wasn’t about “partisan” issues like abortion or peace in the Middle East. Today’s terror is personal, not political, driven by the despair of the disaffected, not manifestos. “Stop having my friends killed.”
I get a ghostly whiff of the gasoline from Balmer’s Molotov. I dart my head around to make sure I’m truly alone.
As bad as all this is, stagnation in traditional political and societal structures is not what’s loading the guns; neither are the Black Panthers. Plenty of people get frustrated without picking up a rifle or a pipe bomb. No, something more disturbing is lurking here, whispering into the ears of our neighbors and turning them into killers.
I think a much better comparison than the ‘60s is something much uglier, more primal in American history: today’s killers, like Mangione and Balmer, echo a familiar and unfriendly ghost, the spirit of the Civil War. When brother shot brother, each side convinced the other was hell-bent on destroying its way of life. 620,000 Americans died because neighbors each cried “treason” over issues like slavery and statehood, convinced the other was evil incarnate. Sound familiar? The modern struggle is reminiscent of the North and South butting heads over every partisan inch, and getting nothing done, except maybe this time it’s liberals versus conservatives, or maybe the vox populi against the 1%. These guys aren’t chasing utopia like the Weathermen. They’re not bombing draft offices for ideology. Whatever view you take, Mangione’s manifesto, Balmer’s Molotov - they’re not revolution; they’re anger and despair, lashing out at a fractured, burning world. The Civil War fits better than the ‘60s; it’s not about hope but survival, a nation split and choking, with no way out but conflict. The stink of death is close, I can feel it.
Pick a side, light the fuse, or get out of the way - America’s waiting.
Stick around for the next dispatch, part II, coming soon: “How to survive a nation eating itself alive” - if I live long enough to write it.
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