RadixJournal - Luigi Mangione and the Revolutionary Normie

00:00:00.000 Well, the Luigi trial is upon us, and it is set to be the trial of the century internet style.

00:00:11.180 And Luigi has one notable supporter, and she is the Bette Noire of the incels, and that is Taylor Lorenz.

00:00:21.720 It's hilarious to see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone standing a murderer when this is the United States of America, as if we don't lionize criminals, as if we don't have, you know, we don't stand murderers of all sorts.

00:00:39.780 Do you know what I hate is using internet language in real life?

00:00:44.020 I was in a conversation once with someone who used unalive to refer to killing someone, as if our phone call was going to be demonetized or something if we use the word kill.

00:01:02.680 I really hate that. Just stop using standing. That's just stupid.

00:01:08.580 There's a huge disconnect between the narratives and angles that sort of mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels, and you see that in moments like this. 0.99

00:01:20.640 And I can tell you, I saw the biggest audience growth that I've ever seen, because people were like, oh, somebody, some journalist is actually speaking to the anger that we feel.

00:01:31.600 The women who got her outside court in New York. 1.00

00:01:35.020 So you're going to see women, especially, that feel like, oh, my God, right? 0.99

00:01:38.900 Like, here's this man who's revolutionary, who's famous, who's handsome, who's young, who's smart.

00:01:47.360 He's a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.

00:01:55.540 Yeah.

00:01:56.320 Oh, my God.

00:01:57.140 Women will literally date an assassin before they swipe right on me. 1.00

00:02:00.920 That's where we are.

00:02:01.720 All right, I kind of like that guy, actually.

00:02:06.340 He's being self-deprecating.

00:02:08.320 Some of how people cannot understand why people have sympathies for Mangione strikes me as the same as a lot of media not understanding why people support Trump.

00:02:24.600 I totally agree.

00:02:25.260 It's because a lot of people are just really, really desperate.

00:02:29.860 They want somebody to take on the system.

00:02:33.380 They want somebody to tear down these barbaric establishment institutions.

00:02:38.540 What I find fascinating here is that it is a sort of revolutionary normie.

00:02:46.980 It's a normie revolution, maybe even a bourgeois revolution, but not in the way that Marx meant it.

00:02:54.560 So let me pick some low-hanging fruit on this first.

00:03:00.040 So it is fascinating that there is just this obvious contradiction in what Taylor Lorenz is saying.

00:03:09.200 So she makes a very similar argument as Alex Jones made when he was being interviewed by Piers Morgan 10, 15 years ago, and they were talking about gun control.

00:03:21.740 Piers Morgan, who's more or less conservative, was basically saying, like, come on, man.

00:03:27.160 No other country has the gun issues that the United States has.

00:03:31.600 And many of those other countries have hunting, hunting culture.

00:03:35.640 In fact, maybe even a little bit of gun culture, but it's so much worse than the United States.

00:03:40.460 Can't you just be reasonable? 1.00

00:03:42.360 And he's like, listen, Pierce, you English want to come on here and we're going to go 1776 on your ass. 0.99

00:03:51.280 This country was founded on guns and whiskey. 0.99

00:03:54.340 You know, this kind of attitude, we're a country of outlaws, which is wrong.

00:04:02.760 I mean, it's getting at a kernel of truth.

00:04:05.520 I guess I'll give you that, but it is wrong.

00:04:08.660 This country is not Wyatt Earp.

00:04:12.000 This country was settled by Puritans.

00:04:16.280 The revolution, maybe it wasn't begun by aristocratic liberal plantation owners, but was certainly completed by them.

00:04:27.760 And the country was defined by them, by Jefferson, Washington, et alia. 0.93

00:04:33.020 So this notion that it's a country of outlaws is sort of ridiculous. 0.90

00:04:38.000 Now, I actually do get it.

00:04:40.260 The frontier in the West is an extremely important component of American identity.

00:04:45.000 And yeah, you could sort of say that the country was founded on guns and whiskey like in the gold rush.

00:04:52.280 Go West, young man. 0.98

00:04:53.640 And the entire economy was based on, you know, pulling things out of the earth and getting wildly drunk, gambling, shooting the dealer when he cheats you, and then screwing prostitutes, taking one as your wife. 0.99

00:05:09.280 Tombstone, basically. 0.99

00:05:10.600 I get it.

00:05:11.460 But yeah, you're certainly leaving out quite a bit of American identity.

00:05:16.660 So she says that, and then 30 seconds later, she says, he's such a moral man.

00:05:25.600 And he's like the perfect man for someone like Taylor Lorenz, because he holds all of her midwit values. 0.98

00:05:36.980 I mean, what we learned about Luigi was that he was worried about doom scrolling, reducing autonomy or something like this, or the fact that health insurance providers might be rejecting a significant portion of their clients.

00:05:57.440 And so we're all not fully integrated into the healthcare system.

00:06:02.260 Like this is what he was fighting for.

00:06:04.660 Now, I get, in a way, many criticisms of the healthcare system, but this is a sort of unreflective, completely non-Marxian, middle-class conception of the world.

00:06:19.560 You're a wagey, and you want better benefits is, in effect, what you are fighting for.

00:06:25.780 So he basically appeals to the normie, millennial, not-too-bright leftist.

00:06:34.740 Taylor Lorenz has been concerned with, you know, anti-trans bigotry on social media, etc.

00:06:42.340 She has deeply normie values.

00:06:46.320 The fact that, as a revolutionary or something, you would even think about that, just expresses the middle-class basis of her ideology.

00:06:55.500 And so you have this guy who's not the Unabomber. 0.95

00:06:59.340 I mean, I reject the Unabomber. 1.00

00:07:02.120 And the Unabomber has a fascinating history as an MKUltra victim, after all. 0.73

00:07:06.600 But I won't go into that.

00:07:08.020 But, I mean, I reject this extreme, I guess you could call it Ludditism, anti-technology, anti-industry.

00:07:18.020 I mean, I ultimately reject it.

00:07:20.180 But there is something sort of wild and cool about the Unabomber. 0.73

00:07:25.580 He obviously is highly intelligent and obviously thought through his ideology.

00:07:32.800 And it's an ideology that has been expressed by other radical traditionalist thinkers.

00:07:39.180 His terrorism, I found a bit lame and random, mail-bombing.

00:07:45.160 The living in the woods alone, going off-grid, not something I would do, but rather cool, if I'm honest, badass.

00:07:53.820 Sort of better than getting arrested in a McDonald's while eating hash browns.

00:08:00.780 All those photos we see of Luigi where he's really liking McDonald's is like, oh my god, a Lion King Happy Meal.

00:08:09.120 He's a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.

00:08:17.180 I genuinely wonder if Brian Thompson would be alive today.

00:08:22.020 If UnitedHealthcare had branded their insurance using a Disney film.

00:08:28.800 You know, Aladdin, perhaps, or maybe a Peter Pan throwback.

00:08:34.260 It's something to think about.

00:08:35.520 So you're going to see women, especially, that feel like, oh my god, right? 0.98

00:08:38.980 Luigi's horrible. 1.00

00:08:41.420 He's a midwit. 0.99

00:08:42.760 He is sadly exactly the type of person that Ivy League colleges are promoting. 0.94

00:08:51.460 It's a kind of Matthew Iglesias-like intellectual.

00:08:55.800 The midwit who's ultimately not reflective and thoughtful, certainly not revolutionary. 1.00

00:09:02.600 So he's basically going to be a good cog in the system.

00:09:05.700 That's Luigi.

00:09:08.520 But Luigi and revolutionaries around him felt like the system wasn't working well enough.

00:09:15.520 So Marx, to his credit, or Lenin, Chase, everyone, they wanted a radically different social order.

00:09:26.880 And they, in fact, predicted and longed for some sort of great crisis in the current order so that they could implement a new way of being.

00:09:41.840 They were genuinely revolutionary.

00:09:47.260 The French revolutionaries, unquestionably, not at the beginning at the very least, but unquestionably at some point, were committing a sort of genocide, a kind of classicide, against the landed aristocracy and even the church.

00:10:05.440 They were trying to implement a new age of reason.

00:10:10.700 Now, I don't necessarily agree with any of these people, but I guess I can respect game when I see it.

00:10:18.980 It is badass.

00:10:20.960 It is cool.

00:10:22.220 The normie revolutionary, represented by Taylor Lorenz, is, in effect, this notion that middle-class America isn't working in the way that they hoped.

00:10:33.800 And they feel that there's some sort of demon on the other end who isn't allowing them to experience the American dream.

00:10:46.220 So there must be malice involved with Brian Thompson, this sort of douchey, multimillionaire dude who is running UnitedHealthcare.

00:11:01.220 He's letting people die.

00:11:04.000 And, you know, everyone has a right to health insurance.

00:11:07.100 And so he needs to help out all of these people.

00:11:10.780 This is not at all how an actual revolutionary would act and think.

00:11:17.440 It's a sort of angry, violent, normie reactionary.

00:11:21.100 They are worried that the middle-class existence that they were promised and that they are, in effect, living is going to be taken away from them or won't be implemented to them in the way that they desire.

00:11:38.460 And you see a lot of this with, like, red note people.

00:11:42.380 I mean, I don't know if the red note trend is popular anymore.

00:11:47.240 But when it looked like TikTok was about to be banned right before Donald Trump was sworn in, there was this move to red note.

00:11:57.440 And they were seeing all of these fake LED-laden Chinese cities.

00:12:03.220 And they were also seeing the impact of, first off, all the stuff we talked about last Tuesday, free-floating currencies.

00:12:12.660 They were seeing the impact of currency manipulation by the Chinese. 0.70

00:12:16.640 They're not strengthening the yuan.

00:12:18.700 They're constantly weakening the yuan.

00:12:21.320 And so you'll get into a situation where they can buy a bag of groceries for the equivalent of $20 U.S. 0.99

00:12:29.600 Well, of course they can, because it's the fucking exchange rate. 0.94

00:12:34.180 And the fact that you are falling into the same trap as Tucker Carlson going to Russia is kind of incredible. 0.98

00:12:45.540 Russia has a different currency situation with the U.S. due to different causes.

00:12:51.620 But, yes, you can go to Russia and feel like a millionaire, and that's the life of the expat, the tourist.

00:13:03.000 But if you're living in Russia and groceries cost 40% of your monthly wage, you're going to have a very different attitude towards the situation.

00:13:16.360 And I saw someone doing this exactly.

00:13:18.220 She was looking at Red Note, and then she was, like, pointing eastward or something.

00:13:22.940 They don't tell us what it's like over there.

00:13:25.500 You can have an apartment, and you can afford groceries, and, like, they just get health care.

00:13:34.380 Maybe there's even a stronger millennial quality to this than I even imagine.

00:13:39.300 Because it's not even the American dream that was constructed by the government through things like the GI Bill after the Second World War or the promotion of home ownership, the creation of the suburbs, which was a sort of government finance collaboration.

00:14:03.480 Those suburbs can't exist without the federal highway system.

00:14:07.900 There's no question about it.

00:14:09.040 They wouldn't exist without zoning.

00:14:11.300 They obviously wouldn't exist without big finance making massive bets on suburbs, et cetera, et cetera.

00:14:18.900 So the American government created this American dream, which, if we're really being honest, I mean, a lot of us could maybe be tagged as anti-American in this group.

00:14:30.780 But if we're really being honest, was a sort of healthy, if I guess a bit white bread and boring ideal of you can go to the burbs, have two kids, own a car and two television sets, and TV dinners are cheap, and you can watch game shows every night. 0.84

00:14:56.140 And mom, while she's running the dishwasher and washing machine, can watch her stories, her soap operas, and dad's hard at work nine to six, and he'll commute back to the burbs, and you go to church on Sunday and teach your son baseball on Saturday.

00:15:13.280 I mean, we can criticize from some Nietzschean standpoint the last man nihilism at the heart of situations like this, but it was sort of good, and it could be eugenic in many cases.

00:15:31.860 It was at the very least a sort of fertile model.

00:15:35.800 The burbs wasn't really promoting culture and intellectual activity.

00:15:41.580 It was promoting strip malls and chain stores in the end, but, you know, nothing's perfect, I guess.

00:15:52.340 To this millennial model of, I want to live with a roommate or even live alone in my apartment.

00:16:02.000 And the fact that groceries are less expensive and that the government pays for my anxiety meds and my birth control.

00:16:14.160 Like, this is just so much better.

00:16:16.060 It's this millennial revolutionary standpoint where their pathetic lifestyle, it's become too expensive, and it looks like it might even become impossible at some point in the near future.

00:16:34.680 And so they're looking to a state capitalist or communist Chinese government as fully implementing their nihilism. 0.62

00:16:45.480 China, nihilism, it's affordable. 1.00

00:16:48.440 It is the most contemptible ideology I could perhaps imagine.

00:16:58.080 Last man idealism.

00:16:59.580 It really is.

00:17:00.700 Last man identitarianism.

00:17:01.540 And I think Nietzsche would have probably thought mom and dad living in the suburbs in the 60s is the last man, but this is somehow worse.

00:17:10.380 Look, a lot of, like, red pill or manosphere people have pointed this out.

00:17:18.060 This has even entered mainstream academic discourse as well.

00:17:22.360 What is it with the love of criminals?

00:17:25.480 Why is it that women are sending letters to these just horrible people? 1.00

00:17:32.200 I'm fascinated by Hannibal Lecter.

00:17:34.360 If he existed, I would be writing him letters. 0.82

00:17:36.480 But, like, someone as just totally despicable as Chris Watts gets love letters from women.

00:17:44.360 What has gone wrong?

00:17:46.380 Like, why?

00:17:47.980 And it is basically a quest for an alpha.

00:17:52.200 So being an alpha, what does that mean?

00:17:55.780 That means that you are above it all.

00:17:58.120 So you're richer than everyone.

00:18:00.080 You have higher social status politically than everyone.

00:18:03.060 It might also mean that you're just sort of a badass.

00:18:07.220 You know, the loner biker who comes into the bar, he doesn't have a boss.

00:18:11.900 He doesn't answer to anyone.

00:18:13.620 He does what he pleases.

00:18:15.860 That is maybe not quite the alpha of thinking, but it is an alpha.

00:18:21.040 He stepped outside of social norms.

00:18:23.900 And many women will naturally see that and love it and want to birth his child. 1.00

00:18:33.740 So that's a sort of baseline quality of why anyone would be attracted to someone like Luigi, who I just think is pathetic and should be bullied. 0.99

00:18:45.880 He's a midwit. 0.99

00:18:49.180 Like, we should bully Luigi. 1.00

00:18:51.360 I think he should just be sent to the electric chair just because his manifesto was so lame. 1.00

00:18:57.700 Like, dude, you brutally murdered someone on the streets of New York. 0.99

00:19:04.760 Like, the possibility of getting away with that is really close to nil.

00:19:10.700 So you're done.

00:19:12.520 You're done.

00:19:13.880 So why haven't you written a manifesto or expressed an idea that is bold or just simply wacky?

00:19:23.060 Why not go full Unabomber or just write Nietzschean aphorisms or declare yourself a Maoist?

00:19:29.980 That's at least cool, bro. 0.61

00:19:32.820 But when you declare yourself a follower of Matthew Iglesias, in effect, by your lame manifesto, you're contemptible. 0.97

00:19:43.080 We should crush you for being boring, which is a much greater sin than being violent or revolutionary. 0.95

00:19:55.520 I think the world needs that. 0.99

00:19:57.380 The world needs outsiders or alt-alphas, if we want to call them that. 0.98

00:20:03.420 The world needs people questioning everything and pushing the limit.

00:20:08.460 But at this point, you're basically Taylor Lorenz who went on a murder spree.

00:20:15.460 I have no words.

00:20:16.560 I do think that normie millennial radicalism is actually going to be a thing.

00:20:28.020 Now, I don't know how far this is going to go.

00:20:30.840 But it was interesting in the weeks following Luigi that I would see these TikTok edits where they would do that song from Chicago.

00:20:41.660 He had it coming.

00:20:43.000 He had it coming.

00:20:44.180 He had it coming all along.

00:20:46.600 This is like the perfect millennial thing.

00:20:48.800 Broadway musical plus murder plus normie politics.

00:20:53.000 They were just showing fan edits of Brian Thompson lying in the sidewalk, and then fan edits of Luigi and his six-pack or whatever.

00:21:03.080 Maybe it will come back in Trump's second term.

00:21:06.520 An interesting trend to keep your eye on.

00:21:09.900 I've noted recently that the most radical people I know are sort of middle-class people who have not been politically engaged throughout their lives and for whom the American dream has largely worked.

00:21:26.240 They have wealth.

00:21:27.880 They have two cars in the driveway, a big house, all the baubles that they could ever want in the world.

00:21:33.920 And they are deeply discontented and radical, but in a strange way, like my parents even have been radicalized.

00:21:43.480 And I laid at the feet of social media, and I feel like people that are especially new to the Internet, older people, have really been radicalized by these algorithms.

00:21:56.380 They got heavily online during COVID, probably.

00:21:59.400 It's also like an unintended consequence of COVID.

00:22:02.300 Yeah, it's an interesting point.

00:22:04.820 Like, when I was a lot younger, say 20 years ago, I read Thomas Frank's work, and I don't know what he's up to now.

00:22:14.500 I think he's still writing, but he doesn't get the credit he deserves, and I don't think is as relevant as he should be, in my opinion.

00:22:24.140 He sort of predicted Trumpism with his book, What's the Matter with Kansas?

00:22:28.940 And he founded the Baffler, might have been the late 90s, I can't remember, or early 2000s.

00:22:35.460 He was looking at, like, vans, sneakers.

00:22:38.860 So vans are still around, but maybe not quite as relevant.

00:22:41.920 I don't know.

00:22:42.320 I'm not connected to Zoomer culture. 1.00

00:22:43.760 But basically, if you hate your parents and they don't let you take the car out, or, you know, the man's got you down, or your social study teacher sucks, or the girl doesn't want to go to prom with you.

00:22:55.360 You buy vans and you're commodifying revolution, where you can be anti-social and anti-patriarchy, you could say, while purchasing something from a major corporation.

00:23:10.160 And so it's the amazing gelatin-like quality of capitalism. 0.88

00:23:17.840 I think the left wants to believe that capitalism is cruel and gray on gray and brutal and is run by boring white men in horn-rimmed glasses. 0.97

00:23:32.520 But the reality is that capitalism is going to sell you the Che Guevara t-shirt, or it's cool, it's gay, it's trans, trans in multiple ways. 0.96

00:23:45.160 It can kind of transition to other things.

00:23:47.560 So it's going to allow you to engage in radical dissent through purchasing products.

00:23:54.100 And I think this is totally correct.

00:23:59.680 Now, maybe this situation has progressed or it's been amplified in a way.

00:24:06.920 Maybe with social media, which is capitalism, but different.

00:24:11.940 It's almost, you know, like in a new stage.

00:24:15.580 When I was younger, you could commodify your dissent by being a skateboarder and buying a Santa Cruz skateboard or listening to Nirvana, buying an album, which I believe was produced by Warner Brothers.

00:24:28.680 So capitalism will allow you to dissent against the system and it will profit off that.

00:24:36.920 But maybe something more extreme is happening with social media.

00:24:43.300 Teenage girls looking at Instagram feeds of these women who in many cases have a sugar daddy of some sort, who are Botoxed out, have fake breasts, are on a yacht, are just living their best life. 1.00

00:25:02.120 They're, you know, traveling to Greece and having like the greatest meal ever.

00:25:07.020 And it's casual and relatable, yet totally beyond your spending capacity.

00:25:15.300 Like maybe there's something new that's happening with social media that is generating actual alienation and suicidal alienation, in fact, in young people.

00:25:27.860 And it really is different because, remember, if you buy the Nirvana album or wear the vans, you're commodifying your dissent and you're sort of neutralizing it.

00:25:39.280 You know, you can function normally and go to school and even study, take the SAT and get into college while being a Kurt Cobain fan.

00:25:50.860 But in some ways with social media, it's radicalizing people to go kinetic offline. 0.81

00:25:59.720 And that could be, I suck because I'm not attractive. 0.99

00:26:05.380 I'll never be her, my favorite Instagram model, and I'm just going to kill myself. 0.98

00:26:10.960 Or social media is getting people to engage in J6 and effectively try to overthrow the government.

00:26:19.460 It's making them kinetic offline in a way that was unappreciated and unintended.

00:26:27.800 Whereas the previous variations of capitalism were able to neutralize people and make their real-world activity not damaging to society.

00:26:43.520 So maybe something has changed, actually.

00:26:46.220 I would just comment that as someone who owned Nirvana Records and Vans shoes, you weren't looking at them 24-7.

00:26:53.860 And, you know, you ignore your shoes when you're walking around, but these phones and the engagement level of social media with the constant dopamine hits of checking lists and scrolling that is insidious.

00:27:07.500 And it's rotting people's brains.

00:27:09.940 This is the other comparison I wanted to make as well between J6ers and Luigi Stans. 1.00

00:27:19.600 They are very similar people.

00:27:23.260 And they also have a sort of similar message in a way.

00:27:29.040 So J6ers eventually attempted to overthrow the government. 1.00

00:27:36.920 Now, they did it in a buffoonish manner that was never going to work.

00:27:43.660 And it involved them stealing lecterns and taking a poop in the hallway of Congress or putting their feet up on Nancy Pelosi's desk or whatever. 0.99

00:27:54.620 It was totally ridiculous, no doubt. 0.90

00:27:58.060 But at the end of the day, it was a direct threat to government. 0.91

00:28:03.280 That was the biggest coup attempt I've seen in America, certainly in my lifetime, and well beyond that as well.

00:28:15.460 And by coup, I don't mean a sort of soft change in power.

00:28:19.460 I mean, you could argue that FDR was a kind of coup or regime change or the Civil Rights Administration or what we're seeing now.

00:28:27.800 I mean, they're soft and invisible and largely consensual as well in many cases.

00:28:35.980 But this was just a direct attempt at seizing power.

00:28:39.840 But none of them thought of it in that way.

00:28:42.600 They thought of it as, I'm here protesting, or finally we're taking our government back, or this is the people's house.

00:28:49.860 They were like a deer in headlights in all of those photos and videos of J6ers. 1.00

00:28:55.340 And if you look at them, it's interesting to compare them to Charlottesville.

00:29:00.180 So Charlottesville was largely young.

00:29:02.540 And I think it was, if we're being a little bit unfair here, it was kind of like a bunch of cringe people from the internet who had seen memes and, you know, read Andrew Anglin or something.

00:29:14.040 To a large extent, it was that.

00:29:15.800 I, you know, I, it's being a bit unfair, but you get my point.

00:29:19.860 And it was people who just wanted to go out and shine, you know, it's like, we won with Trump.

00:29:26.060 We've created these online communities and let's, you know, strike up the band on behalf of the Robert E. Lee statue.

00:29:34.480 And like, woo, you know, there was that quality to it.

00:29:38.300 There are other qualities as well.

00:29:39.860 Bad people on both sides, I would say, but you get my point.

00:29:43.320 And there is some crossover between J6 and Charlottesville, but the crossover is small.

00:29:51.220 You see people like Fuentes, you see people like Bakes, Alaska, and I'm sure there's some others.

00:29:57.780 But there wasn't a lot of crossover.

00:30:01.300 And J6 dwarfed Charlottesville by many levels of magnitude.

00:30:06.180 So you had this sort of normie type.

00:30:10.980 So there was a study done by the University of Chicago on who was at J6.

00:30:16.920 And the average age was more or less my age.

00:30:19.720 It was like 44 or something like that.

00:30:23.080 And there were people who were often red state voters in blue states.

00:30:29.100 That was a trend that was picked up on.

00:30:31.600 So they sort of felt surrounded, perhaps.

00:30:36.080 But they were largely a normie type.

00:30:39.120 There was higher levels of divorce.

00:30:41.660 Interesting.

00:30:43.200 Is that causal or correlation?

00:30:45.540 It's interesting to think about that.

00:30:47.480 Someone like Ashley Babbitt, who was shot while raiding the Capitol, was divorced. 0.73

00:30:53.600 She was a former Obama voter, and she was in financial distress.

00:30:57.520 There was a certain type of person who was activated by QAnon and all of these memes.

00:31:04.920 Now, QAnon is, of course, wild and crazy.

00:31:07.460 And I don't think you can underestimate its impact on J6. 1.00

00:31:10.700 But that being said, they were disappointed normies who genuinely believed that democracy had been taken away.

00:31:19.220 And we're just bringing it back.

00:31:21.360 Don't you understand?

00:31:22.240 Like, everyone voted for Trump.

00:31:23.800 So we got to go to the Capitol.

00:31:24.960 I'm like, come on, Trump's our guy.

00:31:26.680 Put him back in.

00:31:27.980 We believe in democracy, guys.

00:31:30.120 I can't believe the elites took it away from us.

00:31:32.860 That was the attitude.

00:31:35.520 But I think even among the sort of crazy radical elements, I think they still fought in those ways.

00:31:43.180 It was a normie revolt.

00:31:45.260 And I think it has the same dynamics of thought as a lot of the Luigi stuff. 1.00

00:31:55.860 I might have had some respect for J6ers if they were just like, fuck it. 1.00

00:32:03.280 America's over. 1.00

00:32:04.440 We're taking over the government.

00:32:05.780 I mean, that at least would have been honest.

00:32:10.700 And if you're going to go kinetic and you're going to just raid the Capitol, you're going to actually do it.

00:32:18.180 Then just go for it.

00:32:19.760 You're doing an open coup.

00:32:22.000 Just declare what you were doing boldly.

00:32:25.720 Get people on your side.

00:32:27.000 They didn't do any of that.

00:32:30.080 And I think precisely because they sort of believed in these things.

00:32:36.160 They believe in the institution of voting, even as they were disrupting democracy.

00:32:42.280 They believe that if every American were just allowed to speak his or her voice, that this economy would work for your average citizen.

00:32:52.960 They believe in it so hard.

00:32:58.480 They're so angry.

00:32:59.780 It's so disappointed that this dream has been taken away from them.

00:33:04.580 So it, too, was a sort of normie revolution.

00:33:07.140 Now, there's some obvious differences between, say, MAGA in 2020 and Luigi love.

00:33:13.140 But they seem to be the sort of, like, left and right caduceus of American politics.

RadixJournal - April 23, 2025

Luigi Mangione and the Revolutionary Normie

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