‘A killer five-star review from an actual killer’: Michael Moore opens up on being name-dropped in Luigi Mangione’s manifesto

Luigi Mangione — alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was shot and killed on Dec. 4 as he was leaving the New York Hilton Midtown hotel — was arrested on Dec. 9, and on his person was, among other things, a manifesto detailing his thoughts and emotions toward the American healthcare system. A transcript, courtesy of journalist Ken Klippenstein, can be read here.

The manifesto commends the work of filmmaker Michael Moore for his efforts in “illuminating the corruption and greed” inherent to the aforementioned system (in reference to Moore’s Oscar-nominated documentary Sicko, which takes aim at America’s health insurance and pharmaceutical industry). So, of course, plenty of eyes turned to the ever-humanist Moore, perhaps expecting a condemnation of the murder that Mangione allegedly carried out.

And condemn murder Moore did, but not in the way that many may have (quite foolishly) expected him to. In a lengthy response on his personal Substack blog, Moore let us all know exactly what he thinks about being named in the manifesto, and the resulting attention he’s received from it.

It’s not often that my work gets a killer five-star review from an actual killer… Hmmm. Do I condemn murder? That’s an odd question. In Fahrenheit 9/11, I condemned the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi people and the senseless murder of our own American soldiers at the hands of our American government. In Bowling for Columbine, I condemned the murder of 50,000 Americans every year at the hands of our gun industry and our politicians who do nothing to stop it.

And that’s just a taste of the latest in a long line of searing indictments that Moore has made about American systemic violence, wherein he stresses the point that everybody seems to be missing — in identifying with Luigi Mangione, the public isn’t celebrating murder, but loudly decrying a system that has been murdering them, for profit. As Moore states:

If everyone who was angry was ready to kill the CEOs, the CEOs would already be dead. That is not what this reaction is about. It is about the mass death and misery — the physical pain, the mental abuse, the medical debt, the bankruptcies in the face of denied claims and denied care and bottomless deductibles on top of ballooning premiums — that this “health care” industry has levied against the American people for decades… People across America are not celebrating the brutal murder of a father of two kids from Minnesota. They are screaming for help, they are telling you what’s wrong, they are saying that this system is not just and it is not right and it cannot continue.

Moore’s condemnations didn’t end there, either; he had no patience for political leaders who were eager to push the “no place for political violence in America” talking point, as though the country hadn’t been founded amid genocide and slavery, and hasn’t been central to violently destabilizing other political systems, particularly in the Middle East, for decades.

Moore also stresses, quite simply, that nobody needs to die. He’s referring to the fact that a lack of health insurance should never be the reason that someone dies on account of not receiving the care they need, but it applies to Thompson’s murder, as well; political leaders would not have to worry about people killing CEOs of healthcare companies if they didn’t perpetuate a system that allows these companies to pocket trillions of dollars at the unquantifiable cost of human life.