What you say about Luigi Mangione is what you would’ve said about John Brown

Luigi Mangione killed a health insurance CEO and became a folk hero. At first, I thought he was America’s latest Robin Hood, an outlaw like Jesse James, John Dillinger, and Pretty Boy Floyd, loved by the poor and desperate because in hard times, we want to believe someone is on our side. As more details came out about Mangione’s past, I learned I was wrong. He is not our latest Robin Hood. He is our latest John Brown, a child of wealthy parents who thought the best way to fight a social evil is to kill.

If I had lived in John Brown’s day, I hope I would’ve agreed with Frederick Douglass that the problem with Brown’s plan to seize Harper’s Ferry was not that it was wrong morally, but that it was wrong tactically. You cannot change a system by killing a few of its supporters.

Yet after Brown acted, I pray I would’ve praised him as Douglass did:

“John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry was all his own. His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was a taper light, his was the burning sun. Mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the silent shores of eternity. I could speak for the slave. John Brown could fight for the slave. I could live for the slave. John Brown could die for the slave.” —Frederick Douglass