How support for the Luigi Mangione erupted from what remains unfinished in the American Revolution—and the unexpected path to fulfill its promise.
On December 4, 2024, the CEO of America’s largest health insurer was shot dead on a Manhattan sidewalk. At the scene lay bullet casings inscribed with the words “DELAY, DENY, DEPOSE.” Amid the shocking popular celebration of the killing, a nationwide manhunt captured a suspect: Luigi Mangione, a handsome Ivy League graduate from a wealthy background. He was immediately embraced as a hero across America, as if Brian Thompson were the real criminal in a much larger crime; as if the bullets had deposed a tyrant.
Who gets to draw the boundary around a crime scene? The government, or the people?
DEPOSE: Luigi Mangione, the Right to Health, and the Unfinished American Revolution makes a new kind of case for why the healthcare system in America is itself a crime. Connecting the dots between the rise of for-profit health insurance and the nearly 15 million “excess deaths” in America that accompanied it, the authors track the opponents of universal healthcare back to their sources. There, they discover a little-known coverup that has shaped the law itself: the forced disappearance of our natural right to health. Reclaiming that right changes how we understand our history—and reveals what remains unfinished in the American Revolution.
Written by the December 4 Legal Committee, the anonymous collective behind the fund that raised more than $1.5 million for Luigi Mangione’s legal defense, Depose takes the American healthcare debate onto the terrain of the fundamental political questions facing all of us today.