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.
