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, a health insurance CEO was shot dead on a Manhattan sidewalk. The police cordoned off a stretch of pavement and initiated a multi-state manhunt that captured the world's attention. But across America, the killing was embraced as an act of popular justice, as if the official victim was the real criminal—as if the bullets that read DELAY, DENY, DEPOSE had, indeed, deposed a tyrant.
Who gets to draw the boundary around a crime scene?
DEPOSE: Luigi Mangione, the Right to Health, and the Unfinished American Revolution is an investigation into the common sense, shared by people across the political spectrum, that the American healthcare system is itself the scene of a larger crime. Beginning from the suspicious correlation between the rise of for-profit health insurance and nearly 15 million “excess deaths” in America, the authors follow the opponents of universal healthcare back to their sources. There, they find the evidence for a crime against natural law, one that has been shaping the institution of law itself for three centuries: the erasure of the natural right to health. Recovering that right changes our understanding of what it meant for American revolutionaries to fight in defense of their unalienable rights—and what it means for us all to do so today.
Written by the anonymous collective that raised more than $1.5 million for Luigi Mangione's legal defense, Depose moves the discussion of healthcare in America beneath misleading debates around costs and technocratic policy proposals. The authors argue that healthcare transcends existing political divisions because it cannot be separated from deeper questions about justice, legitimate force, and the very idea of free government.
Building from the common ground of outrage at health insurance companies, this book is a provocative intervention into the debate around healthcare in America, revealing an unexpected path out of rigid political silos toward the reclamation of our natural right to health.
