An occasional UD feature, tipping our hat to people who cleared his path to victory.
In an Instagram story that went viral this week, Julia Alekseyeva, an assistant professor of English and media studies [at U Penn], appears to refer to Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old Penn grad, as the “icon we all need and deserve.”
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“I have never been prouder to be a professor at the University of P3nnsylvania,” Alekseyeva wrote in a post on TikTok.
You know, cuz U Penn was the school what made Mangione what he is today.
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If killing CEOs is so important to Julia Alekseyeva, why doesn’t she do it herself? The woman certainly presents herself as a badass feminist. But oh no: She stands around waiting for a MAN to do the deed.
For the future, she needs to read Valerie Solanas, who, like Alekseyeva’s MAN, wrote a famous manifesto and killed important people she didn’t like, and unlike Luigi was a woman.
Or… well… typical woman! She tried to kill three people but the little flibbertigibbet fucked it up and only managed to injure Andy Warhol. But she was a woman. And she had guts!
Cowardice advances the cause of women not one bit.
December 12th, 2024 at 7:08AM
This incident exposed a deep rage that transcended our normal ideological boundaries. I assume (hope) that nearly all of the hundreds of people joking about the murder recognize that shooting someone–anyone–in the back on a city street is morally indefensible. (No idea whether that includes Professor Alekseyeva.) But the vulgar celebration of this ambush killing was very much not limited to the left.
Also, Trump won because of inflation (at least that was the tipping point in this super-close election). The sort of people who would determine their vote based on outrage over the latest comments by some idiot professor are already baked into the 45% (or so) of Americans who make up Trump’s core constituency.
In any event, I hope that someday we can address the source of the bipartisan rage over health care without validating the murdering Mr. Mangione.
December 12th, 2024 at 8:12AM
It’s strange to me that a rage that deep, across boundaries, was until now so silent. Americans aren’t known for their silent tolerance of agonizing national outrages…
Not sure I’d call the election super-close — sadly. And plenty of commentators isolated culture wars issues broadly (with Penn’s idiot a potent symbol) as just as important – or almost as important – as inflation.
And yes – enthusiasm for their murdering hero appears on the right as well as left. But it was a left elite who sang of his greatness online. I’m not sure we’ve seen an Ivy League (or any other professor) on the right feeling comfortable talking to the public about how iconic Mangione is.
December 12th, 2024 at 9:59AM
We’ve had such a dizzying series of close elections lately that it’s easy to quibble over which were merely super-close and which were stay-up-past-midnight-biting-off-your-fingernails close. Of the three most recent presidential elections, this is the closest in terms of popular vote margin (currently 1.48%, versus 4.45% in 2020, and 2.09%–in favor of Hillary Clinton–in 2016). As to the Electoral College, 2020 and 2024 are about equal, with 2016 just a bit closer. And, of course, the 2000 presidential election remains the closest ever, at least since the turn of the 20th Century. So, I guess it’s all relative: compared to 2000, Trump’s win in 2024 was a landslide, but in historical terms, and excepting 2000, we’d have to go back to the 1880s to find an election that was signficantly closer in both the popular vote and the EC.
And, yes, a lot of Trump voters named culture war issues as decisive, but they were, by and large, voters whose choices were never in doubt, and they would have supported their man for a variety of reasons even if every American college were Liberty University. Inflation moved the swing voters and dampened Democratic turnout. Culture was issues gave Trump voters something to complain about to pollsters.
Also, the elite Right were publicly delighted with Kyle Rittenhouse.
December 12th, 2024 at 11:54AM
Not to diminish the tone-deafness of faculty social media posting (have you visited BlueSky yet, UD?), but isn’t it obviously the case that this guy being very hot is playing a major role in his public popularity? Imagine if the Unabomber looked like him instead of like…the Unabomber.
December 12th, 2024 at 1:15PM
Not just hot, but he’s got that smoldering suffering dark male thing (Pacino, mucho other swarthies) that Julia A and fangirls like her cannot resist. Iconically, he carries the weight of lethal anti-corporatism on his shoulders. He is a tousled Danton, shouting to his executioner “Show my head to the people, it is worth seeing!” And is it ever.