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.
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.
