Hello comrades. In the interest of upholding our code of conduct - specifically, rule 1 (providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all) - we felt it appropriate to make a statement regarding the lionization of Luigi Mangione, the alleged United Healthcare CEO shooter, also known as “The Adjuster.”
In the day or so since the alleged shooter’s identity became known to the public, the whole world has had the chance to dig though his personal social media accounts and attempt to decipher his political ideology and motives. What we have learned may shock you. He is not one of us. He is a “typical” American with largely incoherent, and in many cases reactionary politics. For the most part, what is remarkable about the man himself is that he chose to take out his anger on a genuine enemy of the proletariat, instead of an elementary school.
This is a situation where the art must be separated from the artist. We do not condemn the attack, but as a role model, Luigi Mangione falls short. We do not expect perfection from revolutionary figures either, but we expect a modicum of revolutionary discipline. We expect them not simply to identify an unpopular element of society 
, but to clearly illuminate the causes of oppression and the means by which they are overcome. When we canonize revolutionary figures, we are holding them up as an example to be followed.
This is where things come back to rule 1. Mangione has a long social media history bearing a spectrum of reactionary viewpoints, and interacting positively with many powerful reactionary figures. While some commenters have referred to this as “nothing malicious,” by lionizing this man we effectively deem this behavior acceptable, or at the very least, safe to ignore. This is the type of tailism which opens the door to making a space unsafe for marginalized people.
We’re going to be more strict on moderating posts which do little more than lionize the shooter. There is plenty to be said about the unfolding events, the remarkably positive public reaction, how public reactions to “propaganda of the deed” may have changed since the historical epoch of its conception (and how the strategic hazards might not have), and many other aspects of the news without canonizing this man specifically. We can still dance on the graves of our enemies and celebrate their rediscovered fear and vulnerability without the vulgar revisionism needed to pretend this man is some sort of example of Marxist or Anarchist practice.
This has consistently been an issue of mine with a lot of the recent struggle sessions: you cannot build a mass movement among a population that often has reactionary views without being willing to educate and convert them. A cursory glance at any successful communist revolution in the past 200 years proves this time and time again. Tsarist Russia was not a bastion of progressive beliefs. Warlord-era China did not have the correct takes on feminism. Batista Cuba was dominated by traditionalist Catholics and all the cultural brainworms that go with it. That did not prevent vanguards from overthrowing the existing order and bringing about a worker’s state, and it certainly did not prevent those worker’s states from then correcting those beliefs over time.
That doesn’t mean we should excuse reactionary beliefs. That doesn’t mean we should ignore vitriol or abuse being hurled at marginalized comrades. That certainly doesn’t mean we should lionize the shooter as an individual’s random Twitter takes from 2022. But that does mean we should be quicker to educate good-faith commenters when they post something that can be taken as reactionary in nature rather than immediately shut them down with zero discussion and/or ban them, because that has a chilling effect on engagement and makes growing leftist outreach extremely difficult.
The overwhelming majority of people in the west have completely incoherent political and social beliefs driven by the miasma of ideological garbage they’re subjected to the way a fish is subjected to water; the good news is that you can yank them out of it by presenting a coherent ideology that matches their lived experiences, and the bad news is that it’s going to take some effort to yank them out because the counterpropaganda is literally all-encompassing. You’re going to have to let them have some opportunities to find out what their particular brainworms are and have a chance to pull them out; if they make it abundantly clear they have no intention of ever doing so and are perfectly content to remain reactionaries then fuck 'em, but most people don’t fall into that category.
If Lenin had concentrated this much on his coalition having All the Correct Opinions All the Time with No Exceptions Lest You Be Immediately Purged™ prior to going out and actually doing something, Russia would’ve likely spent the twentieth century as a reactionary hellhole that modern Russian far-right nationalists could only have wet dreams about.