GoFundMe, the crowdfunding site, has pulled all legal fundraisers for Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused of shooting and killing UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson in New York on Dec. 4. But there’s one platform that is allowing fundraisers for Mangione to go forward and it has a pretty controversial history with right-wing causes.
“GoFundMe’s Terms of Service prohibit fundraisers for the legal defense of violent crimes. The fundraisers have been removed from our platform and all donors have been refunded,” a spokesperson for the site told Gizmodo over email Friday.
GiveSendGo, a platform that bills itself as “Christian” and has a long history of controversial fundraisers for right-wing figures, has not only allowed a fundraiser for Mangione to stay up, it’s currently being featured on the homepage. The fundraiser has raised over $85,000 at the time of this writing.
It’s unclear whether Mangione will even accept the money that’s being raised in his name. When Mangione’s lawyer in Altoona, Pennsylvania, was asked by CNN about fundraising efforts earlier this week, he said he’d be unlikely to accept that money.
“I just don’t feel comfortable about that. So I don’t know,” Mangione’s lawyer Tom Dickey said. “I haven’t given that much thought, but I’m not looking.” Dickey continued “Obviously my client appreciates the support that he has” but said that “it just doesn’t sit right with me.”
Mangione reportedly wrote a short note explaining what he allegedly did, which leaked to an independent reporter while mainstream outlets refused to publish it. The note says of the health care insurance industry, “they continue to abuse our country for immense profit” and describes their “corruption and greed.”
The alleged shooter has become a controversial figure in mainstream news coverage, with TV and legacy print media painting Mangione as a cartoonishly horrifying figure who terrifies Americans. But the conversation on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram has been very different from what you see on TV. In fact, some people have been celebrating Mangione and his alleged actions, with people even photoshopping his face to look like a Catholic saint.
And even people who aren’t outright celebrating Mangione are often using the killing as a jumping-off point to talk about their own struggles with the U.S. healthcare system, which is the most expensive in the world while delivering poorer health outcomes than peer nations. There are roughly 26 million Americans who don’t have health insurance of any kind, an astounding figure that’s unique among developed countries.
Every other wealthy nation has achieved universal coverage, sometimes through single-payer government-run health systems like Canada, the UK, and Norway, other times through hybrid public-private systems like Germany, France, and Australia. Every system is a little different, but every other country with the resources to do so seems to have figured it out—except for the U.S.
The killing of UnitedHealth’s CEO has kicked off a national debate about healthcare in a way that the U.S. hasn’t seen in years. And the parent company’s CEO Andrew Witty released an opinion article in the New York Times on Friday insisting that while the current system is “flawed” his company is working to fix it. Notably, the article doesn’t mention a single real reform or concrete way in which UnitedHealth is working to fix it, something that was pointed out repeatedly in the almost universally negative comments. The ability to make comments was quickly turned off by the newspaper.
Americans are pissed about their health care. But it remains to be seen whether this conversation will continue well into the future. This is the country that just re-elected Donald Trump, after all. We’re not known as people who are particularly bright or for having a long memory.
