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Is Pennsylvania a hub for extremism?

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Is Pennsylvania a hub for extremism?

The state finds itself in the spotlight of another act of terror with last week's arrest of UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter

It's not a crime to hate.

In America, anyone can believe in the most toxic, radical ideas, as long as they don’t act upon them.

What might have pushed Luigi Mangione over that line has emerged as the pressing question in the aftermath of his arrest in the assassination-style shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO  Brian Thompson, a man who never saw it coming on a sidewalk in Manhattan.

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Mr. Mangione, 26, was arrested Monday in Altoona, Pa., 280 miles west of New York City. He is charged with second-degree murder and is being held at SCI-Huntingdon until he is turned over to New York authorities.

This booking photo released Dec. 9 shows Luigi Mangione, a suspect in the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Before New York can put Mr. Mangione on trial for murder, it has to get him back in the state.
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"[A] relatively sophisticated young man, he could have been anywhere on the planet. … Why was he only able to be in Pennsylvania” when he was arrested, said Javed Ali, who teaches courses on counterterrorism and domestic terrorism at the University of Michigan.

Mr. Mangione is a University of Pennsylvania graduate and a member of a prominent real estate family in Maryland. Investigators are looking into an accident that injured Mr. Mangione's back and sent him to an emergency room in July 2023. They say his writings about the injury and his criticism of corporate America and the U.S. health care system could be tied to the shooting of Mr. Thompson, 50, on Dec. 4.

Mr. Mangione could also face domestic terrorism charges — similar to those filed against an 18-year-old man who pleaded guilty to fatally shooting 10 Black people at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket in 2022.

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Few states have had as long a history of domestic extremism — or as violent a recent past — as Pennsylvania. Now, the state finds itself in the spotlight of another incident, leaving residents grappling with the aftermath.

Extremism in Pennsylvania

Since George Washington's administration, when anti-tax insurgents launched the Whiskey Rebellion, Pennsylvanians have — sometimes alone, other times in organized bands — turned to weapons to wreak havoc on society or rise up against the government.

The far-right extremist group the Oath Keepers found fertile ground for recruiting in Pennsylvania as it grew into one of the largest organizations of its kind in the county after its founding in 2009. Almost 1,500 of the group's members came from the Keystone State; only four other states produced more, according to a leaked membership list.

The organization played a pivotal role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, helping spark the uprising to stop the peaceful transfer of power to President Joe Biden and keep now-President-elect Donald Trump in the White House.

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The group's founder, Californian Stewart Rhodes, was found guilty in May 2023 of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 months in prison as part of the FBI's nationwide prosecution of insurrectionists.

It has grown into the largest investigation in the FBI’s history — a dragnet that has swept up more than 1,500 people.

More than 110 of them are from Pennsylvania, according to a database of defendants compiled by NPR. Only Florida and Texas — states with far larger populations — are home to more people implicated in the investigation.

But the state's dark history of violent extremism extends beyond organized rebellions. Lone gunmen in the Pittsburgh region have ravaged public gatherings and gone on deadly rampages.

In 2000, two unrelated racially charged killing sprees left eight dead. 

Nine years later, a Stanton Heights man who had posted on white supremacist forums murdered three Pittsburgh police officers outside his home. That same year, a gunman frustrated by his failure at romance killed three women and wounded nine others at an LA Fitness in Collier — an outburst of violence with parallels to the online subculture of so-called incels that would arise in subsequent years.

And in October 2018, in the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history, a gunman who subscribed to the far-right Great Replacement theory killed 11 people in a Squirrel Hill synagogue.

Just five months ago, a gunman from Bethel Park climbed onto a rooftop just outside of a Donald Trump rally in Butler County, took aim with an AR-15 rifle and attempted to assassinate the once and future president.

Gov. Josh Shapiro referenced that July 13 attack at a news conference following Mr. Mangione’s arrest last week. He stressed that violence should never be used to address political differences or prove an ideological point.

"That is not what we do in a civilized society," he said. "That was true in Butler, it was true in NYC, it's true anywhere. That is not how you make progress in this country. The suspect who shot at that CEO and killed that CEO is a coward, and not a hero.

"That is an important lesson coming out of Pennsylvania and it is one that I think the rest of the country needs to hear as well."

Why Pennsylvania?

Experts have called Western Pennsylvania, specifically Pittsburgh, a "focal point for white supremacy and extremists."

"Our area has become a hub. It's important to understand that it is here," John Pulcastro, a supervisory analyst at the Pittsburgh FBI, said at a symposium on domestic terrorism in 2020.

Mr. Ali, the University of Michigan professor, said there are primarily two factors that influence such attacks — what people believe and when they make a decision to act on their beliefs.

"This is what makes combating this kind of extremism here in the country so so hard, because there are very few tools the FBI can use," he said. "You really have to get lucky sometimes in sort of catching people when they make that transition from being radicalized to then being mobilized."

Acts of extremism also tend to be localized and individualized, Mr. Ali said, with few exceptions — such as the 2020 kidnapping plot against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer orchestrated by more than a dozen men.

Colin Clarke, an expert in domestic extremism and director of research at The Soufan Group, a security service in New York City, emphasized the difficulties of preventing a lone actor. It’s also more of an issue in the United States due to firearms access, he said.

"I don't think there's much you can do, to be honest with you. That's the scary part," Mr. Clarke said. "We can't surveil people's every thought and every online murmuring.”

The aftermath

In many online communities, the killing of a health insurance company CEO has been excused, rationalized, and even celebrated.

After Mr. Mangione was arrested, Altoona police had to turn their attention to investigating threats made against the department and officers involved in the arrest — similar to what Butler officials experienced after the Trump rally shooting.

"This is clearly a very polarized case. We have received some threats against our officers and building here. We've started investigating some threats against some citizens in our community. We're taking all those threats seriously and doing all the follow-up we can with those," Altoona police Deputy Chief Derek Swope said at a news conference last week.

The McDonald’s restaurant where Mr. Mangione was captured also was subjected to negative online reviews before they were flagged as a violation of Google's policy and removed.

"This location has rats in the kitchen that will make you sick and your insurance isn't going to cover it," one said, according to Reuters.

Such incidents have ripple effects throughout the communities where they occur, said Will Fuller, who heads Pennsylvania's Resilient States Project, an initiative from Common Ground USA that aims to mitigate ideological tensions before they manifest into violence.

"People are still navigating and making sense of an incident in their own community while also having to manage people from the outside wanting information from them," he told the Post-Gazette. "It does have an ongoing disruptive effect."

Temperature Check

Data from Common Ground USA shows the world has seen an "alarming" rise of political polarization in recent years, leaving every region more divided than ever except in Europe during the two world wars.

Many have called Mr. Mangione a hero, comparing him to a modern-day Robin Hood. GoFundMe campaigns for his defense have also flooded social media in the days since his capture.

"No one gets noticed online by having nuanced opinions. You have to go hard on an issue, and you have to go in one direction or the other. And I think that's pushed people to the poles," Mr. Clarke said.

Just days ago in Pittsburgh, a poster showing a security footage capture of Thompson being shot to death was put up outside the AHN Downtown Medical Center on Penn Avenue with a cryptic message: "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping."

The typewritten note on the poster — quoting advice for children facing a crisis from Pittsburgh native Fred Rogers — appeared to suggest that Thompson's accused killer was acting as a "helper" in shooting the executive. Similar posters were put up around Market Square, which was decorated for the annual Holiday Market, Highmark and city police said.

It’s plausible that Mr. Mangione’s fame will inspire similar attacks, said Mr. Ali.

"If you feel like you've been aggrieved by the health care system or a family member or loved one has been wronged, well, [the Thompson killing] was the ultimate opposition to that," he said.

"So how will this impact the people who want to act out violently? It's hard to know, but I do know people already are thinking about this."

Experts point to factors such as technology, social isolation and a loss of objective truth as key drivers in modern extremism. Christine Sarteschi, a researcher and expert on extremist ideologies at Chatham University, emphasized the erosion of civil discourse.

"People get into their camps and they stay there, and they view things from the lens of that particular political viewpoint. It becomes seemingly more black and white," Ms. Sarteschi said. "People don't see the gray areas or want to even have a discourse around things. They just kind of say, 'That person's in that camp, and I'm in this camp, and I don't see anything in between.’"

Post-Gazette Assistant Managing Editor Mike Wereschagin contributed to this report.

First Published: December 15, 2024, 10:30 a.m.
Updated: December 16, 2024, 8:30 p.m.

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