Depose: Luigi Mangione, the Right to Health, and the Unfinished American Revolution
The December 4 Legal Committee
Release date: September 1, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9997930-7-2
On December 4, 2024, a health insurance CEO was shot dead on a Manhattan sidewalk. The police cordoned off a stretch of pavement around the victim, launching a multi-state manhunt that captured the world’s attention. Across America, the alleged killer was instantly embraced as a hero — as if the CEO was the real criminal, as if the bullet casings carrying the words 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 argues that America's for-profit healthcare system is itself a crime.
Connecting the dots between the rise of for-profit health insurance and nearly 15 million “excess deaths” in America, the authors follow opponents of universal healthcare back to their sources. There, they discover a crime 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 clarifies what remains unfinished in the American revolution.
Written by the anonymous collective 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.
The December 4 Legal Committee members include medical professionals, philosophers, historians, high school dropouts, an herbalist, a sign-spinner, and an HVAC technician. 100% of all Authors' royalties will be split evenly between grassroots healthcare initiatives and Luigi Mangione's Official Legal Fund for All 3 Cases until he is free.
Cover Art by Dianna Settles
“Health or wealth? The two words were once close in meaning, as in ‘well-being’. Now their meanings could not be further apart. The result is the malignant mix of profiteering and morbidity formerly known as illth. This book is among the first to imagine — and to argue for — the revolution to restore well-being to the body politic for the times to come. We the people are the jury: the decision is ours.”
— Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Verso, 2006) and, with Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Verso, 2000)