Deny, Defend, Depose: Robin Hood, For-Profit Healthcare & the Social Contract
Deny, Defend, Depose
Why I Made This Song
If you've followed me for a while, you know I don't make songs just to make noise. I make edutainment, and "Deny, Defend, Depose" might be the most important civics lesson I've put on a track. It's about ethics, not personal morals, but the ethics a whole society agrees to live by. It's about who gets protected in America and who gets left to die.
Let me be clear up front. I have no plans to harm anyone, and I don't condone violence. When I wrote this track, the case was still just an accusation, and I was speaking to the lore around it. Since then, Mangione has pleaded guilty in federal court and admitted to the shooting. That doesn't change what the song is about. The song was never about one gunman. It's about the system that made millions of Americans look at that crime and see something else.
Why Luigi Is Robin Hood on the Cover
The Robin Hood legend goes back to at least the late 1300s, when English writers were already referring to popular rhymes about him. In the old ballads, Robin Hood stays loyal to the king while waging war on the Sheriff of Nottingham. He isn't against the kingdom. He's against the local power structure squeezing the common people dry.
That's the parallel I'm drawing. The public sentiment around Luigi wasn't anti-American. It was aimed at the sheriff, meaning the insurance industry and the wealth that protects it. People who cheered weren't rejecting the country. They were rejecting who the country works for.
We're Living in Technofeudalism
There's another reason the Robin Hood image fits. Robin Hood lived under feudalism, where lords owned the land and peasants worked it for scraps. A growing number of economists and social theorists argue that America has slid into something similar, which they call technofeudalism.
The term technofeudalism was popularized by economist Yanis Varoufakis in his 2023 book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, building on a case French economist Cédric Durand made a few years earlier. The basic idea is that a small group of tech and finance giants no longer compete in open markets the way capitalism promised. They own the platforms everyone else has to use, and they collect rent from all of us the way lords collected from serfs.
I go deeper on this in my book Techno-Feudalism: The Great Enclosure: How They Fenced the Land, the Factory, and Now You, written under my author name, Eric Leo. The book traces a straight line from feudalism to industrial feudalism to the techno-feudalism we live in now. First they enclosed the land, then the factory, and now they're enclosing your data, your attention, and your ability to own anything outright. I also walk through the symptoms you already feel every week, like housing, childcare, education, and healthcare, before showing you the system behind them.
Healthcare is where this connects directly to the song. Medical bills or illness-related work loss are associated with roughly two-thirds of personal bankruptcies in America, something almost unheard of in peer nations. One argument in the book is that people under feudalism rarely rose up over theory; they rose up when something they already had was taken from them. A denied claim, a lost house, a loved one who didn't make it: that's the kind of loss that wakes people up. It's why so many Americans looked at this case and saw Robin Hood instead of a headline.
Let's Talk About "Murder Is Wrong"
Every time this case comes up, somebody says "murder is wrong" and thinks the conversation is over. Okay. I agree. Now let's apply it consistently and see who's still standing.
If killing is wrong, war is wrong, and America is the most militaristic nation on earth. We spend more on our military than the next several countries combined. Your tax dollars fund bombs that have killed children in Gaza. If killing is wrong, that should bother you as much as anything that happened on a Manhattan sidewalk.
Guns are now the leading cause of death for children and teens in America, according to CDC data going back to 2020. Most of those deaths aren't school shootings, which are a smaller share. They're homicides, suicides, and accidents in a country that won't regulate the weapons. If killing is wrong, ban the guns. Lead by example.
That's my point. You can't tell people not to throw stones while your government, your industries, and your society are throwing stones every day. Murder may be immoral to you personally. But the state has already decided that some killing is ethical, meaning acceptable to society, as long as the state or its allies do it.
The State's Monopoly on Killing
The sociologist Max Weber defined the state as the institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Wars, police shootings, and executions are all killing that the state has labeled legitimate. In a real democracy, I can accept that, as long as the laws come from the people.
We have courts and regulations for that reason. In theory, we collectively decide, through our laws, what the state is allowed to do. The problem is that a lot of Americans no longer believe we live in that democracy. Researchers at Princeton and Northwestern found in 2014 that economic elites and organized business interests have far more influence over federal policy than average citizens do.
When laws protect the wealthy instead of the whole, the state's monopoly on violence starts protecting a class of people instead of the public. That's the civics lesson. Legitimacy isn't automatic. It has to be earned by representing the people.
Jordan Neely, Daniel Penny, and Who Gets Called a Tragedy
If you want to see how American authority really looks at killing, look at Jordan Neely. Leeja Miller does a deeper breakdown on this case that I recommend. Here's the short version.
Neely was an unhoused Black man in New York who had fallen through every gap in our social services. In May 2023, he was on a subway car yelling that he was hungry and thirsty and didn't care if he went to jail. Daniel Penny put him in a chokehold for several minutes, and the medical examiner ruled Neely's death a homicide. In December 2024, Penny was acquitted of criminally negligent homicide. Days later, he was a guest in President-elect Trump's suite at the Army-Navy game.
That's what the line in the song is about. In the eyes of America's capitalists, choking out a homeless Black man got treated as public service. But when a wealthy, powerful white executive dies, it's a national tragedy, a terrorism charge, and a manhunt.
About the N-Word in This Track
I want to address this directly. I don't like using the N-word, and I rarely do. I used it on this track because the whole song is built to shock, and that line is the point where everything lands.
I'm a sociologist, and sometimes you have to say a word with its full weight to teach what it means. The way I use it here is a defense of Black people. What I'm really saying is "stop treating Black people like they're less than human." In the bigger picture, I'm saying you don't actually care about murder or morals. You care about who died.
The Healthcare Body Count
Here's what's morally and ethically appalling to me. Health insurance companies deny claims every day, and some of those denials cost people their lives. Analyses of Affordable Care Act marketplace plans by KFF have found insurers denying close to one in five in-network claims. Very few patients ever appeal.
In the song, I say insurance companies have taken a hundred thousand lives, and I believe the real number is higher. The honest answer is that nobody has an official count of deaths from claim denials, because the government doesn't track them. The closest research looks at lack of insurance. A 2009 Harvard study estimated that roughly 45,000 American deaths a year were associated with being uninsured, and that number has been debated ever since. Put denials, underinsurance, and people skipping care because of cost together, and you're looking at a death toll with no one held responsible.
The people making those decisions know that denying care will hurt people. They do it because it's profitable. If we're serious about accountability for killing, that's where it belongs, in law, with real penalties.
What the Song Actually Demands
Strip everything else away, and the track makes two demands. I say the first one in both verses: healthcare should be a not-for-profit industry. Medical care is a human right, not a product to squeeze margins out of.
The second demand is that the law should protect the patient. If your doctor orders a medically necessary procedure, your insurance company shouldn't be allowed to deny it. Your doctor went to medical school. The claims algorithm didn't.
Other lyrics hit the same nerve. I call out the premiums, deductibles, and copays we're all expected to pay with a smile. I say that insurance companies prosper off the death of Americans and that finance is hostile to our people's democracy. And when the industry points to its holdings and its shareholder value, the track answers with a word I'll let you hear for yourself.
A Lesson in Philosophy: The Social Contract
At the time, I was deep into Jean-Jacques Rousseau while writing about what I call the cumulative will in my book Can and Will Do. The cumulative will is related to Rousseau's general will, and it's the key to understanding this whole situation.
For centuries, kings claimed to rule by divine right, meaning God gave them the throne. Most people didn't question it. Then Enlightenment thinkers started asking where government's authority actually comes from. Their answer was the social contract, the agreement between the people and the power that governs them.
Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), believed humans were naturally destructive. Without a strong ruler, he thought life would be "nasty, brutish, and short." So he argued people should hand nearly total power to a sovereign, something close to a monarch or dictator. Hobbes grounded that power in the people's consent, not in God, but the result looks a lot like the kings he was replacing.
John Locke saw people differently. He described the mind as a blank slate, and he believed people left to their own devices would improve themselves and society. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), he argued for limited government that protects life, liberty, and property. He also believed the people have the right to overthrow leaders who break that trust, an idea that shaped the Declaration of Independence.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau looked at Locke's world of property and competition and saw trouble coming. In his writing on inequality, he argued that social structures breed envy and corruption, and that inequality of power corrupts everything. In The Social Contract (1762), he described the general will. It isn't the same as a simple majority vote, which he called the "will of all." The general will is what the community shares as its common good, and laws are only legitimate when they express it.
Locke for the Rich, Rousseau for the People
Here's how I see America right now. The state and the capitalist class want Locke, especially the part about protecting property. The people want Rousseau: a government that serves the common good.
Healthcare is where you can see it most clearly. For years, Gallup has found that a majority of Americans say the federal government is responsible for making sure everyone has health coverage. The whole country smells like death and medical debt, and the general will has been obvious for a long time. The government just isn't listening.
That's why so many people saw Robin Hood in that story. They weren't celebrating a death. They were recognizing their own anger at a system that has buried their family members and friends. When prosecutors reached for a terrorism charge, that went beyond punishment. It was a way of saying that anger itself was the threat. A judge threw those terrorism charges out.
The Double Standard Goes Both Ways
Here's what I'd say to conservatives who want the harshest possible punishment. Many of you called the January 6 rioters political prisoners, and you celebrated when President Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 of them in January 2025. You made the argument that anger at the system explains political violence. You don't get to throw that argument away when the anger comes from the other direction.
I'm not asking anyone to excuse violence. I'm asking for one standard. Either political anger explains things or it doesn't. Either killing is wrong or it isn't. Pick one and apply it to everyone, including billionaires, the military, and the insurance industry.
When Bernie Is Impossible
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy warned that "those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Kennedy was talking to people in power, not giving permission. He was telling them that shutting down peaceful change has consequences.
That's how I mean it when I say that when Bernie is impossible, Luigi is inevitable. When every peaceful path to universal healthcare gets blocked by lobbyists and campaign money, desperation fills the gap. The fix isn't more violence, more police, or harsher sentences. The fix is making peaceful change possible again.
If the powers that be don't want this to happen again, they should change the laws to reflect the general will. Make healthcare not-for-profit. Make wrongful claim denials illegal. Hold insurance executives to the same standard as everyone else.
Why This Is Personal for Me
This isn't abstract for me. Until we get universal healthcare, I can't take a job that pays real earned income and keep my coverage. I can work part-time, but I'm capped at about $1,000 a month. If I go over, I risk losing the care I need.
I got into graduate school, but I can't afford tuition. Where I live, there isn't much opportunity to build the life I'm working toward. I've been on a Section 8 waiting list to move to Kalamazoo for years.
Healthcare touches every part of my life. My labor is being held hostage by an insurance system, and I can't have a normal American life because of it. There are millions of people like me, and most of them don't have a microphone. That's why I use mine.
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