Person of the Year: Luigi Mangione

PART ONE: Perhaps there has been a vibe shift: one where the cultural script is shifting from “nothing matters” to “something must be done.”

Dec 22, 2025

You’re reading WOODRUFF. I cover the convergence of pop culture, psychology, and astrology. Join my entourage of subscribers—you’ve been missed. My bio is here.

LET’S PRETEND THERE WAS a subversive calendar created for 2025. A calendar that featured, for each month, a rendering of a radical anti-capitalist, a loose cannon provocateur, a skilled activist, or a forthright politician. For those months when anonymity was essential—a white page filled with cryptic computer code that honored a particular hacker or cyberpunk would suffice. Throughout, there’d be prominent stars that would shine within MAGA’s stygian blight. Beacons like activist Cory Doctorow, investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr and NY mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.

As 2025 shuts down, let’s back up and consider January—the month that launched our annus horribilis. For, as astrologers will tell you, the way any time fraction commences says everything about how that slice of time will play itself out. With apologies to T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland, January, not April, is the cruelest month. And so, natch, our calendar’s first icon would be the alleged vigilante Luigi Mangione.

Mangione is the comely kouros who—plucked from a Cassandra-like myth or Dave vs. Goliath biblical yarn—readied us for one of the most grotesque years in US history. Although Mangione didn’t appear on the cultural radar until December of 2024, his presence dominated the news cycle for months (a rarity nowadays when several church, school, or Carolina dive bar shootings occur weekly in America). And so, Mangione dovetailed easily into the slot of our calendar’s first month.

Stop and think about it: 2025, with its paroxysm-generating cultural shift, was the only year that could follow the 16-year-long transit of Pluto in Capricorn. A reaming that commenced when the global financial markets sinkholed in 2008—days after the planet entered the sign. And so commenced a surgical process that dredged up the guts and goo of decaying late-stage capitalism. The Pluto-Capricorn transit set up the chessboard in a ‘broad daylight’ arrangement, revealing how the pillaging and grift are played, rigged, and won. And by whom. And on that note, let’s consider some of its kingpins.

After the 2024 election, sociopathic Broligarchs Musk, Cooke, Thiel, Chew, Zuckerberg, Altman, and Bezos—like porn star fluffers—were on full display on Trump’s inaugural podium. Fittingly, the only woman in the mix was Bezos’ wife, Lauren Sanchez, personifying the worst of surgical artifice—a prescient glimpse of the disturbing Mar-a-Lago face fad.

The apical bookend to the Trump inauguration would have to be the very vulgar Hunger Games-like Bezos-Sanchez wedding in Venice in August. Again, a reminder: Pluto forces everything that’s covert and on the down-low into conspicuous daylight.

The structural collapse that Pluto’s Capricorn transit exposed eventually morphed into the ideological realm with the planet’s ingress into Aquarius. Capricorn, an earthy Earth sign, is aligned with ‘touch grass’ corporeality. Aquarius reframed the structural collapse into the conceptual. Air is the least tangible of the elements. It’s considered the most ‘human’ element in astrology, which is why when Pluto occupies the sign, you have to wonder what sort of ghoulish humans are going to lord over the sociopolitical dialogue. Trump’s inaugural posse was the most in-your-face way of answering that question.

After the Pluto-Capricorn transit, Air sign attributes became the new template. We now experience life from the cloud. It’s ‘on the cloud.’ I lost it on ‘the cloud.’ ‘The cloud’ was hacked. ‘The cloud’ is down. Bury me on ‘the cloud.’ In a heartbeat, Aquarian fascination with technology and Promethean fever dreams channeled Pluto’s raw power (and the billions of dollars associated with it) into AI and the sort of criminality and mob-like grift that tags any Pluto transit. And we’ve been gagging on it throughout 2025. The message reads, “You will align your life with AI, regardless of your preferences—in your head or on your computer.”

But, as is common with any Pluto transit, it’s the unsavory manifestations that appear first. When you deep dive into the impact of AI on culture, you discover that many of Aquarius’ most classic qualities are being rotted and desecrated from the inside out. AI makes people stupider while diminishing their ability to reason. It’s also destroying natural resources and efforts to maintain the well-being of our environment. As fits most Plutonic meshegas, AI involves scams, grift, and blatant con artistry by the tech freaks that tout it.

And, similar to the transit through another Saturn-related sign, it threatens to destroy the global economy when the bubble that sustains it bursts. Although it’s touted as a ‘friend’—it isn’t. It steals from creative individuals, and what it can’t copy and regurgitate, it hallucinates. In other words, it lies as a way to maintain its hegemony on the public’s imagination. It’s fascinating to see the primordial survival drive associated with Pluto channeled through a future-leaning, high-ideals-centered sign like Aquarius.

The Broligarchy’s abandonment of ethics coincided with Trump’s reelection. In his own way, each tech lord dropped the pretense that they gave a fuck about the societal contract. Or the mental health of children. Even the nominally prudent Tim Cooke began genuflecting to MAGA, gestures that included a hand-delivered gilded Apple bauble for Trump to showcase—a prelude to the soon-to-be kitsch-slathered Oval Office and its Midas touch makeover.

With Pluto’s ingress into Aquarius (a sign that represents a complex mix of qualities—everything from ‘power to the people’ to the imaginative wilds of tech to the inner working$ of the insurance companies that oversee corporatized medicine), the world was ready for a mascot or icon or flesh and blood catalyst that would remind us that effective protest requires more than simply posting a complaint on social media. It can be ugly. And sometimes deadly. Again, two significant Pluto themes.

Luigi and the Vibe Shift

“…Mangione’s alleged assassination attempt aligns with a more deliberate logic, however twisted, one that might imagine you can change the world by taking out a key player. Perhaps there has been a different sort of vibe shift: one where the cultural script is shifting from “nothing matters” to “something must be done.” —Katherine Dee, The Spectator

I want to stop here and, for part two of this essay, drop into the astrology of the US’s chart for 2026. To do so, I’ll superimpose Mangione’s natal chart—a horoscope that is galvanized by a fecund Mars-Sun conjunction in Taurus—and honor it as a template or instruction manual of sorts. Mangione symbolizes whatever rays of hope exist amidst a cultural moment that feels almost hopeless. And as Taurus is likely to convey, there is a sense of necessity (fate) to do something about untenable conditions. Survival depends upon it. And I don’t mean through violence, but through renewed revolutionary remaking. This, of course, involves the position of Uranus in the US’s natal chart.

I want to consider the resonance that elevated Mangione into what Martin Heidegger would describe as becoming a man of Time and Fate. Heidegger’s philosophy explored how individuals project themselves into the future and how a lone individual might become intertwined with destiny—and alter the flow of history.

Next week, in PART TWO of this essay, for my paid subscribers, I study the synastry between Mangione’s natal chart and the United States’. This is a fascinating reading that highlights why Mangione became a salvo and symbol for the Pluto through Aquarius years. Not that people mimic his actions, but that we understand what can be wrought from any creative struggle for existence. Many times, from destruction, constructive activism arises. This is essential to comprehend and parse out. Presently, we seem caught between a condition of ‘nothing matters’ (Saturn and Neptune in Pisces) and ‘something must be done’ (the upcoming Saturn-Neptune conjunction next year in Aries). Can we move forward together? That’s the real Aquarian ‘power to the people’ question. Join me in this inquiry!

Opening collage by FW ©2025, Nightcharm, Inc. Main painting, David with the Head of Goliath, c. 1606-1607, by Caravaggio. Kunsthistorisches Museum, in Vienna. Luigi portrait via YouTube screen cap.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?