The "Luigi" Threat
A disinformation campaign just launched against the Modern Worker Empowerment Act. It has already inspired alarming language and suggestions of violence.
The posts started landing on X about a week ago. Their target was H.R. 1319, the Modern Worker Empowerment Act.
It’s the federal bill that Congressman Kevin Kiley of California put forward to try and stop the kind of disastrous freelance busting that happened with California’s Assembly Bill 5. That law was designed to force self-employed people into unions, according to state Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, the card-carrying Teamster who sponsored it:
Ever since California’s AB5 passed, unionists have been trying to spread this kind of freelance busting nationwide. That spread is what the Modern Worker Empowerment Act is designed to stop. The bill’s intent is to end this insanity and protect everyone’s freedom to be our own bosses.
It’s the bill I just testified in support of in the U.S. Senate, and that I testified in favor of this past May in the U.S. House of Representatives—where every single witness who testified against independent contractors was either employed by unions or affiliated with organizations that have strong union ties. The same thing happened when independent contractors stood up for ourselves at a recent public hearing in my home state of New Jersey. There, too, every single witness who testified against us was either employed by unions or affiliated with organizations that have strong union ties.
But according to the deeply disturbing and factually inaccurate posts that hit X on July 24, the Modern Worker Empowerment Act is a sneaky attempt to turn everyone into independent contractors:
What a bunch of rancid baloney.
And the claim that lawmakers “snuck back in” to advance the bill is a particularly diseased cherry atop this disinformation cake.
I’ve met Congressman Tim Walberg of Michigan. He’s chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Education & the Workforce that just voted to advance the bill. He also happens to be 74 years old. I’m confident that he did not rappel down through the Bellagio vault like George Clooney and Matt Damon in Ocean’s Eleven to sneak into the Capitol before the bill’s markup.
It was a standard committee meeting that was live-streamed for the whole country to see. I watched it in real time from home. And I cheered when the bill advanced.
‘Luigi’ is Code for ‘Kill’
But we’re not talking about reality here. We’re talking about a disinformation campaign. The posts kept coming on X.
Within just a few days, by July 27, they were multiplying exponentially:
By July 28, these talking points had been turned into an article in the Communist publication People’s World.
In a nation where two-thirds of Americans say we would prefer to be our own bosses, and where 80% of independent contractors say we prefer our way of working, this article cited the AFL-CIO and the union-affiliated National Employment Law Project in what it spun as a fight against the “independent contractor scam.”
Note the byline on that article: “by Press Associates.” It’s defined at the bottom of the piece as “a union news service in Washington, D.C.”
By July 30, similar messaging had been published in a New York union publication that cited Union Press Associates and People’s World in the byline; a chatbot was sending texts to lawmakers urging them to vote no on the Modern Worker Empowerment Act; and a Facebook handle with 93,000 followers called Union Proud Union Strong was spotlighting the bill—with a commenter standing up for independent contractors, and the reply calling him a “fucking colonizing pig.”
As of this morning, July 31, a YouTube video that some of the X posts promoted had 79,000 views. The video’s comments section included several mentions of accused assassin Luigi Mangione, appearing to suggest that people should kill lawmakers who support the Modern Worker Empowerment Act:
Now, I want to state clearly: I have no idea who is behind this current campaign.
But what we are witnessing, at a time when independent contractors are making real headway with the Modern Worker Empowerment Act to protect ourselves, feels eerily like what we experienced in 2021—just as we were making real headway in blocking the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, a bill that would have spread California’s freelance-busting language into federal law.
Back in 2021, the Communist Party USA had been trying for at least a year to get the PRO Act into law:
The messaging blitz that pushed for the PRO Act in 2021 included the head of the AFL-CIO at the time, Richard L. Trumka, who hosted a video town hall that also featured Megan Romer of the Democratic Socialists of America. (When Trumka died, Democrats renamed the PRO Act in his honor. The bill still bears his name today. The National Employment Law Project lobbies to try and get it passed.)
That 2021 campaign spread all the way into publications such as The New Republic and Law 360 before it stopped. I documented that campaign here.
I do not recall threats of violence back in 2021, but welcome to reality as we know it here in the year 2025.
Sadly, we are likely to see more of this kind of thing if Congress continues to advance the Modern Worker Empowerment Act to protect everyone’s freedom to be our own bosses as independent contractors—a protection that is needed now more than ever.
Ask your members of Congress to support H.R. 1319, the Modern Worker Empowerment Act. You can find your House Representative here and your two U.S. Senators here.
To file a public comment in opposition to New Jersey’s proposed independent contractor rule, email david.fish@dol.nj.gov or fill out the form at Save Independent Work by the August 6 deadline.