How I Knitted the 3D Hat
In this post, I discuss my design choices for the 3D beanie and provide instructions so that you can knit one yourself. The pattern is available as a PDF download at the end of this article.
After shooting United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan on 4 December 2024, Luigi Mangione—masked, hooded, and at that time still anonymous—became a folk hero to the proles and poors, and bogeyman to the rich. The killing, caught on tape, sparked an outpouring of emotion. The act served as a lightning rod for discussions on the spiraling costs of healthcare, the cruelty of for-profit health insurance, wealth inequality, media capture, and gun control to name but a few.
Like so many others caught up in the moment, I immediately wanted to do something. Although I’m a US citizen, I live abroad and I’m broke. I can’t join a protest on the ground or buy a politician. So that something turned out to be knitting.
Craft as a form of social protest—also known as craftivism—has a long history in the United States, most recently and most visibly in the knitted Pussyhats at the 2017 Women’s March that followed Donald Trump’s inauguration. Whole books have been written about craftivism. In designing this project, I wanted to draw on this tradition of creativity in the face of political and social intransigence.
This slouchy beanie features Delay - Deny - Depose around the lower edge. These words were written on bullet casings found at the scene of the murder and were initially misreported as Deny - Defend - Depose. Internet speculations suggest that they refer to the book Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It by Jay M. Feinman.
When I showed this beanie to my husband as a work in progress, he half-jokingly exclaimed, “Do you dare?!” I admit that I was extremely nervous, but in the end I did dare. At the same time, I purposely chose muted colours so as not to draw extra attention to the design and the final pattern includes an option to replace Delay, Deny, Depose with snowflakes.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that Delay, Deny, Depose functions as a sort of Rorschach test; people interpret these words in a myriad of ways. Some see them as the opening salvos of a class war, others as morally despicable support for vigilante justice, and still others as an exhortation to political action. On Ravelry, someone left a comment on the pattern page calling this hat “disgusting” while another person wrote “hell yeah.” To me, Delay, Deny, Depose doesn’t indicate support for murder. Instead, it’s solidarity with people who have suffered or who are currently suffering due to the decisions of health insurance companies in the United States.
In the aftermath of Magnione’s arrest, the filmmaker Michael Moore wrote of the public mood:
People across America are not celebrating the brutal murder of a father of two kids from Minnesota. They are screaming for help, they are telling you what’s wrong, they are saying that this system is not just and it is not right and it cannot continue. They want retribution. They want justice. They want health care. And they want to use their money to live — not to throw it away each month into a black hole of health insurance premiums only to discover that when the time finally comes to use their insurance, when the leg breaks or the car crashes or the gun accidentally goes off, their health insurance company is there not to help them but to deny their claim, bankrupt them with deductibles and copays, and give them the runaround until their spirit is broken and they just give up and wait to die.
That’s how I feel, and that’s the spirit in which I designed his hat.
Internet attention is fickle. When Luigi Mangione is no longer making news, it is very likely that people will move on from health insurance reform, universal healthcare, and other related topics. By creating a physical object like this beanie, it is my hope that we don’t forget—that making and wearing this hat reminds us of the work that still needs to be done. (For the record, I don’t mean murder.) Whatever your reason for making this hat, I wish you happy knitting and would love to see your FO.
