The UnitedHealthcare shooter got exactly what he wanted

Luigi Mangione has been inescapable, hasn’t he? His face is all over my social media feeds. Outlet after outlet — some mainstream, some otherwise — have published stories about the video games he liked, his Reddit comments, his Goodreads page, his political ideology, his back pain. Mangione is not merely an accused murderer; he is a celebrity.

There was a time, fairly recently, when it was felt that the best practice in a high-profile shooting was to avoid publicizing the accused killer’s identity and detailing the method by which it was accomplished. The idea, as articulated by Zeynep Tufekci in 2012, was that highly publicized killings functioned as a kind of social contagion; murder as a kind of advertisement for the shooter’s manifesto. Social media platforms generally scrubbed the profiles of people accused of high-profile killings; as recently as 2020, Facebook suppressed searches for “Kyle Rittenhouse,” after he was charged with murder. 

The weekend after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s murder, Tufekci wrote another op-ed. In 2012, she had suggested there should be no reporting on the killer’s words or actions. In her more recent story, she described a video of the killing and noted the messages found on the shell casings. She compared Thompson’s murder to a wave of killings in Gilded Age America and noted America has now passed the Gilded Age in wealth inequality. “It’s not hard to see how, during the Gilded Age, armed political resistance could find many eager recruits and even more numerous sympathetic observers,” Tufekci wrote. “And it’s not hard to imagine how the United States could enter another such cycle.”

Mangione’s profile on X is still up. Since he was named as a person of interest in the killing of Thompson, a blue checkmark has been added to the profile. It’s not just X. Most social media platforms have stepped back from aggressive moderation in general — leaving users’ impulses unchecked.

So the shooter was the subject of murder ballads and general sympathy, even a look-alike contest. As of this writing, there are more than 100 fanfics about the shooter on Archive of Our Own, many of them written before Mangione was arrested. Breloom, the pokémon in Mangione’s header photo on X, has been selling out. Mangione-themed merch is all over Etsy; Amazon has been removing the merch popping up on its platform. Ken Klippenstein, a Substack journalist, published a short statement from Mangione that is rather grandiosely being referred to as a “manifesto.” Users on r/SkincareAddicts jokingly alibied him, saying he was getting a facial with them on December 4th.

A day after Mangione’s statement was posted in its entirety, a Reddit moderator in r/popculturechat wrote, “Reddit has told us that we are not allowed to post Luigi Mangione’s manifesto, even if it is reported neutrally.” Users were not impressed. The top comment on the post was, “Is this the same reddit where people routinely post videos of other people getting straight up murdered?” Other users responded with gifs of the video game character Luigi from Nintendo’s Mario franchise.

The manhunt for Mangione meant that images of his face were necessary for his capture — he was identified in a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, by people who recognized him from those photos. But after his arrest, the pictures kept coming. The police themselves released at least four. One striking photo, taken for The New York Times, showed Mangione as the sole bright spot at the center of an otherwise dark photograph, haloed like a Renaissance portrait of a saint.  

I suppose you could say the mood has shifted.

Murder as entertainment predates social media. (As JonBenét Ramsey’s parents surely know.) Fandom for murder isn’t new either — the Columbine shooters, who murdered 13 people, have an ardent following. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted of the Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people, has a fan base. Before those two, of course, there was Charles Manson, who had his own set of groupies.

This feels different, perhaps because the lionization of an accused murderer isn’t limited to the weirder corners of the internet. Immediately after Thompson was shot, the reaction was anger — at UnitedHealthcare. A Facebook post by UnitedHealthcare’s parent company received 57,000 laughing emoji as reactions, according to CNN. r/nursing effectively threw a party. People all over social media posted their experiences with claims denials. 

The job of a CEO is, in part, to serve as the symbolic representation of a company. Killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare doesn’t kill UnitedHealthcare. It does, however, make a statement. Certainly the shooter was aware of the symbolic nature of his act — why else the “deny, delay, depose” bullet casings? 

I can’t speak to the veracity of the individual claims denial stories, but the broad outlines are supported by fact. UnitedHealthcare, which made $16 billion in operating earnings last year on $281 billion in revenue, has been accused of intentionally denying claims in order to juice profits by a Senate subcommittee. A lawsuit accuses the company of “illegal deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in place of real medical professionals to wrongfully deny elderly patients care owed to them under Medicare Advantage Plan.” 

For most people, an invisible system decides whether they receive the treatment their doctor prescribed. There is no insight into the system, particularly if it is algorithmic, even when — perhaps especially when — it is wrong. This, along with the expense of healthcare and insurance itself, may explain the explosion of fury following Thompson’s death. Brian Thompson, a literal human being, has been blotted out by his symbolic role as the head of UnitedHealthcare.

Sorting through Mangione’s internet detritus to make sense of the killing was somewhat unnecessary, though people did it anyway. He was arrested with a ghost gun, a silencer, and what amounted to a written confession. That confession confirmed what most of us had already figured out from the assassination itself: this was a political act. 

A New York Police Department internal report said Mangione “likely views himself as a hero of sorts,” according to The New York Times. That report suggested other people may decide he’s a “martyr and an example to follow.” After Mangione’s arrest, users left reviews on McDonald’s restaurants in Altoona saying they were full of “rats.” Altoona police say they are receiving threats as a result of the arrest. If Mangione views himself as “a hero of sorts,” he isn’t alone.

There is one more significant event that occurred two days after Thompson’s murder, Insurer Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield reversed itself: it would not follow through on a plan to stop reimbursing anesthesia beyond a certain time limit. The specifics of this policy were complicated, but the overwhelming anger and swift reversal were notable.

So far, it appears Thompson’s assassination was ruthlessly effective: Mangione’s image and ideas were widely disseminated, to broad approval. This is a total failure of the best practices once suggested to make killing for publicity less attractive. The New York Times realized this, according to Ken Klippenstein — arguably about a week too late for it to matter.

The possibility of contagion — as referenced in the NYPD report — is still theoretical. (Other attacks have been going on as usual, though they rarely get national attention now; the same day as Thompson was killed, two kindergartners were shot at school in California.) The public celebration of Mangione and the timing of the Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield announcement may suggest to some that violence will make corporate executives likelier to agree to regulation and smaller profits, because they prefer that to credible murder threats. But the reaction to violence is rarely that orderly. The response to Mangione suggests something else to me: political murder in America feels so inevitable now that we’ve simply accepted it.