The homicide of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson final Wednesday sparked a five-day manhunt for the mysterious killer, who left behind irresistible clues like a hidden message on bullet casings and a backpack filled with Monopoly money.
As soon as the alleged killer was caught on Monday at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, one other type of hunt started—on social media.
Office productiveness slowed to a crawl nationwide round 1 p.m. ET, as those that had been frantically following the story realized they may freely discover the suspect’s social media accounts and different digital breadcrumbs. Some particulars had been revealed instantly. The alleged killer, whom TikTokers had glibly dubbed the Claims Adjuster, turned out to be 26-year-old College of Penn graduate Luigi Mangione, who studied laptop science and labored as a software program engineer. What solely trickled out on the velocity of scrolling, nonetheless, had been insights into the topic’s character and motivations gleaned from his Fb, X, Instagram, and Goodreads accounts. (As of this writing, solely the X account stays accessible to peruse.)
The search unfolded on social media in a disjointed frenzy as extra folks discovered the massive information in waves. Many people had been nonetheless simply processing the alleged shooter’s very Italian name whereas others had moved on to analyzing Mangione’s preferred Pokemon. (It’s Breloom, the mushroom Pokemon.) Weaned on true crime mysteries, tantalized by the breadcrumb path of bullet casings and backpacks, and fired up with Swiftie-like relentlessness, beginner social media detectives hurled themselves at any scrap of data, whether or not or not it’s his LinkedIn profile or his valedictorian speech. Hoping, maybe, for a juicy revelation that will put Mangione’s actions into contemporary perspective, they picked by means of his sprawling physique of self-disclosure and touted what turned out to be fake YouTube videos alongside the way in which.
Each the preliminary response to Thompson’s homicide and the breathless pleasure round Mangione’s social media converse to a need to suit what had occurred right into a tidy narrative. Previous to his seize, Luigi Mangione was a thriller. He had gotten everybody’s consideration; now everybody wished to know why. The act of violence had resonated with lots of people, whether or not they condemned it or not, as a result of it spoke to deep frustrations with the healthcare system, together with a normal sense of powerlessness. The unknown heartthrob who allegedly dedicated the crime had change into a clean slate onto which anybody may ascribe their most well-liked ideology.
Some on the left celebrated his alleged act, elevating Mangione to folk-hero standing for combating again towards inhumane healthcare insurance policies. When right-wing influencers together with Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh vilified the left for doing so, although, viewers left furious comments to let the pair know their followers additionally recognized with the killer.
However Mangione’s social media presence proved him neither a Marxist revolutionary nor a militia-affiliated libertarian. And any hopes for a grasp plan of nice profundity, past the alleged homicide itself, appeared to evaporate rapidly. This was not the work of a thriller man exposing rot on the core of unfettered American capitalism; it was an Ivy League graduate who retweeted movies about Peter Thiel, praised Elon Musk, loved gaming, and wolfed down corporate-friendly airplane books like Predictably Irrational.
Certainly, probably the most telling revelation to spill from Mangione’s social media turned out to be his profound spinal injury. An X-ray of his again hangs within the banner of his X account, and its specter looms in a few of his reading material, alongside extra anticipated books corresponding to The Unabomber Manifesto. A lot of the opposite particulars that emerged on Mangione’s social media complicate the picture of the insurance coverage trade’s darkish new nemesis, with out including any depth to it. It actually didn’t show, as Ted Cruz quickly claimed, that “leftism is a psychological illness.”
It’s a lot simpler to make sense of such a violent public act when the perpetrator’s ideology is in lockstep with it. The Christchurch mosque shooter in 2019, as an example, was an avowed white supremacist, as was the El Paso shooter that very same yr, and the Buffalo supermarket shooter in 2022. The incel behind the 2014 Isla Vista killings equally left behind a path of self-pitying YouTube movies for anybody trying past his manifesto. None of those killers resisted simple classification; their on-line personas match their actions. Mangione’s digital path is extra confounding.
Luigi Mangione had a again downside, which probably uncovered him to the more infuriating and financially devastating aspects of the health insurance industry. It seems to be this sequence of occasions, fairly than any ideological indoctrination, that will have pushed him astray from no matter his life was going to be. Then, he disappeared. (“No person has heard from you in months, and apparently your loved ones is searching for you,” reads one friend’s message on X from October.) The FBI and different authorities will comb by means of his search historical past, manifesto, his notebook, and a few objects the general public won’t ever see, to find out what occurred subsequent. Perhaps they’ll even uncover the reality.
Till their report emerges, although, if it ever does, probably the most outstanding factor we are able to be taught from Mangione’s social media is that he won’t be so outstanding.
As a pal who shared a Discord group with Mangione describes him: “He simply appeared like another regular frat dude that you would see at a frat occasion.”