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It used to be, when a killer emerged in America, that we found out who the man was before we began to enshroud him in myth. But with Luigi Mangione, the lead suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, that process was reversed. The internet assumed it already knew everything about Thompson's killer before a killer had even been identified, let alone arrested.
Within hours of the shooting, social media was churning out a mythologized version of the masked man. In his anonymity, he became an instant folk hero, portrayed as a crusader for universal healthcare, a martyr willing to risk it all to send a message to America's insurance giants with "the first shots fired in a class war." A Reddit forum offered up dozens of laudatory nicknames to crystalize his mythology: the Readjuster, the Denier, the People's Debt Collector, Modern-Day Robin Hood. "I actually feel safer with him at large," read one tweet a day after the shooting; it received 172,000 likes. The surveillance image of the suspect moved some to comment that he was "too hot to convict," and prompted comparisons to Jake Gyllenhaal and Timothée Chalamet. In New York City, a "CEO shooter lookalike competition" was held in Washington Square Park. Surely, the internet assumed, the killer shared left-wing ideas about the cruelties of privatized healthcare.
Then the man himself appeared — and he didn't fit into any of the neat categories that had already been created to describe him. On X, he followed liberal columnist Ezra Klein and conservative podcaster Joe Rogan. He respected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and retweeted a video of Peter Thiel maligning wokeism. He took issue with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He played the cartoon video game Among Us, posted shirtless thirst traps, quoted Charli XCX on Instagram, and had the Goodreads account of an angsty, heterodox-curious teenage boy: self-help, bro-y nonfiction, Ayn Rand, "The Lorax," and "Infinite Jest." Yes, he seemed to admire the Unabomber. But mostly this guy — a former prep school valedictorian with an Ivy League education and a spate of tech jobs — was exceedingly centrist and boring. A normie's normie. He wasn't an obvious lefty, but he wasn't steeped in the right-wing manosphere either. His posted beliefs don't fit neatly into any pre-established bucket. In his 261-word manifesto, which surfaced online, he downplayed his own qualifications to critique the system. "I do not pretend," he wrote, "to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument."
In the attention economy, patience is a vice.
That didn't stop the denizens of social media from pretending to be the most qualified people to lay out exactly who Mangione is. He's "fundamentally "anti-capitalist" and "just another leftist nut job." Or he's "a vaguely right-wing ivy league tech bro." Or he was invented by the CIA, or maybe Mossad, as a "psyop." The reality of Mangione — his messy, sometimes contradictory impulses — allowed everyone to cherry-pick the aspects of his personality that confirmed their original suspicions. In the attention economy, patience is a vice.
The rush to romanticize killers is nothing new. A quarter century ago, we cast the Columbine shooters as undone by unfettered access either to guns or to the satanic influences of Marilyn Manson and Rammstein. A decade ago, we debated the glamorization of the Boston Marathon Bomber, gussied up like a rockstar on the cover of "Rolling Stone." But social media has sped up the assumption cycle to the point where we put the killer into a category before police have found the killer. Perhaps there is a "great rewiring" of our brains that has diminished our capacity to understand each other, as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests in "The Anxious Generation" — a book Mangione had retweeted a glowing review of.
Myth-making is easier, of course, when it's unencumbered by reality. The less we know about a killer, the more room there is to turn him into something he's not. From what we have learned so far, Mangione is a troubled Gen Zer who won the privilege lottery at birth and ascribed to a mishmash of interests and beliefs. We will surely learn more about him in the coming days, weeks, and months. But now that we know who he is, it will be hard, if not impossible, to let go of our initial assumptions. Instead, we'll selectively focus on the details that fit tidily into the myths we've already created. In the digital-age version of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," the legend was already printed by the time the facts came along.
Scott Nover is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. He is a contributing writer at Slate and was previously a staff writer at Quartz and Adweek covering media and technology.
