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Main Character of the Week: Luigi Mangione

Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week: It’s Luigi Mangione, the shooting suspect from the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

This is where I’d recap what’s happened with Mangione in the macro, but I can’t imagine anyone reading this column doesn’t have a preexisting opinion about the 26-year-old former high school valedictorian and subsequent Penn grad. Here goes.

He’s suspected of donning a Macy’s jacket, mask, and shooting Thompson in New York City on Dec. 4. His bullets featured cryptic messages. When his ID was made public this week, a Twitter profile and GoodReads profile offered glimpses into his psyche. He apparently underwent a botched back surgery that rendered him unable to engage in intercourse. He apparently went off the grid and speculation is that he had a psychotic break. He was caught in a McDonald’s, manifesto in hand.

That’s when things got weird. It’s been a full-blown moment online.

As our investigative editor Claire Goforth wrote this week, Mangione united left-wing and right-wing forums. The kinda 4Chan and Reddit watering holes full of extreme partisans that spark revolutions? Both chambers of Chan thought he was a hero.

And more alarmingly, people thought he was in his right mind. A real-life John Q, rallying against greedy corporate healthcare interests. There are Mangione tattoos and he was called “the Adjuster” online, as if he were a Batman villain.

His attorney was flooded with 5-star reviews. Internet users offered up alibis for him. Italian memes surged; just so many memes. Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) finances were tied to Mangione by paranoid internet users. The 9/11 Domino Effect suddenly looped him in.

There was the Pokemon Easter egg and bible quote.

It made me wonder if Mangione was a convenient fall guy. Law enforcement does lie to the public in the interest of safety, after all, and we can’t have people thinking that Mangione was sane. Shoot if I were in charge of the CIA, I’d rush to frame him as cripplingly troubled mentally.

Many on TikTok didn’t buy that the government was telling us the truth about his arrest. I mean unibrows don’t grow in that quickly, right? It takes 4-8 weeks, according to Google’s AI-powered search results for crying out loud.

American healthcare under the microscope

I worked in a call center in the summer of 2008 for a private company called Maximus that would enroll Medicaid recipients into managed care programs. The state deemed them in need of more detailed care, the line we’d say went, so here is a proactive solution.

If you have Medicaid, you can see any provider who takes Medicaid. But when you enroll in these managed care plans, you can only see the primary care provider that we helped you select. So if you have a multitude of needs and see various specialists, this plan torpedoed your access to care.

I got so many calls about this I was eventually fired by Maximus when they caught me dissing insurance companies on a recorded line. (Technically, they chose not to renew my services via my temp agency.) My boss called me downstairs and my desk was packed up by security, my belongings given to me in a box upon exit.

There is little doubt that the American healthcare system is ripe for reform. Especially when it was recently reported that Thompson’s United leaned on artificial intelligence to deny claims.

The killer’s mistake was projecting his virtues onto another human being and feeling emboldened to take a life in the name of protest. Our mistake online has been projecting our American resentments onto a troubled, angry man and uplifting Mangione.

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