From thirst edits to nihilism, what's behind the online response to the CEO murder?

From TikTok to cable news, media old and new have been ablaze with commentary since UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, was shot last week in New York City. When police arrested and charged suspect Luigi Mangione yesterday, things got even more heated online. While mainstream media covers the story as a murder, the internet has created memes praising Mangione, videos fawning over his handsomeness and theories underpinning his motives. 

Internet culture reporters Miles Klee and Rebecca Jennings join Elamin Abdelmahmoud to better understand what this online reaction says about the American psyche.  

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Rebecca, when you look at all that reaction and the intensity of that reaction, what strikes you about that?

Rebecca: What strikes me is that I'm shocked at how not shocking it is, as someone who lives online — especially the way that we've been able to create thirst edits and fan edits of things that are objectively really dark and really complicated. But this is just the way the internet processes this kind of thing. I think that when you see an image of a man who might be handsome that you can project all of your fantasies of a leftist vigilante on, that's really compelling, especially when so many people see what he did as heroic, honestly. One of the first things I saw after the day that that happened was a horny chain text about not necessarily the man, but about the act itself. I don't know if anyone or if everyone knows what a horny chain text, but it's a lot of emojis and like innuendoes about a current event. And those exist for any kind of current event now, like the election.

Elamin: I did not have it in my bingo card this morning that we'd be talking about horny chain text.

There is something kind of uncomfortable about the reality here, which is that this is a story that can't be divorced from the anger that Americans feel towards their health-care system and towards a class of wealthy people who are running that system. 

Miles, what do you make of the gulf between the way that the Internet talks about this and the way the media companies — because of journalistic standards and practices — have to talk about it in a different kind of way?

Miles: Yeah, you do have to be really careful as a journalist. And what's so interesting is this is one of the rare bipartisan issues in American life — that there is broad consensus that our health-care insurance system is a scam. It's really powerful. I think one of the things you can point to in the media are people who start digging up the real data about this stuff. One of the things that went around right after the shooting was a graph showing how UnitedHealthcare denied almost a third of these claims from individual accounts for in-network services. That's about twice the industry average. And that's just insane. And I think that was something that did get through to the larger population. 

That's something that's hard data, that's hard numbers. That is different from doing the fan cams, doing the heart emoji edits of this shooter. That's something that I think did penetrate and I think is coming up in the media, thankfully, and I think will be part of the conversation. There is a really obviously serious conversation to be had about the problems of this system. You can't really glamorize this guy for bringing that to the fore. But as someone in the media, you can talk about that. And I think we should be talking about it because we just had a circus of an election where that really wasn't an issue at all. I don't remember either candidate even talking about health care or the media talking about it, for that matter. 

Elamin: There is a lot of speculation about the motive. We heard little bits and pieces, here and there, but we don't have the full manifesto that this person, the shooter, had written. But the Internet seems to have a very clear read. 

I think it's important to say also that the suspect is a young white man. I don't think we'd be having the same conversation the same way if he was a different race. I think that's a worthwhile thing to point out.  

How do you make sense of that reaction to this death?

Miles: I think a lot of people pictured him as someone who is underprivileged and underserved, and it's turning out that he grew up quite wealthy. He went to an Ivy League school, he had seemingly every advantage. And we're going to find out, hopefully, where he went wrong. But that's confusing for a lot of people because they think it's weird for someone to throw that all away for this kind of act. So I don't know what we're going to find out, but again, I think the picture is just going to get more complicated and it's not going to be fun for people anymore to cast him as this outlaw hero. 

Rebecca: I think people are so desperate for a platform to talk about the rage that they feel in this country with these systems that we have in a way that they'll be heard. And I think the way that they're heard is through this nihilistic irony and the fact that this is the thing that is bonding people on the left and on the right, who are struggling working class people, is really powerful. And to me, it reveals that maybe we need an ideological spectrum that is more about how nihilistic and black pill and hungry for revolution you are. Like Miles said, this was not even a part of the discussion in the election. The media painted this out to be a thing of wokeness and anti-wokeness. But there is another current of regular American feeling and rage that has nothing to do with that, it has everything to do with material conditions and the greed of the billionaire class. And I think this is one way that the people are being heard.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jess Low.