Only in the age of social media does a high-profile murder become cause for celebration among the masses, like it has with Luigi Mangione and his alleged victim, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
“I really can’t over-emphasize how disturbing the response to this murder has been,” Rafael Mangual tells James Poulos on “Zero Hour.” “There’s no shortage of people with terrible takes on social media, essentially celebrating.”
“The shooter wore a very distinctive jacket that apparently has been flying off the shelves,” he continues, adding, “there was a lookalike contest in Washington Square Park the other day for the shooter. It really is kind of something out of ‘Batman’ where you have this terrible person being celebrated for a heinous act.”
“I don’t want to beat the ‘Batman’ thing to death, but it really is striking,” Poulos agrees, noting that it really does resemble the Robert Pattinson brand of Batman.
“This is a figure who is presented as an actual detective. This is a guy who has to solve crimes and figure out these mysteries and as the city sinks deeper into chaos and anarchy and evil. You start getting these figures who come up with these elaborate sort of structures that they use to sort of play with people,” he continues.
“And when I saw the way that hit went down, and the way that sort of information started to be introduced, and they discovered the backpack and it’s full of Monopoly money, and there’s this whole social media thing, it’s hard not to look at the way that that’s playing out and to think, ‘Have we entered into a new phase of crime in American life where there’s kind of this game to it?’”
“There’s this sort of stink of like we are being manipulated in some way,” he adds.
In light of keeping the “Batman” analogy going, Mangual notes that with the rise of social media, offenders like Mangione feel like if they market their actions the right way, they can have their own “Joker moment.”
“It’s up to us to reject that and to remind people that this isn’t a comic book story, that this is reality. You can’t just take lives on the streets of major cities,” he adds.
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