UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting sparks a viral meme explosion

26-year-old Luigi Mangione has been charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — but he’s not going quietly.

Mangione was captured on camera yelling, “It’s completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people,” as he entered the courtroom, and the internet has gone wild in the aftermath.

“The culture being where it is today, in the midst of this tragedy, the memes have been rolling in,” Jill Savage of “Blaze News Tonight” says, asking Blaze Media digital strategist Logan Hall, “What do you think it is about him and this case that has just grabbed the attention of the nation?”

“I mean, you don’t really see this sort of crazy street violence where somebody just goes up to a big CEO of a big company and just guns them down in broad daylight,” Hall says. “Part of it too is that the news cycle has been kind of slower since Trump, since the election, so this is sort of what people glommed on to.”

Matthew Peterson has another theory.

“I think part of it is because it’s hard to tell what the hell is going on a lot these days, and when you look at this case, we’ve got a guy who gunned someone down in broad daylight, as it were, Monopoly money in the bag,” Peterson says.

“So you get this thing where you go, ‘Am I in a movie? Does this guy think he’s in a movie? Is someone making a movie? What’s real here?’” He continues. “And then this sort of strange persona that he is, right?”

This persona being that Mangione was “very online.”

“It just makes for a lot of jokes to sort of get us through this, and some very bizarre humor,” he says while Hall himself admits that “the memes are very good.”

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