It’s been almost four months since the assassination of Brian Thompson, the late and unlamented CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Since Thompson was gunned down in front of a Hilton hotel in Manhattan, the American public has been captivated by the case—and by the alleged shooter, Luigi Mangione. After a 2024 election cycle where healthcare reform was barely mentioned, the murder has put the subject back into the national spotlight, with Thompson widely seen as an avatar of everything wrong with the United States’ for-profit medical system. Meanwhile, Mangione has become something of a folk hero, with countless memes, songs, T-shirts, and pieces of graffiti dedicated to him. In a country where almost everyone has been hurt or ripped off by insurance companies in some way, his popularity reflects Americans’ deep-rooted anger and demand for change. But big corporations, apparently, have learned nothing from the rise of Luigi-mania. Instead of making any serious effort to reform the practices that have made so many Americans hate them, they’ve taken a different path. They’re trying to suppress information about Mangione’s case, shut down expressions of sympathy for him, and peddle a corporate-friendly narrative that whitewashes UnitedHealthcare and preserves the status quo. It’s a remarkable demonstration of how the U.S. media operates as propaganda for entrenched power and wealth—and why corporate control of information, along with healthcare, needs to end.

First, there’s the online censorship. The latest example of this came from the administrators at Reddit, who have enacted sweeping new policies that flag people as rulebreakers for even mentioning “Luigi” in their posts. Earlier this March, the moderator of the r/popculture subreddit—which has 173,000 users—posted a warning that “All comments with the word ‘luigi’ get flagged as possibl[y] inciting violence,” even when the comment has nothing to do with Mangione or the New York shooting. In screenshots, they showed how posts about the Nintendo character Luigi, the big band song “Luigi” by Louis Prima, and even criticism of the censorship itself were flagged as “violent” by the site’s automated systems:

When asked by reporters from the Verge, a spokesperson for Reddit said this automatic flagging was only happening on r/popculture and claimed there is no “sitewide filter” for Luigi-related posts. But this doesn’t seem to be entirely true, since similar restrictions have also hit the Reddit community for Kyle Kulinski’s YouTube show Secular Talk. There, one moderator reports that “We see it when they censor posts for ‘community safety’ all the time. Almost anything that’s anti Elon or pro Luigi gets the community safety treatment and has to be manually approved.” At the same time, Reddit has also introduced a new policy to punish users who merely upvote, not just those who post, what its administrators call “bad or violating content.” In an interview with Slate, one moderator reports that the site has even banned entire communities: 

I remember r/LuigiMangione got banned, then r/LuigiMangione2, then r/LuigiMangione3, and I think it went up to r/LuigiMangione6 before people were like, ‘We’re not going to keep doing this.’ […] I’d made one called r/LuigiFever, which was just photos of him, and that got banned too.

This crackdown is a prime example of why Reddit is kind of a terrible website for discussing controversial topics. On the surface, it’s presented as inherently democratic: users “upvote” or “downvote” posts, and whatever’s popular rises to the top. But like American political democracy, which is shaped by wealthy donors and party elites, Reddit’s platform democracy is largely an illusion. Administrators can simply issue decrees about what kind of speech is and isn’t allowed, and everyone else has to obey or face punishment. And since Reddit became a publicly traded company last year, it’s ultimately rich shareholders who have the final say over the site’s policies. It’s the same on other websites and apps: on TikTok, for instance, just typing “Free Luigi” is reportedly enough to get your comments deleted. 

Given that we’re talking about a murder, this kind of aggressive content policing might seem somewhat reasonable. Most social media platforms, after all, have a blanket rule against posts that promote or celebrate violence, and Reddit is no exception. But as we’ve seen, some of the posts getting restricted aren’t violent at all. And in practice, the idea that Reddit administrators apply their “do not post violent content” rule in a consistent or principled way is ridiculous. Posts that promote or normalize violence abound.

Any given day on Reddit, you can go on r/Israel and post a song called “Bomb Iran,” no problem. You can express support for killers aligned with the political right, like Daniel Penny (who killed an unhoused Black man for having a mental health episode) and Kyle Rittenhouse (who shot three Black Lives Matter protesters, two of them fatally). You can also post videos of street fights, or a Ukrainian soldier stepping on a land mine, or a compilation of the “Top 15 worst injuries” in mixed martial arts. You can start a fan community for Jeffrey Dahmer and call him “Angel Jeff,” as one rather disturbing post did last week. All of this is “violent content,” but it doesn’t attract the same level of scrutiny and restriction as posts about Luigi Mangione. So clearly, the problem isn’t violence. Rather, it’s expressions of sympathy for the one person in the country who is accused of directing violence at a rich healthcare executive, which is being treated as worse than violence against anyone else. That’s not moderation, it’s political censorship. The effect is to suppress popular anger and opposition to the for-profit healthcare system, with “violence” as a pretext. 

It’s not just “Free Luigi” memes, either. Elsewhere on the internet, UnitedHealthcare itself is now trying to purge criticism of its practices from public view. Last month, Bloomberg reported that the company had hired a defamation law firm called Clare Locke “to counter what it sees as inaccurate and irresponsible social media posts” about its claim denials following Thompson’s death. If the name Clare Locke sounds familiar, it’s probably because the same law firm represented Dominion Voting Systems in defamation cases when they were accused of helping to rig the 2020 election. But this time around, their work is a lot less noble than defending democratic processes against conspiracy theorists. Instead, Clare Locke has contacted a plastic surgeon named Elisabeth Potter and demanded that she take down Instagram posts where she accused the company of denying care to her patients. 

This January, Potter posted on Instagram that she’d been “interrupted by a call from United Healthcare—while the patient was already asleep on the operating table” for a breast cancer surgery. She says the insurance company demanded a “justification” for her patient to stay overnight at the hospital once the procedure was done, which they eventually refused to pay for despite Potter insisting it was “medically necessary.” UnitedHealthcare not only denies doing this, but has demanded that Potter take down all her posts about the incident and make a public apology, with the threat of a lawsuit from Clare Locke if she doesn’t comply. But given that UnitedHealth is an industry leader in claims denials, and Brian Thompson himself was a pioneer in the use of AI to deny care more quickly and efficiently, Potter’s story is a highly plausible one. At any rate, she has no obvious reason to make it up, and the investor Bill Ackman—who’s certainly no anti-capitalist, but took an interest in the case and “spoke at length” to Potter—says he finds  her account “totally credible.” But the only reason we even know about the legal threats against Potter is because she did not comply and went public. It’s possible that UnitedHealthcare has also threatened other whistleblowers in the medical field with defamation suits, and that those people have quietly censored themselves to avoid legal and financial disaster. And it’s abundantly clear that all this is only happening because Luigi Mangione’s case has shined the world’s biggest spotlight on the company and its misdeeds, and they’re desperately trying to shut it off again.

The traditional print media is involved here, too, and one of the worst offenders is the country’s most influential newspaper: the New York Times. As independent journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed back in December, the paper’s editors had internal discussions about whether or not to release the handwritten document full of anti-corporate rhetoric that was (according to police, anyway) found in Mangione’s bag when he was arrested. The document points out several important facts about the healthcare industry that might lead someone to be furious at it, including that “the U.S. has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy,” and argues that “these parasites simply had it coming.” But in their company group chat, New York Times staff members said they wanted to avoid “amplifying the crime and inspiring others,” and decided to keep the document (which they called a “manifesto,” a somewhat loaded term) under wraps “so as not to provide bullhorn.” An editor also instructed reporters to “dial back” on showing photos of Mangione’s face. Rather than simply providing the public with information, which is the job of any journalist, the Times staff appointed themselves chaperones of what information the public should and should not have access to, and what conclusions they should draw from it. Klippenstein aptly calls this “media paternalism,” but it may also indicate a conflict of interest. The New York Times, after all, has never been shy about running ads for drug companies, pharmacy benefit managers, and other branches of the for-profit medical industry, so the idea that they can cover this case objectively is questionable at best.

What happens when you suppress information in this way? Well, if it weren’t for Klippenstein releasing the full document, the public wouldn’t be able to read its contents for themselves and form an opinion independently. Instead, they would be forced to rely on the Times—and other corporate news outlets, like the Bezos-owned Washington Post—to provide them with paraphrasings and interpretations. Withholding information or presenting only selected facts enhances your ability to control the narrative around a situation, and it soon became clear that the Times’ editorial line on the Mangione case was distinctly pro-UnitedHealth. In a pungent stinkpiece from December 12, New York Times opinion writer Bret Stephens contended that “Brian Thompson, Not Luigi Mangione, Is the Real Working-Class Hero,” calling the slain CEO a “talented and determined man from humble roots” and comparing Mangione to the arrogant and self-absorbed axe murderer Raskolnikov from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. And on the following day, the Times published a guest essay from Andrew Witty, the CEO of the UnitedHealth Group (of which UnitedHealthcare is the insurance branch). He, apparently, was deemed worthy of the paper’s “bullhorn.”

Witty’s essay is an unctuous piece of propaganda, full of crocodile-tear appeals for sympathy and outright lies about UnitedHealthcare and its business model. Like Stephens’s “working-class hero” piece, Witty emphasizes the fact that Thompson was born in Iowa and “worked farm jobs” growing up—which is irrelevant, since it’s not where we’re born but what we do in life that defines us. He pulls a slick rhetorical move to imply that Mangione and the outpouring of public support for him have resulted in ordinary healthcare workers being terrorized, first complaining about “the vitriol that has been directed at our colleagues” and then saying that “nurses who visit patients in their homes” shouldn’t have to worry about their safety. Really, though, it’s top executives like himself, not nurses, who have been receiving the well-deserved “vitriol” online. Witty makes a token admission that “the health system does not work as well as it should”—now there’s an understatement—but he blames this on the fact that it’s a “patchwork built over decades” rather than the deliberate extraction of profits that is working just fine for corporate shareholders. He even defends claims denials, saying that “the reasons behind coverage decisions are not well understood” and that the solution is to “improve how we explain what insurance covers and how decisions are made,” rather than change the decisions themselves. Most unbelievable of all, he claims that Thompson’s “legacy” was “making health care more affordable, more transparent, more intuitive, more compassionate—and more human,” and that Thompson was a “brilliant, kind man who was working to make health care better for everyone.” The conclusion is obvious: the reader is supposed to feel bad for the fallen CEO, feel guilty for any other response they might have initially had to his killing, and see Mangione (who is legally presumed innocent at this point) as straightforwardly evil. 

Witty’s article reads like a press release from UnitedHealth’s PR department which was posted to the New York Times website unedited, and that’s essentially what it is. But the job of a newspaper is not to just let big corporations say whatever they want without questioning them. If the Times editors were doing their job properly, they might have asked for a fact-check on the claim that Brian Thompson was “working to make health care better for everyone.” It would have revealed that he was doing just the opposite. In fact, Thompson’s innovative AI denial system is alleged to have had a 90 percent error rate (meaning that 9 out of 10 denials would be reversed upon appeal) and is the subject of a huge class-action lawsuit. So he was making things worse, not better. But even without a shady AI involved, simply being a for-profit healthcare operator should be considered a crime of the worst kind. No matter what any healthcare CEO tells you, health insurance companies are not in the business of providing or improving healthcare for anyone. Paying out claims costs them money, so they’re incentivized to avoid doing it whenever possible. Instead, they exist to take people’s money and send it up to their shareholders. They do this by denying care, and ordinary people suffer and die so they can line their pockets. 

In the United States, the Lancet medical journal estimated in 2020 that 68,000 people die every year because they can’t afford to buy healthcare. That’s 68,000 of people’s parents, siblings, spouses, and other loved ones who have been denied the chance to live, simply because a handful of profiteers wanted to make money. Those people would still be alive if we had a universal public system, like almost every other developed country. Instead, we have an organized racket that dangles lifesaving medicine and care just out of reach. (And that’s not even counting the less-than-lethal cases. This week, a video crossed my YouTube feed of an engineer named Ian Davis who resorted to building his own prosthetic hand after his insurance company refused to pay for one. That kind of denial happens a lot in the U.S., and you can even have your prosthetic limbs repossessed if you fail to pay for them promptly.) 

As the single largest healthcare firm in America, the UnitedHealth Group bears a large portion of the guilt for all this preventable death and pain. But these facts aren’t what the New York Times chooses to emphasize. If they did, the public might make a very different conclusion from the one Andrew Witty wants: that Brian Thompson was a worse killer than Luigi Mangione could ever dream of being, that there’s no reason anybody should feel particularly sad that he’s left this mortal plane, and that the whole system he represented needs to be torn down. And the paper of record can’t allow that. 

Nor, it seems, can the purveyors of trashy reality TV. There are now at least three different streaming documentaries about Luigi Mangione, each hastily churned out to capitalize on the drama around Thompson’s death. From ABC’s 20/20 series, there’s Manhunt: Luigi Mangione and the CEO Murder; from the New York Post there’s Luigi Mangione: Monster or Martyr?, and from TMZ there’s the most inflammatory title of all: Luigi Mangione: The Mind of a Killer. Now, true crime TV is a pretty sleazy genre at the best of times, since it exists to make money off human tragedy; its creators are basically the media equivalent of ambulance chasers, and they help to promote “tough on crime” politics by showing people constant reminders of violent crime. (If you got your news mostly from these TV shows, you’d think murderers are lurking around every corner, but that isn’t the case.) But even by true crime’s already low standards, these “documentaries” are nasty pieces of work. Like the New York Times’ coverage, they seem calculated to paint Mangione in the worst possible light, encourage sympathy for Thompson, and obscure or downplay the uncomfortable facts about for-profit healthcare. The producers of the TMZ offering, in particular, seem to have used the “scariest” pictures of Mangione they could find for their thumbnail, and they applied what can only be described as a Joker font on the word “killer”:

Apart from the graphic design choices, describing Mangione explicitly as a “killer”—not an “alleged” or “suspected” killer—is a problem, because he has not yet been proven to be one. It may seem likely that he’s the one who shot Thompson, but that isn’t the same thing as a proper court verdict, and people are entitled to be considered innocent until a verdict has been reached. But TMZ gleefully ignores this basic rule. The documentary’s presenter, Harvey Levin, muses about how “a privileged young man who on the surface was smart, engaging, and charming becomes a killer,” and CCTV footage of the masked and hooded shooter is accompanied by descriptions like “Mangione is seen walking to a nearby Starbucks,” as if the identity of the blurry figure onscreen were settled fact. We also get talking-head testimonials from people like Ninette Toosbuy, a “former LAPD detective” who is not a medical professional, about how she believes Mangione “probably had some mental health issues, so he’s not gonna think as a quote-unquote normal person.” At another point, Levin speculates that he might be a “sociopath,” seemingly based on nothing. In the British legal system, which is much stricter than the American one when it comes to libel and defamation, Mangione could likely sue TMZ for saying things like this. Even having media narratives about his potential “sociopathy” circulating could prejudice the jury pool in his case, even if jurors didn’t watch the documentary and just heard vague gossip about its contents. And because U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced this morning that she’s ordered federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty, a biased jury could cost him his life. Journalistic standards exist for a reason. 

Importantly, TMZ is owned by Fox and is thus a tendril of Rupert Murdoch’s infamous right-wing media empire. So it shouldn’t exactly be surprising that its content is pro-corporation and anti-Luigi. But even with that in mind, the bias on display is striking. In one interview, Levin opines about how “I don’t understand” anger about wealth disparities, because the Rockefellers were famous millionaires when he grew up and “they were aspirational, not outrageous.” (This is especially silly because plenty of people have opposed the Rockefellers and their wealth-hoarding ways for over a century.) In the New York Post documentary, it’s more of the same: we’re told by various guests that Thompson was a “quintessential American success story,” that he was “a family man with kids who lived in Minnesota in an affluent suburb, and for all I know was a perfectly good person,” and that “there’s a role that insurance companies play in terms of making sure the care that’s provided is good care, it’s ethical care, it’s needed care.” And in the ABC 20/20 installment, we’re met with dismay that “People are cheering the demise of this person they’ve never met,” with no mention of Thompson’s care denial algorithm. 

In all three films, the views of Mangione’s supporters and critics of the healthcare industry are represented, with pro-Luigi clips from TikTok and YouTube and even interviews with left-leaning commentators like Cenk Uygur and Taylor Lorenz (who briefly became infamous for telling Piers Morgan she felt “joy” at the assassination) in the TMZ documentary. But these views are consistently framed as a trend the viewer should find strange and worrying, with descriptors like “an ideology that is kind of sick and perverted” (podcaster Michael Moynihan, in the TMZ film) or “the sick and ghoulish reaction” (Post managing editor Lia Eustachewich) applied to them. In the ABC version, Mangione’s popularity is even compared to the small fan clubs that rose up around Charles Manson and Ted Bundy in the 1960s and ’70s. Being angry at the healthcare industry, apparently, makes you no better than someone who admires a cult leader or a misogynist serial killer—or at least, that’s what the filmmakers would like you to believe.

There’s even an episode of Law & Order based on Mangione’s case—and, bizarrely, it’s more nuanced and sympathetic to its subject than any of the other media accounts so far. As the name suggests, Law & Order is an emphatically pro-police show, and one of the classic examples of what’s become known as “copaganda.” It’s not a place you expect to find radical anti-capitalist messages. The Luigi-inspired episode certainly starts out from the cop’s-eye-view, with its blue-clad heroes chasing down a Mangione analogue (“Ethan Weller,” played by Ty Molbak). But when the plot departs from the facts of the real-life case and enters the courtroom, something remarkable happens. The defense lawyers admit that Weller committed the killing, but they claim it was justified because it was done to prevent the Thompson-inspired character (“Logan Andrews”) from killing thousands of people with a faulty algorithm, much like someone who shoots a bank robber to prevent them shooting someone else: 

Logan Andrews killed thousands of innocent people by denying their legitimate insurance claims. Thousands more were about to die—ARE about to die. So Ethan Weller killed Logan Andrews before Mr. Andrews could kill again. And his actions are completely and unequivocally legal under the laws of New York. 

This is provocative, to say the least, and there’s no telling whether the real-life Luigi Mangione’s legal counsel will try a justifiable homicide defense (sometimes known as the “he needed killing” argument). But it makes for great television—and ironically, it means that the fictional drama is more accurate on this issue than the documentaries, which carefully dance around UnitedHealthcare’s lethal AI-denial algorithm or ignore it entirely. Even more intriguingly, the episode cuts to black right before the jury foreman reads the verdict (a fact that has annoyed some reviewers), leaving it open-ended whether Weller beats the case. But some of the dialogue in the final scenes, like prosecutor Nolan Price’s admission that “I may have underestimated how strong the current is here” and the defense lawyer’s boast that half of the jury are “ready to grab a pitchfork and join the revolution,” strongly suggests that he did. In any case, the writers clearly understand why people across the United States like and support the real-life Luigi Mangione, and the show they’ve produced just throws the propagandistic nature of a lot of other media into sharp relief. 

In the aftermath of Brian Thompson’s death, CEOs around the country reportedly beefed up their security, hiring more bodyguards and removing photos of themselves from their company websites. That’s perfectly understandable. Nobody wants to get shot, and for that matter, I don’t think the vast majority of Luigi fans really want anyone to get shot, either. (Though they might indulge in an edgy joke about it from time to time.) But CEOs have boosted their defenses on the ideological front, too, not just the physical. What they really fear isn’t a lone assassin. It’s a mass movement of people who reject for-profit healthcare as a concept and fight to end it. 

They’ll do anything to prevent such a movement from arising. When Bernie Sanders mounted his presidential campaigns and advocated for Medicare for All, big media companies first refused to talk about him at all, then waged a relentless propaganda war against him. Now that Luigi Mangione has become a symbol of popular anger at exploitation, they’re doing something similar to him, employing newspapers, TV documentaries, and social media platforms as weapons. They’re trying to convict him in the court of public opinion before he ever gets a fair trial, and to make sure Brian Thompson’s death is seen as an isolated tragedy and not an indictment of their whole industry. If we’re going to get the universal healthcare we need and deserve in this country, seeing through that veil of propaganda is the first step. So don't stop talking about Luigi, and more importantly, don't stop talking about Medicare for All. Because the real killers wear suits and ties to the shareholders’ meeting, and they’ve got to be stopped.