Before law enforcement arrested Luigi Mangione as a suspect in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the “CEO shooter” had already gained a cult following. 

“I hope the UHC CEO shooter is never identified and goes on to become a hero of American folklore for hundreds of years,” reads a post with over 149,000 likes.

Then there were the thirst tweets that popped up as soon as law enforcement released grainy surveillance camera images of the suspect: “Is there a Mrs. Guy Who Shot The UnitedHealthcare CEO?” one viral post read.

On Saturday afternoon in Lower Manhattan, people participated in a look-alike contest for the gunman, similar to the events for doppelgangers of celebrity heartthrobs like Timothée Chalamet and Jeremy Allen White.

The fact that support for the shooter was so immediate is a testament to how widespread distrust of medical insurance companies has become in the US

Social media users also made snarky comments at the expense of Thompson, the gunned-down executive. Quite a few invoked some of the language insurance companies use to deny coverage, joking that “thoughts and prayers are out of network.”

Meanwhile, since his arrest Monday, GoFundMe campaigns have popped up for Mangione, a 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania grad who worked in tech. (The crowdfunding site has pulled these fundraisers for violating its terms and conditions, which forbid raising money for someone accused of a violent crime.)

“Luigi has risked everything to stand up to corporations that are destroying American lives,” the description of one deleted fundraiser read. “It is our duty to support this man so his story can be told and why it matters to us and our families. We the people for the people!”

If the UnitedHealthcare shooter does go down as a folk hero or crusader against insurance companies, it wouldn’t exactly be surprising. America has a long history of celebrating outlaws they believe are avenging widely-felt injustices, from John Dillinger, the famed bank robber whose gang destroyed thousands of mortgage records in the course of some of their heists, to Chris Dorner, the Los Angeles Police Department officer-turned-cop-killer whose manifesto revived longstanding criticisms of racism and corruption within the police force.

“There’s often fanfare if a figure is somehow connected in the public mind with resistance to big forces that seem to be overwhelming them,” said Brent Shaw, a historian and professor of the Classics at Princeton University.

Among other things, Shaw studies “social banditry,” a term coined by the late British historian Eric Hobsbawm to describe someone who is considered an outlaw by legitimate authorities while remaining a hero to the populace. Sometimes there’s a Robin Hood element to these folk heroes: They’re stealing from the rich to give to the poor.  

“Even if these ‘bad people’ made their income by robbing banks and had to go on the run — like say, Bonnie and Clyde — while on the run, they were lionized by many ordinary people who saw the banks being robbed as parasitical corporate entities that had ruined small householders and farmers,” he said.

Still, public support for these criminal’s actions is never universal.

“Some called these [people] villains, lambasted them in the papers, chided them as curs and killers and no-good criminals. Others saw them as their noble defenders,” said Keagan LeJeune, a professor of English at McNeese State University in Louisiana and author of Legendary Louisiana Outlaws: The Villains and Heroes of Folk Justice.

By and large, people supporting these types of criminals don’t necessarily believe in violence or celebrate it. “Instead, they feel trapped and burdened when all other responses are seen as things they’ve tried and have failed to result in change,” LeJeune explained. “They see options that are too slow to do any good, too small to not be engulfed by time and the tedium of the days they spend at work.”

Perhaps that’s the point of some of these outlaw hero narratives, LeJeune said: “It’s a way of making these societal issues real, a way of making the debate about an issue tangible.”

How the UnitedHealthcare shooter fits into the ‘social bandit’ narrative

In the case of Thompson’s shooting, the larger issue is the public’s fury at health insurance companies, which regularly deny Americans care. 

Police say shell casings found at the scene of the crime were marked with words like “delay” and “deny,” — possibly references to the tactics insurers use to avoid paying claims.

A manifesto believed to be written by Mangione is short ― there’s no mention of one transformative run-in with UnitedHealthcare that radicalised him ― but it includes pointed critiques of health giants that “continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.” 

According to multiple outlets, Mangione fell out of touch with friends and family earlier this year, after undergoing back surgery to treat chronic pain linked to a pinched nerve.

But even before these details came out, it was easy to imagine that whoever was responsible for the shooting must have had a painful personal history with insurance companies — a loved one who was denied care, for instance.

In criminal-turned-folk-hero stories from the past, the public often gives their avenger a noble backstory, said Kristina Downs, the executive director of the Texas Folklore Society and assistant professor of folklore and English at Tarleton State University. 

“For example, [Mexican revolutionary] Pancho Villa’s bandit career began with him killing a rich man who raped his sister,” she said. “With the [CEO shooter], I very quickly started seeing people online making assumptions about his story and motivations that mirrored the pattern of so many other of these outlaw narratives ― that he was avenging a spouse or other family member that was denied treatment.” 

That was just idle internet speculation. But given how expensive, complicated and dysfunctional the US health care system is, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t at least have a relative who has been treated unfairly by their insurance company.

There’s still so much that’s not known about Mangione, including whether he’s guilty of the murder police have charged him with. But if he has a personal history with chronic pain and treatments that insurance companies considered “not medically necessary,” that’s relatable for many Americans, too.

“There are few things in American society that will radicalise you more, or faster, than being suddenly disabled in your 20s with a condition that no doctor wants to treat or touch or interact with, and leaves you in pain every second of every day,” one Bluesky user wrote. “It is a cooker beyond belief.”

Not everyone is on board with giving a cold blooded criminal the folk hero treatment

Who’s considered a folk hero or social bandit depends on who you ask. One group’s lone avenger is another’s ruthless criminal, said Giovanni Travaglino, a professor of social psychology and criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London.

“In more recent times, hacker groups like Anonymous, whose illegal cyberattacks carry an air of ambiguity ― are they genuinely acting on the people’s behalf? ― echo earlier forms of banditry,” he said. “It’s all in the eye of the beholder.” 

Or take the case of Daniel Penny, a Marine veteran who choked Jordan Neely, a homeless subway rider, on a New York subway in 2023, and was acquitted of killing Neely earlier this week. On the right, his freedom is being celebrated as a win for righteous vigilantism. On the left, critics point to Penny as another example of a white man escaping accountability: “Black Lives Still Don’t Matter in America,” writer Wajahat Ali posted on Bluesky.

Meanwhile, Mangione’s politics seem to be all over the place; while some were quick to label him an anticapitalist left-winger, social media accounts that have been linked to him also suggest a libertarian, right-wing tech bro bent. (Also of note: If that Goodreads account really is his, he gave “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski’s anti-government manifesto a four-star review.)

Alex Goldenberg, a senior adviser at the Network Contagion Research Institute, which tracks online threats, told The New York Times that he and experts like him were “pretty disturbed” by the way the murder of Brian Thompson has been framed in public discourse and by the “lionization of the shooter.”

After mass shootings, it’s not uncommon for posters on fringe sites like 4chan and 8chan to rally around the suspect, but in this case, the fanfare is mainstream, taking place on far less shadowy places like Facebook, Bluesky and X.

“It’s being framed as some opening blow in a broader class war, which is very concerning as it heightens the threat environment for similar actors to engage in similar acts of violence,” Goldenberg told the Times. 

Downs, the Texas folklore expert, finds it unnerving, too. 

“I can talk all I want about legends and narrative patterns, but at the end of the day, a man has been killed,” she told HuffPost. “I don’t know much about him, but I know he had a family and can only imagine their devastation. I hope that they are staying offline right now.”

Cathy M. Jackson, an associate professor at Norfolk State University in the department of mass communications and journalism, thinks there’s two separate conversations going on in the country right now, and both sides are perplexed by each other’s reactions. 

“One group perceives the action as an act of murder, of inherently personal or selfish revenge,” she said. “The other group perceives the action as justice, taken by a social avenger who is acting on behalf of a greater good.”

As more details come out, some online are trying to talk about the case in a more measured way: No one is celebrating a murder, they say, but given how ill-served Americans are by the health care system, a debate is long overdue.

Or, as Gen Z activist James Crocker wrote on Bluesky earlier this week: The shooter “is not our savior, but he has ignited a crucial conversation: the urgent need for free, universal healthcare.”