• The UHC CEO killing has led to an outpouring of frustration toward the healthcare industry.
• Some progressive Democrats on Capitol Hill say it's the "right time" to talk about it.
• "I think for people who are surprised, it's a wake-up call," said Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.

In the wake of the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, lawmakers are weighing in on the crime and the reaction to it, including expressions of frustration many Americans feel toward the healthcare system.

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York told Business Insider on Wednesday that the rapturous online response to the shooting and the valorization by some of the suspect, Luigi Mangione, was indicative of a "mass bubbling of resentment around the precarity that people have been living with."

"Of course, we don't want to see the chaos that vigilantism presents," said Ocasio-Cortez. "We also don't want to see the extreme suffering that millions of Americans confront when your life changes overnight from a horrific diagnosis, and people are led to just some of the worst, not just health events, but the worst financial events of their and their family's lives."

She added, "I think for people who are surprised, it's a wake-up call for how much of this exists in our society."

Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida, who began his political career as a gun violence prevention activist, told BI that he's "against gun violence in all forms," but that he understood some of the reaction.

"There's so much animosity and hatred of this system that people are looking beyond maybe their typical moral scope to meme this guy, or to praise him, because the issue is just so pervasive," he said. "That's something to take note of."

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts told HuffPost that the shooting was "a warning" to the healthcare industry — though she later told the outlet in a statement that she "should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder." Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont told the outlet that the "outpouring of anger at the health care industry" showed that "millions of people understand that health care is a human right."

Not all lawmakers on Capitol Hill are taking this approach — both Republicans and Democrats have opted to condemn the shooting and leave it at that.

"It's pretty simple to me. Nobody who commits cold-blooded murder is a hero. Period, full stop," Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told BI.

"He's the asshole that's going to die in prison," Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania told NBC News about the shooter. "Congratulations if you want to celebrate that."

For some progressives, though, the praise for Mangione and the outpouring of frustration over the healthcare industry can't be ignored, even if it's coming on the heels of a murder they condemn.

"It's exactly the right time when you've got thousands of people that are sharing their stories of frustration," Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California told BI.

In his view, it's simple enough to talk about the healthcare industry while not making excuses for the alleged murder.

"There's no linkage," said Khanna. "You condemn the murder of an insurance executive who was a father of two kids. At the same time, you say there's obviously an outpouring behavior of people whose claims are being denied, and we need to reform the system."

It used to be that when a killer emerged in America, we found out who the man was before we began to enshroud him in myth. But with Luigi Mangione, the lead suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, that process was reversed. The internet assumed it already knew everything about Thompson's killer before a suspect had even been identified, let alone arrested.

Within hours of the shooting, social media was churning out a mythologized version of the masked man. In his anonymity, he became an instant folk hero, portrayed as a crusader for universal healthcare, a martyr willing to risk it all to send a message to America's insurance giants with "the first shots fired in a class war." A Reddit forum offered up dozens of laudatory nicknames to crystalize his mythology: the Readjuster, the Denier, the People's Debt Collector, Modern-Day Robin Hood. "I actually feel safer with him at large," one tweet a day after the shooting said; it received 172,000 likes. A surveillance image of the suspect moved some to comment that he was "too hot to convict" and prompted comparisons to Jake Gyllenhaal and Timothée Chalamet. In New York City, a "CEO-shooter look-alike competition" was held in Washington Square Park. Surely, the internet assumed, the suspect shared left-wing ideas about the cruelties of privatized healthcare.

Then the man himself appeared — and he didn't fit into any of the neat categories that had already been created to describe him. On X, he followed the liberal columnist Ezra Klein and the conservative podcaster Joe Rogan. He respected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and retweeted a video of Peter Thiel maligning "woke"-ism. He took issue with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He played the cartoon video game "Among Us," posted shirtless thirst traps, quoted Charli XCX on Instagram, and had the Goodreads account of an angsty, heterodox-curious teenage boy: self-help, bro-y nonfiction, Ayn Rand, "The Lorax," and "Infinite Jest." Yes, he seemed to admire the Unabomber. But mostly, this guy — a former prep-school valedictorian with an Ivy League education and a spate of tech jobs — was exceedingly centrist and boring. A normie's normie. He wasn't an obvious lefty, but he wasn't steeped in the right-wing manosphere either. His posted beliefs don't fit neatly into any preestablished bucket. In his 261-word manifesto, which surfaced online, he downplayed his own qualifications to critique the system. "I do not pretend," he wrote, "to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument."

That didn't stop the denizens of social media from pretending to be the most qualified people to lay out exactly who Mangione is. He's "fundamentally anti-capitalist" and "just another leftist nut job." Or he's "a vaguely right-wing ivy league tech bro." Or he was invented by the CIA, or maybe Mossad, as a "psyop." The reality of Mangione — his messy, sometimes contradictory impulses — allowed everyone to cherry-pick the aspects of his personality that confirmed their original suspicions. In the attention economy, patience is a vice.

The rush to romanticize killers is nothing new. A quarter century ago, we cast the Columbine shooters as undone by unfettered access either to guns or to the satanic influences of Marilyn Manson and Rammstein. A decade ago, we debated the glamorization of the Boston Marathon bomber, gussied up like a rock star on the cover of Rolling Stone. But social media has sped up the assumption cycle to the point where we put the killer into a category before police have found the killer. Perhaps there's a "great rewiring" of our brains that has diminished our capacity to understand each other, as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests in "The Anxious Generation" — a book Mangione had retweeted a glowing review of.

Mythmaking is easier, of course, when it's unencumbered by reality. The less we know about a killer, the more room there is to turn him into something he's not. From what we have learned so far, Mangione is a troubled Gen Zer who won the privilege lottery at birth and ascribed to a mishmash of interests and beliefs. We will surely learn more about him in the coming days, weeks, and months. But now that we know who he is, it will be hard, if not impossible, to let go of our initial assumptions. Instead, we'll selectively focus on the details that fit tidily into the myths we've already created. In the digital-age version of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," the legend was already printed by the time the facts came along.

Scott Nover is a freelance writer in Washington, DC. He is a contributing writer at Slate and was previously a staff writer at Quartz and Adweek covering media and technology.