Occasionally the embrace of Mangione would leap from the safety of the internet into environments where it sat less comfortably.
What followed was a bonanza of memes, especially in the days after Mangione’s arrest. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Some were made from mug shots and perp-walk photos that highlighted how young, handsome and sane Mangione appeared. Others used photos from his social media accounts, like the one that showed the suspect, shirtless and smiling, alongside a text warning: “Friendly reminder that Luigi Mangione promotes an unrealistic beauty standard that will harm the CEO hitman community for years to come.” A few portrayed him as a saintly figure — shirtless before Jesus, who is telling him “It’s OK, they called me guilty too,” or handcuffed and surrounded by police, positioned next to a similar tableaux in the late-16th-century painting “The Taking of Christ.”
This celebration of an accused murderer in memes was not so different from the lionizing of a handsome train robber in song a century ago. Both are essentially passive acts of solidarity, opportunities to telegraph an attitude that most people would have a tough time articulating in earnest conversation. But this does not make either form of expression empty. Occasionally the embrace of Mangione would leap from the safety of the internet into environments where it sat less comfortably — as with a recent “S.N.L.” broadcast, when the mention of Mangione’s name in a “Weekend Update” segment elicited a whoop of approval from the audience. The cast member Colin Jost seemed so taken aback by the crowd’s approval that he stepped on his own punchline by adopting an oddly serious tone. “Yeah, definitely woo,” he said dryly. “You’re wooing for justice, right?”
The Mangione mania reminded me of something most Americans did not follow as closely: the assassination of Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe, who was shot while giving a speech in the summer of 2022. That inspired memes, too, many of them focused on the homemade explosive device used by the killer, which posters compared to everything from jury-rigged vape pens to video-game controllers. But the striking part was the degree to which Abe’s accused killer, Tetsuya Yamagami, succeeded in getting what he wanted. He targeted Abe, the most visible member of Japan’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party, because of the party’s close ties to the Unification Church, which Yamagami resented because of the large donations it had solicited from his mother, bankrupting the family. His hope, apparently, was to make the country inhospitable for the church, and the extent to which he accomplished this can hardly be overstated. Seemingly overnight, much of the population came to a consensus that favored the assassin’s worldview. Politicians faced a reckoning over ties to the church; recently, the scandal contributed to the loss of the L.D.P.’s long-held majority in Parliament.
There are ways in which the aftermath of Thompson’s killing has felt similar, with America’s health care system and the companies that profit from it facing more sustained, ferocious and bipartisan abuse than I have seen in my lifetime. Perversely, there is only one word that accurately describes what the killing seemed to make many people feel, and that word is “hope” — an ugly and unkind variety of it, the sort that appeals to those desperate enough to settle for politics by any means possible. In Japan, no one had to hope that Abe’s killing might bring about change: Newspapers investigated the church’s ties to politicians, scandals ensued, corruption probes began. Instead of wishing for change, people seized it. Abe’s killer wasn’t valorized, though it seems that he was understood.