Executive Summary
Insite assesses that the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare (UHC) CEO has become a cultural touchstone, which will likely continue to influence online hostile rhetoric, anti-establishment protests, and threat actors’ stratagems in the long term.
The “Luigi Mangione effect” lowers psychological barriers to violence and saturates the risk landscape, complicating legitimate threat detection and mitigation.
While the recent murder of Charlie Kirk cannot be characterized as a copycat attack, allusions to the UHC assassination by both the assailant and his peers underscore the notoriety of Mangione’s crime and its impact on popular culture.
This necessitates a novel analysis of Mangione’s impact on the current threat environment and the security implications.
The Mangione Effect
On December 4, 2024, Luigi Mangione shot and killed UHC CEO Brian Thompson in a targeted attack. This event was quickly mythologized in public discourse, before and after the manhunt to apprehend Mangione, due to widespread anger with wealth inequity and the U.S. healthcare industry specifically, amplified by social media at an unprecedented scale.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue found over 50,000 posts containing the word “hero” in relation to Mangione within three days of the murder. Luigi Mangione and his crime became a viral sensation with an intense following and support network propping him up as a folk hero.
By May 2025, Mangione’s legal defense fund had raised over one million dollars crowdsourced from over 28,000 individual supporters; demonstrators regularly protested Mangione’s arrest; and a vast market of commercial products (ranging from “Free Luigi” mugs to T-shirts) emerged for his fans.
The “Luigi Mangione effect” denotes the phenomenon of widespread support and iconography that emerged after Thompson's assassination.
A combination of psychological and sociopolitical factors contributed to the swift transformation of Luigi Mangione into a folk hero, a romantic vigilante figure, and symbol of class resentment. Psychological variables such as the “halo effect,” a cognitive bias equating attractiveness with innocence or positive traits, may have influenced support for Mangione.
On December 16, one of the top posts on X/Twitter mentioned the assailant’s appearance and called for authorities to free him; this post received almost 3 million views and 90,000 likes.
Another contributing factor is the decline in trust of U.S. institutions, which may have softened opinions on vigilante-style justice.
A 2024 poll found that average confidence in 14 key U.S. institutions was only 28%, continuing a trendline of decline below 30% from 2023. This widespread distrust may have lent further sympathy to Mangione’s quixotic attack against the health care industry.