It was almost too shocking to be real. Footage showed a young hooded man pointing a pistol at the back of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan, only to shortly gun the innocent man down in the street and escape into Central Park via bicycle.

The fact that such a video is available and became so widely watched is a horror in itself; a grisly crime is now a scene in a murder episode, holding the world captivated by the mysteriously caped killer who we know next to nothing about.

That’s all changed now. We know that the suspect is a former Ivy League student named Luigi Mangione, and that he is currently in custody on murder charges after getting nabbed in a McDonald’s. You would think such a shocking, open-air murder would garner condemnation from people all across the political spectrum, but in our hyper-divided age, exacerbated by a hostile online atmosphere, that’s exactly what didn’t happen.

Critics of the American healthcare system were quick to sanction and even applaud Mangione’s crime, citing how UnitedHealthcare is responsible for the health problems of many people seeking proper care and treatment. Chief among these voices was Taylor Lorenz, a former journalist for The Washington Post who left the organization after its decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in the 2024 election. In a bizarre series of X posts, Lorenz celebrated the incident, and even wrote an article titled “Why ‘we’ want insurance executives dead.” She doubled down on her comments on the Piers Morgan show, noting how she felt “joy” at the news of the CEO’s murder, much to the astonishment of the host.

Be critical of the healthcare system all you want, but to say you felt joy at the murder of a husband and father is psychopathic. This woman shouldn’t be platformed or listened to. And yet this isn’t an isolated sentiment. There are other instances, if you watch the video above, of people nodding along to the execution-style death of the CEO executive, who was in New York City for a conference.

Just when you thought an event might be unanimously condemned, America’s absurd media moment still manages to surprise.

Walter Kirn, a novelist and cultural commentator, who appears on a bi-weekly podcast “America This Week,” theorizes that this whole murder debacle could have been designed to subsume the media ecosystem into a frenzy. Here we have a real murder, a trail of clues, a handsome culprit, a manifesto waiting to be discovered, and a hungry world audience waiting for more juicy details to unfold.

The whole thing almost feels scripted by some Hollywood screenwriters. Because we’ve witnessed events like these so many times, they’ve become almost fictions designed to titillate and enrage the passive public. It also seems, though, that these events can be planned simply to stoke our pre-existing conflict. Suppose bad actors choose the perfect crime not only to make some broad point, but to rub salt in the national wound? When people know our weakness, they can design crimes they know will cause a media meltdown and further divide us. Perhaps that wasn’t this killer’s motivation whatsoever. But there’s no question that the murder has consumed the media in recent days.

Jon Askanos writes about the media and our perceptions of reality in his significant 2022 essay “Reality is Just a Game Now.”

“Digital discourse creates a game-like structure in our perception of reality,” he writes. “For everything that happens, every fact we gather, every interpretation of it we provide, we have an ongoing ledger of the ‘points’ we could garner by posting about it online.”

With this approach, truth and facts don’t matter so much as the particular narrative a certain group is telling. And with the case of the CEO’s murder, different groups of people are telling radically different stories about the event. Askanos goes on, “The puzzle that today’s media consumers are trying to solve is the world, and interpretations are more or less up for grabs as long as they fit the story.”

What if we get to a point where criminals are strategically committing crimes they know will generate conspiracy, outrage, and infinite rabbit trails? And what happens when we can’t quit the echo chambers and have a moral consensus that murder is always bad? It’s an absurd media moment to say the least, but the Askanos essay is a great place to start in understanding some of the madness and how we got here. Learning to navigate digital media in a culture of competing narratives remains a challenge, but it’s worth seeking to regain our moral bearings as a society.