There have been several public opinion polls that included questions about Luigi Mangione. He’s consistently unpopular among the average population and his actions are generally unsupported. Not at all surprising for an extremist activist who literally committed murder in public.
It’s only when you visit smaller internet bubbles like Reddit where you can start to get into areas where it feels like his actions are widely supported.
A lot of activists are like this: If you go into little bubbles that align with their actions they seem popular. Zoom out and look at the population, including people they were trying to persuade and reach, and they’re not popular like they seem within the bubble.
Naive journalists thought twitter was a "public square" that they could conveniently access from the comfort of their living room. They didn't know that it was a powerful echo chamber that resonated the best with strong views, and the space had long been a refuge for people with extreme outlier opinions.
Hence why "topics worthy of national attention" where just whatever was trending on twitter.
You're missing the story here. Any popularity of a murder in the streets is exceptional. The expected value for "What fraction of the population supports this (alleged) murderer?" is much closer to zero than the ~25% that Mangione polls at, never mind the 40-odd% that he polls with young people.
Sorry, but how was that murder successful?
Did it achieve the effect that everyone is getting cheaper healthcare now?
OR, on the contrary, it only achieved that CEOs are now getting more anonymity and private security, while the plebs are getting more invasive law enforcement tracking like Palantir and Flock shoved up their ass to prevent them from doing something like that again?
More or less the same except a family of kids would not be missing their father and grow up with the idea of wanting to get revenge on their father's murderer. An eye-for-an-eye never makes good societies which is why all civilized countries outlawed their practice.
>Would Palantir or Flock disappear?
The more elites you murders, the more of your tax dollars the elites will send to the military and law enforcement to better protect them from you and the more of your tax dollars they'll send to Palantir and Flock to spy on you. You can't win this by killing elites, they have more money, more guns than you and their guns are bigger and more powerful than yours. You win by enacting change through popular votes.
Do you think that this alternative universe would not have the equivalent of TSA and Five Eyes?
It would. These things do not exist because $event happened, they exist because they are useful to those in power.
Look at the city of Trinidad, TX for example: Lady is arrested because of Facebook about how she heard that brown colored water coming from pipes has hospitalized people. Another guy because he is protesting the arrest. Her crime is "Felony false alarm". His crime "Disorderly conduct".
Both laws created, I am sure, to combat issues the community or state has had to deal with. But also able to be used to suppress people those in power dislike.
There's many anecdotes of people who managed to get lifesaving or lifechanging treatments in the panic after the CEO got murdered. Obviously, anecdotes aren't data - but it is highly likely that even though one life was lost, many were saved.
Successful in winning over the public.
Were there people that liked high Healthcare bills that changed their mind?
Was there a way of politicians elected to implement socialized Healthcare that I missed?
In practice however he didn't inspire further revolutionary action by the public, because they were pacified by memes. And that's why he's a failure.
It was murder, but it was neither indiscriminate nor irrational. Certainly not in a culture that enshrines the right to shoot people as its second most sacred Constitutional principle.