On subreddits dedicated to Luigi Mangione, tens of thousands of followers pore over the links between the man who allegedly shot the CEO of United Healthcare and the number 286. On Discord servers, dedicated groups obsess over individual eyebrow hairs. On X, accounts share the Monopoly-linked trail of clues that could prove Mangione’s innocence. And on TikTok, all of these conspiracy theories and more are shared in videos viewed tens of millions of times and set to songs like Britney Spears’ Criminal.
This is the online world of conspiracy theories dedicated to Mangione, which have exploded in the week since he was arrested and charged with the December 4 murder of Brian Thompson.
Following the shooting, a community of fans lionized the shooter as a left-wing folk hero standing up for the common man against the evils of the US health care system. Even though his real identity didn’t match this idealized version, fans on TikTok and X embraced him anyway, buying hoodies with his image and writing songs dedicated to him, along with posting AI-generated music videos.
While a huge fandom has emerged in support of Mangione, though, there is a parallel world online where seemingly just as many people are dissecting every single aspect of the shooting and Mangione’s arrest to try and find the “truth.”
One of the earliest of these conspiracy theories relates to Mangione’s distinctive eyebrows, which were one of the main ways in which he was reportedly identified by a customer in a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. (It should be pointed out that some in conspiracyland believe a previously unknown face recognition technology was used to identify him—something for which there is no evidence.)
Online sleuths have been comparing the images of the suspected shooter released by police prior to his arrest and Mangione’s mugshot and have come to the conclusion, based purely on eyebrow examination, that these are not the same person.
On Reddit, where there is now a dedicated Luigi Mangione subreddit with 21,000 followers, one user took the time to “photoshop Luigi Mangione’s eyebrows onto the UHC CEO shooter” to prove their point that these are not the same person.
In one particularly testy exchange on a conspiracy theories subreddit, two hair stylists clashed over Mangione’s eyebrows.
“I was a hairstylist for 20 years back in the day, no one’s eyebrows grow that fast in three days,” one user wrote. “It was on the state board test. Hair on your head grows a quarter of an inch a month. Hair on your brows grows slower.”
“I’m also a hair stylist and I work with models,” another user responded. “Different lighting and different facial expressions cause different shadows in photos. This man is trying to start a revolution. Don’t make a conspiracy out of someone who is for the people.”
This is just one of the conspiracy theories swirling around about Mangione, though. Another popular theory relates to the number 286 and its multiple links to the alleged shooter.
In his profile on X, Mangione features the Pokémon Breloom, which is the 286th Pokémon. Mangione also had posted exactly 286 times on X when he was arrested. 286 is also the code health insurance companies use when “when the appeal time limits for a health care claim are not met.”
Other users on TikTok pointed out a potential link to the Bible, with Proverbs 28:6 stating: “Better is a poor man who walks in his integrity than a rich man who is crooked in his ways.”
Finally, some people online claimed the distance between the location of the shooting and the McDonald’s where Mangione was spotted is 286 miles. However, according to Google Maps, the distance is actually 279 miles.
Whatever the distance between it and Manhattan, the location of this McDonald’s has itself sparked some conspiracy theories, as seen in the work of one Reddit poster who took the time to document the many links between the board game Monopoly and the shooting.
First, they pointed out that the backpack found in Central Park by police contained money from the game. They also noted that Altoona is the home of Pennsylvania Railroad, one of four railroads for sale in the standard US version of the game. Finally, the poster highlighted the fact that McDonald’s ran a promotional campaign with the game for decades, though it was halted briefly at the beginning of the century after a massive fraud scandal involving, among dozens of others, a key insider and Gennaro “Jerry” Colombo, who claimed to be a member of the Colombo crime family.
Some conspiracy theorists on X are also trying to claim that Mangione is a “patsy” or a “CIA plant”—a typical suggestion in the wake of any high-profile shooting. One claim is that former House speaker Nancy Pelosi was somehow involved because her brother, a former mayor of Baltimore, once mentioned Mangione’s grandfather, a well-known businessman, in an interview in The Baltimore Sun. Beyond comments like “suspicious” or “well, well, well,” though, there appears to be little interest in this one even among the conspiratorially-minded.
One of the more interesting theories floated over the weekend on Reddit claimed that the mysterious drones seen in New Jersey in recent weeks——which are quite possibly neither mysterious nor drones—are being used to “try to distract us from the United Healthcare uprising.”
As with pretty much every other major incident that has happened in the US in the last century, for some people it just comes down to one idea. “It’s a psyop,” an account called Illuminati Eyes wrote as part of a 1,000-word post on X that has been viewed 4.6 million times.
Having laid out the case for why this is a psyop—a psychological operation typically conducted by a government to influence a target audience’s beliefs—the account concludes: “Luigi didn’t kill Brian Thompson, the deep state did. 3/10 psyop—lazy execution, but it’s working.”
