I want to make a prediction here, and I want to be upfront that it is speculative, it is not something I can prove in advance, it is a bet based on watching how these online defense movements tend to behave over time, but I feel confident enough in it that I am willing to put it in writing now, before any of it has happened, so that later, whenever it does happen, I can point back to this and say I called it. Here is the scenario. Say Luigi Mangione is acquitted, or the charges against him get dropped, or he receives a reduced sentence, or he serves a full sentence but it is short enough that he is out again in a handful of years, or he gets out early for good behavior, whatever the specific legal mechanism ends up being, the outcome is the same, he is a free man again at some point, walking around, living a life, with or without his family’s money, possibly propped up by donations and legal defense funds and the broader cottage industry of support that has built up around him during all of this. And my prediction is this, if he does anything wrong after that, anything at all, anything that causes real harm to another person, the online left that spent this entire period defending him is going to split cleanly into two camps, and neither camp is going to look good.
The first camp is the easy one to predict, because we have already seen its shape in how people are behaving right now, before he has even been convicted of anything. This is the camp that will defend him no matter what, that will find a justification for whatever he does next, that will treat any future harmful act the same way they treated the initial killing, as somehow understandable, somehow contextualized into righteousness, somehow not really his fault, or if it is his fault, not really disqualifying. I think this camp will be smaller than it is right now, because the initial killing had a very specific, very convenient political narrative wrapped around it, a healthcare executive, a broken system, all of it easy to cast as a symbolic act rather than a personal one, and I do not think every future harmful thing he might do will have that same convenient wrapping available. But I think there will absolutely be a hardcore remnant, a group of people who have built enough of their identity around defending him that walking it back becomes psychologically very difficult, and for that group I predict the goalposts will simply move again, the same way they moved this time, the same rhetorical tools will get redeployed, the same instinct to find the systemic explanation, the mitigating context, the reason it is not really on him, will kick in automatically, because by that point defending him will not be a political position anymore, it will be an identity, and people do not surrender identities easily just because new evidence shows up.
The second camp is the one I actually think is more interesting to talk about in advance, because I think it is going to be much larger and much more common, and it is the camp that eventually turns on him but does so through a very specific, very predictable kind of revisionism, where they retroactively downplay how invested they actually were in the first place. I think you are going to see a lot of people who right now are posting merchandise, who are laugh reacting at anyone who brings up his privilege, who are treating him as an unambiguous hero, quietly and gradually recast their own history once the sentiment shifts, and they are going to do it in one of a few very familiar ways. Some of them will simply go quiet, delete old posts, scrub the merchandise photos, and just never bring it up again, letting the internet’s short memory do the work of erasing their own involvement for them. Others will do something a little more active, which is the classic retroactive hedge, the I never said I fully supported what he did, I was just pointing out the systemic issues, I was just critiquing healthcare, I was never actually cheering the violence itself, even though, if you went back and actually pulled their posts from this exact period, you would find plenty of unambiguous cheering, plenty of straightforward hero worship, not careful, hedged systemic critique but genuine uncomplicated glee. That gap between what people actually said in the moment and what they will claim they said in retrospect is, I think, going to be one of the more quietly telling artifacts of this entire saga, because it reveals that a lot of the support was never really principled to begin with, it was performative, it was riding a wave because the wave felt good and felt righteous and felt like being part of something, and the second the wave becomes inconvenient, the same people who rode it hardest will be the first to claim they were only ever wading in the shallow end.
I think there is a particular psychological mechanism at work here that is worth naming directly, which is the difference between people who actually hold a considered political position and people who are engaging in motivated reasoning dressed up as political conviction. Someone with an actual considered position on political violence, on healthcare, on class, on all of it, is going to have a framework that holds up under new information, that can accommodate the possibility that a specific person they once supported turns out to do something that does not fit the narrative, without the entire worldview collapsing, because the worldview was never actually built around that one person to begin with. But a huge amount of what I have watched over the last few days does not look like that, it looks like motivated reasoning, it looks like people who decided early, emotionally, almost instantly, that Luigi Mangione was one of the good guys, and then built a scaffolding of justification underneath that initial emotional decision after the fact, and scaffolding like that is notoriously brittle, it survives right up until the moment it becomes too expensive to maintain, and then it gets quietly dismantled, plank by plank, with nobody ever quite admitting out loud that the whole structure came down.
I also think, and this is maybe the most cynical part of my prediction, that a lot of the eventual disavowal is going to be less about genuine moral reconsideration and more about reputational risk management, which is its own kind of tell. Right now, defending Luigi Mangione is, in certain online spaces, a low risk, high reward position, it generates engagement, it signals allegiance to a broader anti corporate, anti healthcare industry sentiment that is genuinely popular, and it costs very little because the social consensus in those specific spaces currently rewards it. But social consensus is not stable, it shifts, sometimes quickly, sometimes because of a single new piece of information, a piece of testimony, a detail from the trial that reframes the whole narrative in a less flattering direction, and the moment that shift happens, the calculus for a lot of people is going to flip from is it safe to support him to is it safe to have been seen supporting him, and I think you will watch, in something closer to real time, a specific subset of accounts recalibrate their entire posting history to protect themselves from that second question, not because they suddenly developed a more sophisticated moral framework but because they are managing personal and professional risk the same way anyone manages risk when the wind changes direction.
None of this is a particularly flattering read of online political culture, and I want to be honest that I am not exempting myself from the possibility of being wrong about the details, maybe the split will not be as clean as two camps, maybe there will be a much larger middle group of people who genuinely reconsider their position through actual reflection rather than pure reputation management, and if that happens I will be glad to be wrong about how cynical this prediction turned out to be. But I think the broader pattern I am describing, the two camp split between unconditional continued defense and quiet, self protective retroactive distancing, is one I have seen play out with other online folk heroes before, in other contexts, with other causes, and I do not think there is anything especially unique about this situation that would make it immune to the same dynamic. People build emotional investments in symbols quickly and they tend to protect those investments long after the underlying reality stops supporting them, and when the investment finally does become untenable, the exit rarely looks like an honest accounting, it usually looks like a quiet edit, a vague reframing, and a whole lot of people who were very loud a year ago suddenly, mysteriously, remembering themselves as having been much more measured all along.
I am making this prediction now, in writing, specifically so that whenever it does happen, whichever version of it happens, I can point back to this and say this is exactly what I expected, and I think part of why I feel comfortable saying that in advance is that I do not think this is really a prediction about Luigi Mangione specifically at all, I think it is a prediction about how online political culture handles the collapse of a folk hero narrative in general, a pattern that has nothing to do with the specific facts of his case and everything to do with how people manage the gap between what they said in public and what turns out, later, to have been true.