The Anti-System Mentality of Social Media
What the UHC shooting reactions tell us about the dominant worldview espoused on the internet.
Since at least 2016, the tactic of tapping into rage about “the system” has gone mainstream. The notion of challenging our institutions and lambasting the status quo is now the bread and butter of countless politicians, pundits, and media personalities, so much so that our only observable partisan agreements tend to overlap on which areas of the American government and private sector we think are broken.
Recent events give us some troubling insights. Take the case of Luigi Mangione, the young man accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Brian Thompson. The mainstream media struggled to figure out where Mangione sat on the political spectrum. Was he an outraged left-winger motivated by corporate excess in health care? A right-wing extremist motivated to commit violence? In truth, he doesn’t fit neatly into either box. Mangione’s social media profile and the manifesto he left behind point to something deeper, more pervasive, and digitally ubiquitous—a decidedly anti-system worldview. It’s an ideology that used to be confined to more niche corners internet but has now become the dominant one for 4chan users and TikTok scrollers alike.
That worldview has quickly become the internet’s macro-culture. This cynicism isn’t fleeting. It’s a lived, 24/7 experience for many who spend large chunks of their day online (as nearly all young people do), reading post after post about corruption, corporate malfeasance, and political hypocrisy. There is no institution or personality beyond reproach. Over time, that drumbeat fosters the belief that every institution is irredeemably rotten and every solution is an unacceptable half-measure. When politicians and elites try to harness this anger for election wins or brand-building, they often fail to grasp how profoundly the sentiment runs.
The Native Ideology of the Internet
There’s always been a degree of skepticism in American politics, a baseline suspicion of elites and government that simmers under the surface. But the internet has transformed that skepticism into a cynical worldview that is, in many cases, totalizing. The online echo chambers where people gather aren’t just complaining about one particular party or policy. They’re complaining about the entire structure—corporations, the two-party system, higher education, media conglomerates, you name it. The partisan lean of your media diet is only differentiated by which institution your influencers hate on the most.
Politicians and commentators often miss this because they’re fixated on the old categories. If you can’t label someone a standard “progressive” or “conservative,” we tend to lose interest. Yet the defining feature of so many younger people’s political ideology is precisely this anti-system stance. You see it in the populist fervor that brought Bernie and Trump into prominence. You also see it in the meteoric rise of podcast figures like Joe Rogan and Hasan Piker—personalities who are sometimes hard to classify as strictly left-wing or right-wing. Their brand is pure skepticism of the elite-ordained truth and cynicism about the systems those elites run. They acknowledge the failures and bask in the approval of audiences who feel validated in their anger.
Truth be told, large parts of the system are broken. It’s impossible to pretend otherwise. But instead of proposing nuanced solutions, these personalities double down on pointing out the flaws and criticizing any proposed solutions which naturally breeds an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. Their message isn’t, “Here’s a complex pathway to fix health care.” It’s, “The system is irredeemably rigged—let’s endlessly observe why.” That message resonates powerfully with younger audiences, who have come of age amid financial crises, murky economic security, and an endlessly fractious political landscape. It feels cathartic.
This explains why Mangione—whose early social media likes and posts seemed sympathetic to Bernie Sanders and left-wing populism—could later pivot to positions that sound more aligned with Trump’s message. It’s not ideological whiplash so much as an unyielding discontent with the status quo, wherever it resides. Bernie and Trump both rose on the promise of smashing “the system.” They each claimed they’d do it in very different ways, to say the least, but the underlying message was the same: “Everything is broken, and I’m the outsider who can fix it.” They’re not just distrustful of some elites–they are distrustful of the entire class as a whole and the system they believe elites are responsible for building and maintaining.
When the initial outpour of support for Mangione hit the airwaves, I was shocked. Not by the support, but because so many media personalities seemed blindsided by it. Perversely, it makes sense if you understand the online sentiment. The deluge of support–or withheld sympathy for the victim at the very least–has even the most perceptive online influencers caught off guard. In the days after the shooting, Ben Shapiro posted a video reviewing the reactions of online progressives who were objectively gleeful about the murder and tried to assign partisan sides to this debate.
In response, his viewers flooded the comment section with stern opposition against Shapiro’s sympathy for Brian Thompson. One comment, which has 3x the total likes as the video itself, says “We got conservatives and liberals hugging each other in a comment section.” When you see the surprising pockets of support or justification for Mangione’s alleged actions, you’re seeing the shared anti-system mentality that permeates online culture and is much farther upstream than the partisan identities we tend to focus on.
This anti-system mentality lies at the root of young people’s minds. This isn’t the typical, rational protest of “Hey, the healthcare system is broken, let’s fix it together.” It’s a glimpse into a raw and more menacing anger—an anger that is the foundation of young people’s media diet. So if you wonder why they seem so supportive of the shooting, look no further than their mindsets. To them, they are being told by the stewards of the system they hate to mourn the loss of someone who embodies one of the systems they hate most. They’re being asked to respect and honor someone that they feel does not respect or honor them.
Luigi Mangione’s story, to be clear, is no justification for murder. We should not cheer someone’s death even if we acknowledge serious problems in the healthcare industry and murder is not a solution to any of these problems. We should never support an extrajudicial assassination of a private citizen. That said, to pretend you don’t see why young people would celebrate reflects a deep ignorance of what’s brewing online.
Recent polls have shown high levels of support for Magione among young people or, at the very least, an overwhelming lack of sympathy for the victim, and the outpour of online content since the shooting has been almost categorically celebratory. And in an era where cynical content runs rampant—where platforms thrive on continuous outrage and any solution feels either shallow or nonexistent—that fury can morph into something far more dangerous. Mangione is a case study, albeit an extreme one, of what it looks like when anti-system rage bursts off the screen and onto the streets. It’s a warning about what’s simmering under the surface and a sign that the us-vs.-them chasm has grown frighteningly wide.