NBC Seems to Suggest a Children’s Video Game is to Blame for UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Killing

I have a measured take about swing states and harsh realities lefties must face that I’ve been working on sporadically the past week, and I had planned to finish it up this afternoon. I was looking forward to writing about something a little more grounded in empirical reality than abstract debates of murder in America and “unidentified drones” currently playing a game of peekaboo over our nukes and bypassing the defenses of the mightiest military in history, but then I came across this fucking bullshit and knew I had no choice. I have spent too much of my career yelling at the media to not yell at them once more for what is instantly on my Mount Rushmore of clinically insane mainstream media “reports.”

I grew up near Columbine, and was at my middle school about a half hour away from it when that shooting began. I remember that day and the following ones vividly, and how the blame shifted from the shooters being bullied (they were in fact, the bullies at Columbine) to being Goth to Marilyn Manson finally to violent video games in a milieu of excuses that never included guns. They shot people in virtual reality and thus became desensitized to doing it in our shared one, so the story from the mainstream media went—and still goes—with the implication being that every kid playing Doom is a potential school shooter. This is the type of “these kids these days” coverage targeted at the aging (and liberal) mainstream news audience that may be flattering to a certain type of person resentful at continuing humanity’s tradition of older generations feeling different from younger ones, but it has little to no truth to it.

Which brings me to NBC News who produced a masterpiece in this genre so deranged there is no word in any language that exists to define it. This is a headline that a group of people somehow not dedicated to self-parody put together and willingly published in the year 2024:

‘Extremely ironic’: Suspect in UnitedHealthcare CEO slaying played video game killer, friend recalls.

If this was just another lazy headline from 1999 about Doom’s target audience, I would not be writing about this. But dear reader, this one is special. At best it is a babybrained game of word matching that NBC is confusing for real journalism. This whole CEO murder then manhunt has been a real cultural moment rooted in the deep injustice of the American healthcare system and **gestures everywhere**, and I want to make sure that we preserve this comedy gifted to us by NBC in this torrent of news and takes and horny posts. The game played by Mangione?

Among Us

For the uninitiated, it’s a niche little game only played by about 500 million people including movie stars and Congresspeople.

I am guffawing. Actually rolling on the floor and laughing out loud. What is this! What is NBC even trying to say here? That Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a budding CEO assassin? That it’s “ironic” that a game with more downloads than Americans exist was played by someone who allegedly shot a gun in a country with more guns than people? What the fuck is the point of any of this?

Luigi Mangione, who was arrested and charged with murder in the shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, once belonged to a group of Ivy League gamers who played assassins, a member of the group told NBC News.

In the game, called “Among Us,” some players are secretly assigned to be killers in space who perform other tasks while trying to avoid suspicion from other players.

Okay

“Among Us” is a child-friendly whodunnit game in which a group of friends run around several space station-like maps. The “crewmates,” who are simply drawn, cartoonish-looking astronauts, run around the ship and complete tasks.

The intent of the game? One member is a killer and attempts to off the other crewmates. The death animations are silly and shown as someone getting stabbed in the back or having their neck snapped.

Yes, precisely. It’s silly. So why the hell are you writing about this?

Once a body is discovered, a crewmate reports it and a conversation ensues to deduce who the gamers think committed the crime. If they’re wrong, an innocent player will be ejected in a humorous animation of them floating off into space. If they’re right, the crewmates win. If the “killer” gets all the crewmates or gets all the innocent ones ejected, they win.

What does this even mean in the context of this murder? Luigi Mangione and Brian Thompson were crewmates? Was anyone under the age of 85 involved with the publication of this piece? Did I accidentally take ayahuasca this morning? What is happening?

The game has been wildly popular, especially during the pandemic, and particularly among young children because of its simple mechanics, colorful cartoonish nature, and unpredictability. The game is so beloved by younger gamers, dressing as a “crewmate” is often a popular children’s costume at Halloween

Mangione, 26, was arrested Monday morning in a McDonald’s restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after an employee spotted him.

Ahhhh gotcha, I see now. The juxtaposition of those last two sentences and the rest of it detailing the arrest and Mangione’s friends describing him as a “normal frat dude” is what this story is really about—that our violent culture and video games which teach kids to kill is to blame—not, yannow, what Mangione wrote in his manifesto or what every other person in America has assumed to be the case since the killing happened. Can’t have the public mad at powerful people in the United States, then they may actually want the folks supposed to speak truth to power to do something about it! Much easier to just brand yourself as Very Serious and bothsides as equally bad to keep the profits flowing.

This is genuinely deranged. It’s either the most incoherent piece of…journalism…I guess? that I have ever read out of a mainstream news source, or it’s half-assed (at best) propaganda designed to run interference for health insurance executives as an attempt to try to divert the real rage that long predates this murder on to a fucking children’s video game.

Fuck this shit man. This is what cursing is for, when something is so viscerally offensive to your basic sense of humanity that no other words will soothe the rage emanating from your soul. This article made me so angry that I need to go blow off steam, so I’m going to turn on my PS5 and play Call of Duty and hope that NBC doesn’t SWAT me in dedication to this unhinged worldview from the 1990s that needs to go the way of every digital avatar who’s about to get in the way of my kill to death ratio.