He's a Murderer, Yet a 'Hero' Online

Police released two new photos of the suspect in last week's assassination of a health insurance CEO, reports the Guardian, but the mystery man remains at large. As the manhunt goes on, outlets are trying to make sense of the public support the shooter is receiving. The New York Times, for example, notes that he is being "venerated as something approaching a folk hero" in some circles." Coverage:

• 'Narcs:' The New York City hostel where the man stayed before the shooting is cooperating with police, and it's been rewarded with a barrage of online criticism and one-star reviews, reports the New York Post. Critics are calling employees "narcs."

• Majority of posts: The Network Contagion Research Institute, a group that tracks online threats, found that six of the top 10 tweeted posts in the aftermath of the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson "either expressed explicit or implicit support for the killing or denigrated the victim."
• An example: "anyone who helps to identify the shooter is an enemy of the people," tweeted one user. The NCRI sees "cause for concern that these patterns reflect the emergence of a permission structure for targeted violence, akin to those historically observed on platforms such as 4chan and 8chan." The difference now is that the sentiment is more mainstream.
• Trending: TMZ reports that the same type of jacket the killer wore is suddenly a hot seller online. And the Times notes that a few dozen men took part in a lookalike contest Saturday in Manhattan's Washington Square Park.
• Criticism: A Washington Post editorial sees the celebration of the murder as "flatly inconsistent with stable democracy." It also criticizes those who insist they are not condoning violence but say the killing should nevertheless open a debate. "(W)e're skeptical that this particular moment lends itself to nuanced discussion of a complicated, and heavily regulated, industry," the editors write.
• Think piece: In a lengthy New Yorker analysis, Jia Tolentino writes that the murder "is one symptom of the American appetite for violence; his line of work is another," Tolentino writes. "Denied health-insurance claims are not broadly understood this way, in part because people in consequential positions at health-insurance companies, and those in their social circles, are likely to have experienced denied claims mainly as a matter of extreme annoyance at worst," she writes. But for people less well off, such denials "can instantly bend the trajectory of a life toward bankruptcy and misery and death. Maybe everyone knows this, anyway, and structural violence—another term for it is 'social injustice'—is simply, at this point, the structure of American life, and it is treated as normal, whether we attach that particular name to it or not."
• One fear: A big concern is copycats, says Alex Goldenberg of the aforementioned NCRI. "It's being framed as some opening blow in a broader class war, which is very concerning as it heightens the threat environment for similar actors to engage in similar acts of violence," he tells the Times.

(Read other coverage about the shooting.)