Conscientious Objectors Won't Help Find Him
Online sleuths are refusing to help police identify or find the UnitedHealthcare shooter
Typically, these internet sleuths don’t even have to be asked to help find notorious criminals. But this time they’re saying “no” even when they are asked.
After most high-profile crimes — and even some lowerish-profile ones — amateur detectives jump on the case, scouring the internet for clues; social-media breadcrumbs, deleted accounts, relevant images, and so on.
Just the opposite is happening after Wednesday’s murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. As NBC notes, hundreds of basement Barnaby Joneses helped catch dozens of Jan. 6 attackers caught on video storming the Capitol Building.
But some of the best-known Sherlock Homepages are sitting this one out, according to an NBC report in which they were asked whether they’re helping.
“Absolutely the fuck not,” said Savannah Sparks, who’s been asked by cops to help out on other cases.
“We’re pretty apathetic towards that,” Sparks told NBC. Speaking for her peers, Sparks — a healthcare worker — invoked the phrase signaling inaction after other high-profile crimes. She said she and her fellow gumshoes are offering “thoughts and prayers. It’s, you know, claim denied on my prayers there.”
A popular TikToker who goes by thatdaneshguy is also sitting this one out.
“I don’t have to condone violence by any means. But I also don’t have to help,” he told NBC News. He put his energy instead into a video ripping UnitedHealthcare and, shall we say, unsympathetic about the one (1) loss of life compared to UnitedHealthcare’s wholesale loss-of-life business model.
Another TikToker follows crime news and told NBC this one’s different.
“I have yet to see a single video that’s pounding the drum of ‘we have to find him,’ and that is unique,” Michael McWhorter, aka TizzyEnt, told NBC. “[I]n other situations of some kind of blatant violence, I would absolutely be seeing that.”
How come? “There’s … this vibe of, like, I don’t see a bunch of people just feeling an urgency.”
And that’s with the NYPD offering a $10,000 reward and the FBI dangling $50,000 for people to come forward with info.
In fact, the opposite is happening. Internet dwellers are piling on anyone even seen to be helping.
Riley Walz tried to track the killer’s bike when it was thought to be a CitiBike, with accessible usage data. He got called a snitch — even though it turned out the killer didn’t use a CitiBike.
After reports they cooperated with police, the hostel where the suspect stayed got barraged by mean and snarky online comments, even in their reviews. One earnest poster wrote “Terrible, staff are narcs, no solidarity with their fellow humans struggling to free themselves from an oppressive yoke.”
Other reviews exhibited a kind of bleak, gallows humor we would never endorse here at The Fucking News:
“Snitches get…one star reviews. Since stitches aren’t covered by my health insurance any more.”
“Great location next to Healthcare conferences!”
“This hotel has KILLER service! Fake Ids accepted!”
Of course, the right wing have blasted this kind of response as sick, immoral, left-wing inhumanity.
Meanwhile, in a trial happening right now in the same city, they’re cheering on the guy who killed an unarmed subway who might maybe in theory have posed a danger to other riders but not by methodically denying them life-saving medical care.
And Daniel Penny isn’t the only killer lionized by the right. There’s Kyle Rittenhouse and George Zimmerman.
There are several differences. The right’s heroes kill in the moment, unthinking, reactive, for their own benefit — although Penny argues he was saving subway riders from Jordan Neely…because Neely might have later hurt them or something.
And the left has not en masse suggested that Thompson’s murder was justified. Certainly some individuals have, but nothing like the massive, right-wing campaigns to make heroes out of its panicked, infantile, man-children.
What we’re seeing now is not justification of the crime, merely the recognition that no one is obliged to prioritize solving it over other activities that may have greater social utility. Such as catching up on “Archer.”
And the jokes about the killing and the manhunt and the clues are best understood not as callousness or indifference to human suffering. Just the opposite, they’re a response to decades of suffering great and small.
They’re releases; a culture finally given a simple valve to express the trauma of relentless victimization by a complex and inescapable Kafkaesque system of predation and exploitation.
We don’t yet — and may never — know the motives of Thompson’s killer. But the words on the bullets and casings certainly suggest that this was a premeditated attack driven by the nature of Thompson’s life’s work: Profiting off incalculable damage done to countless people throughout the country.
Thompson, in other words, represented our extractive system. And the killer’s message suggests it was that system, a threat to all of us, that was in his cross-hairs.
A revolution starts with a single shot. Aren't I so sage? 🙄Actually that's probably already been said before. I don't even know if it's true. What I do know is I feel no sympathy for Brian Thompson or other fat catz like him, but I do feel immense empathy and sorrow for all the sick and terminally ill people who are denied the treatment they need becuz of the mighty buck.
It's interesting in that this may be the start of the resistance revolution. Like say Syria. Or France maybe. People will only be pushed so far then they push back. We're the only country that lays down and takes it. Maybe the breaking point is here.