Remember in The Hunger Games when Plutarch laid out his plan to President Snow:

They think she’s one of them. We need to show that she’s one of us. We don’t need to destroy her, just the image, then we let the people do the rest.

It’s startling to watch our media execute this very tactic on us with Luigi Mangione—he grew up in a nice house, he went to an Ivy League school, he’s “one of us” over and over again.

Regardless how you feel about the situation, there’s no excaping the feeling that we are being herded like cattle. It’s bizarre. It’s icky.