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It doesn’t surprise me. There always a kind of push-pull effect for political figures that you want to support but doing so would make you look less virtuous to other people. The Reddit community wants to support the destruction of capitalism and the death or at least confronting of CEOs. They’re also self-aware enough to understand that open support of Luigi is going to make them look like terrible people who support the things he did. It’s much easier to hide behind claims that Luigi was framed, that he couldn’t have really done those things, that the state is bad for arresting him and so on. You can still support the man, but now it’s not because he did something you support, but because it’s an obvious miscarriage of justice that all of this happened.
The only part of the story that I doubt is that he was apparently noticed and reported by McDonald’s staff during lunch rush. I doubt anyone at McDonald’s would have had time to notice him (he’s actually fairly normal looking), or had time to call the police, or would have bothered. But that can be explained as a way to hide drones or other surveillance that the cops don’t want public.
The reason the Internet is simping over him and not over Tyler Robinson is precisely because he is not "fairly normal looking". Tyler Robinson is fairly normal looking — Mangione, by contrast, is ever so dreamy.
I’m not convinced being “good looking” is enough to set a person apart from a crowd enough to have someone not only recognize him, but be sure enough of that recognition to call the police. If there’d been something truly unique about him — say a scar on his right cheek, bright orange hair, green eyes, a limp, etc. sure I get that. Luigi has dark hair, brown eyes, maybe a bit tall and his hair is curly, but on the scale of human appearance, he’s within the median human appearance. Usher is unique— very dark skin, a prominent scar, unusual voice. Those things people will notice because of how unusual they are for the median American. Being “dreamy” isn’t necessarily being weird enough to stand out. There are plenty of tall men who have dark, curly hair and brown eyes who could be described as good looking.
You're right, I was being a little facetious.
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His problem was that he continued to wear a mask in an area where masks were weird. And said mask was worn when he was photographed. He actually would have been better off taking the mask off! I think the anonymous tip is reasonable. Also, Bayes rule/selection bias. While I’m not sure how many other municipal cops got tip offs of various types that turned out to be false, I bet there were still a lot. We are only seeing the one tip that panned out.
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I agree that this is a bit of an anomaly, but on the other hand, there are people out there who are really really good at recognizing faces.
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