Internet commentators have settled on the subculture most aligned with accused murderer Luigi Mangione: TPOT. While many initially suspected the shooter would be a Bernie Sanders-style leftist, Mangione’s social media feeds reveal an Ivy League-educated tech bro who disavows “wokeism” and venerates Elon Musk; a former fraternity member equally as dedicated to AI as he is to psychedelics and self-improvement.
And so began the quest to label Magione, to pin him down. Is he a tech accelerationist? A Dimes Square neo-trad fascist? A dirtbag anarchist? One subgroup seems to have come out on top: TPOT — an acronym for This Part of Twitter — a loosely defined internet subculture whose members most regularly define themselves as “ambitious nerds” obsessed with self-improvement and personal agency.
While members of the TPOT community struggle with whether to embrace Mangione as part of what they call “the ingroup,” other extremely online commentators insist he has to be a member of the scene. “Tried explaining that the shooter wasn’t a far left radical but actually a right wing tpot adjacent ted k reading lindyman following, rfk pilled upenn grad and got kicked out of the family group chat,” said one popular post on X.