Satire Website Accidentally Reports Actual News About Altoona McDonald’s

On 9 December 2024, five days after the targeted fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the suspect, 26-year-old Maryland native Luigi Mangione, was apprehended in Altoona, Pennsylvania and charged with second-degree murder and numerous other offenses. According to the manifesto discovered during the arrest, Mangione despaired of the US health insurance industry’s rampantly greedy profit motives, which has precipitated the financial ruin of many sick and injured people through denial of insurance claims.

Accounts also indicate that Mangione himself had undergone surgery for spondylolisthesis, a painful and crippling spinal condition in which a vertebra slips out of place; had documented his treatment on social media, had been handicapped in his athletic and romantic life as the result of his problem and had had a frustrating time navigating the healthcare system. Furthermore, in his manifesto, Mangione discusses his mother’s diagnosis of neuropathy, the expensive treatment, and UnitedHealthcare repeatedly denying her insurance claims.

Indeed, UnitedHealthcare has become notorious for leading the health insurance industry in claim denials, a fact that has been corroborated by social media posts from numerous clients and former employees. The latter have declared that the company has treated its workers just as shoddily as it has treated its patients.

The arrest was made after Mangione stopped to eat at a McDonald’s in Altoona and an employee there tipped off police.

As many citizens view Luigi Mangione as a folk hero, on the day he got pinched, satirical website The Hard Times cooked up a jokey story about the McDonald’s in Altoona getting one-star online reviews not for the food, but for employees being class traitors, complete with a fictitious quote from an imaginary general manager to the effect of, “I’m screwed this year. Corporate is going to have my ass.”

Screenshot of the Hard Times article

In a hilarious coincidence, news website Axios.com reported that in real life, sympathetic consumers took to Google Reviews and Yelp to dogpile upon that particular McDonald’s, flooding the page with one-star reviews complaining about rats – not the actual rodent of the genus Rattus known for spreading diseases and contaminating kitchens, but informants. One reviewer asked, “Why go here when Taco Bell is just across the way and [the staff] knows how to keep their mouths shut?”

Another declared, “McSnitches get McStitches.”

Though Google has deleted any negative reviews accusing the Altoona McDonald’s staff of being tattletales citing violations of their policy that accounts must be objectively based on actual customer experiences, the rebukes found on Yelp still stand as of this writing.

I personally cannot recall any other instance in my lifetime of a satire outlet publishing a timely gag story that turned out to more or less be true. Granted, Mad magazine has predicted picture phones and voice changer attachments for telephones, but generally it took a few years if not a few decades for technology to realize those visions. Here we have a satire website and proper news websites reporting the same story within the same news cycle and in most cases on the same day. Despite pervasive concerns that satire could be used as a Trojan horse for misinformation, sometimes true events take turns unbelievably ridiculous enough that it would be impossible to fabricate a tall tale about it.

In other words, you simply can’t make this shit up.

As for the chain of events at hand, it raises important questions. What is the alternative for someone caught in a life-or-death situation whose claims are denied and grievances unheard? What recourse would this person have if all else has failed, leaving them with nothing to lose?

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