‘Concepts of thoughts and prayers for all CEOs’: Gen-Z flawlessly explains why so many young people have no sympathy for CEO killings

In the wake of Luigi Mangione’s alleged slaying of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a clear divide has emerged across the nation. 

On one hand you have the “eat the rich crowd,” comprised largely of younger folks, frustrated and fed up with the impossible wealth divide that keeps so many people mired in hardship, and on the other you have those preaching “empathy” and “kindness” in the wake of a man’s killing. The former has emerged in droves on TikTok in the wake of Thompson’s death, and their celebrations are making the other camp extremely uncomfortable.

Now it’s reasonable, in almost every situation, to sympathize with a person who’s been killed. If you remove everything else about him, Thompson was a human being, and at base most people believe that human beings deserve kindness and compassion. But it becomes very hard to treat Thompson with compassion when his innumerable ethical crimes are considered, particularly when paired with the abysmal mental state of America’s youth. 

As TikTok user @gachelraede impeccably points out across an instantly-popular 36-second video, that’s largely due to the bad decisions made by the same people demanding we have “respect for the dead.” These people expect empathy for a man who robbed thousands of their lives — all for profit — and they expect it from a group whose empathy died years ago, right alongside their classmates.

“Y’all really raised the school shooter generation, and now you’re asking us for sympathy,” the TikToker aptly notes. “You normalize gun violence to the point where we take days to weeks off of school to practice what to do when an armed gunman comes into our building.”

@gachelraede points out that the solutions proposed by politicians thus far, as school children die around the nation, are bulletproof backpacks. Not common sense gun reform, enhanced background checks, or any kind of gun control — bulletproof backpacks. Her polishing statement is just as traumatically true, as she adds “you want us to cry because some man got shot in broad daylight? This happens. Welcome to a regular Tuesday at school in America.”

@gachelraede’s harrowing video couldn’t be more true. Gun violence on the scale we experience is a uniquely American problem, and one that robs an average 12 children of their lives each and every day. That’s according to data gathered by the Sandy Hook Promise, a non-profit created in honor of the young lives lost in the Sandy Hook school shooting. In the years since Columbine, “338,000 students in the U.S. have experienced gun violence at school,” according to the site, and the number of school shootings go up year over year. It’s an epidemic, and one that exclusively targets our youth. 

Which all brings us back to Luigi, and the horrific point made across @gachelraede’s upload. The harsh truth of the matter couldn’t be clearer, as we witness the nation’s response to Thompson’s slaying. Some lives matter far more to those in charge than others, and the party of “all life matters” sure acts like only some lives are worth protecting. At the end of the day, if CEOs died at the same rate as schoolchildren in this nation, we’d be out of CEOs in months. And yet they call Mangione a terrorist.