Aristide Economopoulos
Americans reacted with horror this week to a new poll that found young voters evenly divided on the righteousness of Luigi Mangione’s cold-blooded assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
To me, the result was no surprise: I’m seeing far worse on my Ivy League campus every day — the logical result of the morality crisis running rampant throughout “elite” academia and among many of my generation.
The Emerson College poll found 41% of voters age 18 to 29 saw Thompson’s murder as “acceptable,” while just 40% found it somewhat or completely “unacceptable.”
But here at Princeton, a poll of nearly 1,500 students on the Fizz social network revealed that 25% found Mangione’s action “completely justified,” with another 22% saying Thompson’s death was “deserved.”
Only 13% managed to say the killer was purely “in the wrong.”
Together, the two surveys reflect an alarming trend.
In Princeton’s Fizz community, one of the most up-voted posts glorifies Mangione, a graduate of the rival University of Pennsylvania, as “Penn’s only W.”
Others refer to Mangione as “next level based,” or attempt to rationalize the slaying: “In essence, a serial killer got murdered.”
This shocking response has been widespread among a vocal segment of the online left.
Of course, leftist college students — particularly Ivy Leaguers — have for generations fancied themselves revolutionaries.
But this outright glorification of violence marks a significant escalation.
And I believe I know why.
To far-left young Americans, on any given issue, the world is divided into two buckets: oppressor and oppressed.
There is little room for nuance, and next to none for negotiation.
I’ve seen this phenomenon firsthand in my role as president of Princeton’s premier pro-Israel student organization.
Antisemitism has deeply interwoven itself among both students and faculty — and clearly, Jews were only the first targets of the pervasive moral rot.
Just last week, the Daily Princetonian published an article exploring the campus dialogue surrounding Israel, or the lack of it.
I told the paper I’d certainly be willing to sit down and have a conversation with a student supporter of the Palestinian cause.
After all, isn’t college supposed to be a place where you challenge yourself intellectually, engage with diverse perspectives and attempt to share your ideas on critical issues with those around you?
Apparently not.
“You don’t go around asking oppressed people why they don’t have conversations with their oppressors,” a pro-Palestine senior scolded the paper.
Of course it’s ludicrous to suggest that pro-Israel students at Princeton are the “oppressors” of anyone, much less of our anti-Israel counterparts.
If anything, the evidence suggests the contrary: Jewish students were attacked and told they “don’t deserve to live” at Columbia, blocked from going to class at UCLA and harassed on campuses nationwide, including mine.
And while this oppressor-oppressed dynamic is not new, the extent of its application absolutely is.
Throughout the West, anti-Israel protesters have chanted for the past year that “all resistance is justified.” In New York City, posters and stickers have declared “rape is resistance.”
Now the same rationale is being applied to justify Brian Thompson’s murder.
In the current climate, many people my age see Mangione as a resistor, something of a martyr, while capitalist CEOs like Thompson are framed as the unquestionable oppressors.
Just as my fellow Princeton student dismissed the notion of conversing with someone like me, Brian Thompson, as a member of the class of oppression, was not entitled to a conversation.
Instead, he was condemned without trial, his murder rationalized as resistance by a privileged young person with two Ivy League degrees.
That so many students and other young people are failing this basic moral test is a searing indictment of our education system and “elite” institutions.
The students who are celebrated as our nation’s most brilliant are often adopting the most morally perverse positions.
This is not just a campus problem, but one with far-reaching consequences.
The institutions tasked with educating our (supposedly) brightest minds have instead become breeding grounds for moral equivocation.
Universities that once championed critical thinking and open inquiry are now dominated by ideological conformity and simplistic binaries — and we risk raising a generation that cannot distinguish right from wrong.
The reckoning, from elementary school on up, must begin now, before my generation’s morally confused graduates take the helm as your governors, senators and presidents, dragging their dangerous ideas into the halls of power.
Maximillian Meyer is a sophomore at Princeton University and president of the advocacy group Tigers for Israel.