Healthcare assassin Luigi Mangione, or simply “Luigi” as he is now known by his online fangirls and fanboys, has lifted the veil on a corrosive, youthful nihilism. An Emerson College poll found that 40 percent of people aged 18-29 believe Mangione was justified in killing Brian Thompson, the corporate executive randomly selected to be the victim in his juvenile Breaking Bad cosplay.

Mangione’s desire to be mythologized has been satisfied by the hackneyed, made-for-Netflix narrative of his personal decline, which is now everywhere blasted before our eyes by sensationalist and sympathetic media. He has been depicted as a tortured genius of sorts, with tragically wasted potential.

Much has been made of his “Ivy League” education—he went to the University of Pennsylvania, the most spuriously designated, perhaps, of the Ivies—and his seemingly idiosyncratic political views. He sympathized with the Unabomber’s luddite beliefs, and was disillusioned with the pervasiveness of porn, for example. But his grab-bag of cranky ideas should not be mistaken for profundity.

Mangione’s intellectual sources are dilettantish in the extreme: He cites progressive filmmaker Michael Moore in his magnum opus, an impressively stupid, self-important, and superficial rant against corporate greed. Compared to, say, the Unabomber’s essay, Mangione makes little effort to justify his crime, and appears preoccupied with strutting for the public. With false modesty, he calls his murder “trivial” and offers help on solving the crime—a move typical of egomaniacs.

On the right, Mangione has been painted as a Marxist college brat who went off the deep end. While Mangione does not appear to be a doctrinaire leftist, he has the lazy and resentful temperament of one. His illiterate “manifesto” is the product of a diseased and unoriginal mind desperate for notoriety at any price.

The media, and members of the jaded public, obligingly place Mangione on a pedestal. An absurd, oversized importance has also been ascribed to his victim, a corporate hustler who would have died an obscure figure had he not been gunned down outside a hotel conference on a Wednesday morning. Nobody who is now dancing on Brian Thompson’s grave would have recognized him while he was living, and no court of law would have charged him with “murder” for working in the for-profit healthcare industry. He was a bureaucrat from Iowa who probably had little time for leisure. But in death, the sick and perverse have made him a scapegoat for the grievances of millions.

Mangione’s chronic back pain has been widely cited as the reason for his radicalization, but his surgery was apparently successful, and his family is swimming in money, so it’s difficult to imagine cost of treatment was at issue. Yet spectators are living vicariously through “Luigi” and his rage against the machine. This includes some disillusioned young men of the right, who mistakenly see Mangione as an Ubermensch figure of sorts. Far from it, Mangione is a weakling who showed where he belongs in the hierarchy of existence: at the bottom, with the rest of the dregs cheering him on.

His cowardly act is perhaps a timely reminder of what separates, or ought to separate, the left and the right. The right accepts that life is a struggle, and suffering is inevitable. The right also believes in and embraces hierarchy, as it extols the virtues of hard work and perseverance. Some of the most gifted figures in history suffered great misfortune: Beethoven went deaf when his career was just starting, and Milton composed his masterpiece as a blind man in middle age. If you’re looking for a living hero, consider Donald Trump, whose mythic political return, at the age of 78, is like something out of an epic poem.

People in every time and place will have complaints, some more justified than others, because life is cruel and often unfair. The leftist answer to this reality has been, always and everywhere, to plunder, to kill, to tear down those who have more, who have succeeded and turned out well, and especially those who were born well. Although born in privilege himself, Mangione obviously was not called to do anything great. But he has earned himself a seat of honor in the libtard Valhalla, along with George Floyd, Jordan Neely, and countless losers yet to come.