Eat the Rich

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• Guerrilla street artist Banksy used the phrase in one of his works with his own humorous slant.◊

• The UK-based clothing label Eat the Rich prides itself on producing "sweatshop-free" T-shirts while promoting a vegetarian lifestyle, including some shirts with the message, "Meat sucks, eat the rich."
  • Which is stupid, because they could grind them into fertilizer and increase crop yields instead.

• Eat the Rich (2021) is titled such because Joey is a working-class newcomer to the rich town of Crestfall Bluffs who is horrified by how they exploit the staff. It then becomes literal since Joey leads the help in an uprising against the rich residents and eats them.
• Wonder Woman (1987): Jaded PI Micah Rains' favorite T-Shirt has "Eat the Rich" printed on it in huge letters.

• Slavery and Freedom: Since "Freedom" takes place in the French Revolution, anti-wealthy people sentiments are high, forcing Christine and her brother to hide in a tomb just because they are rich. While it later comes out that Christine's brother is indeed guilty of multiple crimes, Christine is still set to be executed for being loyal to her brother and being a potential enemy in the future.
• With Pearl and Ruby Glowing: Shazadah Khan, the son of Pakistani billionaire Badshah Khan, was kidnapped by the Ark and violently tortured and raped. People had no sympathy for him due to his wealth and him being a Spoiled Brat, even when a video of his abuse was posted online. The narrative makes it clear he still didn't deserve this, with Mary Poppins suspending several Palace members for using the building's WiFi to share the video.

My Hero Academia

• Redbone AU: Amongst the illustrator's sketches for Part 5, there's a drawing of Todoroki holding up an "EAT THE RICH" sign at what has to be a protest. Midoriya is flummoxed by it when he notices that Shoto's clothes value in the tens to hundreds of thousands of yen.

• Assault on Wall Street depicts the 2008 financial crisis as the collapse of a giant Ponzi scheme pulled off by corrupt portfolio managers and bank executives. The protagonist, Jim, who having been conned out of his money and lured into a debt trap of $60,000, ends up losing his house, his job, and then his wife, who commits suicide out of guilt that she feels responsible for her husband's pain. He tried to argue with the Assistant District Attorney who refused to take his case but accidentally ends up killing him instead, inspiring him to go on a killing spree upon Wall Street's most powerful corporates so that when they die, their wealth will be used to compensate the Ponzi scheme's victims.
• The premise of the horror film The Cannibal Murders.
• In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane manipulates many of Gotham's citizens into rioting against the city's upper class and remaining authority figures, causing chaos to distract from Talia's plan to nuke the city. There is even a Kangaroo Court where said targets of the rioting populace are considered guilty by default and get to choose one of two punishments: Exile, or death by exile.
• In John Waters' Desperate Living, the evil Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey) ends up cooked and eaten by her subjects.
• In Eating Raoul, the Blands murder well-to-do swingers and steal their money and personal possessions. Their partner Raoul disposes of the bodies by selling them to a local dog food manufacturer.
• The British Black Comedy Eat The Rich from The Comic Strip comedy troupe is about a waiter at an exclusive, high-class restaurant who, no longer willing to put up with the disgust and contempt of the upper class, begins serving minced rich people with a side of chips to other rich people at the restaurant.
• Villain Protagonist Bill Foster in Falling Down was a dark Working-Class Hero on a Going Postal rampage against the society that left him behind. When walking through a country club, he's accosted by a wealthy Grumpy Old Man. Bill then pulls out a shotgun and goes on an angry tirade accusing him of hoarding land that could be used to benefit the community, causing the man to die of a heart attack from the stress as Bill mocks him.
• In Joker (2019), Arthur shooting three yuppies on the subway is misunderstood by the media and public as being politically motivated (in truth, he had shot the first two out of self-defense and the third for joining the other two in harassing him). This sparks a series of violent protests against economic inequality, with "Kill the Rich!" slogans prominently displayed.
• Invoked in Land of the Dead; George A. Romero's zombie flicks tend to have an underlying social message, and in the case of this film, it concerns how the wealthy poorly treat the lower classes. When the flesh-eating undead horde siege the Fiddler's Green colony, although both rich and poor die in the onslaught, the more intelligent zombies' main targets are the upper-class establishment. Once they're wiped out, the zombies withdraw and the class system ceases to exist. It's revealed afterward that the majority of Fiddler's Green other residents have survived the zombie attack.
• Major Grom: Plague Doctor. The Plague Doctor carries out several vigilante murders of corrupt Russian oligarchs, then proceeds to fake his death, leaving a supposed Video Will calling on his supporters to take up his cause by robbing and killing rich people whose names and addresses he sends out on the Internet. His actual intention is to get rid of the oligarchs trying to steal his company (he's like an evil Batman), then martial law will be declared and the army will shoot his riff-raff followers.
• The Menu: Chef Julian's primary motivation is to exact revenge on the people who have made his life a stressful hell without even properly appreciating his food, and most of his elite clientele are shown to be rather contemptible. Since Julian himself is very wealthy, and parts of the menu extend to punishing himself, the ethos extends to him as well.
• Mutant Action: The titular Ragtag Bunch of Misfits are a terrorist group who target the wealthy, "pretty" people in their dystopian Crapsack World, and the main plot kicks off with the kidnapping of a powerful industrialist's daughter for ransom.
• In Parasite (2019), the Kims are undoubtedly swindlers who take advantage of the Parks, but they also suffered poverty and lack of opportunity. While the Parks are presented fairly sympathetically, their wealth and comfort at the expense of the people in their service contrast very sharply with the living conditions and lifestyles of the Kims. This is ramped up by the end when Ki-taek, fed up with the Parks' Conspicuous Consumption and denigration of the lower classes, fatally stabs Mr. Park. He flees, becomes a fugitive, and runs back to the Parks' house, where he remains in the secret bunker. After the (surviving) Parks move out, the house is bought out by German expatriates, and he survives by eating their food. There is no guarantee that his son will be able to secure his freedom by buying the house, so it can be presumed Ki-taek will have to live like a cockroach for the rest of his life.
• Rampage (2009):
  • In Rampage: Capital Punishment Bill Williamson sends out a nationwide broadcast raving, "We need to kill the rich. You get out there, you use your weapons, you rip Washington apart, you hunt down the billionaires, the bank bosses, the CEOs, the scumbags and the liars, the governors, the lobbies, the senators!"
  • The third movie President Down has Bill's dreams come true despite that he died before he was able to see it when his viral followers arm up and start targeting the wealthy elite and decision-makers who are affiliated with the U.S. government, the U.S. military, large powerful conglomerates such as Microsoft and General Motors, Wall Street, big banks and even Hollywood and the music industry.
• The Running Man (2025): Graffiti which says Kill The Execs is seen several times on walls, and people later start to shout this as a revolt erupts against their oppressive corporate overlords.
• In Snowpiercer, the rich occupy the front of the titular train and enjoy gourmet meals while the lower classes in the back subsist on nutrient jelly made from bugs and recycled water. Said lower classes, sick of the mistreatment they face, launch a revolt.
• In A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, Harold, who works as a Wall Street banker, is swarmed by a crowd of unemployed protesters part of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. One of the picket signs they carry says this trope's name.

• An anonymous quip: "Eat the rich. The poor are tough and stringy."

• One of the phrases used on the 'We Want What You Have' blog in Capital.
• Dead Silence has the luxury space liner Aurora built to cater to the rich. For those who might be afraid of this trope, they built the "Versailles Contingency", a failsafe in the form of panic rooms that would seal and save the very richest passengers in case of a mutiny. Being a Sci-Fi Horror story, it didn't save them.
• Political satirist and journalist P.J. O'Rourke published the book Eat The Rich: A Treatise On Economics. The last chapter, titled "Eat the Rich," praises capitalism as "the worst economic system anyone ever invented, except for all the others."
• In the Honor Harrington books, Pierre, the head of the People's Republic of Haven, does this three times. First, he confiscates the wealth of the Legislaturists — the previous ruling class — but it's not nearly enough money to fund Haven's social welfare system and solve its financial problems. Then he gives the Legislaturists show trials and executes them, which only makes the mob hungry for more blood. So he unleashes Haven's navy on the Star Kingdom of Manticore, an enormously wealthy neighbour, in order to solve both his financial and the bloodthirsty populace's problems. This sets off a chain of events that results in his own death and brings the People's Republic within weeks of total collapse. Though other things he does do result in improvements in Haven's economy and society, long term.
• Jeeves and Wooster: In one short story named "Comrade Bingo", one of Bertie's Idle Rich friends is in love with the daughter of a communist revolutionary. He disguises himself and gives speeches with a very Eat the Rich bent to them:
  Bingo: And the fat one! Don't miss him. Do you know who that is? That's Lord Bittlesham! One of the worst. What has he ever done except eat four square meals a day? His god is his belly, and he sacrifices burnt-offerings to it till his eyes bubble. If you opened that man now you would find enough lunch to support ten working-class families for a week.
• Only the Dead Are Cold-Blooded: In-universe propaganda magazine The Worker's Respite includes a joke that references this (invokedHumor Dissonance is in play):
  Question: When is an Eskimo a good socialist?
  Answer: When he eats the flesh of a rentier.
• In The Time Machine, humanity in the distant future has "evolved" into two human subspecies: The Eloi, who are descendants of the wealthy elite, and the monstrous, subterranean Morlocks, who are descendants of the working class who now feed on the Eloi, playing this trope rather literally.
• In one story of World War Z, a bunch of celebrities lock themselves in a well-armed and supplied compound during the outbreak. It falls not to zombies, but to the starving masses, since the guards were unwilling to shoot the living.
• The Wyoming Bubble: Besides the Knight Templar Big Brother Gonzalezes, most of the men trying to lynch Grimes for rustling are impoverished cowboys and barflys who feel resentful about how this rich man stole thousands of cows while people like them and their friends get hung for stealing one.

• Arrow: In Season 2, Sebastian Blood seems to be spouting this as part of his rhetoric to the masses, using the destruction of the Glades by Malcolm Merlyn at the end of Season 1 as justification.
• In the Spanish series Billionaires' Bunker, this turns out to be the true motive of Minerva and her associates at Kimera Underground Park. Disgruntled from spending their lives toiling in the middle class while rich elites profit off of their hard work, they concocted a massive scam to get even – first, they trick numerous billionaires into financing the construction of an Apocalyptic Underground Refuge capable of surviving a nuclear war, and then during a moment of heightened global tensions, convince their clients to retreat to the bunker just in case. Then, they use fake news reports and special effects to make it appear as if World War III has in fact broken out, giving them an excuse to seal off the bunker indefinitely; while the billionaires are now stuck cut off from the world, Kimera use their Panopticon of Surveillance to study them and create perfect virtual deepfakes, which they can then use to start embezzling the billionaires' money for themselves.
• Elementary: In "Ready or Not", Holmes and Watson are investigating a murder in "The Keep", a Doomsday-survival bunker meant exclusively for wealthy people. Holmes notes with disgust that these people are "a uniquely vile subset" of the "prepper" subculture, who, in addition to all the other apocalyptic disasters such preppers fear, are afraid of the poor rising up against them with Torches and Pitchforks.
• The spirit of the trope is very much alive in Game of Thrones, in which the famine-stricken poor of King's Landing riot against the aristocracy. While they are not actually shown eating anyone onscreen, the line in the book that the crowd "tore the High Septon limb from limb" was taken very literally on the television show, looking like something out of a Zombie Apocalypse.
  • Invoked in the prequel series House of the Dragon episode "Smallfolk"; Rhaenyra's faction, the Blacks, stirs up the eponymous peasant class of King's Landing against Aegon's faction, the Greens, by speaking loudly about how the royals are feasting on lamb and honey cakes on the regular while the people are starving. On top of that, Rhaenyra's navy secretly sends out fresh food and supplies on small boats to the beaches for the fishermen to find. By the end of the episode, the smallfolk are fully rioting and start throwing rotten vegetables and fish at Alicent and Heleana and their guards while declaring for Rhaenyra as the true queen.
• Mentioned by name in the episode "Spirit of the Goat" in Gotham; a Serial Killer known as "the Goat" kills the social elite with decades in between rampages, and it turns out that a psychotherapist has been hypnotising and brainwashing her clients into doing it. When confronted with this, she explains that the old belief that people can't be hypnotised into doing something they don't want to do is true and that her plan only worked because, deep down, people really do want to "eat the rich".
• The Hunting Party: This was the idea behind Zack Lang's murders before he was arrested/sent to The Pit. During Occupy Wall Street, he murdered rich people, justifying this due to as saying that they preyed on the poor, and was hailed as a hero for it in some quarters. After escaping the Pit though, he discovers he's rich himself from his investment in Bitcoin. His sudden wealth didn't curb his bloodlust, however. He was originally targeting rich people as a substitute for his father, who he'd grown to hate. With his new resources, he began targeting men who bore a physical resemblance to his father, buying them fine suits and fancy watches before he beat them to death.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022):
  • "The Thing Lay Still": Most of the guests that the vampire family invite to their Mardi Gras ball are the elite of New Orleans, and several human prey are selected for the after-party feast, where Lestat de Lioncourt, Louis de Pointe du Lac, and Claudia literally eat the rich.
    Lestat: Well, this idea of yours, what kind of a party did you imagine?
    Claudia: A ball. A lavish, decadent ball.
    Lestat: To what end?
    Claudia: We invite the most beautiful, the most gluttonous, seduce a choice few for a feast to remember.
  • In the Season 2 First Look Scene, Armand targets the wealthy de la Croix family and their guests as food for his vampire coven because of their war profiteering during World War II.
    Armand: The estate of the family de la Croix. Whilst their countrymen clutch ration cards, they've made quite a killing manipulating the black markets.
  • "Detroit": After Lestat tells Louis that he resides in a well-to-do area of Montreal, the latter responds that moneyed people are tasty meals.
    Lestat: It's an affluent neighbourhood. Old money, young professionals, a smattering of criss de trust fund bébés.
    Louis: Mmm, good eating.
• Subverted in season 2 of iZombie, regarding the Chaos Killer. Ostensibly a Serial Killer inspired by the "Occupy" movement who is targeting Seattle's wealthy, he's actually Major going after the city's zombie population, having been coerced into becoming a zombie hunter by the energy drink company Max Rager, who wants to keep one of the side effects of their flagship product under control. The idea of a radical leftist kidnapping and murdering these people helps to throw off suspicion from the real culprits.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The Uruk have a proletarian vibe to their motives. They turned on Sauron when he tried to govern them as a kingly figure before nominating one of their own as leader. When "Halbrand" reappears, they put him in chains and sarcastically refer to him as king. While Adar still holds authority over the orcs, at the same time, he doesn't hold any privilege that would put him above his people.
• Quite literally with Hickey from The Terror. Working-class Hickey begins the series with quite reasonable gripes about the way lower-ranking men are treated and the life-or-death power of the incompetent officers who are leading everyone to their deaths. The story then has Hickey stage a mutiny, psychopathically sabotage everyone's chances of escape, and start killing and eating his comrades and superiors as revenge against the officers who have humiliated him. He is defeated by the reasonable and noble captain Crozier, and his own hubris.
• The New Zealand show The Tribe sees The Locos wear jackets with the slogan "STAY WARM BURN THE RICH" on the back of them while under the Zoot regime.
• You (2018)'s fourth season sees Joe get tangled up in the exploits of a Serial Killer called the "Eat the Rich killer", since they are seemingly targeting members of an extremely elite London social circle. Turns out the "Eat the Rich killer" really is the manifestation of Joe's suppressed murderous tendencies that now manifest as a Split Personality, living out Joe's own distaste in the high society since he himself comes from the lower class of New York.

• Aerosmith recorded a song titled "Eat the Rich" for their 1993 LP Get a Grip. It quickly became a crowd favorite at live concerts.
• In the Bad Religion song "I Want to Conquer the World", one of the things the singer says he'll do to establish his utopia is "expose the corporates and feed them to the children."
• Black Sabbath (performing under the name Heaven & Hell) allude to this in a song called "Eating The Cannibals."
  Taking till you've got no more to give
  Building boxes where you used to live
  The word out on the street is no delay
  Do it today!
  Come to the meeting
  It's true that we're eating the cannibals!
  ...
  Come on in, we love our clientele
  You're here to taste revenge, and so you shall
  It's been raised upon your body and your bones
  But now you're not alone!
• Swedish band First Floor Power's "Eat The Rich" suggests that you "make sure to cook them first - they're dry."
• Flanger Moose's song "Billionaire Buffet", being a satirical Protest Song against income inequality, has a few "eat the rich" chants and a Visual Pun on the concept.
• The German rap formation K.I.Z has a song called "Ich esse Reiche" - "I eat rich people":
  Zeig mir dein Alarmsystem auf MTV Cribs
  Und beim nächsten Abendessen sind deine Kinder die Ribs!
• "Eat the Rich" is also the title of a song by metal band Krokus about a homeless man who is sick of being abused and seeks to take his aggression out on people who have more than he does.
• The Motörhead song "Eat the Rich" was written as the title track for the film of the same name (See Film, above), which also featured Lemmy in a supporting role. However, the song's lyrics are actually a thinly veiled reference to a certain sex act. The song is mostly remembered for its chorus.
  C'mon baby, eat the rich,
  Put the bite on that son of a bitch!
• The bridge of Tears for Fears' "Closest Thing to Heaven" instructs the listener to "eat the countries that are making billions" and "save the crumbs for all the starving millions."

• Bloom County:
  • In one Sunday strip, Donald Trump at one point mused on the greatness of America since it helped him become wealthy. He starts bragging about his wealth to one of the main cast members, Ronald-Ann, a poor girl who lives on the wrong side of the tracks. The strip ends with Trump remarking that it's amazing that people like her haven't risen up and eaten people like him already. To which Ronald-Ann's headless doll replies, "Yet."
  • Earlier, one of the times that Bill and Opus ran for President and Vice President, Opus was accused of being...a liberal. After unsuccessfully fending off the accusation for a while, Opus finally gave up and screamed that what he really wanted was to see the rich ground up into hamburger to feed the poor.

• Paris Hilton, of all people, posed in a Stripperific bikini emblazoned with the words "EAT THE RICH" in a photoshoot for Rolling Stone magazine's 2006 Hot List. It has been suggested that she used 'eat' in a specific meaning.

• In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, Daigo planned to create a lizard monster and have it gorge on the upper-class, due to his distaste for how they ostracise and discriminate against the lower classes. However, he's instead manipulated by his girlfriend to test it first in a poverty-stricken area, which leads to its death when the protagonists find out about it.

• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: During the song "A Little Priest", Sweeney Todd briefly considers exclusively serving the upper classes in Mrs. Lovett's pie shop before discarding the idea as "discriminating".

• In Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, although Mandus and the Engineer initially focus their murderous intentions on the lower class, they still hate the rich with equal fervor, and once their diabolical machine is ready, Mandus turns his attention to abducting wealthy guests at his mansion and transporting them to the machine to be turned into food for the next batch of guests.
• In BioShock 1, Rapture's Kill the Poor attitude finally gives rise to a massive rebellion not just by the oppressed working class but also by the ADAM-addicted Splicers. The majority of the city's upper class is killed in the ensuing riots, though so is almost everyone else.
• Greta from Library of Ruina despises the rich and wealthy and advocates for this trope... in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Why does she despise the rich? Well, according to her, rich people and poor people both taste bad, so she'd like to put a stop to the City's horrible economic disparity so she can eat better.
  Greta: The ingredients we get today are either greasy fatsos who ate too much or skinny twigs with barely any meat... Neither are any good! Now the filthy flavor is seeping into the dishes we cook!!! Our conductor will be the one to fix that! He'll take me to a world where there are pure and clean ingredients aplenty!
• A general motif in Luck be a Landlord; your landlord is set to be 'defeated', and will receive a random death upon completion of the game. There is also the Billionaire symbol, which gives no money to you when rolled (though it will increase the value of nearby Cheese and Wine) but delivers a tidy sum when destroyed...possibly by the Guillotine item. Billionaires are also the only characters that do not have a soul according to the Shrine item. This puts them below Thieves, General Zaroff, Golems, random ordinary mice and bees, and a literal Eldritch Abomination, all of which are confirmed by the Shrine to have souls when they die.
• Catherina from Metaphor: ReFantazio, one of the candidates to the throne and championing for her impoverished tribe, vows to bring justice by first executing the wealthy nobles oppressing the poor. Her Bond events involve her understanding the flaws of this school of thought, and she drops out of the race to seek a different approach to reform when she realizes her people are using her vision to commit robbery in her name.
• Neofeud: Deconstructed. When the party has to travel to the landfill in the past, they discover that Noah Goertzel betrayed them in favor of working with Walker Coch-Jobbs, since he wants to claim Proto-J's power for his own plan to wipe out all Neofeudals, including reformists like Sybil Clington-Busch. This is despite how he and Sybil have largely similar visions for society, meaning he's alienating one of his most trustworthy allies in favor of a temporary alliance with Coch-Jobbs, who is planning to backstab him back.
• One of the main themes of No Umbrellas Allowed:
  • Avarice Criminals are defined by AVAC as people who are extremely greedy, regardless of their morals, and because the organization loosely interprets the law, they arrest anyone that they consider as Avarice Criminals regardless of the crime's severity, their innocence, or their financial status. If they can't pay the fine, which increases with their Renunciation Rate the more they defy the law, they get Fixed by AVAC by being injected with an emotion-suppressing drug.
  • Starting on Week 3, AVAC encourages everyone to report anyone they suspect to have committed Avarice Crimes with the press of a button, and they expect to catch 90 Avarice Criminals by the end of each week. Every day, they publicly update the bulletin boards with the number of criminals reported, the place with the highest crime rate, and the top reporter of Ajik City. You are also encouraged to participate in this by reporting any of your customers who are tagged with a Pre-Avarice Crime Badge so they can be arrested immediately, but this risks destroying your store's reputation because it gets labeled as a place with a high crime rate. You can also be reported for falsely reporting innocents who just happened to be reported themselves.
  • If you haven't donated to the Fixerain Project for the week, an AVAC officer will constantly urge you to do so, telling you that you have more than enough money for it. Even if you know that the project is bad for the city since it involves forcing the emotion-suppressing drug on everyone with artificial rain, the officer shames you by telling you the exact amount of money you have since donations are only 100V each, which increases by a hundred more the more you donate to AVAC.
  • The economic inequality between the Junuk Side and Singsing Side of the city can be seen as you go to work. You move from the slums of Junuk to the Elevator Bridge that lifts you to Singsing, where all the high-end businesses, including Darcy's secondhand store, are. This is because all the money was poured into funding Singsing Side even after its status as an Avarice Permitted Zone, which was declared by Darcy Jo, was abolished. If you accumulate more than 20k Vana, the residents of Junuk start protesting against this inequality on the Elevator Bridge, and to further shame you for your riches, you can't skip this cutscene if you take the Elevator Bridge to work and back. If you accumulate more than 50k Vana, a cyberattack steals half of your money from you as part of a relief scheme for the impoverished, although AVAC pays it back to you towards the end of the day.
• Taken literally by the Commoners in Tooth and Tail, a game set in a World of Funny Animals where the sole source of meat is other people. The Commoners' goal in winning the Civil War is to institute a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, where everyone would vote on who would get eaten (the Commoners are by far the most populous faction, so no guesses who's going to come up short under that system).
• From 2006 to 2008, there was a zombie group called "Eat The Rich" in Urban Dead. They only attacked mansions, malls, banks, and office buildings.
• Shadow of the Eagles: The Terror happens after the first in-game year. If your Reactionary Reputation is too high, or your Jacobin Reputation is too low as an Aristocrat, you end up arrested during it and lose several months of game time.
• Warframe: Grendel's lore has an example that's both figurative and literal. In the Europan city Riddha, the impoverished population starved while a gluttonous Orokin Executor named Karishh hoarded all the food for himself, even getting artificial stomachs grafted onto him so he could eat twelve times as much as a normal man. Grendel, a man-eating Warframe, stormed Karishh's mansion, devoured the corrupt guards, then used his "Nourish" ability to revitalize the weakened citizens, who went on to storm the manse and eat their fill for the first time in ages. It's implied that Karishh was later literally eaten by Grendel when he tried to flee into the mountains, where a satisfied-sounding belch was later heard. This is further reinforced by the Gauss and Grendel Prime trailer, where he is shown terrorizing the hypercapitalistic Corpus by barging into an executive meeting and doing horrible things which heavily imply some level of devouring and/or regurgitation.

• In The Hayseed Knight, this is the ultimate goal of Eka and the Beasts, led by Ilegrab. The nobles of Eyrlum have grown decadent and bigoted towards their own subjects, so the Beasts plan to assassinate enough of them to start reforms towards a more-equitable state. Since the story takes place in a World of Mammals in a city full of prey animals, it is meant quite literally.
• Slay the Princess: At the beginning of the game, you can tell the Narrator that it doesn't feel right to kill a princess. He responds that killing a princess is less immoral than killing a fisherman, miller, or seamstress, since the latter three actually contribute to society.

• Freefall has Mr. Ishiguro trying to explain the problem to Mr. Kornada:
  Ishiguro: It's okay to have steak when there's a chicken in every pot. But if you're eating steak and the majority of people have nothing, it doesn't take long for you to look like a chicken.

• Amphibia: Shouted by Hop Pop just before guillotining the Cloak-Bot's arm.
• One of [adult swim]'s bumpers for Bob's Burgers has Bob and Gene singing a song about rising up against the rich.
• DuckTales (2017): In "The First Adventure!", an Origins Episode, young Donald Duck is shown going through a Grunge phase, and he uses this line in a song he makes up in front of his ultra-rich uncle.
  Just another rich uncle
  Gotta EAT THE RICH UN-CLE
  Store up all that rage in a bin
  RICH UNC—
• The Simpsons: "Treehouse Of Horror XXXII" has a segment parodying Parasite (2019), though unlike the original film, it's not the house owners (Rainier Wolfcastle and his family) who fall victim to this trope. Instead, a mob of angry, homeless Springfielders end up killing Mr. Burns, who seems to be present in the house simply so there'd be a wealthy victim, as the rest of the story revolves around the poor killing each other.

• Possibly the oldest example is recorded in the Hellenica, regarding the polis of Sparta. Within Sparta, the ruling class of ~8,000 spartiates (the people you probably think of when someone says 'Spartan') was supported by some 30,000 non-slave non-citizens and 200,000 slaves who did all the actual work. And 'all' is very literal, spartiates viewed doing any sort of labor at all to be the behavior of a slave rather than a free man, and even female spartiates didn't do any of the cooking or textile work the women in other polis did for their households. Combined with the incredibly brutal treatment these lower classes faced, including a yearly 'war' where spartiates would kill any slaves who were too attractive or willful, and enough rape that their bastard children were their own distinct social class (the mothakes), and the spartiates were hated by the other 97% of Sparta's population. And thus quotes Xenophon, "[the leaders of a conspiracy against the spartiates] knew the secret of all of the others – the helots^note slaves who made up 85% of Sparta's population, the neodamodes^note freed helots, who still were not considered citizens, the hypomeiones^note ex-spartiates who failed out for various reasons, losing their citizenship with no way to reclaim it, the perioikoi^note non-slave non-citizens – for whenever mention was made of the spartiates among these men, not one of them could hide that he would gladly eat them raw.”
• The Dutch Republic was a wealthy country, but in 1672, a French invasion led to the head of government, Johann de Witt, being lynched by a crowd opposed to his 20-year-long rule, and was ultimately partially eaten by the mob.
• Reportedly one of the worst horrors of China's Cultural Revolution. According to Zheng Yi's book "Scarlet Memorial," members of the Red Guard and general public in Guangxi are reported to have killed, divvied up, and publicly eaten over a hundred former landlords, "intellectuals" (e.g. school teachers), other "counter-revolutionaries" and their descendants as a show of loyalty to Mao and his ideals, with the backing of the local (but not national) Party. Bodies were split up and served to the community to partake of en masse, and the murderers were often people close to the victims who were making a show of their revolutionary fervor. Many of the former revolutionaries are still in power to this day. Virtually the same types of purges would play out in Cambodia, Vietnam, and North Korea when Communists gained control of those countries. In Cambodia's case, this was much worse because the Khmer Rouge took an absurdly broad view of "The Rich", including people with glasses and virtually all ethnic minorities.
• This trope served as a metaphor for the Communists' October Revolution in Russia and the temporary upswing in public support the Bolsheviks gained in the cities prior to the general election and the outbreak of the Civil War.^note In which they secured some 24% of the total vote, including virtually the entire urban vote. They did this by promising to relieve the famines in St Petersburg and Moscow. These had occurred in the winter of 1916-17 because the country's village communes had stopped producing or selling as much grain: the total mobilisation of industry for war production meant there was nothing left that they wanted to buy, and the value of money steadily decreased thanks to the wartime economic boom and the government's inflationary policies. For a time the Bolsheviks were able to marginally improve the food situation in the two major cities, but after the outbreak of the civil war and the outbreak of terror - both red and white - their popularity began to decline, and the economic policy of war communism, aimed at meeting the needs of the army, worsened logistics and food supplies. In the Volga region, another drought led to famine amid all these troubles. However, after a few years, the NEP corrected this; we can say that the rich were figuratively eaten after all. The sheer mind-blowing incompetence of the nobility in their management of and interference in the war effort, the sickening war-profiteering and conspicuous consumption (even during the winter of 1916-17!) of the captains of industry after total economic mobilisation in 1915-16, and the bureaucratic nightmare of the Russian state meant that many quite rightly blamed the upper-classes for the country's plight and so inspired 60% of the entire country to vote for the Socialist Revolutionary Party (which promised a socialist democracy) and a further 24% to vote for the Communist Party (which promised a communist democracy). The Bolsheviks refused to accept their loss and shut down the assembly elected when it tried to meet.
• Léon Bloy gleefully exulted at the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, a fire at the Opéra-Comique in 1887 which killed dozens, and another fire in 1896, at the Bazar de la Charité, an annual Catholic charity event, which cost more than 100 lives. He even jubilated at the thought of a wealthy woman burning to death in The Woman Who Was Poor.
• A bizarre 1870 case of mass hysteria (he relayed bad news and was accused of being a Prussian spy) ended with an aristocrat, Alain de Monéys, being burnt alive by the villagers of Hautefaye, France, who, allegedly, used the resulting fat drippings in cooking. Unruly French peasants reportedly also roasted an aristocrat in the Jacquerie peasant uprising during The Hundred Years War and force-fed him to his family, whom they killed too.
• The French Revolution, being inspired and prophesied by Rousseau, was entirely driven by this mentality. During the Great Fear after the fall of the Bastille, several people across France marched into the chateaus, seized weapons, and killed aristocrats, beheading them and putting their heads on pikes, which they carried with them. Those ghastly images became an iconic part of the revolution. Most of those beheaded were aristocrats and soldiers, and in one famously appalling incident, Marie-Antoinette's confidante and friend, the Princesse de Lamballe.
  • One grotesque case is that of the tax minister Foullon, notoriously unpopular and severe. There was a rumour that he was supposed to have suggested that "the poor eat hay" if they are starving. The poor were starving. When the mob got hold of him, they dragged him to Paris with his mouth stuffed with hay, and then they cut off his head and put it on a stick. Then they killed and beheaded his son-in-law and made his head "Kiss Daddy!".
  • The Reign of Terror often has this reputation, as it is seen as the blade that would fall on the necks of the rich. Actually, the final tally of 17,000 people executed by guillotine after a trial in the year 1793-1794 features only 8% of aristocrats (a disproportionate number, considering that only 1% of the population of that time was noble). 25% of the victims were bourgeois and middle-class, 28% were peasants and working-class, and the rest were clergy. During the final month of the "Great Terror", after the Law of 22 Prarial where 1,000 people were executed in a single month (matching the executions in Paris for the entire previous year), the victims became 38% nobility and 26% clergy, with the wealthy victims discriminated against, since the law deprived them of a right to call for witnesses, legal representatives or evidence, all of them mechanisms by which the wealthier segment of the society had escaped the blade (according to Georges Couthon, who drafted the law to the Convention). This eventually led to the Thermidorian Reaction and the end of the Terror. Robespierre and his closest associates, including Couthon, were guillotined themselves after this.
• The New York Draft Riots of 1863 were sparked by the outrage of wealthy young men being able to buy their way out of being drafted into the American Civil War, while the poor had no way out. Poor rioters targeted anyone on the street in wealthy-looking clothing, killing them in many cases. Unfortunately, blacks were also targeted, as the poor Irish immigrant participants also resented them for being exempted from the draft.
• The Los Angeles Times reported demonstrators in Beverly Hills, following the death of George Floyd, were heard chanting "EAT THE RICH!"
• 2020 saw protestors outside of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' home brandishing guillotines.
• A downplayed version of this happened with the GameStop short squeeze in early 2021, as the store was floundering to the point that professional stock traders decided to short^{What is shorting?}The investor "borrows" the stock from someone else to return at a later date, so they sell the borrowed stocks immediately, then buy them back (ideally at a lower price) later for return, typically at a profit the company's stock. Reddit subforum "r/wallstreetbets" caught wind of this, and bought up the stock partially because they felt it was undervalued to start with, and partially as a means to deliver payback to the wealthy investors who'd played a large role in The Great Recession of 2007-2008. This ended up causing billions of dollars in losses to certain hedge funds, and was celebrated online as a modern-day redistribution of wealth from the insanely rich to the normal people.
• The implosion of the Titan submersible in 2023 has elements of this, as the incident drew major media attention and sparked polarized responses. On one hand, there was public sympathy for the loss of life and the families affected. On the other, critics seized on the event as a case study in elite risk-taking, pointing to the submersible’s lack of independent certification, and the operator’s earlier remarks downplaying regulation. Not to mention that seats for the voyage to explore the wreck of the Titanic were advertised at about US $250,000 per person; and the high cost in both of the search-and-rescue effort (estimated $1.2 million in U.S. and Canadian agency involvement). Observers also contrasted the extensive coverage given to the incident with the much larger-scale migrant-boat disaster off the coast of Greece just days prior, in which hundreds died or went missing — arguing the contrast illustrated a media and social-media readiness to highlight wealthy adventure tourists over vulnerable victims.^note  To be fair to the media regarding the "Titan" incident, submersible implosions & accidents are extremely-rare events, and since it occurred near the famous wreck of the Titanic, the incident is rather unique and practically writes itself. Whereas the incident near Greece is part of the greater, ongoing Mediterranean migrant crisis, where people by the dozens or hundreds are illegally smuggled across the Mediterranean sea from North Africa to Europe, often in pure discretion; and sadly it's not the first time that a boat carrying hundreds of migrants sank during the traverse.
• When UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered in December 2024, very few people on any side of the political aisle showed any sympathy due to how the company profits from denying people making claims for their medical procedures. Most of the people commenting on the various news articles on the event expressed sympathies towards the people that got screwed over by the health insurance over showing any sympathy towards the CEO or the company.