Many radical pro-crime lefties, like New Yorker's Jie Tolentino, have criminal parents who got justice

 by Monica Showalter

Leftist elites are a spoiled, entitled, bunch and as a result, have little contact with the real world and all the havoc their ideas create there. They call for crime, they get crime, and then they call for more crime, blaming President Trump.

But there's something else weird that might be worth a second look, particularly on this strange pro-crime stance which has cropped up on the left in the past twenty years: The criminal pasts of their parents. 

Noam Blum, who is a podcaster and contributor to Tablet and Commentary magazines, put his finger on it, citing the case of New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, who proudly said in a New York Times podcast a few days ago that she had shoplifted numerous times from Whole Foods as her social-justice protest.

Perhaps childish people are abnormally attached to their parents, and in a funny way, want to defend them -- by making the consequences for crime the bad guy, not the crime itself.

In Tolentino's case, she claimed her parents had been innocent victims of bureaucratic paperwork foul-ups, but those who follow the human trafficking trade said her parents' deeds were doozies.

According to MEMSNYC, a Queens, New York City-based nonprofit that combats human trafficking:

In Jia Tolentino's blog post, she talked about her parents’ work to set up an agency that gave Filipinos jobs as nurses and teachers in the United States. Though upon first glance, this work may seem positive, an opportunity for immigrants to gain employment, but as she highlights, “any business involving immigration is inherently unethical." These labor agencies, especially Filipino owned ones, are the modern manifestation of institutionalized trafficking. Her parents stole almost 2.75 million USD and indicted on 40 counts of money laundering, conspiracy to smuggle immigrants, and visa frauds. They charged each Filipino teacher $10,000 for a visa, but less than 100 of the 273 teachers brought to the USA had jobs.

Jia's parents are simply one example of the common and modern trend of trafficking, particularly the labor trafficking of Filipino migrants. Jia is the example of the culture normalizing and excusing trafficking because it is does not match history's depiction.

 

Apparently, they were exploiters, taking thousands in fees from hopeful Filipina teachers and nurses who sought employment in the U.S., forcing them to take out loans, and reportedly pocketing 50% of their salaries. They got busted and had to pay hefty fines. 

It's not surprising she considers the system 'bad' then, if mom and dad, boots on the necks of migrants, are always 'right.'

Another one named in that vein was Wajahat Ali, a New York Times and Atlantic contributor whose schtick is that Americans are anti-Muslim racists with completely unreasonable suspicions about Muslims who hate America. Get a load.

He, too, is all in for crime, because his parents did this:

Soon after 9/11, his parents, who sold academic software, were arrested and imprisoned for mail fraud, wire fraud and other counts as part of a large Microsoft anti-piracy criminal indictment. They spent nearly five years in prison.

Sound like the kinds of migrants who should be allowed in to 'diversify' our American values?

Ali thinks so. And if they do something fraudy, well then America is the problem. He's said in various interviews that they were targeted for their stealings because they were Pakistani Muslims, rather than because of anything they did, so the system, see, was racist.

He's quite a piece of work.

Another one whose name came up on the thread was Chesa Boudin, the former San Francisco district attorney and Hugo Chavez translator, whose parents were literally domestic terrorists, and served long jail terms, while Bill Ayers was left to raise him in his "guilty as sin, free as a bird -- America is a great country" values.

Was it loyalty to mom and dad that made him let every criminal off the hook, and got himm recalled by San Francisco's lefty voters as a result? One wonders if he had an axe to grind.

There also are a couple of overseas examples of this resentment fueling leftwing pro-crime stances.

Chilean actor Pedro Pascal had parents who were doctors and radical leftists who fled Chile after the 1973 Allende dictatorship fell. They got asylum first in Denmark, then here in the states, then his father began a checkered medical career in Southern California. According to Wikipedia:

 His parents returned to Chile in 1995 after his father Dr. José P. Balmaceda was accused of stealing fertility patients' eggs and embryos and implanting them in other women without their knowledge and consent.[21] After his mother's death, he began using his maternal surname professionally as a tribute to her and because he felt that people in the US had difficulty pronouncing his paternal surname, Balmaceda.[19]

Really? More likely, his dad was an embarrassment. But none of this got him to stop his pro-crime left-wing activism.

There also was Rafael Correa, the former president of Ecuador. Young Rafael was the son of an illegal alien in the states who dealt drugs, got deported, and ended up raising young Correa in Ecuador. He grew up to be president of Ecuador on an anti-American ticket, aligned himself with Hugo Chavez, and left Ecuador -- once a very pleasant place -- a crime pit that it's still trying to clean up after.

There's probably some meaning to this pattern of childish leftists with guilty parents hating justice for criminals in all these examples found largely among the intelligentsia of the various elites. There's also a strong ungrateful migrant thread running through most of it (Boudin, of course, was from an anti-American communist background, the rest were the children of migrant criminals). The conclusion here is that the U.S. needs to vet its migrants more closely for nothing else to prevent producing people like these. 

It seems significant that many of those who hate U.S. justice seem to be seeking to avenge their criminal parents as only resentful children can.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/04/crime_and_resentment_many_radical_pro_crime_lefties_like_the_new_yorker_s_jie_tolentino_have_parents_who_committed_crimes_and_got_justice.html