Three days before a 31-year-old male stormed the White House Correspondents Dinner, hoping to assassinate President Donald Trump and members of his cabinet, the New York Times published a 35-minute video titled: “‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’ Why petty theft might be the new political protest.” In it, a Times editor interviewed two other members of the media aristocracy about the moral code shared by a large swathe of young Americans.
That code justifies theft—and even violence—when harnessed to a fashionably left-wing cause. None of the participants—podcasting celebrity Hasan Piker, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, and Times opinion editor Nadja Spiegelman—expressed alarm at the glorification of crime. They smirked and giggled through the discussion, betraying a breezy indifference to lawbreaking.
It was striking enough that the Times published the video after reviewing the final cut. The paper was not embarrassed by the participants’ ignorance and entitlement. Nor was it troubled, apparently, by their debate over whether the December 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was “actually effective political action” or merely—and disappointingly—effective “political consciousness-raising.”
But after the assassination attempt on Trump on April 25 by yet another young megalomaniac, one might have thought that the Times would want to distance itself from its hipster commentators and their ends-justify-the-means morality.
It apparently feels no such discomfort, however, and thus has left the video online. That is fortunate. The exchange offers a more revealing window into left-wing political violence than the latest would-be assassin’s predictably disjointed manifesto. When future archeologists seek to date the moment that the demise of the West became inevitable, this artefact of peak decadence will be a strong contender.
The video’s most memorable feature is the visual contrast between the participants’ studied downtown chic and their professed identification with what Piker calls the “masses.” Tolentino’s makeup is flawless, accentuating her exotic feline beauty; her nails gleam with shell-pink lacquer; her carefully styled waves glow with tawny highlights; her low-cut denim tank top, jeans, and high-heeled boots signal urban sophisticate. This outfit may not be ideally suited to organizing the proletarian “sabotage and, sort of, engagement with property destruction” she evokes with wistful nostalgia. But it fits perfectly in the all-white Brooklyn loft where the interview was filmed.
Piker sports a powder-blue, long-sleeved Ralph Lauren shirt, complete with polo pony logo. His tennis shoes are by Adidas, the very embodiment of the “system of global capital” that he claims to want to overthrow, complete with allegations of labor abuses in its Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indonesian factories.
Admittedly, Spiegelman’s plumpness might earn her some demerits when trying to enter a Soho nightspot, but her Times affiliation can do wonders to overcome deviations from the optimal clubbing look.
These three analysts of compensatory crime speak into state-of-the-art microphones, the product of centuries of Western technological development, protected by patent rights that they disparage as capitalist expropriation.
The video’s most memorable aural aspect is how dopey the participants sound, especially the females. Tolentino and Spiegelman’s speech is clotted with the usual female verbal tics—“like,” “I mean,” “you know,” “right?” “kind of”—and variations thereof: “It’s like, I mean,” “It’s like and I think I mean.”
One of the most frequent of those tics is: “I feel like”:
“I feel like that’s taxpayer funded . . . ”
“But I feel like what I’m seeing on TikTok and social media . . .”
“I mean, I feel like Mike Davis wrote about this . . .”
And a double whammy: “And, and I was like, but I feel like part of what I’m seeing around me is that people feel like the laws are immoral.”
“It feels like” is also prominent: “It feels like finally, someone can actually do something about health,” in reference to the murder of CEO Thompson.
The speakers even feel their own feelings: “And yet right now it feels like I agree with you,” Tolentino tells Spiegelman, in reference to the wonderfulness of the “political destruction of property.”
This “I feel like” reflex is more telling than its vapidity suggests. It marks the eclipse of rationality and the rise of the emotion-based thinking that characterize the conversation as a whole. That substitution of feeling for rational thought is among the signal traits of contemporary academia. Those traits have been carried into the body politic for decades by graduates like Piker (Rutgers, B.A. in Political Science and Communications Studies) and Tolentino (University of Virginia, B.A. in English). They now fuel the Left’s moral code.
Trait Number One: Unalloyed ignorance of basic economics. The dominant theme of the Times video is that because corporations are supposedly stealing from their employees and their customers, it is appropriate to steal from them.
Piker: “I’m pro stealing from big corporations because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers.”
Tolentino: It “is basically true, right, [that] every major grocery chain [steals] from workers and consumers.”
Piker: “Wage theft is the most consequential amount of theft that takes place in the United States of America.”
The participants never explain how they determine that prices and wages are confiscatory, or how to know when they are not. They show no understanding of the forces of supply and demand that set prices for goods, services, and labor. Nor do they grasp how difficult it is to build a business and survive in a competitive market, or the risks involved. Like self-righteous Western teenagers everywhere (that is, individuals enjoying the highest standard of living in human history), they simply assume that any successful business must be doing something immoral. Never mind that a firm can earn a profit only by meeting a customer demand or need.
Successful individuals also are thieves. Wealth, if possessed by someone other than oneself, is zero-sum: it is accrued by making someone else poorer. Piker: “The rules are already designed in a way where if you steal from the poor, you become rich. If you steal from the wealthy, you go to prison.” Spiegelman: “I feel like what I’m seeing on TikTok and social media is people saying that they’re stealing from Whole Foods . . . out of a feeling of anger and moral justification, because the rich don’t play by the rules. . . . And Jeff Bezos has too much money. He’s a billionaire.”
We are not told how much wealth Bezos should be allowed to accrue, after billions of customers voluntarily flocked to his new retailing structure.
Trait Two: Play-acting at being revolutionaries. Tolentino finds the non-academic world insufficiently developed in its revolutionary goals. The concept of “microlooting”—stealing as a way to get back at greedy corporations—“kind of speaks to an attenuation of the tactical language of direct action, you know what I mean?” she says.
But “microlooting” is at least a first step toward the necessary class-war fervor: “I think it’s great that the valence of property is kind of on the table as something to be toyed with in terms of direct action.” (Tolentino can’t even reproduce High Theory articulately: “the valence of property” is no known term in the neo-Marxist academic code.)
We are to imagine Tolentino, in her sexy boots and carefully applied foundation and blusher, leading an anarchist cell planning to bomb the stock exchange: “I feel like we’ve forgotten there’s a long and storied history of sabotage and engagement with property destruction,” she says brightly.
Piker is also dissatisfied with Americans’ abortive class consciousness: “Concepts such as microlooting indicate that there is an energy there, just like you said. And yet many Americans, I think, are totally oblivious to this political language. They lack the political education. They lack the class consciousness to recognize their position in society and lack the capacity, unfortunately, to engage in some kind of organized disruption that would be infinitely more effective.”
Piker’s own “position in society,” along with his college professors, is among the sheltered elite. He would have us believe, however, that he is about to go out and organize some “labor militancy.”
Trait Number Three: Unalloyed ignorance of themselves. Whole Foods is mentioned 17 times in the Times’s microlooting dialogue. It is the polestar in the participants’ universe; their lives and those of their peers revolve around it. They do not feel any incongruity in staging their allegedly revolutionary platform in the context of a high-end supermarket catering to such Western affectations as the desire for “organic” products (including, of course, “organic” hair conditioner and “organic” paper towels).
The Times video begins with clips of young adults justifying stealing because of hunger, deprivation, and the need to stay alive. “It’s a survival technique. Gotta eat to live, gotta steal to eat,” says one Instagram poster.
None of these able-bodied thieves needs to steal to eat; like any other American, they are awash in cheap food. Of course, if they want “organic avocados,” they will pay more than for a regular avocado.
But if they are so straitened, maybe they skip the avocado entirely and shop in a budget supermarket. Ground beef in my proletarian Key Food supermarket in Manhattan costs $5 a pound—or $1.25 a serving. Planning ahead, buying unprocessed primary ingredients, and, god forbid, actually cooking lie outside these spoiled consumers’ lifestyles, however. Yet they think of themselves as oppressed, just as colleges teach their nonwhite, nonmale, non-heterosexual students to think of themselves as “marginalized.”
Trait Number Four: Self-aggrandizement masquerading as principle. Rarely since Moliere’s Tartuffe has there been such a shameless display of hypocrisy. The practitioners of politicized theft portray themselves as crusaders for economic justice, whereas they just want free stuff. Likewise, college protesters, cozily encamped in their campus quad, portray themselves as martyrs, whereas they’re just having fun partying in their North Face tents and cutting the classes for which their parents pay $60,000 or more a year. Likewise, New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani and his political followers portray themselves as champions of the common man, whereas they just want to cannibalize the wealth created over centuries by entrepreneurial daring and hard work.
Trait Number Five: The inability to think in terms of principle. Spiegelman makes a fleeting reference to what she calls a “categorical imperative-type thing,” but the conversation is otherwise devoid of any recognition that the “microlooters” live by a rule that, if widely adopted, would torpedo the possibility of civil life. Spiegelman asks her co-panelists what they think should be legal that is currently criminalized. She should have asked: What do you think should be stolen from you?
The inability to apply neutral principles pervades campus culture as well. Faculty and administrators assert the right to silence speech that they deem harmful to “underrepresented minorities,” without considering whether they would approve the censorship power if lodged in conservative hands.
Trait Number Six: Phony empathy. The advocates of political crime think that excusing certain lawless acts demonstrates compassion. Tolentino lauds Americans’ alleged support for stealing on behalf of the supposed downtrodden:
We understand it’s well within the collective consciousness, that stealing for need or purpose, you know. It’s something that we understand and feel quite friendly towards. And I think if someone were, let’s say, walking out of Whole Foods with an IKEA bag of whatever and giving it to the people, you know, sheltering underneath the scaffolding at the jail going up in Brooklyn next door, you know, like, you know, I think most people would agree that if someone were to be stealing with a purpose. We love that in America. We do. We can love it again. We just have to do it with a purpose.
(Whole Foods is not the only multinational consumer corporation to which these boutique Robin Hoods are tied umbilically, it seems. IKEA is apparently a fixture, too.)
Despite their working-class-adjacent self-image, these crime whisperers are clueless about ordinary wage workers. Tolentino offers “blowing up a pipeline” as a commendable crime. But it is the blue-collar laborer who will be most hurt by industrial sabotage. Tolentino finds it “shocking” that the mere “interruption of the capital flow of the workday” is criminalized. It is again unclear what she is referring to, but without “capital flow,” there is no “workday.”
Trait Number Six: Substituting the abstract for the tangible and the metaphorical for the literal. The conversants chastise the public for caring more about physical acts of violence than about “systemic” and “structural” violence. Piker rues the fact that “we never look at systemic forms of violence in the same way that we do [at] individuals breaking that social contract.”
By “systemic forms of violence,” Piker means structural racism and police brutality. By “systemic forms of theft,” he means the “extraction of surplus labor value”—in other words, paying a market wage. The academy pioneered this substitution of abstract categories of harm for concrete ones. As intentional acts of racial discrimination became harder to find and litigate, it advanced the concept of “systemic racism,” which requires no identifiable perpetrator to allege racial harm. On college campuses, underrepresented minorities and overrepresented women claim to be targets of “systemic violence,” even as those fawning colleges twist themselves into knots to recruit and retain blacks, Hispanics, and females.
The systemic violence equation in academia runs as follows: speech that challenges victim identity is “hate speech.” “Hate speech” is violence, and the person using such speech is assaulting the vulnerable. The consequences of such verbal sleights of hand were manifest in the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University last September. The shooter justified the murder by accusing the conservative thought leader of being a “hater:” “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out”—it must, apparently, be snuffed out. A student petition opposing Kirk’s appearance at Utah Valley University used the same equation between unorthodox speech, hate, and harm: “When speakers with a record of targeting marginalized groups are given the microphone, the result isn’t dialogue—it’s harm.”
Kirk did not “target” or “hate” “marginalized groups;” he civilly argued against their claim to marginalized status.
The Times talkers take this melodramatic rhetoric to new heights of bathos. Piker said that the assassination of Brian Thompson was a “fascinating story . . . for me”—not a tragic or disturbing story, but a “fascinating” one. As a general matter, Americans are “very draconian about crime and punishment,” Piker noted with contempt. “They’re very black and white on this issue”—the “issue” being murder.
And yet, when it came to the slaying of Thompson, Americans seemed to have taken a page out of Friedrich Engels’s Communist playbook, Piker observed with approval. Engels pioneered the concept of “social murder”: murder allegedly carried out by social structures, not by individuals. The celebrations of Thompson’s killing showed a recognition that Thompson was “engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder,” Piker explained. “The systematized forms of violence. The structural violence of poverty, for profit paywalled system of health care in this country.” The public is thus becoming more enlightened, in Piker’s view: “I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place.”
To say that they understood why the “death had taken place”—or, to skip the indirection, why Luigi Mangione gunned Thompson down in cold blood—is to suggest that Thompson’s murder had a defensible rationale.
These mannered metaphors are lethal ones. Thompson was not engaged in any form of murder, social or individual, nor in any form of violence, systemized or personal. He was one manager in a hybrid public-private medical complex that has been regulated into admitted forms of dysfunction. To accuse Thompson of “social murder” and “systematized violence” invites, in today’s narcissistic moral universe, vigilantism.
No one in the Times conversation condemned that vigilante killing as an abomination. The closest they get, during a concluding “smash or pass” quiz on what things “should be OK but currently [aren’t] O.K,” is a listless “no” to Spiegelman’s question whether murder should be OK. Tolentino hesitates regretfully. This is hardly a rousing repudiation of political violence.
What exercises the participants instead is Democrats’ failure to leverage Thompson’s murder to eliminate “privatized” health care. “But I think and I find that kind of one of the most egregious missed opportunities that we have seen in recent political history,” says Tolentino, with the strangled back-of-the-throat laugh of the world-weary young. It was not the murder that was egregious. What was egregious was the inability to exploit a killing that “was served up for someone to just spike that ball over the other side,” as Tolentino puts it. “I felt enormously frustrated in the weeks following that, that every single, like, I was like, I assumed I don’t know why I thought that Democrats would immediately take this up as pushing a sort of unified message towards universal health care. . . . I thought it would be, I don’t, and I don’t know why I expected that, but I, I do not think that it was effective political action. I do think it was an effective act of political consciousness raising.”
Scorecard: Luigi Mangione gets an A for starting the ball rolling. Democrats get an F for lousy follow-through. The anti-corporate crusaders will likely get another chance to do better, thanks to the instrumental morality expressed in this conversation.
Spiegelman asks Piker and Tolentino to rate “legitimate” targets of theft. Some are predictable: “Whole Foods,” “big-box stores,” “big corporations.” One, however, is a surprise: the Louvre. Piker is immediately on board. Tolentino admits her limits as a thief beyond Whole Foods lemons and such but is otherwise enthusiastic: “I would not be logistically capable of executing such a feat. But would I cheer on every news story of people that I see doing it? Absolutely, absolutely.”
The standard for acceptable crime is whether it is “cool.” “We gotta get back to cool crimes like [robbing the Louvre],” Piker says. “Bank robberies. Stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature. I feel like that’s way cooler than the 7,000th new cryptocurrency scheme that people are engaging in.”
Piker and his fellow talkers can always deflect accusations of depravity by claiming irony. But neither the question nor the answers can be written off as tongue-in-cheek. That Spiegelman came up with the question at all is a revelation. What is going on here is not merely the glorification of make-believe anti-capitalist rebellion but a hate-filled attack on Western civilization itself. Stealing from the Louvre satisfies none of the criteria advanced by Piker and Tolentino to justify crime. It does not stick it to the Man. It does not redistribute wealth. It does not trigger the collapse of private health care. Corporations don’t own the Louvre’s collections; humanity does. Those art works are the product of man’s desire to create beauty; a vast majority of them preceded the Industrial Revolution’s dark Satanic mills. The thieves who plunder museum holdings are not living hand-to-mouth. Their loot will not be released into some worker’s collective but will disappear into secret, heavily guarded compounds.
“Priceless artefacts” are priceless because they have come down to us, miraculously, from a past that is no longer accessible. They are not fungible and not replaceable. Robbing museums is not crime with an alleged purpose (not that having a purpose would excuse such predation). Cheering on such crime reflects the impulse to destroy, to tear down what individuals a million times more talented than you have created, whose accomplishments you could never replicate.
This is the morality of children—self-involved, unprincipled, self-promoting.
Piker calls for “chaos. Full chaos. Let’s go.” He and his peers admire themselves for courting anarchy, secure in the belief that their own comfortable lives will never be in jeopardy. But the civilization that they know nothing about, yet take for granted, can in fact be eroded into nothingness. Every time someone ducks under a subway turnstile in New York City (which a rider now witnesses almost every time he enters the underground), every time someone steals from a drugstore despite the plexiglass shields to protect the increasingly vulnerable merchandise, another brick in the magnificent edifice of the rule of law is dislodged. Those criminals are confident in their lawbreaking because progressive prosecutors have been schooled in the academic theory of systemic bias. And now the plunderers have the media empyrean cheering them on.
The psychic meltdown of the corporate and cultural elites in the wake of the George Floyd race riots, in which virtually every mainstream institution declared American society racist to the core, was only a warm-up to the current glamorization of law-breaking. The Times video expresses a worldview that gives the selfish, the greedy, the mediocre, and the lazy permission to prey on others and to justify that predation in righteous terms. More theft and more death will follow.
