The Leftists Who Think Stealing Is Awesome!

    If you’re wondering what the hot new trend among Brooklyn progressives is—apparently, it’s stealing from Whole Foods. Stealing is bad, and you shouldn’t do it. It really is as simple as that. Children understand this, even from a young age, and it’s taught to them by their parents, grandparents, teachers, and other mentors. Some people, of course, find themselves in desperate circumstances, and are forced to steal to survive. We may empathize with them, and we may even decide that their situation mitigates the blameworthiness of the offense. However, that doesn’t change the wrongness of stealing. If you catch your kids snatching a candy bar from the grocery store checkout line, you invariably punish them. You don’t commend them for striking a blow against capitalist oppression!

    Which brings me to leftists Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino, who have been roundly and deservedly mocked on social media after participating in a podcast interview for The New York Times titled “The Rich Don’t Play By the Rules. So Why Should I?” The full half-hour discussion is something the late Tom Wolfe could have written as satire. Piker, who resides in a $2.7 million West Hollywood mansion, and Tolentino, whose family is sufficiently well-off to run an alleged human trafficking ring, present themselves as stalwart defenders of the poor and downtrodden engaging in “radical” action against a “violent” system. Piker endorses stealing not just from Whole Foods but also the Louvre. Tolentino says blowing up pipelines is probably moral. Nadja Spiegelman, the host, does a lot of giggling. Already, we are on shaky ground here, since the headline—a direct quote from the host, Nadja Spiegelman—positions Piker, Tolentino, and Spiegelman as a trio of people that should be contrasted with the rich. This is ridiculous: All three of these dopes are members of the wealthy, successful, cultural elite. Spiegelman is a culture editor for the Times, an author, a cartoonist, and the daughter of legendary cartoonist Art Spiegelman (creator of Maus, a well-known graphic novel about the Holocaust). Tolentino is a relatively famous feminist writer of not-exactly modest means. Piker is a wildly successful far-left Twitch streamer and nephew of The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur, who gave him his start. Suffice it to say, these are not people who need to steal to survive.

    And yet, their conversation includes a full-throated defense of shoplifting:

    Spiegelman: Would you steal from the Louvre?

    Piker: Yes.

    Tolentino: I would not be logistically capable of executing such a fact, but would I cheer on every news story of people that I see doing it? Absolutely.

    Piker: I think it’s cool. We've got to get back to cool crimes like that: 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.

    Spiegelman: Would you steal from Whole Foods?

    Tolentino: Yes. And I have, under very specific circumstances. I will say, I think that stealing from a big box store—I’ll just state my platform—it’s neither very significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest or direct action. But I did steal from Whole Foods on several occasions.

    Piker is not being facetious: His brand of left-wing politics apparently holds that stealing things is fun and cool. Tolentino is a bit more equivocating—stealing is not “significant in any way as protest or direct action,” but still she does it. Piker doesn’t want her to feel any guilt about this, since large corporations “factored in” the cost of her theft. He continues:

    Piker: I’m pro-stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers. However, one thing that might even help your ethical dilemma is the fact that the automated process that they design, these companies know will increase shrink, right? So it's actually factored in. The lemons that you stole are factored into the bottom line of these mega-corporations regardless. And they still end up having increased profit margins, because they no longer have to pay the cashiers that they used to hire, as opposed to this automated system, knowing full well that people are still going to be able to steal a lot more efficiently, as a matter of fact, through the automated process.

    Tolentino: Totally. (Yes. She actually said, on a podcast that more than a few people listen to, the word “Totally” using it as a one-word sentence. I weep for the future of mankind.) I was looking things up, and shrinkage is roughly equal internally as externally. These companies expect it from their employees that they are disenfranchising constantly.

    This “factored in” nonsense is basically the “write-it-off” scene from Seinfeld, except articulated with sincerity rather than for mockery. Yes, companies account for the fact that some proportion of their inventory will be stolen; they “factor in” that cost in the sense that they are expecting it. This does not mitigate the fact that it’s a loss for the company. As one X user put it, “If my bike keeps getting stolen and I have to add the cost of a new bike to my yearly commuting budget, well yes, I’ve factored it in. But it still costs me money!”

    For Piker and Tolentino, theft is justified because the big corporations and the billionaires who own them are evil: They steal from their workers. The precise mechanism of this more appalling act of thievery is left unexplained, of course. In what sense are the owners stealing from people who willingly work there—workers who trade their labor for financial compensation, as part of an entirely consensual exchange? But this is the leftist way of thinking: Paying people for their work is theft, actual theft is retribution. 

    Now, it’s unlikely that “micro-looting” has much currency outside of the circles in which Spiegelman evidently runs. More broadly, however, the endorsement of casual anti-social behavior represents a genuine current on the American Left—a view that such conduct is permissible because it’s really “the system” that’s unjust. That idea is likely to gain greater acceptance, and it’s worth saying clearly why it is wrong.

    Of course, the radical chic on display on The Opinions goes back at least to the 1960s. More recently, recall the defense of looting and violence during 2020, including NPR’s inexplicably friendly interview with the author of In Defense of Looting. Spiegelman invokes the “looting around the 2020 protests,” which was, she says, “such a huge talking point. It made people so uncomfortable. And I’m curious: What do you think the root of that is?” Huh?

    The idea that opposition to looting is confusing or in need of serious investigation is both ridiculous and alarming. But that’s why The Golf Room is your “go-to” site for all things logical! To that end, I investigated and here is what I came up with: People dislike looting because they would rather their stuff wasn’t taken...especially by force. There is no deeper “there” there. Pretty good, huh? You are such an idiot!

    Yet many on the leftist fringe believe that Americans have a barely suppressed taste for crime. Piker, for example, implies that many regard Luigi Mangione’s murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as justified. The actual number is about 20% according to most polls. I don't know if 20% defines “many,” but think about that. The number really is huge for the crime we are talking about! Out of every 100 people, 20 of them believe that murder is justified because, why...a guy runs a giant healthcare company? Really??  On this view, Americans ostensibly think that the “system” is comprehensively “broken,” and that that brokenness justifies radical, illegal action. Not only are individual laws unjust, but the whole system of law is unjust. So why not steal?

    This stance, or variants of it, seems increasingly common on the Left. Take, for example, the plan offered by Tom Steyer—a leading candidate for governor of California—to arrest and prosecute ICE agents enforcing federal immigration law in his state. Or consider the growing tax revolt among Democrats, predicated on the idea that if the rich don’t pay their fair share, neither should you. Such politics, one suspects, are likely to become characteristic of the 2028 Democratic primary.

    These ideas are profoundly corrosive. A healthy political order depends on the collective commitment to play by shared rules and to acknowledge the legitimacy of those rules. Yapping loudly about shoplifting as political action cuts at the very foundation of our society. That is, in fact, what “micro-looting” amounts to: an attack on the social order as such.

    Stealing, in other words, isn’t bold political action. It is a way of making sure that the rest of society gets a little poorer just to defend itself against your antisocial behavior. There is nothing noble about that. It is just another behavior that eats away at the foundations of our society.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com