The New York Times Celebrates Petty Theft

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we had what the great Tom Wolfe indelibly dubbed “radical chic”: the tendency of rich leftists to support causes that, if they triumphed, would destroy their comfortable benefactors utterly. We’re way beyond that now. Today, rich leftists don’t just support the Marxist revolutionaries who would destroy the comforts of society that those leftists take for granted; they’re actually joining them in small criminal and anarchic acts, all while the intelligentsia cheers them on from the pages of the New York Times.

It’s all fun and games until the Marxist regime is fully in power. Then these rich leftists will realize what dupes they were, but that realization will come while they’re waiting on line in the gulag for a scrap of moldy bread and some watery soup, before they go back to splitting rocks.

And so we come to Jia Tolentino, a 37-year-old writer for the New Yorker who, according to the Daily Mail, “owns a stunning $2.2 million brownstone home in Brooklyn,” and yet “proudly admitted to shoplifting because she believes it is not ‘morally wrong’ to steal from corporations.”

This proud admission came in Wednesday New York Times article entitled “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” It’s an extended discussion between Tolentino, the Times’ Opinion culture editor, Nadja Spiegelman, and Communist gadfly Hasan Piker, all about “why petty theft might be the new political protest.” Spiegelman kicks it off by announcing that she is “proposing a new term: Microlooting. People are taking small things from big corporations and they’re feeling justified. But is it a slippery slope? What’s going on with our moral code?”

What’s going on with our moral code is that smug, short-sighted leftists are setting it aside for their own convenience and to engage in some fashionable virtue-signaling, without realizing how much they will miss it when it’s gone.

Far from missing our moral code when it’s gone, however, Piker says of stealing from big corporations: “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.”

Asked if she would steal from Whole Foods, Tolentino answers: “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.”

Tolentino tells a story about how she once stole four lemons from Whole Foods, and explains: “At the time I was like, I had not been to Whole Foods. I had a bit more consumer discipline about where I was spending my money then, and I already felt like I was in the hole, even by shopping there. And it certainly felt, in a utilitarian sense, I was like, this is not a big deal. Right, guys?”

Right: For these people, it’s not a big deal, because they figure that the corporations have plenty of money, and they are Marxists in favor of forced redistribution of wealth anyway. Piker says: “I’m pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers.”

These comfortable, wealthy leftists approve of stealing because it’s a small foretaste of that redistribution. It also helps them justify their support of the legal policies that have made shopping a much more unpleasant and time-consuming experience than it once was, with numerous items now displayed behind locked plexiglass cases, since the store owners have no recourse against shoplifters who steal items valued at below a certain amount. The corporations can handle the loss, you see, and deserve to do so in order to establish economic justice.

The mainstreaming of petty theft likewise helps leftists justify continuing to elect the Democrat administrations that have made our cities crime-ridden hellholes. The crime, you see, is all part of establishing that economic justice. The big corporations deserve to be squeezed. Power to the people and all that.

Sure. But one day the thieves and their allies, thus coddled and encouraged, will come to the sumptuous residences of Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker, and will not exempt them for all their own little adventures in petty theft. They will find, to their horror, that they were The Rich all along.