The New York Times’s Latte Logic of Social Collapse

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.”

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......SNIP

The Times has reverted to late 1960s fashionable cocktail party radicalism with articles like this. Its amusing that Hasan Piker is the face of that fashionable radicalism. He would never, ever, meet the standards for a late 60s radical that the New York City elite would suck up to. I guess standards have degraded in a lot of ways.

City Journal does a decent job rebutting the arguments that the Times makes, as if they need rebutting. The rebuttal can be summed up as - Capitalism has pulled more of the world’s population out of poverty than any other economic system in the history of the world. The rules of Capitalism are that you have to pay for goods as a means of exchange. If you don’t do that, the system doesn’t work and you revert to pre-Capitalism and poverty. The idea that the rich don’t play by the rules on a mass-scale is wrong. If certain rich don’t play by the rules, then fight to hold them to account.

The left are not "soft on crime" as we used to say.

They are actively in favor of it as a revolutionary force.

The revolution is against the working class and financed by billionaires, and never mind the rhetorical indirection.

That’s too long to read. In keeping with longstanding custom I will comment on the article without reading it: petty theft is petty when only one person does it. It’s a fine line between petty theft and looting.

On second look it actually is not that long and it is worth reading. Ironically the New York Times is a capitalist enterprise and would not like it if you took a newspaper without paying for it but according to these people it is your duty to take as many copies from newsstands and newspaper machines and also to copy and paste the contents of their articles into public websites without compensation to them. In my experience with some of the less, shall we say, law abiding people I have known, the most indignant are thieves who have had something stolen from them. Nothing pisses a thief off more than having something stolen from him. The New York Times will use the full force of the law to protect their copyrights and their physical products.

The number one threat of social collapse is the federal debt. We’re now at 100% GDP. It’s just a matter of time in the near future, huge cuts in welfare spending will be needed. It will be in the form of EBT cuts and when that happens, riots will occur in the magnitude never seen.

The result will be whites fleeing to the countryside, not suburbs, where they can build communal defensive enclaves and start over. Anyone who passes the line will be shot on sight.

“I feel like” these worthless people would be some of the first to die, should society collapse because of the spread of their idiotic, infantile, ignorant ideology.

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