NYT Now Promoting ‘Microlooting’ as Social Justice

It’s pretty clear that one of the greatest threats to the left is social trust. 

I can say that with such confidence because just about everything the left does erodes it. Our public school teachers are encouraged to trans kids behind their parents’ backs, government programs openly promote fraud, and prosecutors and liberals always side with criminals. 

So it shouldn’t surprise me that Hasan Piker is the darling of the media, and that the New York Times featured Piker and Jia Tolentino, a writer at The New Yorker, to describe their love for stealing. 

The Left is rebranding theft as social justice. pic.twitter.com/b6b4xJQadv

— Dante (@ItsDante718) April 23, 2026

Stealing, you see, is a form of promoting social justice, just as open borders, decarceration, DEI, rioting, assaulting law enforcement officers, and killing health care executives are. 

This concept of “social murder” is what led to 100M deaths under communist rule

And the NYT is promoting it pic.twitter.com/CiHRc353gD

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 23, 2026

Yes, you heard that right. The Times’ favorite Democrat also explained how Luigi Mangione murdering Brian Thompson was really totally justified. 

Spiegelman: But then when you feel this much anger — and it doesn’t feel like there’s hope for it to be changed in a regulatory way — I think that’s when you get to things like Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing the C.E.O. of United Healthcare, and there being an outpouring of glee for murder online, because it feels like, finally, someone can actually do something about health care.

I think 41 percent of Gen Z-ers felt that murder was morally justified. But it’s scary to be in a society where people feel that murder is morally justified. And I’m curious how we thread that line.

Piker: Yeah. Friedrich Engels wrote about the concept of social murder. And Brian Thompson, as the United Healthcare C.E.O., was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder. The systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty, the for-profit, paywalled system of health care in this country — and the consequences of that are tremendous amounts of pain, tremendous amounts of violence, tremendous amounts of deaths. And that was a fascinating story for me, because Americans are very draconian about crime and punishment. They’re very black and white on this issue.

And yet, because of the pervasive pain that the private health care system had created for the average American, I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place. Even before they knew who the shooter was or what the motive was, we had universalized this pain so much so that virtually every American has a similar experience. A shared experience, where they have a loved one who spent their last days — instead of spending them with their family — spending it on the phone, talking to their health care provider to maybe get a little bit of economic respite so they don’t carry on medical debt for their next generation, for their next of kin.

That’s a harrowing process for a lot of people. And for them, that is murder; for them, that is torture. And that is the reason why, I think, the reaction to Luigi Mangione, especially by younger generations, was not so negative.

Yep, just a normal conversation at the New York Times, whose newsroom erupted in rage and fear that the paper allowed a U.S. senator to write an Op/Ed, and which fired the editor who approved it. 

And that Op/Ed? It argued that allowing people to riot and look was wrong. 

You can’t make it up. Total moral inversion. 

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.

I’ve been involved in a neighborhood mutual aid group since 2021. And so every week I would go get groceries for Miss Nancy, my now family friend who lived nearby, and she wanted to go to Whole Foods. She wanted food from Whole Foods. And I was like, OK, great. And so I’d be getting Miss Nancy all of her groceries, and then I would finish, and I’d be like, oh my God, four lemons, I forgot four lemons. And on several occasions I was like, I’m just going to go back, grab those four lemons and get the hell out.

It’s apparently now called “microlooting” and is perfectly acceptable because the system is oppressive. 

No, I am not kidding. Capitalism and property are evils that must be eliminated, so stealing is a form of #resistance or something. 

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. 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.

Spiegelman: But what about the argument that if everyone just starts stealing wantonly from these self-checkout machines, Whole Foods will eventually raise the prices?

Piker: Yeah, chaos. Full chaos. Let’s go. I mean, look, I’m in favor of fast and free buses and also government-owned storefronts. And two of those policies, the mayor of this beautiful city is currently working on.

Spiegelman: Would you encourage stealing in the same way from a Zohran Mamdani-run, city-owned grocery store with lower prices, and why?

Piker: No, I would not, because I feel like that’s taxpayer-funded, it’s union labor, and the prices are also adjusted regardless.

Tolentino: I think that hypothetical is interesting, right? Because if you look at it from a categorical imperative type thing, what if everybody did this? The converse is, oh, what if every major grocery chain stole from workers and consumers? And that is basically true, right? It speaks to the thing where harm committed by the individual, strangely, continually draws more ire than the same harm being committed by a structure. And so I kind of am inclined toward this. Everyone, try it. See what happens.

This is why, in urban areas, everything is behind a plexiglass shield. 

Piker and Tolentino are two of the most privileged people in the entire world. They have access to things that average people in the United States, no less the third world, can only dream about. 

The Hasan Piker portion of this interview is understandably getting a lot of attention but can we also talk about how Jia Tolentino thinks that coffee go-cups are the ultimate moral evil but domestic terrorism should be allowed pic.twitter.com/xWjV2WUFyS

— Kat Rosenfield (@katrosenfield) April 23, 2026

And they are complaining about the system. As they sit down with a New York Times reporter in a nice room, discussing how the system oppresses everyone. 

For God’s sake. If you ask the average person they claim to be fighting for, they would, to a person, condemn the very behavior that these communists are valorizing. 

I propose an experiment: send a million liberals to an island, each with a million dollars, and allow them to build a society. We can even help them by building the infrastructure of a city, and then let them figure out how to run it without police, businesses, and all the things they claim are unjust. 

Let them have open borders. We can ship all the illegal aliens there that they want. Give them all the homeless people they know so well how to help. Want Haitians? Somalians? Syrians? 

Have at it. And enjoy your MS-13 and Tren de Aragua pals too. 

I’m sure it would be paradise. 

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