"The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules So Why Should I?" Ask Three Rich Leftists Celebrating Theft and Murder
Hasan Piker's praise of stealing and murder once again shows that wokeness and its telltale moral inversions are a smokescreen for the wealth and privilege of the Left
In its ever-expanding effort to find its way deeper into the gutter, the New York Times has published a cozy interview with Hasan Piker, the Twitch streamer who said that America deserved 9/11 and that he would vote for Hamas over Israel. Piker is a favorite destination for top-tier Democratic politicians; Zohran Mamdani, Ro Khanna, and AOC have all appeared on his stream. And in his New York Times interview, he expanded his belief system from support for terrorism to include praise for cold blooded murder and theft.
Piker called himself “pro-piracy all the way, like, across the board.” He said he’d steal a car and steal from the Louvre: “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.”
Piker also justified the murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson, on the grounds that Thompson “was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder,” whatever that is.
It’s absolutely wild for the New York Times to be promoting people straight up praising stealing and holding up murder as a moral good.
How our literary elites, the people who hold themselves up as better than the rest of us hoi polloi, have fallen.
But the craziest thing about this interview is how wealthy everyone bragging about stealing is.
The headline on the Times piece reads, ‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” which is hilarious, because the three individuals involved in the interview are all rich. Piker owns a $3 million home in Los Angeles. He is being interviewed by a New York Times journalist positing “microlooting” as a political act of resistance, Nadja Spiegelman, who is the daughter of the famous writer and comic Art Spiegelman, author of the Maus comic books about the Holocaust. The third person making up the Times’ cozy, pro-theft trio is writer Jia Tolentino, who apparently owns a $2 million brownstone as well as a second home upstate.
These people don’t happen to be rich and also happen to justify stealing. They justify stealing because they are rich—and they are hoping you won’t notice. Across the country, millions of Americans are feeling the pinch of higher gas prices and inflation. But it’s rich writers and trust fund socialists stealing food and justifying it—and sneering at the good people of this country for refusing to emulate them.
“Many Americans . . . lack 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,” laments Piker, incapable of realizing that what he’s calling a lack of “political education” is actually just your most basic moral compass.
These people don’t happen to be rich and happen to justify stealing. They justify stealing because they are rich—and they are hoping you won’t notice.
These three commentators spend immense amounts of effort dressing up their belief that they have a right to the property of others, using highfalutin words and references to socialist writers to cloak what they actually think: What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.
“I think it’s great that the valence of property is on the table as something to be toyed with, in terms of direct action,” says Tolentino at one point.
Does that include the “valence” of her own $2.2 million property? Inquiring minds wish to know!
But it’s not just the hypocrisy on display.
As the interview clearly shows, rich Leftists have abandoned the Judeo-Christian binary between right and wrong that the rest of America lives by. Instead, they believe in the woke view that the West is inherently evil and the so-called oppressed inherently virtuous, even when they are terrorists or murderers or thieves. By standing up for the allegedly powerless, unbelievably wealthy and privileged people like Piker get to be virtuous by proxy, enjoying the massive privileges of the system they pretend to hate while preaching the kind of lawlessness that destroys societies and imperils people with fewer means than they have.
You have to be pretty well off not to understand the consequences of taking things that don’t belong to you. But just listen to how the New York Times journalist justifies it: “What I’m seeing on TikTok and social media is people saying that they’re stealing from Whole Foods not just for the thrill of it, but out of a feeling of anger and moral justification. Because the rich don’t play by the rules, so why should I? And Jeff Bezos has too much money — he’s a billionaire — so why should I have to pay for organic avocados? My friends and I have started calling this microlooting, because it has a slight political valence to theft, as opposed to just the thrill of getting away with something.”
This is the moral inversion of a rentier class that produces nothing yet controls over 60% of the GDP in this country. They feel absolutely beleaguered, despite their wealth, because they aren’t even richer. Never underestimate the top 10%’s immense class envy of the top 1%.
By standing up for the allegedly powerless, unbelievably wealthy people like Piker get to be virtuous by proxy, enjoying the massive privileges of a system they pretend to hate while preaching the kind of lawlessness that destroys societies and imperils people with fewer means than they.
In pretending that they steal out of unfairness, out of hatred for corporations and corporate abuses, the educated rich get to cosplay as members of the working class, a gambit designed to disguise their own immense privilege. They get to pretend to loathe the system they wouldn’t replace for anything in the world. Live in an apartment? Me?!
At the end of the day, wokeness is and has always been a smokescreen designed to disguise the immense class privilege of the Left, which long ago abandoned labor to cater to the vanity morals of the educated caste. The New York Times joining Hasan Piker in praising theft is the purest distillation of this.
This reminds me of the old meme: "I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."
Piker and Tolentino are either too stupid or too arrogant to realize the logical end game of what they are advocating for. Perhaps they should read a little history and find out what happened during the French Revolution, the reign of the Khmer Rouge, or the many other times when people "engage in some kind of organized disruption that would be infinitely more effective."
You are correct Batya. The rich— just DON’T CARE. They are totally not affected by their views, opinions etc.
they live in soft, cushy bubbles with no real life concerns.