《紐約時報》的拿鐵邏輯與社會崩解

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——在一段如今已臭名昭著的影片中，一群扮演革命者的人一邊慶祝偷竊，一邊將政治暴力正常化

来源：the City Journal

作者：Heather Mac Donald

（原文与链接附后）

就在一名31歲男子闖入白宮記者協會晚宴、企圖刺殺總統川普及其內閣成員的三天前，《紐約時報》發布了一段長達35分鐘的影片，標題為：《「富人不按規則行事，那我為什麼要？」為何小額偷竊可能成為新的政治抗議》。在這段影片中，一名《紐時》編輯訪問了另外兩位媒體菁英成員，討論一種在大量美國年輕人中共享的道德準則。

這套準則為偷竊辯護——甚至在與時尚的左翼議題結合時，也為暴力辯護。參與者——播客明星哈桑·派克、《紐約客》作家賈·托倫蒂諾，以及《紐約時報》評論編輯娜賈·斯皮格爾曼——無一對犯罪的美化表達警惕。他們在討論中面帶笑意、輕聲嬉笑，流露出對違法行為的輕率冷漠。

更令人震驚的是，《紐約時報》在審閱最終剪輯後仍然發布了這段影片。該報對參與者的無知與特權毫不羞愧，也似乎對他們討論2024年12月聯合健康保險公司執行長布萊恩·湯普森被謀殺一事是否屬於「實際有效的政治行動」，還是僅僅——令人失望地——有效的「政治意識喚醒」毫不感到不安。

然而，在4月25日又一名年輕的自大狂試圖刺殺川普之後，人們或許會認為，《紐約時報》應該與這些時髦評論員及其「目的可以證明手段正當」的道德觀劃清界線。

但顯然，《紐時》並沒有這樣的不適，因此仍然讓這段影片繼續在線。這反而是件幸運的事。這場對話比最新一位潛在刺客那份可預見地支離破碎的宣言，更能揭示左翼政治暴力的本質。當未來的考古學家試圖界定西方走向不可避免衰亡的時刻時，這件極端頹廢的文物將成為有力競爭者。

這段影片最令人難忘的特點之一，是參與者刻意營造的市中心時尚形象，與他們自稱代表「大眾」之間的強烈反差。托倫蒂諾的妝容無可挑剔，突顯她異域風情的貓科美感；她的指甲塗著貝殼粉色亮漆；精心打理的波浪髮散發著棕褐色光澤；低胸牛仔背心、牛仔褲與高跟靴，展現都市精英氣質。這身打扮或許不太適合她所懷舊提及的無產階級「破壞行動與某種財產毀壞參與」，但卻與拍攝訪談的布魯克林全白閣樓完美契合。

派克則穿著一件粉藍色長袖Ralph Lauren襯衫，上面帶有馬球標誌。他腳上的網球鞋來自Adidas——這正是他聲稱要推翻的「全球資本體系」的典型象徵，該品牌還被指控在中國、越南和印尼工廠存在勞工問題。

至於斯皮格爾曼，她略顯豐滿的身材或許在試圖進入蘇豪夜店時會被扣分，但她在《紐約時報》的身份足以彌補這些偏離理想夜生活形象的不足。

這三位「補償性犯罪」的分析者，對著最先進的麥克風發言——這些設備是西方數百年科技發展的產物，並受到他們所貶斥為資本主義掠奪的專利權保護。

在聲音層面上，最令人難忘的是參與者的愚鈍語氣，尤其是女性。托倫蒂諾與斯皮格爾曼的語言充斥著典型的語氣填充詞——「like」「I mean」「you know」「right？」「kind of」——以及其變體：「It’s like, I mean」「It’s like and I think I mean」。

其中最頻繁的一個口頭禪是：「I feel like（我覺得）」。

「我覺得那是納稅人資助的……」
「但我覺得我在TikTok和社交媒體上看到的是……」
「我的意思是，我覺得Mike Davis寫過這個……」

甚至還有雙重用法：「然後我就覺得，但我覺得我周圍看到的是，人們覺得法律是不道德的。」

「It feels like（感覺像是）」也同樣常見：「感覺終於有人能對醫療問題做點什麼」，這句話是用來指代湯普森被謀殺一事。

發言者甚至會感覺自己的感覺：「而現在我感覺我同意你」，托倫蒂諾對斯皮格爾曼說，指的是對「財產的政治性破壞」的讚賞。

這種「我覺得」的反射性語言，比其表面的空洞更具意義。它標誌著理性的消退，以及以情緒為基礎的思維的興起，而這正是整場對話的特徵。用情感取代理性思考，是當代學術界的一個標誌性特徵，而像派克（羅格斯大學政治學與傳播學學士）與托倫蒂諾（維吉尼亞大學英語學士）這樣的畢業生，數十年來將這種思維帶入公共政治領域，並構成當代左派道德準則的核心。

特徵之一：對基本經濟學的徹底無知。影片的主導論點是，由於企業被認為從員工與消費者身上「偷竊」，因此反過來對企業偷竊是合理的。

派克說：「我支持從大型企業偷竊，因為它們從工人身上偷得更多。」

托倫蒂諾說：「基本上是事實，對吧？每一個大型連鎖超市都在從工人和消費者身上偷東西。」

派克又說：「工資偷竊是美國最嚴重的偷竊形式。」

參與者從未解釋他們如何判定價格與工資具有掠奪性，也未說明何時不是。他們對供需如何決定商品、服務與勞動價格毫無理解，也不了解創辦企業與在競爭市場中生存的難度與風險。像所有自以為正義的西方青少年一樣——也就是享受人類史上最高生活水準的人——他們簡單地假設，任何成功企業必然是不道德的。他們忽略了一個事實：企業只有滿足顧客需求，才能獲得利潤。

成功人士同樣被視為小偷。在他們的觀念中，財富是一種零和分配：如果別人擁有財富，那必然是以他人變窮為代價。派克說：「規則的設計本來就是，如果你從窮人身上偷，你會變富；如果你從富人身上偷，你會進監獄。」斯皮格爾曼說：「我覺得我在TikTok和社交媒體上看到，人們說他們從Whole Foods偷東西……出於憤怒和道德正當感，因為富人不遵守規則……而Jeff Bezos太有錢了，他是億萬富翁。」

然而，沒有人說明Bezos應該被允許擁有多少財富——畢竟，是數十億顧客自願選擇了他的商業模式。

特徵之六：虛假的同情心。這些為政治性犯罪辯護的人認為，為某些違法行為開脫就是展現同情。托倫蒂諾稱讚美國人據稱支持為弱勢群體偷竊的做法：

我們理解，為了需要或目的而偷竊，是存在於集體意識之中的，你知道的。這是我們能理解、甚至感到相當親近的一件事。我認為，如果有人，比如說，從Whole Foods拎著一個IKEA袋子裝滿東西走出來，然後把它們分給那些在布魯克林監獄施工棚架下避雨的人，我覺得，大多數人都會同意，如果有人是出於某種目的去偷竊。我們美國人喜歡這樣的事情。我們確實喜歡。我們可以再次喜歡它。我們只需要讓它帶有一個目的。

（Whole Foods似乎並不是這些精品羅賓漢唯一依附的大型跨國消費企業。IKEA顯然也是其中之一。）

儘管他們自我認同為接近工人階級，但這些為犯罪辯護的人對普通工薪階層一無所知。托倫蒂諾甚至將「炸毀一條輸油管道」視為值得稱讚的犯罪。但最受工業破壞影響的，正是藍領工人。托倫蒂諾對「工作日中的資本流動被中斷」會被定為犯罪感到「震驚」。然而她所指的究竟是什麼仍不清楚，但沒有「資本流動」，就不會有「工作日」。

特徵之七：以抽象取代具體，以隱喻取代現實。這些對話者批評公眾過於關注具體的暴力行為，而忽視所謂的「系統性」與「結構性」暴力。派克遺憾地表示：「我們從不以看待個人違反社會契約的方式來看待系統性的暴力。」

所謂「系統性暴力」，派克指的是結構性種族主義與警察暴力；所謂「系統性偷竊」，指的是「剩餘勞動價值的抽取」——換句話說，就是支付市場工資。正是學術界率先將這種抽象傷害取代具體傷害的概念引入公共討論。當有意識的種族歧視變得難以找到與訴訟時，「系統性種族主義」的概念應運而生，它不需要任何具體加害者便可指稱傷害。在大學校園中，所謂的弱勢族群與女性即使在學校極力招募與保護下，仍聲稱自己是「系統性暴力」的受害者。

在學術界，「系統性暴力」的邏輯是這樣運作的：挑戰受害者身份的言論被稱為「仇恨言論」；「仇恨言論」即暴力；發表此類言論的人即是在攻擊弱勢群體。這種語言操弄的後果，在去年九月猶他谷大學查理·柯克遇刺事件中已顯現。槍手以「仇恨者」為由為其行為辯護：「我受夠了他的仇恨。有些仇恨無法談判解決」——顯然只能被消滅。當時一份反對柯克演講的學生請願書也使用了相同邏輯：「當有針對弱勢群體記錄的講者獲得發言機會時，結果不是對話，而是傷害。」

然而，柯克並沒有「針對」或「仇恨」任何弱勢群體；他只是理性地反對其自稱的弱勢地位。

《紐約時報》影片中的發言者將這種誇張語言推向新的低俗高度。派克稱湯普森遇害是一個「對我來說很有意思的故事」——不是悲劇或令人不安的事件，而是「有意思」。他還輕蔑地表示，美國人對犯罪與懲罰「非常嚴厲」、「非黑即白」——而這個「問題」指的就是謀殺。

然而，在談到湯普森之死時，派克卻讚賞地指出，美國人似乎採納了恩格斯的共產主義觀點。恩格斯提出「社會性謀殺」的概念，即謀殺並非由個人，而是由社會結構造成。對湯普森之死的慶祝顯示，人們認識到他「從事了大量社會性謀殺」。派克解釋說，這包括「制度化的暴力」、「以營利為目的的醫療體系所帶來的結構性貧困暴力」。在他看來，公眾因此變得更有「覺悟」：「我看到很多人立刻理解為什麼這次死亡會發生。」

說人們理解「為何這次死亡會發生」——或者說，理解路易吉·曼吉奧內為何冷血槍殺湯普森——實際上是在暗示這場謀殺具有某種合理性。

這些精緻的隱喻實際上具有致命性。湯普森既沒有進行任何形式的謀殺，也沒有從事任何形式的暴力。他只是美國公私混合醫療體系中的一名管理者，而該體系早已因監管而產生各種功能失調。將他指控為「社會性謀殺」與「制度化暴力」，在當今這種自戀式道德環境中，無異於鼓勵私刑行為。

在整場對話中，沒有人明確譴責這種私刑殺人行為。最接近的表態，是在最後一個關於哪些事情「應該合法但目前不合法」的問答中，對「謀殺是否應該合法」這個問題給出了一個無精打采的「不」。托倫蒂諾甚至猶豫不決。這遠遠稱不上對政治暴力的有力譴責。

真正令他們不滿的，是民主黨未能利用湯普森之死來推動廢除私營醫療體系。托倫蒂諾帶著疲憊而嘲諷的語氣說：「我覺得這是我們近代政治史上最嚴重的錯失機會之一。」問題不在於謀殺本身，而在於未能利用這次殺人事件——「本來可以輕鬆得分的一球」。她說：「在接下來的幾週裡，我感到極度沮喪……我原以為民主黨會立即把這件事當作推動全民醫療的契機……我不知道為什麼會這樣期待，但我認為這不是一次有效的政治行動，但確實是一種有效的政治意識喚醒。」

評分結果：路易吉·曼吉奧內因為「開了頭」得A，民主黨因為跟進不力得F。由於這種工具性道德觀的存在，反企業鬥士很可能還會有下一次機會。

斯皮格爾曼接著讓派克與托倫蒂諾評價哪些偷竊目標是「正當的」。有些答案毫不意外：「Whole Foods」、「大型商店」、「大型企業」。但有一個出人意料：羅浮宮。派克立即表示贊同。托倫蒂諾承認自己可能無法在Whole Foods偷檸檬以外執行更大規模行動，但仍表示熱烈支持：「我在技術上無法做到，但如果看到有人這樣做的新聞，我會百分之百為他們喝采。」

對於何種犯罪可以接受的標準，竟然只是「夠不夠酷」。派克說：「我們應該回到那種酷的犯罪，比如搶劫羅浮宮。銀行搶劫，偷無價文物之類。我覺得這比第七千個加密貨幣騙局酷多了。」

派克及其同伴可以用「諷刺」來為自己開脫，但問題與回答都無法被視為玩笑。斯皮格爾曼提出這樣的問題本身就是一種啟示。這裡發生的，不僅是對虛構反資本主義叛亂的美化，更是對西方文明本身的仇恨攻擊。從羅浮宮偷竊並不符合他們自己提出的任何正當化標準。這既不能打擊權力，也不能重新分配財富，也不能促使醫療體系崩潰。羅浮宮的收藏不屬於企業，而屬於全人類。這些藝術品源於人類創造美的渴望，其中大多數誕生於工業革命之前。偷竊博物館藏品的人並非為了生存，他們的戰利品也不會分配給工人，而會被藏入秘密的私人收藏之中。

所謂「無價文物」之所以無價，是因為它們奇蹟般地從過去流傳至今，無法替代，也無法再造。搶劫博物館並非有目的的犯罪（即使有目的也不能成為藉口）。為此類行為喝采，反映的是一種破壞衝動——摧毀那些遠比自己更有才華的人所創造、自己永遠無法複製的成就。

這就是孩童式的道德——自我中心、沒有原則、自我膨脹。

派克呼籲「混亂。徹底的混亂。開始吧。」他與同伴自以為在追求無政府狀態，卻相信自己的舒適生活永遠不會受到威脅。然而，他們一無所知卻理所當然依賴的文明，確實可能被逐步侵蝕殆盡。每一次有人在紐約地鐵逃票（如今幾乎每次進站都能看到），每一次有人在藥店盜竊，即使貨架已被防護玻璃保護，法治這座宏偉建築就會鬆動一塊磚。這些犯罪之所以猖獗，是因為進步派檢察官受到「系統性偏見」理論的影響。而如今，媒體精英更是在為掠奪者喝采。

在喬治·佛洛伊德騷亂之後，企業與文化精英的心理崩潰——幾乎所有主流機構都宣稱美國社會本質上是種族主義——只不過是當前將違法行為浪漫化的序曲。《紐約時報》的這段影片所呈現的世界觀，為自私、貪婪、平庸與懶惰的人提供了掠奪他人的正當理由，並用道德語言為之辯護。更多的偷竊與更多的死亡，將隨之而來。

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-yor ... ino?skip=1

The New York Times’s Latte Logic of Social Collapse

In a now-notorious video, play-acting revolutionaries celebrate stealing and normalize political violence.

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.

Bottom of Form

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.”

One of the most frequent of those tics is: “I feel like”:

“I feel like that’s taxpayer funded . . . ”

“But I feel like what I’m seeing on TikTok and social media . . .”

“I mean, I feel like Mike Davis wrote about this . . .”

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.

Trait Number Six: Phony empathy. The advocates of political crime think that excusing certain lawless acts demonstrates compassion. Tolentino lauds Americans’ alleged support for stealing on behalf of the supposed downtrodden:

We understand it’s well within the collective consciousness, that stealing for need or purpose, you know. It’s something that we understand and feel quite friendly towards. And I think if someone were, let’s say, walking out of Whole Foods with an IKEA bag of whatever and giving it to the people, you know, sheltering underneath the scaffolding at the jail going up in Brooklyn next door, you know, like, you know, I think most people would agree that if someone were to be stealing with a purpose. We love that in America. We do. We can love it again. We just have to do it with a purpose.

(Whole Foods is not the only multinational consumer corporation to which these boutique Robin Hoods are tied umbilically, it seems. IKEA is apparently a fixture, too.)

Despite their working-class-adjacent self-image, these crime whisperers are clueless about ordinary wage workers. Tolentino offers “blowing up a pipeline” as a commendable crime. But it is the blue-collar laborer who will be most hurt by industrial sabotage. Tolentino finds it “shocking” that the mere “interruption of the capital flow of the workday” is criminalized. It is again unclear what she is referring to, but without “capital flow,” there is no “workday.”

Trait Number Six: Substituting the abstract for the tangible and the metaphorical for the literal. The conversants chastise the public for caring more about physical acts of violence than about “systemic” and “structural” violence. Piker rues the fact that “we never look at systemic forms of violence in the same way that we do [at] individuals breaking that social contract.”

By “systemic forms of violence,” Piker means structural racism and police brutality. By “systemic forms of theft,” he means the “extraction of surplus labor value”—in other words, paying a market wage. The academy pioneered this substitution of abstract categories of harm for concrete ones. As intentional acts of racial discrimination became harder to find and litigate, it advanced the concept of “systemic racism,” which requires no identifiable perpetrator to allege racial harm. On college campuses, underrepresented minorities and overrepresented women claim to be targets of “systemic violence,” even as those fawning colleges twist themselves into knots to recruit and retain blacks, Hispanics, and females.

The systemic violence equation in academia runs as follows: speech that challenges victim identity is “hate speech.” “Hate speech” is violence, and the person using such speech is assaulting the vulnerable. The consequences of such verbal sleights of hand were manifest in the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University last September. The shooter justified the murder by accusing the conservative thought leader of being a “hater:” “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out”—it must, apparently, be snuffed out. A student petition opposing Kirk’s appearance at Utah Valley University used the same equation between unorthodox speech, hate, and harm: “When speakers with a record of targeting marginalized groups are given the microphone, the result isn’t dialogue—it’s harm.”

Kirk did not “target” or “hate” “marginalized groups;” he civilly argued against their claim to marginalized status.

The Times talkers take this melodramatic rhetoric to new heights of bathos. Piker said that the assassination of Brian Thompson was a “fascinating story . . . for me”—not a tragic or disturbing story, but a “fascinating” one. As a general matter, Americans are “very draconian about crime and punishment,” Piker noted with contempt. “They’re very black and white on this issue”—the “issue” being murder.

And yet, when it came to the slaying of Thompson, Americans seemed to have taken a page out of Friedrich Engels’s Communist playbook, Piker observed with approval. Engels pioneered the concept of “social murder”: murder allegedly carried out by social structures, not by individuals. The celebrations of Thompson’s killing showed a recognition that Thompson was “engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder,” Piker explained. “The systematized forms of violence. The structural violence of poverty, for profit paywalled system of health care in this country.” The public is thus becoming more enlightened, in Piker’s view: “I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place.”

To say that they understood why the “death had taken place”—or, to skip the indirection, why Luigi Mangione gunned Thompson down in cold blood—is to suggest that Thompson’s murder had a defensible rationale.

These mannered metaphors are lethal ones. Thompson was not engaged in any form of murder, social or individual, nor in any form of violence, systemized or personal. He was one manager in a hybrid public-private medical complex that has been regulated into admitted forms of dysfunction. To accuse Thompson of “social murder” and “systematized violence” invites, in today’s narcissistic moral universe, vigilantism.

No one in the Times conversation condemned that vigilante killing as an abomination. The closest they get, during a concluding “smash or pass” quiz on what things “should be OK but currently [aren’t] O.K,” is a listless “no” to Spiegelman’s question whether murder should be OK. Tolentino hesitates regretfully. This is hardly a rousing repudiation of political violence.

What exercises the participants instead is Democrats’ failure to leverage Thompson’s murder to eliminate “privatized” health care. “But I think and I find that kind of one of the most egregious missed opportunities that we have seen in recent political history,” says Tolentino, with the strangled back-of-the-throat laugh of the world-weary young. It was not the murder that was egregious. What was egregious was the inability to exploit a killing that “was served up for someone to just spike that ball over the other side,” as Tolentino puts it. “I felt enormously frustrated in the weeks following that, that every single, like, I was like, I assumed I don’t know why I thought that Democrats would immediately take this up as pushing a sort of unified message towards universal health care. . . . I thought it would be, I don’t, and I don’t know why I expected that, but I, I do not think that it was effective political action. I do think it was an effective act of political consciousness raising.”

Scorecard: Luigi Mangione gets an A for starting the ball rolling. Democrats get an F for lousy follow-through. The anti-corporate crusaders will likely get another chance to do better, thanks to the instrumental morality expressed in this conversation.

Spiegelman asks Piker and Tolentino to rate “legitimate” targets of theft. Some are predictable: “Whole Foods,” “big-box stores,” “big corporations.” One, however, is a surprise: the Louvre. Piker is immediately on board. Tolentino admits her limits as a thief beyond Whole Foods lemons and such but is otherwise enthusiastic: “I would not be logistically capable of executing such a feat. But would I cheer on every news story of people that I see doing it? Absolutely, absolutely.”

The standard for acceptable crime is whether it is “cool.” “We gotta get back to cool crimes like [robbing the Louvre],” Piker says. “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.”

Piker and his fellow talkers can always deflect accusations of depravity by claiming irony. But neither the question nor the answers can be written off as tongue-in-cheek. That Spiegelman came up with the question at all is a revelation. What is going on here is not merely the glorification of make-believe anti-capitalist rebellion but a hate-filled attack on Western civilization itself. Stealing from the Louvre satisfies none of the criteria advanced by Piker and Tolentino to justify crime. It does not stick it to the Man. It does not redistribute wealth. It does not trigger the collapse of private health care. Corporations don’t own the Louvre’s collections; humanity does. Those art works are the product of man’s desire to create beauty; a vast majority of them preceded the Industrial Revolution’s dark Satanic mills. The thieves who plunder museum holdings are not living hand-to-mouth. Their loot will not be released into some worker’s collective but will disappear into secret, heavily guarded compounds.

“Priceless artefacts” are priceless because they have come down to us, miraculously, from a past that is no longer accessible. They are not fungible and not replaceable. Robbing museums is not crime with an alleged purpose (not that having a purpose would excuse such predation). Cheering on such crime reflects the impulse to destroy, to tear down what individuals a million times more talented than you have created, whose accomplishments you could never replicate.

This is the morality of children—self-involved, unprincipled, self-promoting.

Piker calls for “chaos. Full chaos. Let’s go.” He and his peers admire themselves for courting anarchy, secure in the belief that their own comfortable lives will never be in jeopardy. But the civilization that they know nothing about, yet take for granted, can in fact be eroded into nothingness. Every time someone ducks under a subway turnstile in New York City (which a rider now witnesses almost every time he enters the underground), every time someone steals from a drugstore despite the plexiglass shields to protect the increasingly vulnerable merchandise, another brick in the magnificent edifice of the rule of law is dislodged. Those criminals are confident in their lawbreaking because progressive prosecutors have been schooled in the academic theory of systemic bias. And now the plunderers have the media empyrean cheering them on.

The psychic meltdown of the corporate and cultural elites in the wake of the George Floyd race riots, in which virtually every mainstream institution declared American society racist to the core, was only a warm-up to the current glamorization of law-breaking. The Times video expresses a worldview that gives the selfish, the greedy, the mediocre, and the lazy permission to prey on others and to justify that predation in righteous terms. More theft and more death will follow.