They Come to You in Sheep’s Clothing

 

Last month the New York Times produced a video titled “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules so Why Should I? Why Petty Theft Might be the New Political Protest.” You may have to see this for yourself to fully appreciate it. https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010849055/the-rich-dont-play-by-the-rules-so-why-should-i.html

 

The video conversation involved a moderator, Nadja Spiegelman, an editor of the New York Times Opinion Team, and guests Jia Tolentino, a staff writer for the New Yorker, and Hasan Piker, a socialist and leftist commentator streaming on Twitch as HasanAbi.

 

The video opens with an assortment of clips of young people proudly sharing the different ways they routinely steal. The moderator introduces the term “microlooting” to describe it. One person says he goes into a store and “I take what I want and go.”  Another giddy girl says, “It’s a survival technique. Got to eat to live. Steal to eat.” Still another proclaims everyone steals from Whole Foods and a young man suggests that “We really should be rioting but I’m tired so I take bagels instead.”

 

With that as the backdrop for the conversation, Spiegelman settles in to explore with Tolentino and Piker what they think about the growing trend of people taking small things from big corporations and feeling justified.

 

There are no major disagreements among the video panelists as they venture into their views of capitalism and their rationalized explanations of who people should and should not steal from. They believe capitalism is the real crime and seems like “a behemoth that is impossible to defeat.”  They contend that capitalists have broken the “social contract” and are doing the “consequential” stealing by robbing the people of the wages they deserve.

 

The panelists agree: People should share their Netflix passwords with others; they should work around the “paywalls” to get material they want to read without paying for it. Hasan suggests people should absolutely steal the intellectual property of others and proclaims himself “pro-piracy all the way.” “I’d steal a car if I could.”  Hasan is full of answers for what he believes is ailing society. He’s adamant we must steal from the rich and should get back to “cool crimes” like stealing priceless artifacts from the Louvre museum in Paris and robbing banks.

 

Whole Foods is offered as a poster child for the kind of place people should routinely steal from. Tolentino tells a story about coming out of the store having forgotten 4 lemons and promptly going back in and taking them without feeling a bit of remorse. The panelists all agree stealing from big corporations is a good thing to do and “stealing with purpose – we love that in America.”  They further rationalize that in the case of Whole Foods and others like them, the company knows that automating their processes with self-checkout will increase the “shrink” (stealing) so they bake it into the pricing. People “steal more efficiently from an automated process.”

 

The three are equally clear about who you should never steal from. Never “dine and dash” from the local restaurant. Never steal a book from the library. If New York Mayor Mamdani opens government-run grocery stores, don’t steal from them because they will be owned by the taxpayers and have unionized workers. It’s the big corporations that are the enemy.

 

The perversion of morality that is offered as justification for stealing provides a unique and disturbing insight into our current state. The panelists believe if laws don’t feel moral to you, you should alter your sense of having to abide by them. They further explain that stealing from Whole Foods is neither significant as a moral wrong nor significant as a protest action. They compare this type of stealing to a post on social media. It’s a statement.

 

They all agree that in the ideal world “theft from above would be broken by regulatory change” but they don’t expect that to happen. They describe the anger underneath all the stealing as: “If you steal from the poor you become rich and if you steal from the rich you go to prison.”

 

They engage in some banter about how the better approach to fighting the big corporations that they detest would be to participate in collective action such as becoming employed by Whole Foods and working to unionize the workforce. They discard this approach because people “lack the capacity to engage in organized disruption.” Life is too hard and people are too busy with work, childcare and all the things grown-ups must do to go to meetings and organize. It’s easier, they conclude, to steal; sabotage has a useful role.

 

Their discussion about the recent murder of the CEO of United Healthcare on the streets of New York is disturbing, but stopped short of condoning the vile act. Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old murderer, reportedly became a hero to 40% of Gen Zer’s (15–30-year-olds) who believe the murder was morally justified because the CEO was engaging in “social murder”. The young supporters of the murderer believe the pervasive pain and death private health care has inflicted on the public is the real murder. “Private healthcare is profoundly immoral and people understand it.”  The murder was an act of “political conscious raising.”

         

The panel ended their conversation with typical liberal hypocrisy: publicly confessing their feelings of guilt and shame for partaking in many of the things they are against. The panelists chastised themselves for engaging in “morally selfish” conveniences – ordering iced coffee in a plastic cup, traveling on a plane for leisure, and the ultimate selfish act, ordering take-out food that a restaurant employee must deliver when it’s raining outside.

 

Who are Nadja Spiegelman, Jia Tolentino, and Hasan Piker?

 

Nadja Spiegelman is a 38-year-old author and cartoonist. Her father is a famous cartoonist, and her mother is the Art Director for the New Yorker. She grew up in SoHo, an exceptionally affluent neighborhood in one of the top 5 most expensive areas of New York City. She graduated from Yale in 2009 and spent the decade of her 20’s authoring a book published in 2016 titled “I’m Supposed to Protect You From all This”, which she describes as a memoir of 4 generations of mother daughter relationships. “A pattern of mother-daughter resentments” runs throughout the book along with details of her grandmother’s “abortions and suicide attempts.” Her biography has no evidence of a paying job during the years she was writing.

 

In 2016, she launched “Resist”, a publication of political comics, as a reaction to the election of Donald Trump in collaboration with her mother. There were no publications after 2017.

 

In 2020 she was hired as Editor in Chief of Astra Magazine, which folded after 2 issues. Yet in September 2025 when announcing Spiegelman was joining the New York Times Opinion Team as an editor specializing in culture the Times said, “Most recently Nadja was the Editor in Chief of Astra Magazine, a print magazine of international literature”.

 

Jia Tolentino is a 38-year-old staff writer for the New Yorker. She was born in Canada to parents who are from the Philippines. At the age of 4 she moved to Texas where she was raised. She graduated from the University of Virginia in 2009 and received a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Michigan. She is married to Andrew Daley, an architect and labor organizer. They have 2 children and live in a $2.5 million brownstone in Clinton Hall, an upscale, gentrified, highly desirable neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Tolentino and her husband own a second home in the ritzy, upstate New York town of Saugerties.

 

Hasan Piker is a 35-year-old who was born in New Jersey and raised in Turkey. He is the nephew of Cenk Uygur, a co-founder of the Young Turks, a left-wing populist, sociopolitical news and commentary program that is live streamed on YouTube and Twitch. Twitch is the world’s leading live-streaming platform and is used primarily for broadcasting live video games, esports competitions, creative arts, and “just chatting.”  It is owned by Amazon and is a hub for interactive, live entertainment.

 

Piker graduated in 2013 from Rutgers with a dual degree in political science and communication. In 2014 he became a full-time producer and “on-air talent” at the Young Turks. In 2018 he transitioned to streaming on Twitch, engaging a massive audience of young Gen Z and Millennials. Ironically, Jeff Bezos, one of the billionaires railed against by name in the New York Times video, is the founder and major shareholder of Amazon, the company that gave Piker his opportunity to get rich through capitalism. Streamers on Twitch and other platforms earn their money from subscriptions, donations, and ads.

 

According to the Antidefamation League (ADL), an organization that fights antisemitism, Piker has a history of rhetoric that sanitizes violence and denigrates Jewish people. He has frequently expressed support for terrorist organizations and antisemitic ideas. He has been suspended from Twitch on multiple occasions for using terms like “Zionist pigs”. 

 

Piker lives in California and has a net worth of $8 million. He has a 6-figure monthly income and in 2021 he purchased a home in West Hollywood for $2.74 million.

 

Spiegelman, Tolentino, and Piker have a lot in common. They are 30-somethings leading privileged lives that are not the result of their own substantive achievements. They have no moral compass to guide them. They are hypocrites, living the wealthy lives of luxury they publicly oppose. Watching them perform, it is impossible to know if they truly believe they bring something of value to the table, or if they know they are empty vessels, gleefully exploiting the millions of lost young people who are susceptible to pretenders with a megaphone who come their way.

 

Jesus Christ, the greatest teacher the world has ever known, warned, “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves” (Matthew 7:15). False prophets are everywhere.

 

Failure Exposed. Again.

 

The New York Times, once nicknamed the “Old Gray Lady” for its longstanding credibility, maturity, and stature as the newspaper of record, provided its name, a stage, and a microphone to 3 immoral individuals, who have no real-world accomplishments, to advocate against fundamental principles of right and wrong. The video they produced further exposed the dismal failure of millions of American families to teach their children how to live. Failure to effectively parent is destroying the fabric of America with significant numbers of young adults supporting the use of violence to address grievances, suppressing free speech when they find it offensive, and stealing from others as justifiable. Have we seen and heard enough? Is it time to return to truth? Are we ready to take our country back?