Dems favorite podcaster, Hasan Piker, says stealing and murder are OK

At the height of the 2020 riots, a book was published entitled “In Defense of Looting.” At the time I asked a bookshop in New York, which was prominently displaying the work, whether I could walk out with the book without paying.I was told not.But a friend did download it and publish the work for free online before being served a copyright notice by the pro-looting book’s publisher.Some of us had hoped that the madness of that summer had gone away.

But this week we got a good reminder that for a part of the left the question of whether or not it is right to steal is still being mulled over.The issue was raised on a New York Times podcast featuring the radical left’s current favorite podcast guest — Hasan Piker.For anyone unfamiliar with him, Piker is a nasty piece of work.

He has claimed that this city deserved 9/11, has praised the terrorist group Hamas and happily describes himself as a Marxist.In the 21st century it can safely be said that anyone who still calls themselves a “Marxist” is what we used to call “a slow learner.”On the NYT podcast Piker and a writer from the New Yorker were asked to mull on such complex questions as whether it is OK to steal and whether it is OK to murder.The answer to both of these questions appears to be “Yes.”On the first question it turns out that there are certain stores which it is more moral to steal from than others.Piker and his fellow guest agreed that Whole Foods is especially OK to steal from.

A small business is less OK to steal from.But listeners were never treated to an explanation of which shops might be on the borderline between being a place where you could help yourself to a five-finger-discount and those where you couldn’t.That is because neither Piker nor the other people in the studio seemed to have a very stable set of ethics.Not that they don’t think of themselves as highly ethical people.

The NYT’s host — Nadja Spiegelman — moaned at one point that “It is so hard to live ...