Politics

Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino: The Leftists Who Think Stealing Is Great

Actually, shoplifting is bad.

Robby Soave | 4.24.2026 11:05 AM

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Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino (New York Times via @PirateWires on X)

Stealing is bad, and you shouldn't do it. It's really as simple as that. Children understand this, even from a young age, and it's taught to them by their parents, grandparents, teachers, and other mentors. Some people, of course, find themselves in desperate circumstances, and are forced to steal to survive. We may empathize with them, and we may even decide that their situation mitigates the blameworthiness of the offense. That doesn't change the wrongness of stealing, though. If you catch your kids snatching a candy bar from the grocery store checkout line, you invariably punish them. You don't commend them for striking a blow against capitalist oppression.

Enter leftists Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino, who have been roundly and deservedly mocked on social media after participating in a podcast interview for The New York Times titled "The Rich Don't Play By the Rules. So Why Should I?" Already, we are on shaky ground here, since the headline—a direct quote from host Nadja Spiegelman—positions Piker, Tolentino, and Spiegelman as a trio of people that should be contrasted with the rich. This is ridiculous: All three are members of the wealthy, successful, cultural elite. Spiegelman is a culture editor for the Times, an author, a cartoonist, and the daughter of legendary cartoonist Art Spiegelman (creator of Maus, a well-known graphic novel about the Holocaust). Tolentino is a relatively famous feminist writer of not-exactly modest means. Piker is a wildly successful far-left Twitch streamer and nephew of The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur, who gave him his start. Suffice it to say, these are not people who need to steal to survive.

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And yet, their conversation includes a full-throated defense of shoplifting:

Spiegelman: Would you steal from the Louvre?
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.

Piker is not being facetious: His brand of left-wing politics apparently holds that stealing things is fun and cool. Tolentino is a bit more equivocating—stealing is not "significant in any way as protest or direct action," but still she does it.

Piker doesn't want her to feel any guilt about this, since large corporations "factored in" the cost of her theft. He continues:

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.

This "factored in" nonsense is basically the "write-it-off" scene from Seinfeld, except articulated with sincerity rather than for mockery. Yes, companies account for the fact that some proportion of their inventory will be stolen; they "factor in" that cost in the sense that they are expecting it. This does not mitigate the fact that it's a loss for the company. As one X user put it, if my bike keeps getting stolen and I have to add the cost of a new bike to my yearly commuting budget, well yes, I've factored it in. But it still costs me money!

For Piker and Tolentino, theft is justified because the big corporations and the billionaires who own them are evil: They steal from their workers. The precise mechanism of this more appalling act of thievery is left unexplained, of course. In what sense are the owners stealing from people who willingly work there—workers who trade their labor for financial compensation, as part of an entirely consensual exchange? But this is the leftist way of thinking: Paying people for their work is theft, actual theft is retribution.

People should be ashamed of themselves for engaging in this behavior, not bragging about it in the pages of The New York Times. Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino are bad role models, to the extent that it seems almost beside the point to even spend any time on their loathsome… pic.twitter.com/cF1KbP3M9L

— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) April 23, 2026

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Robby Soave is a senior editor at Reason.

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