By Abe Greenwald
Thursday, April 23, 2026
The liberal establishment has decided it can’t get enough
of Hamas enthusiast and 9/11 fan, Hasan Piker. Democratic midterm candidates
campaign with him by their side, and the New York Times seems determined
to give him a daily platform. Yesterday, for example, on the Times’
homepage you could find a podcast featuring Piker in conversation with the
writers Nadja Spiegelman and Jia Tolentino. The nominal topic was what
Spiegelman dubbed “microlooting”—stealing items from corporate-owned stores as
an act of political resistance. But the discussion quickly turned into a
celebration of crime and terrorism committed in the name of justice.
Piker noted that he’s “pro-piracy all the way” and said
“we gotta get back to cool crimes” such as “bank robbery, stealing priceless
artifacts, things of that nature.” Tolentino believes that when it comes to
“stealing with a purpose,” “we love that in America.” She also thinks that
blowing up pipelines should be legal and private schools should be outlawed.
It's three cheers for piracy, robbery, and terrorism on
the homepage of the New York Times! The podcast seems to have shocked
many people. They can’t understand how we’ve gotten here.
I can. It’s precisely the kind of thing I would expect to
see from a culture that’s turned against its Jews. Piker, like New York City
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a bunch of woke-right podcasters, has been celebrated
by the liberals for his brazen anti-Semitic incitement in the years since Hamas
attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. That’s what made him, and so many others, a
beloved star of the left and, eventually, the liberal establishment.
When a culture decides to protect and even reward people
for promoting anti-Jewish terrorism—you know, intifada—that culture
breaks the civic bonds that hold society together. If you think you can get
away with encouraging Jew-hatred while preserving taboos and proscriptions on
other destructive impulses, you’re in for a wild ride.
In permitting and elevating anti-Semitism, leftists and
liberals have not only sanctioned violent bigotry, which is ruinous enough.
They’ve unleashed a tsunami of evil. Because anti-Semitism is fundamentally a
form of scapegoating, they’ve sanctioned the idea that victims are responsible
for the transgressions committed against them. This legitimizes all manner of
thuggery.
It was after a year of mob-led Jew-hatred that
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered, and his suspected killer was
made a left-wing martyr (Tolentino described Thompson’s killing as “an
effective act of political consciousness-raising”). It was after two years of
pro-Hamas protests and anti-Jewish violence that Charlie Kirk was assassinated.
Would these horrors have been carried out in the absence
of a left-liberal establishment that valorized anti-Semitic terrorism? I don’t
honestly know. But I do know that once you glorify Jew-hatred and dispense with
personal responsibility, you don’t get to choose or filter what forms of
violence and destruction follow. And there’s nothing “micro” about the disaster
the left has wrought.
Yesterday, with the airing of this grotesque podcast, the
New York Times announced that the social contract is null and void.
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