By Graeme Wood
Friday, April 24, 2026
The late political scientist James C. Scott endorsed what
he called “anarchist calisthenics”—the regular practice of small acts of
lawbreaking and disobedience. Jaywalk at an empty intersection. Have a beer in
the park. Smuggle a pudding cup past the TSA agents. The point, Scott said, was
to keep the civic muscles strong. Without constant reinforcement, these muscles
will atrophy, and when real tyranny arrives, the flabby citizen will be
powerless to resist. Scott particularly enjoyed telling Germans to get their
reps in, because their grandparents had not.
Tuesday a New York Times podcast hosted the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and the New Yorker staff
writer Jia Tolentino for a discussion of lawbreaking, which they both endorsed
not as a habit of mind but as resistance to actual tyranny, today. They agreed
that shoplifting from grocery stores such as Whole Foods is laudable, because
(as Tolentino says, without evidence) “every major grocery chain” steals from
workers and customers. Streaming services—they specifically name Spotify, which
carries the Times podcast—are bad for creators and, they say, worthy of
being ripped off. Piker said he would steal cars, “if I could get away with
it.” Channeling Abbie Hoffman, Tolentino encourages people to steal from her
own employer, The New Yorker, but does not explain which high crimes
David Remnick has committed to earn this comeuppance.
They are more circumspect about violence against people.
Both Piker and Tolentino giggle their way to a “no” when their host, Nadja
Spiegelman, asks if they endorse murdering executives of a health-insurance
company or burning down companies they dislike. (Piker says his answer is
prompted by legal advice, and Spiegelman joins Tolentino in tittering at his
saucy qualification.) But Piker and Tolentino both accuse health-insurance
companies of “social murder,” and use that concept to (rather sympathetically)
explain why Americans might react with actual murder. The host and her guests
have an awfully good time agreeing about everything.
Six years ago, the New York Times opinion editor
lost his job for publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton because he advised
invoking the Insurrection Act to quell riots. The op-ed, the Times explained,
fell short of the paper’s standards. This same publication today recommends
listening to this podcast about the sunny side of chaos, rather than just
reading the transcript, “for the full effect.” I would go further and recommend
watching the video, whose Scandinavian-minimalist set, along with the
participants’ chic outfits (Piker is wearing Ralph Lauren), greatly enhances
the comedic effect. A previous generation of Marxists would dress down, the
better to relate to the workers they tried to organize at the factory gates.
These podcasters are, I suppose, the hard-left equivalent of those
prosperity-gospel preachers, who dress rich so that they can give others a
vision of something to aspire to.
They could not look or sound more unoppressed if they
tried. Spiegelman invokes Jean Valjean, the Misérable who stole a loaf
of bread to feed his family, but when offering a modern example of virtuous
theft, she asks why she should have to pay for “organic avocados.” Piker says
that “we’ve got to get back to cool crimes,” including Louvre heists, “bank
robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.” Crime, to
these people, appears to be a series of Thomas Crown affairs, punctuated for
some reason by free guacamole. Tolentino is at least self-critical. She lists
the immoral acts that unsettle her conscience: “getting iced coffee in a
plastic cup,” going on vacation in “so many planes,” and failing to organize
workers.
The belief that workers frequently get a raw deal is an
old one, and roughly 200 years of leftist R & D has gone into figuring out
how to configure governments to make it easier for labor to negotiate with
management on fair terms. Also old is the idea that health is a collective
responsibility, and that giving a dignified life to the poor is part of the
government’s job. (The belief that you are oppressed by Whole Foods, however,
is a modern psychosis.) Among the remarkable aspects of this conversation is the
ignorance of this long, eventful history—as if the upshot of the past century
of leftism is that you can simply take things, and maybe the justice of it all
will start to even out, as society gives way to what Piker approvingly calls
“full chaos.”
It is difficult to take any of this seriously, especially
from someone like Piker, who has compared America unfavorably to China and
Cuba, two countries where you will be thrown into a dark hole if you do so much
as an anarchist jumping jack. Cuba is miserable, and to travel there without
noticing the misery is grotesque all by itself. China is a more interesting
case, and much more ironic as a comparison. Piker’s romantic view of crime is,
shall we say, not shared by the Chinese Communist Party. Nor, for that matter,
is his view of communism. For decades now, China has functioned on the premise
that wealth and social stability emerge only from a market economy in which
big, unseen forces—not to be questioned or defied by individuals—control
everything important. The value of the individual is nil, as is the value of
workers, should they differ with those forces about their pay and treatment.
One can agree or disagree that this model is the right one, but one cannot love
the Chinese system and love rampant criminality, even “cool crimes.”
What is really going on here? Spiegelman, the
interviewer, is correct to notice that something is happening “with our moral
code,” and that Piker is a driver of that moral change, or an example of it.
“There are so many moral compromises I make every day,” she says. I am sure she
is right: So do I. Fretting over moral trivia such as using a plastic cup, then
treating weighty matters such as murder with the same gravity may be a source
of the moral vertigo.
Piker and Tolentino deserve some credit for sensing that
their theory of social change is incomplete. They might even sense how pathetic
they sound, when pretending to be outlaws, even though all that is at stake is
a few lemons or a Netflix password. “We have lost the muscle that is built up
to be able to engage in” collective action, Tolentino says. “We lack the
willpower,” Piker agrees, “because we don’t even know what that would look
like.”
Piker says, in my favorite part of the interview, that he
hates stealing stuff because when Piker was a boy, his father caught him
stealing from a friend and punished him. (Good dad.) Piker also says, rather
gallantly, that he could not countenance dining and dashing, and that he would
even cover the bill if he saw someone else steal services this way.
To them, it seems, theft is fine as long as you don’t
have to look anyone in the eye when you do it, and as long as you get away with
it. (Conveniently, corporations have no faces. It is no coincidence that Brian
Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was shot in the back.) This is the opposite
of gallant—and I think the lack of willpower and “muscle” is related to the
cowardice inherent in almost all the acts they endorse or excuse. Spiegelman
calls shoplifting “micro-looting,” a euphemism whose purpose is to avoid the
inglorious term shoplifting, because shoplifting is what children and
petty criminals do.
Civil disobedience, as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote,
should be done “openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the
penalty,” because to be penalized for a righteous act only multiplies the act’s
merit. You have to break the law proudly—not break it, then run away to another
state and get caught with a fake ID in a McDonald’s. Getting clubbed because
you refused to use the bathroom designated for your race—that is something your
grandchildren will brag that you did. I wonder what is wrong with people who
feel like they are on an odyssey against a comparable injustice but who evade
responsibility for shoplifting produce. Leftists need calisthenics too. These
people are all flab.
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