‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’

That brings you a mix of voices from Hey, I'm Nigel Spiegelman, and I'm a culture editor for New York Times Opinion. I'm proposing a new term, microluting. What I started doing is I started going into the grocery store, I would pick up the thing that I wanted and then I would go. You're paying for that, right? No, babe, food is a human right. People are taking small things from big corporations. Justified. Look, everyone's shoplifting from Whole Foods when you're shopping there.

You're not gonna steal from a deli like that. But Ho Fus, fuck hofus. Fuck Bezos, fuck Amazon, Olaf. Like, we should be rioting, but we're tired, so I'm gonna take these bagels.

But is it a slippery slope? And what's going on with our moral code? To find out, I'm talking to political commentator Hassan Piker and New Yorker writer Gia Tolan. Thank you both so much for being here with me today to talk about this. Hi, Jia. Hi. Hi, Hassan. Hi. Um, I want to start with a little exercise just about our own morals. Would you share your Netflix password? I do. I also do well I uh With anyone.

For the longest time I actually had someone else's Netflix password and that was my primary access to Netflix. And now you share your own. Yeah. Um, would you get around a paywall on an article you're trying to read? Do it every day on my stream. Every day. support it when people do it for my own work. I say, Go off. Use the way back machine. Would you pirate music from an indie band? Is it 2005 and I'm using LimeWire? Because yes. I feel like every millennial has at some point done.

I feel like fun fundamentally Spotify is kind of like deleterious to the musician livelihood and I use that. But then I go to the shows. Yeah, no, I'm I'm pro piracy all the way. Like across the board, would you pirate a car? Yes.

You know, I if you could. If one could buy a car. It was just the classic thing back in the day, the government funded anti piracy initiatives would be like, D would you steal a car? I'm like, Yeah, sure. If I could get away with it, if it was as easy as you know pirating IP, I would do it. Would you dine and dash from your local diner? Never, never. Tip thirty five percent. Mike's come on. Uh no, I wouldn't do that. If I saw somebody doing that, I'd probably pay for their meal. Yeah.

Would you steal a book from the library? Never. What do you um steal from the Louvre? Yeah. 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. Absolutely. Yeah. I I think it's cool. We gotta we gotta get back to cool crimes like that. Like, you know, bank robberies, right?

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.

Would you steal from whole food? Yeah. And I have under very specific circumstances, 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, like

I've been involved in like a neighborhood mutual aid group since 2021. And so every week I would go get groceries for Miss Nancy, my now family friend who lived nearby and she wanted to go to Whole Foods. She wanted food from Whole Foods. So I was like, okay, great.

And so I'd be getting Ms. Nancy all our groceries and then I would finish and I'd be like, oh my God, four lemons. I forgot four lemons. And on several occasions I was like, I'm just gonna go back, grab those four lemons and get the hell out. Yeah. I know. You think they're gonna ban me? They should they should throw you in jail. Mm. And was part of it because of how you feel about Whole Foods as a corporation?

Yeah, it already felt like a bit of a compromise. Like at the time I was like I I had not been to Whole Foods. I had sort of I had a bit more sort of consumer discipline about where I was spending my money then. And I already felt like I was in the hole even by shopping there. And it certainly felt in a utilitarian sense. I was like, this is not

As I'm I'm I'm pro stealing from big corporations'cause, you know, they they steal quite a bit more from their own workers. However, uh 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 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 uh increased profit margins because they no longer have to pay for the cashiers that they uh used to hire as opposed to this automated system, knowing full well that people are still gonna be able to steal, still steal a lot more efficiently, as a matter of fact, through the uh automated process.

Totally. Well I'll also I was looking things like and shrinkage is uh roughly equal internally as externally. Like they expect it from their employees that they are sort of disenfranchising constantly. But what about the argument that if everyone just starts stealing wantonly from these self checkout machines, Whole Foods will eventually raise the prices? Yeah, they I I chaos. Full chaos. Let's go. I mean look, I

I I'm in favor. I'm in favor of fast and free buses and also government owned storefronts. And uh, you know, two of those policies uh the mayor of this beautiful city is is currently working on. Do you encourage ceiling in the same way from a Mamdani run city owned grocery store with other prices? I would not because I feel like that's uh taxpayer funded and uh the prices are this union labor and the prices are also uh adjusted regardless.

I think that that hypothetical is interesting, right? Because if you look at it from a categorical imperative type thing, what if everybody did this? You know, the converse is like, oh, what if every major grocery chain stole from workers and consumers and that is basically true, right? Like it's interesting. Like I think it it speaks to the thing where a kind of harm committed by the individual

strangely continually draws more ire than the same harm being committed by a structure. And so I mean, and so I kind of am inclined towards this. It's like Everyone try it, see what happens. Well, I by the way, ironically enough, I don't personally do it. I never do it. Uh when I was younger, I uh stole some Pokemon cards from a friend and my father punished me and it was such a harrowing experience that I have

Like I literally can't even steal like a candy bar. When we were in college, a lot of my friends used to love doing that, you know, getting drunk, going to the gas station. five finger discount. I would never participate in it and I still can't to this day participate in it. I'm just saying that I personally don't really care. If someone needs the food, they should absolutely steal it. Yeah.

There's one thing that's like stealing when you're a teenager and you want the adrenaline rush and part of it is about testing the rules and getting away with something. But I feel like what I'm seeing on

TikTok and social media is people saying that they're stealing from Whole Foods, not just for the thrill of it, but out of a feeling of anger and moral justification because the rich don't play by the rules. So why should I? And Jeff Bezos has too much money, he's a billionaire, so why should I have to pay for organic avocados?

Um, my friends and I have started calling this microlooting, um, because it has a like slight political valence to the theft as opposed to just the thrill of getting away with something. Have you noticed this around you online? Have you noticed more people talking about stealing in this way?

I mean, I have I have not seen people talking about microluting or such, you know, whatever action that this is. online but I think I mean... It kind of speaks to an attenuation of the tactical language of direct action. You know what I mean? Like it's like

It doesn't work for me as a form of direct action because it's it's concealed, right? Like uh any successful direct action in history has to be ostentatious, has to make itself known as ideally collective. And this is sort of necessarily individual and hidden. But I'm like, oh great, let's think of ways to Like, let's take this energy and let's move it into some other thing. Like, I think it's great that the valence of property is kind of on the table as something.

To be toyed with in terms of direct action. I feel like we've forgotten there is a long and storied history of sabotage. And sort of engagement with property destruction, even, which is abhorrent to people. I mean, I you remember in twenty twenty, the like Gucci Chanel stuff in Soho, when that was looted, that looms so much larger in many sort of

Bloomberg liberals' imaginations as profoundly more violent in some ways than the original action being protested, right? And I find that really interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I was I was thinking about the Boston Tea Party as part of like that's a political destruction of property and yet right now it feels like I agree with you, the looting around the twenty twenty protests was

such a huge talking point. It made people so uncomfortable. And I'm curious why, like what do you think the root of that is? I was thinking, you know, that thieves Are actually quite highly valorized in narrative, Aladdin, famously. But like Robin Hood, right? Yeah, Lejean Valjean, like it's we we understand it's it's well within the collective consciousness that stealing for need or purpose.

You know, it's it's something that that we we understand and feel quite friendly towards. And I think if someone were, let's say, walking out of Whole Foods with an IKEA bag of whatever and giving it to the people, you know. sheltering underneath the scaffolding at the jail going up in Brooklyn next door. You know, like

I think most people would agree that that, you know, if someone were to be stealing with a purpose, we love that in America. We we do. We can love it again. We just have to do it with a purpose.

I was reading a um a pew research poll about Americans' morality and it was it basically was just like, Well, we didn't even ask about the obviously immoral things like theft. We only asked about like having an affair. Um and And I was like, but I feel like part of what I'm seeing around me is that people feel like the laws are immoral. The rich don't play by the rules. It is we live in a society where there are billionaires, where

the top one percent holds thirty-two percent of the net worth and the bottom fifty percent holds two point five percent. So at some point if the laws don't feel moral, do you start to question your own sense of having to abide by them? Of course. Yeah. Um, I wanted to work off of a point that you were making. This was also something that was addressed in a previous New York Times podcast that I did with Rouse Dalthit, where I uh brought up the concept of adventurism.

In the Marxist tradition, adventurism is the action that is uh oftentimes decentralized. Uh oftentimes anarchists will will say this is the propaganda of the deed. The action itself, no matter how violent or how disruptive it is, is uh is is justifiable because the disruption is the point.

I believe in the power of organized labor and labor militancy and building these structures of power so that we can actually make more effective change, more longstanding change. So concepts such as microluting indicate that there is an energy there, just like you said. And yet many Americans, I think, are totally oblivious to this political language. They lack the political education. They lack the class consciousness to recognize their position in society.

and and lack the capacity, unfortunately, to engage in some kind of organized disruption that would be infinitely more effective.

I think what you were saying about people lack the language and the organizing structure to engage in, like the you know, the obvious thing to do if you want to chip into the Whole Foods slash Amazon mega structure of exploitation is to unionize, like to work at a Whole Foods and form a union. And I think the first one was formed recently in Philly, I think. But, you know, the I mean this is it's like microluting, it feels akin to like a posting about something. Like it is it's a kind of

As an atomized individual action, it's useless. It's much harder to get a job and accept. Seventeen fifty an hour, and then to organize your colleagues a process that takes years and is often unsuccessful. I mean, that's really, you know, the thing about actual collective direct action, it's so much harder. And it often doesn't profit you whatsoever, such as, you know, me getting an extra ten bucks by grabbing my extra loaf of bread from Miss Nancy. Like it's like I I do think there's

We are also lazy as humans. We're also selfish. We also um like we've lost. Not we've lost not only the language and the union density and the structure to engage in things like this, but we have also lost the sort of muscle that is built up to be able to engage in these sort of things. We've lost the rooms in which these things are planned, you know?

Yeah. And the confidence. I think we've lost the confidence within ourselves because there is not a lot of action like this. And in the absence of that, we lack the willpower because we don't even know what that would look like.

And actual I mean, you know, the there are this the climate protests in Europe tend to be a little more militant, right, than the ones are there are here. And they are, you know, blocking roadways, like th these things that are even objectively completely nonviolent forms of obstruction and interference that that don't even involve property destruction, but merely the

interruption of the capital flow of the workday, like are are criminalized to shocking degrees to me, even in Europe, you know? And I guess I'm saying like maybe we are getting the the lack of courage is a is maybe a rational response to the kind of The way these actions are treated in the popular consciousness as well as by the criminal justice system, but they shouldn't be.

I wanna get back a little bit to the anger underneath this. In nineteen sixty-five, CEOs were paid twenty-one times the average worker. In twenty twenty four, CEOs were paid two hundred and eighty one times the average worker. I feel like some of this is coming from a feeling of

Like the rules are the social contract is broken and then there's also the slippery slope of what happens if we completely bl break the social contract and no one plays by the rules anymore. And I wonder where you two see the interplay of those two ideas. the rules are already designed in a way where uh if you steal from the poor you become rich. If you steal from the wealthy, you go to prison. So there's only uh one direction where you can do unlimited theft.

and and uh erode the social contract for the ninety nine percent. There's an invisibility uh baked into the system that allows the wealthy to engage in this sort of uh in this sort of behavior.'Cause I mean it's a it's a cliche at this point, but like wage theft is the most consequential amount of theft that takes place in the United States of America. a similar invisibility exists in in structural violence as opposed to individual acts of violence as well.

If it's a police officer uh engaging someone violently, the automatic assumption from the average person is, oh, that was probably a criminal. They probably deserved it. But if there's any circumstance where someone else is fighting back against police, like in a normal protest environment, for example, ultimately

most people assume that that is chaotic. There's a chaotic situation and that it is born out of the escalations from the protesters themselves, even if as regular citizens, we're infinitely closer to those exercising their First Amendment rights than those with the power uh stamping out people exercising their free speech rights. Uh, we never look at systemic forms of violence and we don't look at systemic forms of theft in the same way that we do as individuals breaking that social contract.

I think there is, you know, in my in my ideal world Like what what we were talking about, the one kind of theft being inescapable and hegemonic and, you know, completely oppressive. And then people trying to get a little bit of it back through stealing from Whole Foods or whatever, right? It's in the ideal world in is not one in which

this continues and this increases to somehow even it out, right? The ideal world is one in which the theft from above is broken by regulatory means and or bottom up means like unionization, right? Yeah. You were just talking about um wanting not being like we should encourage wanton theft across the board, um, but we should try and fight against the theft that comes from the top. It feels

difficult right now in a moment when um to to like hope for regulatory change when that um would come from the government, let's say. Um and um And a lot of the billionaires like Bezos and Cook and Elon Musk are given a seat at the table in terms of the the government itself when billionaires themselves they pay much lower tax rates than most Americans. Um my producer was just giving me this fact that she saw today. Um eighty-eight corporations.

That made$105 billion in profits in 2025, including Tesla, Southwest, United, Life Nation, Disney. They made$105 billion in profits and they collectively paid income taxes of zero dollars. Right. I mean it's a far more consequential withdrawal of resources and trust from the public sphere to do that, to talk about any individual thing that any person has ever done. Right. Like it's like and I think I mean the one percent the the top one percent of Americans

20% of their income is withdrawn from is is withheld from reporting every year, like as just a standing statistic. And that's not even a corporate structure. That's not even, I mean, that's just ordinary. Rich people, you know?

Um, okay, to go back. You were talking about sort of what you do see as effective political protest. And recently a employee set um fired Kimberly Clark warehouse as a protest. Is that an effective form of political protest or is that purely violent? No, I found it no, th that y you gotta be tactical. I mean, I feel like Mike Davis wrote about this. It's like, it's not the action, it's the context in which it exists. And do I think that some sort of fire

Could hypothetically be framed within a collective action that is tactically useful? Yes. Does a disgruntled guy burning down the warehouse do it for me in terms of effective political action? Not at all. But I do, but. Sabotage has played a formative role in labor union. In everything. Labor unions as well, but if it's if it's uh conducted unilaterally, then it's entirely different.

That's an individual action. And and if he could have gotten away with it without being caught, I bet he I mean, I didn't follow this case very closely, but it seemed like yeah, like anything done by an individual on an emotional uh you know, on a kind of primarily emotional whim, it it's that's not that's not the point. That's not the point.

But then when you feel this much anger and it doesn't feel like there's hope for it to be changed in a regulatory way, I think that's when you get to things like killing the CEO of United Healthcare and There being an outpouring of glee for murder online because it feels like finally someone can actually do something about healthcare. I think um forty percent of Gen Zers felt that that murder was morally justified.

But it's scary to be in a society where people feel that murder is morally justified. And I'm curious how we how we thread that line. Yeah. Um Engels wrote about the concept of social murder. And Brian Thompson as the United Healthcare CEO was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder, the systematized forms of violence.

uh the the structural violence of poverty, the for profit paywalled system of of health care in this country, and the the consequences of that are Uh tremendous amounts of pain, tremendous amounts of violence, tremendous amounts of death.

And that was a fascinating story from for me because Americans are very draconian about crime and punishment. They're very black and white on this issue. And yet Because of the pervasive pain that the private healthcare system had uh created for the average American, I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place. Even before they knew who the shooter was or what the motive was, we had universalized this pain so much so that.

Virtually every American has a similar experience, a shared experience where they have a loved one that spent their last days instead of spending them uh with their family, spending it on the phone. talking to their healthcare provider to maybe get a little bit of economic respite so they don't carry on medical debt for their next generation, for their next of kin. Uh that's a harrowing process for a lot of people.

And for them, that is murder. For them, that is torture. And that is the reason why I think the reaction to Luigi Mangioni, especially by younger generations, was not so negative. I I think also it's worth saying, you know It's not so much. There are not that many healthcare CEOs. There are not that many industries that are as universally understood as merchants of. social murder, as of of structural violence upon people and and it and it was as if the language

appeared lit up within people that had never articulated it out loud. Like it wa there are so few industries, maybe that is singularly the one that touches everyone, that harms nearly everyone. Like even when even when Charlie Kirk was murdered.

But that like I kept seeing reactions online, like leftists are celebrating and I was like, none of all my friends were just like, yikes, this is gonna get so bad, you know? Yeah. And and I I don't think we've turned into a culture where murder is sanctioned. I think that we have turned into a culture where private health care is Is is so profoundly immoral that people had a very particular reaction to Brian Thompson's murder, right? Like I don't actually think.

necessarily that we have come to a place where targeted assassination is seen like, you know? I wonder with something like the w like m murder, like the murder of a healthcare CEO Is it just a release valve for anger or is it actually effective political action? Has anything shifted in terms of healthcare in this country because of that? I felt enormously frustrated in the weeks following that, that every single like I was I I I assumed, I don't know why I thought that.

Democrats would immediately take this up as pushing a sort of unified message towards universal health care. I I I I don't know why I expected that. I don't know why I was disappointed that it didn't happen. Elizabeth Warren did it to her credit.

Sure. But y you know what I mean? I th I thought it would be I I don't know and I don't know why I expected that. But I I do not think that it was effective political action. I do think it was an effective act of political consciousness raising, but I don't think that

I don't think that's action at all. I do think it was served up for someone to just spike that ball over the other side. And I was and that did not happen at all. But I think um and I I find that kind of egregious missed opportunities that we have seen in recent political history.

I go back and forth on this. I think that Democrats are are failing. Uh are are they are they feckless because they're just bad at politics? Or is it something more indecent and that their fecklessness is uh simply cover for their ulterior motives, which is participating in this grand design. They're funded by the same corporate lobbyists that Republicans are funded by, especially when it comes to private healthcare providers.

And they have a vested interest in the continuation of private healthcare. There is consensus in American politics when it comes to the continuation of the private healthcare system, that the system must Be private. Um, this also touches on something that I wanted to address that you said. You you were saying that like Americans are not used to murder, right? Like Americans are not on board with murder. I kind of wanted to push back on that at the moment because

I do think we are a profoundly violent culture. In some ways, Charlie Kirk's assassination was Not unique. Um, school shootings are happening all the time. And we have actually decided almost collectively that it's just another uh another byproduct of American existence.

I mean, I know part of the issue is that Americans have lost a lot of trust in their government. I have this other statistic here that in nineteen sixty-four, seventy-seven percent of Americans trusted the government. In twenty twenty-five, seventeen percent of Americans trust the government. And yet it feels like

There's some political action that feels hopeful, like Mamdani's policies for New York. Is this kind of change achievable through the mechanism of politics? Does it line up with Mamdani's politics? Uh absolutely. I think that this global design of capital that we have. Seems like a a behemoth that is impossible to defeat.

And that obviously discourages a lot of people from taking action. One of the immediate reflections is the fact that we don't really have a democratic process any longer and people don't even have that confidence. in the democratic process because the wishes of the masses are rarely ever represented by our elected representatives. There are many different instances where this has become reality. There was an election cycle that just took place.

only two years ago where there was a genocide that was happening alongside that. And that was the perfect opportunity to show Americans that uh your your voices do matter. Right. The Democratic Party chose not to lean into that real mobilization. Three thousand five hundred college campus protesters were arrested in the process. And now we write think pieces about why there aren't any college campus protesters. Where are the anti-war protesters over and over again? Well, it's like

We did it. The the government succeeded in in undermining the the people's right to protest and the and the confidence that they have by refusing to listen to their demands. So they succeeded in that regard. However, While this system of global capital seems like a giant that is impossible to tackle, it's also very fragile.

Part of this too is like Part of the way that this feels weighted on both sides to me is that if the material conditions of an average person's life are ameliorated by a redistribution of wealth, then the conditions become more possible. to take time and take risks and organize, right? Like I think one of the reasons obviously that these things that people don't have time to attend multiple weekday meetings

m weeknight meetings, you know, organizing something in their community is because they have to work too long, they have to pick up their kids. They pay so much for childcare. There's no there's no margin for anything. And I think

You know, the when you're talking about Mamdani, when you when there is a political program that is about improving about giving people margin for individual pro-social, you know, civic action, then like, you know, a whole realm of possibilities and and energy and ability and interest. Will begin to regrow. That won't be redirected into like, okay, here's my seven minutes of downtime. Yeah. I'm gonna use it scrolling or whatever, you know, not to.

Not that I would know anything about that myself. Not that any of us have used our seven minutes of downtown to scroll. And the thing with with Zoron is that he does instill confidence in governance all of a sudden. People for the first time ever see someone actually making that positive change. And and it brings more confidence and and it creates an environment where people can demand more Zorons. That's why I always say l I wanna let a thousand Zorons bloom all around the country, you know?

There's 'Cause there are people like Zoran out there and and they're just waiting to be elected, uh, and waiting to come into a position of power and show the rest of the country that no, you can actually do things. You can do good governance. Yeah.

I I love that. Um so a lot of what we've been talking about is taking what little power we have and trying to make it bigger, trying to take back some of the power for ourselves. And so I just wanted to end by asking you what's one thing that you think should be okay, but currently isn't okay. I mean, I P theft, stealing uh movies, things like that.

One thing that should be legal that isn't It's interesting because I have to regularly explain th this stuff to a small child, which is and have so thoroughly explained to her. That some things are against the rules, but they're okay. And depending on who you are. And some things are not against the rules, but they're not okay. Like there are so many perfectly legal things I do at

regularly that I find mildly immoral, right? Like getting iced coffee in a plastic cup. Like I find that to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action. You know, I think a lot of like the I have taken so many planes for so many pleasure reasons, for no you know, I have acted in so many selfish ways that are not only that are not only legal, but they're sanctioned and they're unbelievably valorized culturally. And I think

Yeah, I guess I don't really think of any laws. Um yeah, maybe like things like blowing up a pipeline. Let's say that. I really relate what you're saying, Jeff. Like it is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society. And also there are so many moral compromises I make every day. I am So many immoral things. I'm constantly acting in ways that don't align with my belief system and constantly having to justify that. From like ordering in food when it's raining out. Like they're just like

like so many moments when I'm like my comfort is more important than someone bringing me food through the rain and it and it doesn't feel good. But it is part of living I mean, I don't no one's making me do that. But it it it is part of the way in which we live in our society. And it's and it's so incentivized. I mean, it's like splashed all over the subway ads. It's just like, ladies, be selfish tonight, you know? Like it's it's wild. Yeah.

Um what is one thing that shouldn't be okay but currently is? So many things. Extraction of surplus labor value. Great, you went really silly with it. Yeah. Yeah, a anything above Mao. I think New York should charge people to park on the street. Which I mean I park on the street, but I think that's just a huge that's a huge public um that is an access to a large amount of public money that we should be taking. Everyone who does street parking.

Assassinate. No, but I think it's Someone's gonna fight you. I think it's true. I also think private schools should be mostly illegal. oh i agree with that that's a good oneyes You are gonna piss off all the drivers of New York City. Driving their kids to private school. Yeah, it's it's a huge problem. Yeah. Um okay, so because we have talked about so many different things, let's give like sort of a smash or pass yes or no style summary. Steal steal from Whole Foods?

Sure. Sure. Burn down your employer's warehouse. No no. My lawyers are telling me to answer in the negative. Um, murder the CO of a healthcare company. Also no. No. So we have a yes on steel from Whole Foods, microluting. Um But the real yes is get a job there, spend three years being a salt and organize the union. I think is a true better answer than justify your wheel of brie for yourself. But that's fine too.

Um, Jia Hassan, thank you so much for being here. This has been such an interesting conversation. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you both. Thank you, Najee. These episodes will also be playing on our YouTube channel. If you want to see the beautiful loft where we recorded this, find us on YouTube at New York Times. Spotify or Darba, Victoria Chamberlain. And Gillian Weinberger. Jillian Weinberger, Jasmine Romero, and Carrie P. by Carol Sabero. Original music Sonya Harris.

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