New Yorker journalist who boasted about shoplifting triggers massive blowback online
New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino was called out after bragging about stealing from Whole Foods in a Wednesday interview alongside far-left commentator Hasan Piker, who also said he was "pro-stealing."
"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," Tolentino said during a New York Times Opinion podcast.
She explained a specific scenario in which she stole lemons from Whole Foods and didn't feel bad about it.
"I’ve been involved in a neighborhood mutual aid group since 2021," Tolentino said. "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. And I was like, ‘OK, great.’ And so I’d be getting Miss Nancy all of her 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 going to go back, grab those four lemons and get the hell out.’"
The New York Times' Nadja Spiegelman, who hosted the conversation with Tolentino and Piker, deemed the idea that people are stealing small things from big corporations and feeling justified in doing so, "microlooting."
Tolentino was called out by commentators on X, The Atlantic, The Free Press and even some fellow New Yorkers cited by The New York Post.
The Atlantic's Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote a piece headlined "Theft Is Now Progressive Chic," taking issue with the pair's argument.
"It is difficult to know where to begin with such moral reasoning, if it can be called reasoning," Williams wrote. "At a time of kleptocratic governance and corporate oligarchy, Tolentino and Piker resort to a game of jaded whataboutism. For them, theft is a kind of perverse virtue signaling. Societal problems do not just excuse personal wrongdoing; they ennoble it."
"Both Tolentino and Piker seem to justify stealing from large companies such as Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, because those corporations exploit workers and already budget for theft," he continued. "Why wring our hands about shoplifting when it’s been accounted for? Such an attempt to normalize petty crime makes Vicky Osterweil’s 2020 manifesto, In Defense of Looting, look high-minded."
The New York Post reported that Tolentino lives in a $2.5 million brownstone in New York, and spoke to New York City residents about Tolentino's remarks.
"She is rich … and I am not. We don’t live on the same planet at all," said Andrea Jones, 49, who lives in Gompers Houses public housing, according to the Post. "Because of her they’ll raise the price and I have to pay more. She is hurting me, she is not helping me."
"I wonder why CVS has everything from toothpaste to deodorant locked behind plastic," the Post's Lydia Moynihan wrote in reaction to Tolentino's remarks.
In another post to X, Moynihan called for Tolentino to be banned from Whole Foods.
American Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow Robert Pondiscio wrote, "I just cancelled my subscription to @NewYorker. I'll be shoplifting it from now on. Fair is fair, @CondeNast."
"Whole Foods should post her picture and bar her from entering in the future," Jonah Goldberg, the editor-in-chief at the Dispatch, wrote.
Whole Foods did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
"Has there even been a more perfect marriage of smug elitism, contempt for commonsense morality, and masturbatory self-importance?" podcast host Coleman Hughes asked.
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Piker said he was pro-stealing from big corporations because they "steal" from their workers.
"I’m pro-stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers," Piker said on "The Opinions" podcast. "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?"
Asked about the argument that if a ton of people started stealing from Whole Foods, they would raise the prices, Piker said he supported it.
"Yeah, chaos. Full chaos. Let’s go. I mean, look, I’m in favor of fast and free buses and also government-owned storefronts. And two of those policies, the mayor of this beautiful city is currently working on," he said.
"'Microlooting' and "social murder" are part of this new soft socialist language that gives permission to break the law and kill," Kirsten Fleming, a New York Post columnist, wrote in reaction to the news.
Reason reporter Billy Binion called Tolentino out for shoplifting while shopping for her "mutual aid group."
"The most maddening part about this is she says she stole while shopping for her mutual aid group. Those networks supposedly exist to bring communities together, build trust, and pay it forward. Hard to think of a better way to undermine that than to steal from your own community," Binion wrote.
The National Review's Jim Geraghty reacted with the suggestion, "If you commit crimes, don't brag about them on podcasts."
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Batya Ungar-Sargon, a host at NewsNation, called out both Piker and Tolentino in posts to X as well as in a Substack column headlined, "The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules So Why Should I?" Ask Three Rich Leftists Celebrating Theft and Murder."
"In pretending that they steal out of unfairness, out of hatred for corporations and corporate abuses, the educated rich get to cosplay as members of the working class, a gambit designed to disguise their own immense privilege. They get to pretend to loathe the system they wouldn’t replace for anything in the world," she wrote on X.
The New Yorker and Tolentino did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Fox News Digital.