The New York Times Asked Two Prominent Members of the Cultural Elite If Stealing Is Okay

I’ll be speaking at the University of Austin (UATX) tomorrow (Tuesday, April 28) at 5:30pm. If you’d like to attend, please register here. and I dissect the recent New York Times podcast that has set off a firestorm online. Two of the most fashionable voices on the left, Jia Tolentino (writer for The New Yorker) and Hasan Piker (popular Twitch and YouTube personality), were asked simple questions about stealing. Their answers were worse than you think. They glorify shoplifting. They flirt with endorsing murder. They giggle through all of it. I went in to this conversation thinking this was just stale 2020-era politics, the kind of thing a smart audience has already moved past. Louise has a very different take. Something darker is replacing the old woke era, and it shares a team with the current mayor of New York. By the end we asked a question I still can’t shake. In a few years, will we be begging to go back to fights about pronouns?