In which the children of the comfortable discover theft, murder, and the working class — in that order

Let us begin with the lemons.

Four lemons. Left behind at Whole Foods. The kind of oversight that happens to everyone who has ever shopped for groceries — a small inconvenience, quickly remedied. You go back. You grab them. You pay. You leave.

Unless, of course, you are Jia Tolentino, New Yorker staff writer, NYT podcast guest, celebrated essayist, and daughter of a family whose Houston immigration business allegedly charged Filipino teachers 60% annual interest on loans, housed them ten to fifteen to a room on bare floors, and — according to court documents — collected fees from 273 teachers while placing fewer than 100 of them in actual jobs. In that case, the lemons become something else entirely. They become a political act. A stand. A moment of moral clarity in an unjust world.

“I didn’t feel bad about it at all,” she tells us.

Of course not. Guilt, like most inconveniences, is easier to outrun when you’ve had practice.

The podcast is called The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I? It was produced and hosted by Nadja Spiegelman, culture editor at The New York Times and daughter of Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus, recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, and owner of an estimated $10 million fortune. Nadja herself, before her Times perch, was editor-in-chief of an international literary magazine and the founding editor of a cinema journal attached to an arthouse movie theater. She attended the best schools. She has published a memoir. She lives, presumably, somewhere nice.

The third member of our revolutionary tribunal is Hasan Piker — known online as HasanAbi, Twitch’s most-watched political streamer, proud owner of a $2.7 million West Hollywood mansion, and son of Mehmet Behçet Piker, former Vice President and board member of Sabancı Holding, one of Turkey’s largest conglomerates, with revenues in the billions. His uncle is Cenk Uygur, founder of The Young Turks, the progressive media empire through which Hasan conveniently got his start. His college tuition was paid by his family. He has acknowledged he never faced true material deprivation.

Three people, in other words, who have never, not once, genuinely wondered whether they could afford the lemons.

Gathered together to explain to you why stealing them is resistance.

The conversation begins, as all great revolutionary manifestos must, with a quiz.

Would you share your Netflix password?

Yes! Obviously yes. Hasan not only shares — he has someone else’s password. Jia supports people pirating her own work. “Go off,” she says. The generosity of the comfortable toward intellectual property that is not theirs.

Would you pirate music from an indie band?

“Is it 2005?” Jia laughs. She uses Spotify, which she acknowledges is bad for musicians, “but then I go to the shows.” The peasantry, presumably, are grateful for her attendance.

Would you steal a car?

“Sure, if I could get away with it.” Hasan. Of course, Hasan.

Would you steal from the Louvre?

“I would not be logistically capable,” Jia concedes, with what sounds very much like genuine regret, “but I would cheer on every news story of people doing it. Absolutely.” She pauses, warming to the theme. “Bank robberies. Stealing priceless artifacts. That’s cool. Way cooler than the 7,000th new cryptocurrency scheme.”

One notes, with only mild amusement, that the woman whose family is alleged to have run what critics called a predatory debt-extraction business targeting desperate Filipino workers is now on record finding bank robbery cool.

The irony is not subtle. But then, neither is the apartment.

Now we arrive at the lemons in full.

Jia was shopping at Whole Foods — already, she explains, something of a moral compromise, though one she was apparently making regularly for her neighbor Miss Nancy — when she realized she’d forgotten four lemons. And so, on several occasions, she simply took them.

“I already felt like I was in the hole even by shopping there,” she explains.

This is the theology of the comfortable progressive in its purest form. Every act of consumption at an ethically impure institution accumulates a kind of moral debt, which can then be repaid — to oneself, spiritually — through minor theft. It is an indulgence system for the post-Catholic left. You buy the organic arugula. You take the lemons. The ledger balances. God, or whatever has replaced him in the Brooklyn brownstone, is satisfied.

Hasan approves. The lemons, he explains helpfully, are “factored into the bottom line of these mega corporations regardless.” The self-checkout machines were always going to eat the shrinkage. The lemons were already lost. Taking them is not theft — it is simply accepting what was structurally inevitable.

This is either very sophisticated economic analysis or the reasoning of a man who grew up in Istanbul while his father ran a billion-dollar conglomerate and has therefore never had to think very carefully about why one shouldn’t steal things.

“Full chaos,” he adds, when asked what would happen if everyone did this. “Let’s go.”

He does not steal. He has acknowledged this openly. The lemons are purely theoretical. He is cheering from the $2.7 million home.

But let us not linger too long in the produce aisle, because the conversation has somewhere more interesting to go.

It goes, as these conversations always do, to murder.

“I think that’s when you get to things like killing the C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare,” Nadja offers, “and there being an outpouring of glee for murder online.”

The tone does not change. There is no intake of breath. No pause to acknowledge that we have just crossed from lemon theft into assassination as a topic of casual afternoon analysis. It slides in as smoothly as the discussion of Netflix passwords.

Hasan, who studied political science at Rutgers on his family’s dime, produces Friedrich Engels on cue. Engels wrote about “social murder,” he explains. Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare executive who was shot dead on a New York sidewalk, was “engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder.” The reaction to his killer, Luigi Mangione, was therefore “not so negative” among younger generations — and Hasan finds this “fascinating.”

He is not advocating murder, he is careful to say. He just finds it fascinating.

This is the verbal equivalent of watching someone pour petrol around a room and announce that they are simply interested in the chemistry of flammable liquids.

Jia, to her credit, calls it “not effective political action.” But she does wonder aloud whether it was “an effective act of political consciousness raising” — which is a very long way of saying that someone dying violently in the street was, on balance, a useful communications strategy. She calls the aftermath “one of the most egregious missed opportunities in recent political history.” The missed opportunity being, one gathers, that Democrats failed to capitalize on the murder of a man to advance a legislative agenda.

She does not appear to hear herself.

Nadja, who coined the term “microlooting” for stealing four lemons from Whole Foods, nods along. “I love that,” she had said earlier, of a different provocation. The room is warm. The affirmations are soft. No one is in any danger.

Let us step back for a moment and take in the full tableau.

We have, gathered in this studio:

The daughter of a celebrated artist, who has spent her career at the most prestigious literary addresses in American media, who invented the concept of “microlooting” to describe petty shoplifting, and who is here to explain to you that stealing from Whole Foods has “slight political valence.”

A staff writer at The New Yorker who grew up in a private Christian school in suburban Houston, attended UVA on a full scholarship as a Jefferson Scholar, got her MFA at Michigan, and whose family operated a business that court documents describe as charging Filipino immigrants 60% annual interest, housing them on bare floors, and collecting fees for jobs that didn’t exist — who is now the author of celebrated essays about scammer culture and capitalism, and who is here to tell you that the social contract is broken.

A Twitch streamer and socialist commentator worth $8 million, son of a Sabancı Holding executive, nephew of a media mogul, resident of a $2.7 million Hollywood home, who used his family’s connections to enter an industry he now occupies as a tribune of the working class — who is here to tell you to steal from Whole Foods while confessing, with apparent sincerity, that he personally cannot bring himself to steal so much as a candy bar. His father punished him once for taking Pokémon cards. The trauma, he reports, was “harrowing.” He has never recovered. The working class, however, should absolutely go for it. Full chaos. Let’s go.

They complete each other’s thoughts. They affirm each other’s frames. They say “I love that” and “absolutely” and “go off” with the warm regularity of people who have never been contradicted by anyone whose opinion they value.

It is a salon. A very comfortable salon. With, presumably, good coffee.

The conversation does eventually turn to private schools.

“Private schools should be mostly illegal,” one of them says.

Nodding. Murmuring. “Yes.”

This is the ladder-and-roof maneuver, executed with characteristic grace. Having ascended via the precise advantages they now propose to abolish, they advocate abolition from the summit. The logic is beyond reproach. The timing is, one might say, convenient.

Hasan went to school in Istanbul. Jia went to Second Baptist School in Houston, a private Christian institution. Nadja is the product of New York’s cultural and educational elite. They have all arrived. They have all cleared the wall. And now they look down and say: we should really think about whether walls are good.

One does not doubt the sincerity. It is the sequencing that gives one pause.

Near the end, the conversation turns to what each of them does that they know is wrong.

Jia volunteers: ordering food delivery when it’s raining. Plastic coffee cups. Flying for pleasure.

Nadja: “Yeah, I mean, it is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society.”

They bond over this. The difficulty of the ethical life. The weight of complicity. The impossibility of purity in a fallen world. “I do so many immoral things,” Jia says. “I’m constantly acting in ways that don’t align with my belief system.”

She means, to be clear, that she uses DoorDash.

She does not mention the lemons. She does not mention Miss Nancy, who may or may not know she was the alibi for a talking point. She does not mention her family.

The conversation, like all good conversations in comfortable rooms, resolves into something like absolution. We are all complicit. We are all trying. The system is the problem. The system, conveniently, is elsewhere.

They thank each other. They are so glad to have had this conversation. It has been such a pleasure. They really must do this again.

And then, one imagines, they went out to dinner.

Somewhere in this city, the workers they theorized about were on their second shift.

The Whole Foods cashiers — the ones who weren’t replaced by the self-checkout machines that enable the microlooting — were bagging groceries.

The Filipino teachers, some of them, were still here. Still teaching. Still, perhaps, carrying debts.

The UnitedHealthcare executives who survived last December are still, presumably, going to work. Still, presumably, afraid.

And four lemons, somewhere, were the spark that lit the revolution.

It is genuinely hard to tell.

The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I? is available wherever the New York Times distributes its content, including, presumably, behind the paywall that Hasan circumvents on his stream every day while earning $2.8 million from Twitch.*

“Go off,” as Jia says. “Use the Wayback Machine.” The rules, after all, are for people who need them.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)