I know, I know...this might have been staged. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t staged, but just a single group of assholes after other trick-or-treaters used the communal candy basket as it was designed to be used. Maybe this video has no larger significance at all.
I hope it doesn’t.
But I suspect it does.
ADDED: I see that Ann Althouse also posted this video. Her focus is a bit different. She writes,
Why are we doing handouts anyway? To show what human beings are like? If you answer the door and dispense the handout personally, you can maintain a system of one portion per person, and you might even get a smile or a thank you. If you put out a big bowl of multiple portions because you don’t want to monitor the process and impose single portions, then people will serve their own interests and take all they want. You knew that. The kids who took it all also knew that if they didn’t take it all, the next group of kids would take it all. It’s a state of nature without supervision and enforcement. Don’t pretend you trusted people and you had some sort of admirable “hope” that now I’m supposed to feel bad got crushed. No, you lazy bastard. Answer the damned door next time. Or have the courage to turn off the porch light and huddle in a back room and celebrate the end of the holiday you no longer believe in.
Well, in the past, I have known people who did this (put out baskets of candy to be used with the honor system) not because they were lazy or didn’t want to participate in Halloween, but because they were not going to be home, or had mobility issues for one reason or another. Ann just assumes that the natural tendency is to act badly and just take it all. I don’t.
But she lives in uber-progressive Madison, Wisconsin, so there’s that…
Ethics Alarms 
That video seems about right. When I was trick-or-treating back in the late ’80s in Casper, Wyoming, some people in our neighborhood would just place a bowl outside and ask treat-or-treaters to only take one or two. Whenever we came by, and it was either still early in the evening or we were trudging through blizzard conditions, the bowls were always empty. We figured back then that an unattended bowl would last maybe 2 or 3 trick-or-treaters before someone just emptied the entire thing into his bag.
My favorite scenario is when someone dresses up as a scarecrow holding the bowl and jumpscares the looters.
We leave out a candy bowl so we can go out with our children. One of us would stay home to answer the door but neither wanted to miss out on being out with our kids while they’re still young.
No one in our neighborhood did anything remotely like this–we came home to a bowl that was approximately 75% gone, which is about what was expected given the traffic we saw.
Just so happens that in the Über-progressive 77 Square Miles Surrounded By A Sea Of Reality there was a great deal of Door-Cam documentations of that very same activity, posted to neghborsnextdoor (They Report/You Decide!)
It’s irritating seeing this sort of behavior from poorly raised kids. It pisses me off to see it from adults. I’m glad their faces are being plastered far and wide.
What language are they speaking?
The accent sounds like southern Mexico/Central American Spanish, but I can only make one word (“Apurate” – hurry up!) – and I’m a native speaker. I wonder if they are also speaking some minority native language. There are major migration waves from Central America crossing through Mexico and causing havoc along the route, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that is the case here.
If that was staged, the acting was impeccable, as was the casting and directing and script.
I’ll just say this is NOT what is happening to America right now. There is a very small segment of America that might do this kind of stuff, and, of course, that very small segment gets a ton of publicity and is portrayed as typical by those who want to make this or that point. I’ve lived in a bunch of different neighborhoods, mostly thanks to the military, and I have never seen this kind of behavior.
Ann’s point, that trick-or-treaters should be greeted at the door and given the treat, individually, is exactly right.
During the great Covid scare, a former neighbor used a drain pipe to dispense goodies from his door to the assigned and labeled spot down the driveway where kids to supposed to stand and hold their bags and catch the stuff. A dumb idea then, and he still is using it. That is a neighborhood I don’t miss.
What I do miss is the kids coming up the sidewalk and hollering, “Trick or Treat”. Somehow, at my very advance age, I’ve gotten myself into a community where there are no kids who do that.
To ask and to guess at the language they are speaking smacks of racism. Why in the hell make a presumption about that unless you are looking for a reason to denigrate one race or ethnicity?
And at the end of the vid you hear a Nelson voice say, “Haha”.
No compassion there for the next ToT group.