• Piker: “Would you steal a car? I’m like, yeah, sure. If I could get away with it, if it was as easy as pirating intellectual property, I would do it.”

• Spiegelman: “Would you steal from the Louvre?”

  Piker: “Yes.”

  Tolentino: “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.”

  Piker: “I think it’s cool. We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, 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.”

• Spiegelman: “Would you steal from Whole Foods?”

  Tolentino: “Yes. And I have, under very specific circumstances. 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. I’ve been involved in 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. 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.”

• Piker: “I’m pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers. 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? So 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 increased profit margins, because they no longer have to pay the cashiers that they used to hire, as opposed to this automated system, knowing full well that people are still going to be able to steal a lot more efficiently, as a matter of fact, through the automated process.”

That’s just a sample from many equally nauseating statements. Read the rest if you dare, or if you want to understand the sick culture the U.S. is fighting right now.

The pandering moderator ends by saying, “Jia, Hasan, 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.”

I wish she had projectile vomited on both of them. Their ideas aren’t even new: Abbie Hoffman wrote “Steal This Book,” making the same arguments 60 years ago from the standpoint of the violent Sixties radicals. But at least Hoffman was witty: these people are simply smug, simplistic and arrogant.

And unethical beyond excuse or redemption.