It’s high time we got to know Hasan Piker … and this week Piker was in the spotlight, celebrated by the New York Times, for heaven’s sake.
Mr. Piker, emerging one of the biggest voices on the left for some time now, had a breakout moment this week. Piker joined a New York Times group chat.
A transcript of the chat appears in the Times under the fetching headline “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” Among other things, Piker proposed that assassinated United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was the real murderer in the case. Piker further argued in favor of stealing, as long as it’s from big companies. National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke on what happened next when the mainstream media professionals were confronted with Piker’s moral inversions:
To which Piker’s interlocutors, the Times’ Nadja Spiegelman and the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino, responded, “Wow, that all seems utterly psychotic, have you considered getting professional help?”
Nah, I’m just kidding. In reality, Tolentino responded by explaining that she is opposed to “profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive” actions such as “getting iced coffee in a plastic cup” or flying on airplanes for pleasure, but that she is supportive of selfless, moral, collectively constructive actions such as “blowing up a pipeline,” and Spiegelman responded by saying, “I can relate to what you were saying, Jia. It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society.”
According to Vox, Dems are having a hard time getting Piker out of the limelight:
For the last month, some moderate Democrats have called on their party to shun Piker in light of his “antisemitic” and “hateful” remarks — among them, that “America deserved 9/11,” that “Hamas is 1,000 times better than Israel,” and that ultra-Orthodox Jews are “inbred.”
This ostracism campaign has gained little traction. In recent weeks, the center-left columnist Ezra Klein defended Piker against charges of antisemitism, while the flagship podcast of Resistance liberalism — Pod Save America — had the streamer on its show. And even resolutely pro-Israel Democratic politicians, such as Rahm Emmanuel and Gavin Newsom, have suggested they would appear on Piker’s livestream.
Kudos to one liberal magazine for acknowledging that shoplifting is not to be held up as an example of virtue. In honor of the affluent New Yorker mag writer’s admission (make that boast) of pilfering lemons from Whole Foods The Atlantic uses a bin of lemons as the art for a story headlined “Theft Is Now Progressive Chic.” Townhall describes Piker as “a glamorous backer of theft and murder.” Unherd sees “the latest example of moral confusion” in “microlooting.” Douglas Murray writes about the New York Times Piker chat this morning, too. Murray notes another admission from the irksome New Yorker writer:
New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino chimed in that she frequently does things that are ethnically questionable. “Like getting iced coffee in a plastic cup. I find that to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action.”
As apparently, is taking a commercial flight.
All of which makes something that the trio didn’t seem to find morally troubling all the more startling.
As long as we’re in a morally inverted world, there’s this: Trans-identifying male prison inmates in Massachusetts are getting away with threatening the safety of incarcerated females. City Journal is on the case:
Just west of Boston, the state’s MCI–Framingham facility houses at least 11 trans-identified men, including serial rapists, wife-murderers, and child molesters, whose presence imposes degrading and dangerous conditions on female inmates. (MCI–Framingham did not return a request for comment for this article.)
Charles Horton, a level-three sex offender, was sentenced in 2000 to one year of house arrest for raping a minor. In 2019, he was convicted of repeatedly kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 14-year-old at gunpoint. He is now serving a 25- to 35-year sentence at MCI–Framingham as “Charlise.”
Meanwhile, “a biological male [i.e., male] killer housed in Oregon women’s prison wins high-dollar legal settlement in sex abuse suit.” Ms. Must would be against unkindness, including to Zera Lola Zombie, as the former Daniel Lee Smith, who beat his girlfriend to death, but the offense on the part of prison personnel seems to be this:
The claim said Zombie was discriminated against based on gender, that officials broke the law by housing a female in a male prison, said they failed to “follow both federal and Oregon rules and laws concerning the designation and protection of plaintiff as a Vulnerable Adult-In-Custody … at high risk for both physical and sexual assault,” housed an inmate with a known sexual predator, refused to provide legally-mandated counseling and failed to report the sexual assaults per Oregon and federal law.
We’d best get to the hard news segment of today’s programing. An Iranian ship tried to get past the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, but one of our destroyers chased it down. The U.S. blockade is reaching peak leverage. Meanwhile, U.K. writer Joanna Williams makes the counterintuitive claim that that President Trump’s actions regarding Iran make him “America’s first ‘feminist’ president?” “In taking on the ayatollahs and the trans activists, The Donald has done far more for women than his woke opponents,” Williams argues.
The Wall Street Journal has a very sensible editorial on the recent DOJ indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center:
President Trump’s lawfare against his political opponents is destructive, but that doesn’t mean every case is unjustified. Consider Tuesday’s stunning grand jury indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on charges the group funneled donor money to hate groups it was publicly warning about.
According to the indictment, between 2014 and 2023 the Alabama-based nonprofit used donor contributions to infiltrate right-wing extremist groups and pay informants. The SPLC’s mission is to fight hate and extremism, but the SPLC allegedly helped the groups by paying more than $3 million to leaders at the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Movement….
Using informants to warn about threats of violence may be defensible. But the charges, if true, reveal a problematic symbiosis between the SPLC and its informant sources. One informant was allegedly the member of a chat group that helped plan the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. The source, who was paid $270,000 between 2015 and 2023, “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC,” the indictment says. The Charlottesville protests proved to be a great fund-raising event for the SPLC, with sizable donations from George Clooney, Apple Inc., and others….
To the extent the money encouraged or sustained the racist groups, tacitly or otherwise, SPLC benefited from perpetuating racial division. A court will decide if that’s illegal, but it’s certainly disreputable.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of Ms. Must’s heroines, writes “The SPLC Targeted Me. Now Its Reckoning Has Come” at The Free Press.
Gosh, I Wish He Wouldn’t Do Things Like This. “Trump Calls for 2020 Presidential Election to be ‘Permanently Wiped from the Books’ if Southern Poverty Law Center Convicted of Fraud” is a New York Post headline.
“Liberals Shocked! San Francisco Fixed Its Subway by Stopping Crime” is the headline on a Hill story by Robby Soave. Soave writes:
Today, we have an exciting new report from Obvious Land: San Francisco’s public transportation system has raised revenue, dramatically improved customer safety, and is cleaner and more orderly than ever, and they accomplished it all with one neat trick. They actually cracked down on crime. And it worked.
This news won’t surprise most normal people, but liberals might be in for a shock. It turns out that when you install new gates that it make impossible for fare-evaders — that’s the euphemism we use to describe criminals who refuse to pay to use the subway — to jump the gate, you magically improve everything about the subway. Seriously.
Ms. Must avers there is absolutely no basis for the dastardly rumor that a New Yorker writer was detained trying to jump the fare gate in San Francisco.
“Pope Leo: Between Gospel Witness and Humanitarian Illusions,” by Daniel J. Mahoney, in City Journal contends that the Holy Father was right to warn against hatred and rash recourse to war—but his tendency toward a kind of functional pacifism marks a departure from older Christian wisdom.
