The dumbing down of America continues, and the story I’m about to write is going to send a lot of heads crashing to desks while trying to pinpoint exactly when it all started going so wrong.
Many of us remember the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, where Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters tried to justify the looting being done by rioters in her crime-ridden congressional district by stating that “There were mothers who took this as an opportunity to take some milk, to take some bread, to take some shoes. Maybe they shouldn’t have done it, but the atmosphere was such that they did it. They are not crooks.”
But that wasn’t all:
Later, she told a Times reporter: “One lady said her children didn’t have any shoes. She just saw those shoes there, a chance for all of her children to have new shoes. Go**amn it! It was such a tear-jerker. I might have gone in and taken them for her myself.”
We’ve seen countless examples of elected Democrats promoting this behavior in the years since, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blaming a 2020 New York COVID-era crime wave, where as many as 43 people were shot in one week, on poor people being so desperate that they had no choice but to steal:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shrugged off New York City’s frightening rise in crime, suggesting that tough times are forcing parents into committing petty theft to feed their kids.
“They feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry,” Ocasio-Cortez (D-Queens) said last week on a virtual town hall for constituents that was broadcast on her official Facebook page.
And the looting we saw during the 2020 George Floyd riots that same year was excused away in the name of “social justice.”
During the Biden-Harris years, when crime rose and we were seeing a steady stream of videos of smash-and-grabbers, along with news reports of thugs walking into Walgreens stores, calmly filling trash bags with merch and exiting without being stopped, we were reliably informed that, hey, crime isn’t that bad. It’s just your imagination.
Well, folks, I’m sorry to say that in the year 2026, the left has advanced to another level of downplaying theft and justifying it when it does happen.
We can thank The New York Times for clueing the rest of America in on what’s apparently become a growing trend on TikTok and elsewhere of bragging about and applauding “microlooting” – described as another form of “political protest” against corporations for the crime of making a profit.
And the cherry on top is that this is not really about encouraging poor people to do it because they allegedly “need” to, but instead middle-class and well-off folks, as a way of politically virtue signaling against rich CEOs or something.
It’s really hard to pick out a place to start with how cringe and disgusting this was, with Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman, millionaire Democrat darling Hasan Piker (partaking in the Times’ latest effort at trying to normalize him), and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino (who reportedly lives comfortably in a $2.5 million NY brownstone) just casually talking, laughing, and justifying petty theft as a form of striking back at “the man” like it was and should be a completely normal, rational, acceptable thing like driving or walking your dog.
I’ll start with this exceedingly stupid comment from Piker, and we’ll go from there:
Spiegelman: Would you encourage stealing in the same way from a Zohran Mamdani-run, city-owned grocery store with lower prices, and why?Piker: No, I would not, because I feel like that’s taxpayer-funded, it’s union labor, and the prices are also adjusted regardless.
Piker apparently doesn’t realize that it’s those same taxpayers and union workers who will have to pay higher costs at other grocery stores when the prices inevitably go up due to the “microlooting.” Stupid on steroids here, and it just got worse:
But don’t you dare confront them over their lunacy:
So Democrats and their media allies have now gone from “crime is not that bad” to “it’s okay to casually steal in your everyday life as long as you’re trying to make a political point.” This is modern progressivism in action, folks, with the “progressive” part meaning progressively worse.
For anyone who wants to subject themselves to the full podcast, it’s on YouTube here.
– Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via X. –
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY