The New York Times’s Latte Logic of Social Collapse
5th May 2026
Three days before a 31-year-old male stormed the White House Correspondents Dinner, hoping to assassinate President Donald Trump and members of his cabinet, the New York Times published a 35-minute video titled: “‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’ Why petty theft might be the new political protest.” In it, a Times editor interviewed two other members of the media aristocracy about the moral code shared by a large swathe of young Americans.
That code justifies theft—and even violence—when harnessed to a fashionably left-wing cause. None of the participants—podcasting celebrity Hasan Piker, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, and Times opinion editor Nadja Spiegelman—expressed alarm at the glorification of crime. They smirked and giggled through the discussion, betraying a breezy indifference to lawbreaking.
It was striking enough that the Times published the video after reviewing the final cut. The paper was not embarrassed by the participants’ ignorance and entitlement. Nor was it troubled, apparently, by their debate over whether the December 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was “actually effective political action” or merely—and disappointingly—effective “political consciousness-raising.”