On Crime And Oppression
You may have seen the latest fad that is rapidly gaining popularity on the left—the practice of micro-criminality committed by spoiled lefty rich nepo babies and theater kids. It’s really nothing new; it’s just a bunch of insulated social media “influencers” cosplaying transgression to show solidarity with their soft on crime anti-capitalist heroes.
It is just a day spa variant on the oppressor/oppressed model they use for literally everything.
I’ve written before about how the left has increasingly adopted the idea that crime and law enforcement are not neutral tools of order, but instruments of control—mechanisms used by an “oppressor class” to keep everyone else in line. In its academic form, this argument at least attempts to be serious and has been advanced by the left for decades, running from Karl Marx through later thinkers like Richard Quinney and Michel Foucault. The conclusion, in its strongest version, is not that crime is imaginary or that law enforcement is unnecessary, but that both are shaped by power and therefore subject to bias and imbalance.
Maybe, but those influences cut both ways. Identifying as the “oppressed” does not mean perpetual absolution for consequences.
What we are watching instead is what happens when a nuanced argument gets stripped down, flattened, and handed off to lightweight thinkers, activists and influencers who are far more interested in signaling than thinking. The result is not critique, it is a permission structure that defines crime based on power, and if that power is defined as illegitimate, then breaking certain laws can be recast as morally justified. If property rights are merely constructs designed to preserve inequality, then taking someone else’s property becomes “reparations” rather than theft.
If enforcement itself is viewed as suspect, then evading it becomes a badge of honor rather than something to avoid.
Enter the latest trend: privileged progressives engaging in what can only be described as boutique criminality. Shoplifting becomes an act of protest, and petty theft becomes praxis. The idea, floated in various corners of the internet and even dressed up in respectable outlets, is that small-scale lawbreaking is a legitimate tool in the fight against capitalism. When figures like Hasan Piker flirt with this idea as he just did in a recent New York Times opinion piece, it is not some spontaneous eruption of rebellion. It is the downstream product of that earlier intellectual framework, simplified to the point of absurdity and repackaged as performance art.
When you have a long-time staff writer for the New Yorker who lives in a $2.25 million brownstone brag in a New York Times podcast about stealing produce from Whole Foods, you understand this is not Les Misérables, and not desperation born of hunger or necessity. This is not even particularly rebellious. This is wealthy or well-insulated people committing low-risk, low-level offenses and calling it resistance. It is transgression with a safety net, a childish “rebellion” where the worst likely outcome is a stern look, maybe a citation, and a story to tell over cocktails.
It feels like cosplay because it is cosplay.
There is something almost comical about people who have benefited the most from the system suddenly deciding that swiping a few items from a store is their contribution to dismantling it. It is nothing new, just the political equivalent of a trust fund kid putting on a Che Guevara t-shirt and declaring himself a revolutionary. The stakes are low, the performance is high, and the self-congratulation is off the charts.
What makes it more than just ridiculous, however, is the feedback loop with policy. In a number of jurisdictions, the same ideological currents that produced these theories have influenced enforcement decisions. Minor crimes are deprioritized, prosecution thresholds are raised and the resulting message, intentional or not, is that certain behaviors simply do not matter very much. That environment does not just tolerate petty crime, it normalizes it, and once normalized, it becomes very easy for people to convince themselves that it is not really crime at all.
This entire dog’s breakfast of thought eventually collapses into contradiction. The original argument was about uneven enforcement, about the gap between how different kinds of harm are treated, about the influence of power on legal systems. It was not an argument that theft is good, or that laws should be treated as optional, or that personal behavior is irrelevant as long as you can attach the “correct” ideological label to it, but that is exactly where we have landed. The “oppressed versus oppressor” model has reached such a level of ridiculousness that it now covers the act of a well-off activist walking out of a store without paying and calling it solidarity.
What we are seeing now is not a revolution or even a coherent strategy. It is the cultural afterlife of an idea that has been diluted to the point where it serves mostly as a moral shield for small acts of self-indulgence. It allows people to break rules and to indulge in transgression without consequence while feeling righteous and calling it “principled”, which none of this is. It’s just an act. All of it. A bad off-off-off Broadway play we are all forced to watch.
Unfortunately, like most things built on that foundation, it will persist—not because it is true, but because it is the current thing, and the current thing exists because it is temporarily useful.
