April 23, 2026

TRAPPED IN THE COLOR REVOLUTION:

Staffers at crosstown rival magazine New York entertain similar thoughts: What Fresh Hell Is This? New York Mag Lionizes Shoplifter and Gives Tips on How to Steal.

Here’s the excerpt from a New York Magazine article headlined, “Paying the Price for Shoplifting From Whole Foods:”

At Whole Foods, you are apparently being monitored by a swarm of security officers, some of whom wander the aisles in plain clothes, and the company’s surveillance tech is improving. When security officers catch you, they will take you to Whole Foods Jail. Sometimes with glee.

The Union Square Whole Foods jail is a windowless storage closet near the entrance, says Astrid, a photographer. She mostly remembers the wallpaper: “Layers and layers of grainy faces,” she tells Nora Deligter. “All the thieves that had come before me.”

A sculptor we’ll call Gina found herself in the Bowery Whole Foods Jail. She was late to an Alex G concert at Bowery Ballroom and had decided to slip into Whole Foods for a quick spicy-tuna-roll walk-and-dine. She had a system: Approach the item with confidence, grab it, then head upstairs to the dining area and surreptitiously place it into her bag. But this time, she headed straight for the exit. “A rookie mistake,” Gina says.

Gina remembers keeping her head bowed and her eyes low as she was escorted back to Whole Foods Jail. The windowless office was almost too bland to recall, she says, except for a rudimentary banner, that read: ALL SHOPLIFTERS ARE BANNED FROM WHOLE FOODS FOR LIFE. A few weeks later, Gina says her parents received a $90 ticket in the mail from the company.

David Strom replies, “Is this the new socialism? Why wait for the revolution when you can just decriminalize stealing, or take your chances of getting caught and running to the media with your sob story?”

Still though, could be worse: Assassination Culture.

Much as Columbine captured the American imagination like a smash hit horror movie, which triggered a memetic wave of copycat school shooters we have still, to this day, not escaped, Luigi dragged us to hell in the form of a new archetype for the American assassin. There is some precedent for assassination culture in American history. In the 1960s and 1970s we were very much in the grip of a memetic death loop, as both political assassinations and the assassination of men deemed political, from Martin Luther King Jr. to John Lennon, were an almost regular occurrence. But today, on the internet, news of political killings for causes considered “just” are not only disseminated throughout the media, but celebrated on the internet. I do think this is categorically new, and worse.

Late last year, I touched on these themes, with a focus on left-wing violence in particular, in a piece for The Atlantic called “Abundant Delusion.” There, my thesis was simply the “Abundance Democrats,” if earnest in their stated goals of both civic and technologic progress, were doomed to fail. The problem, I argued, was they framed the movement as explicitly a Democratic project. Not only was this frustrating, given the most prominent ideas inherent to “abundance” — from megaprojects in energy and terraforming earth to reforming the regulatory environment crippling progress — were co-opted from libertarians and centrist tech thinkers, it was somehow totally ignorant of the left-wing base. These people did not want a bullet train. They did seem to want pretty much every guy capable of building bullet trains to die.

A large and growing segment of the left, I argued, had become deeply, openly violent. I did not just rely on anecdotal evidence, vibes, or even mainstream reporting, though I did cite all of these things. There was data supporting the notion.

Two days later, as the abundance libs just about concluded their mocking condemnation of my piece, Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

Upset, I wrote about — again — the reactions. Sharing grisly celebrations of Kirk’s gruesome murder was itself, I was told, dangerous. Frustrating as this was, I did attempt, in a follow-up, to thoughtfully parse this concern. Americans needed to reassert a very strong taboo against violence, I wrote. I hoped, at the time, if I could somehow convince the center-left to join me, there might be some way out of the cultural spiral. The center-left, including the massively influential ‘abundance lib’ Ezra Klein, has since taken to normalizingthe work of Hasan Piker, a socialist who has repeatedly called for the murder of his political enemies.

I no longer have any illusions we can significantly shift our country out of assassination culture. At this point, we can only try to be more aware — not only of assassination culture itself, but of the people either tacitly or explicitly encouraging it.

Just hours after what appears to have been a second attempt on Sam Altman’s life, the SF Standard, the Chronicle, and the Onion all shared photos of his home. The Chronicle reported its location. Incredibly, they did this not only as lunatics celebrated online, but as popular influencers made actual cases for further political violence (a lengthy thread here, from the Manhattan Institute’s Stu Smith).

Finally, at another niche Manhattan publication, it’s all the assassination prØn that’s fit to print:

UPDATE:

Posted at 10:55 am by Ed Driscoll